Reply to u/ManuelRodriguez331 on https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zvvuke/are_hyperlinks_needed_for_a_zettelkasten/

Eminem would indicate it's a clear no.

By direct translation zettelkasten = slips + box. There is no word in the name to indicate links of any sort. 😁🗃️🤣

I gave some examples of uses in arts/media a while back that you might find interesting for your use case: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xdrb0k/comment/iofo5vv/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

In particular, a more commonplace book approach or something along the lines of Chapter 6 of Twyla Tharpe's book may be more useful or productive for your use case.

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/znbvw3/ephemeral_sources/

If it makes you feel better, this is a long standing problem of document and source loss. As just a small historical example from a fellow, but very early, note taker and practitioner of the ars excerpendi (art of excerpting):

Presumed to have been written in the fifth century Stobaeus compiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known as The Anthologies of excerpts containing 1,430 poetry and prose quotations of classical ancient works from Greece and Rome of which only 315 original sources are still extant in the 21st century.[1] Large portions of our knowledge of many famous classical texts and plays are the result of his notes. Perhaps your notes will one day serve as the only references to famous documents of our time?

Often for digital copies of things, I'll use a browser bookmarklet to quickly save archive copies of pages to the Internet Archive as I'm excerpting or annotating them. See https://help.archive.org/help/save-pages-in-the-wayback-machine/ for some ways of doing this.

[1] Moller, Violet. The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2019. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546484/the-map-of-knowledge-by-violet-moller/.

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/comment/izuew08/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Often the context to properly illustrate these new insights can be more than they're worth. However this self-contained one linked here, may be useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/comment/j02niq3/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Reply to:

Who is Zettelkasten note-taking system for? <br /> u/Beens__<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/who_is_zettelkasten_notetaking_system_for/

Perhaps your use case may benefit from knowing the longer term outcomes of such processes, particularly as they relate to idea generation and innovation within your areas of interest? Keeping notes which you review over periodically and between which you create potential links will help to foster more productive long term combinatorial creativity, which will help you create new and potentially useful ideas much more quickly than blank page-based brainstorming.

Her method was much more ad hoc than the more highly refined methods of Luhmann which allowed him to write, but perhaps there's something you might appreciate from the example of the character Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl. Even more base in practice is that of Eminem, which shows far less structure, but could still have interesting long term creativity effects, though again, it bears repeating that one should occasionally revisit their notes (even if they're only in "headline form") in attempts to refresh their memory and link old ideas to new to generate completely new ideas.

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zixzgj/should_i_use_a_zettelkasten_if_im_just_intending/

If you're considering less work upfront, you might consider a closely related form by maintaining a commonplace book, or a pared down version of what folks here are calling a zettelkasten.

https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/

reply to u/I_saw_the_Aleph<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/zgx3pv/i_published_an_article_about_the_zettelkasten/

Thanks for adding to the tradition in another language. This is great.

I'm obviously not a fan of the commonly held Luhmann "zettelkasten origin myth", but since you don't cite a source for "otros métodos de tomar notas similares se originan en el siglo XVII" (translation: other similar note taking methods in the 17th century), I'm curious what and potentially who you're referring to here? I've seen a handful of online sources nebulously mention this same 17th century time period without any specific evidence, so I'm curious if you're following that crowd, or if there's something more specific you have in mind or could point to from a historical standpoint?

reply to https://www.reddit.com/user/thomasteepe/

Luhmann's method is certainly an evolution on prior methods, but only has a few differences. Sadly there aren't a broader array of other options that are open in the solution space to create an actual Cambrian explosion here. At the end of the day, one still has to do actual reading, note taking, thinking, and work to make the system go. It this hurdle of work that most often dampens people's spirits and despite it's ability to be more easily sustainable, it's really not very sexy, so people move on to the next shiny, new thing.

I'm aware of that series of videos and a few others, though my German is almost non-existent which makes them a slow slog. I suppose I should use Google's auto-transcription/translation, but that often muddies things further. I've had a few people translate pieces of things like that for me, but it becomes cost prohibitive after a while.

I wish Manfred Kuehn had left his site up, but I understand why he did it. I still delve back into Archive.org every now and then to find new things. If I had some extra time, I'd contact him to see if he'd be willing to publish archived versions of his blog as a book and do the collation/editing to get it out, but it's a lot of work, even with large portions automated.

One of these days I'll find a copy of the Marbach catalog to read...

Based on Luhmann's ZKII 9,8.3 (aka The Ghost in the Machine) and various other video and anecdotal sources, his colleagues saw his system and generally didn't care. His influence has primarily only been influential after-the-fact beginning online with mentions by Manfred Kuehn after 2007 with more interest following the Marbach zettelkasten exhibition in 2013 and the launch of zettelkasten.de. You're living amidst his greatest influence on the space, particularly asking this question just two days before Scott Scheper's book Antinet Zettelkasten, focusing on the specifics of Luhmann's method, is set to be released.

With respect to zettelkasten, I would posit that it was Luhmann himself who was actually standing on the shoulders of other giants which preceded him in these broader traditions including Desiderius Erasmus, Rudolph Agricola, Phillip Melanchthon, Konrad Gessner, John Locke, Ernst Bernheim, Charles Langlois, Charles Seignobos, Antoine Sertillanges, Beatrice Webb, Johannes Heyde, and C. Wright Mills, etc. See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/ for more on the history here.

While I'm thinking about influence, has anyone named their children after the method yet? Is there a baby named Slip, Zeke, or Luhmann in honor yet? Perhaps this is the week that may have happened? 😉

I'm enamored of this idea as well and this is a fascinating example.

It seems similar to the related (and also difficult-to-name) concept which I've called combinatorial creativity. One of the earliest versions I've seen is that of Raymond Llullus' work with respect to combinatorial mnemonics described in Frances Yates' The Art of Memory (1966). Farnam Street's post is a good start https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/, but I've been collecting other examples: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22combinatorial+creativity%22 and other names for it over time.

I can't help but wonder what Ericsson's role of deliberate practice would look like with arts as the subject? What motivates long term deliberate practice?

Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. 1966. Reprint, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/0226950018.

Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 1993.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/12/the-ethics-of-syndicating-comments-using-webmentions/

Not an answer to the dilemma, though I generally take the position of keeping everything unless someone asks me to take it down or that I might know that it's been otherwise deleted. Often I choose not to delete my copy, but simply make it private and only viewable to me.

On the deadnaming and related issues, it would be interesting to create a webmention mechanism for the h-card portions so that users might update these across networks. To some extent Automattic's Gravatar system does this in a centralized manner, but it would be interesting to see it separately. Certainly not as big an issue as deadnaming, but there's a similar problem on some platforms like Twitter where people will change their display name regularly for either holidays, or lately because they're indicating they'd rather be found on Mastodon or other websites.

The webmention spec does contain details for both editing/deleting content and resending webmentions to edit and/or remove the original. Ideally this would be more broadly adopted and used in the future to eliminate the need for making these choices by leaving the choice up to the original publisher.

Beyond this, often on platforms that don't have character limits (Reddit for example), I'll post at the bottom of my syndicated copy of content that it was originally published on my site (along with the permalink) and explicitly state that I aggregate the replies from various locations which also helps to let people know that they might find addition context or conversation at the original post should they be interested. Doing this on Twitter, Mastodon, et al is much harder due to space requirements obviously.

While most responses I send would fall under fair use for copying, I also have a Creative Commons license on my text in an effort to help others feel more comfortable with having copies of my content on their sites.

Another ethical layer to this is interactions between sites which both have webmentions enabled. To some extent this creates an implicit bi-directional relationship which says, I'm aware that this sort of communication exists and approve of your parsing and displaying my responses.

The public norms and ethics in this area will undoubtedly evolve over time, so it's also worth revisiting and re-evaluating the issue over time.

reply to u/deafpolygon at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/z5haa9/comment/iy6yowi/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

It's been reported by his son that Luhmann did learn about a method (which either he heavily modified or someone else showed him their modification thereof) from Johannes Erich Heyde. There's sure to be more details on this in Scott Scheper's upcoming book Antinet Zettelkasten.

see: Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens: zeitgemässe Mittel und Verfahrungsweisen. Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.

See: https://hyp.is/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA/www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wryt4t/the_secret_book_luhmann_read_that_taught_him/

Post at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/z5haa9/victor_margolins_zettelkasten_process_for_writing/

It's not as refined or as compartmentalized as Luhmann's process, but art Historian Victor Margolin broadly outlines his note taking and writing process in reasonable detail in this excellent three minute video. (This may be one of the shortest and best produced encapsulations of these reading/note taking/writing methods I've ever seen.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI

Though he indicates it was a "process [he] developed", it is broadly similar to that of the influential "historical method" laid out by Ernst Bernheim and later Seignobos/Langlois in the late 1800s.

https://www.dalekeiger.net/on-being-a-gentleman-well-unread/

Both your 積ん読 game and master level antilibrary skills are on wonderful display here.

Your observations here ring true to me. They're also supported by similar observations by Malcolm Gladwell in chapters 8 and 9 (I believe) of Miracle and Wonder. There he's got stories of Wilt Chamberlain and Paul Simon which provide additional examples though he's also attributing some of the success to memory and the idea of situational awareness. He quotes his own researcher there who makes some comments on short versus long artistic careers and how they relate to creativity and longevity. See also this "zettel": https://hypothes.is/a/Kd7X4lvPEe250Gvn57Pbdg

Gladwell, Malcolm, Bruce Hedlam, and Paul Simon. Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. Audiobook. Pushkin Industries, 2021. https://amzn.to/3ENU32D

Reply to Andy https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/16865#Comment_16865

Andy, I'll take you at your word. You're right that none of it requires extraordinary genius--though many who seem to exhibit extraordinary genius do have variations of these practices in their lives, and the largest proportion of them either read about them or were explicitly taught them.

With these patterns and practices being so deeply rooted in our educational systems for so long (not to mention the heavy influences of our orality and evolved thinking apparatus even prior to literacy), it's a bit difficult for many to truly guarantee that they've done these things independently without heavy cultural and societal influence. As a result, it's not a far stretch for people to evolve their own practices to what works for them and then think that they've invented something new. The common person may not be aware of the old ideas of scala naturae or scholasticism, but they certainly feel them in their daily lives. Commonplacing is not much different.

By analogy, Elon Musk might say he created the Tesla, but it's a far bigger stretch for him to say that he invented a new means of transportation, or a car, or the wheel when we know he's swimming in a culture rife with these items. Humans are historically far better at imitation than innovation. If people truly independently developed systems like these so many times, then in the evolutionary record of these practices we should expect to see more diversity than we do in practice. We might expect to see more innovation than just the plain vanilla adjacent possible. Given Margolin's age, time period, educational background, and areas of expertise, there is statistically very little chance that he hadn't seen or talked about versions of this practice with several dozens of his peers through his lifetime after which he took that tacit knowledge and created his own explicit version which worked for him.

Historian Keith Thomas talks about some of these traditions which he absorbed himself without having read some of the common advice (see London Review of Books https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary). He also indicates that he slowly evolved to some of the often advised practices like writing only on one side of a slip, though, like many, he completely omits to state the reason why this is good advice. We can all ignore these rich histories, but we'll probably do so at our own peril and at the expense of wasting some of our time to re-evolve the benefits.

Why are so many here (and in other fora on these topics) showing up regularly to read and talk about their experiences? They're trying to glean some wisdom from the crowds of experimenters to make improvements. In addition to the slow wait for realtime results, I've "cheated" a lot and looked at a much richer historical record of wins and losses to gain more context of our shared intellectual history. I'm reminded of one of Goethe's aphorisms from Maxims and Reflections "Inexperienced people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago."

https://brainsteam.co.uk/2022/11/26/one-week-with-hypothesis/

I too read a lot of niche papers and feel the emptiness, but because I'm most often writing for myself anyway, its alright. There are times, however, when I see a growing community of people who've left their associative trails behind before I've found a particular page.

I've used the phrase "digital exhaust" before, but I like the more positive framing of "learning exhaust".

If you've not found it yet, my own experimentations with the platform can largely be found here: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/

https://readwriterespond.com/2022/11/commonplace-book-a-verb-or-a-noun/

Sometimes the root question is "what to I want to do this for?" Having an underlying reason can be hugely motivating.

Are you collecting examples of things for students? (seeing examples can be incredibly powerful, especially for defining spaces) for yourself? Are you using them for exploring a particular space? To clarify your thinking/thought process? To think more critically? To write an article, blog, or book? To make videos or other content?

Your own website is a version of many of these things in itself. You read, you collect, you write, you interlink ideas and expand on them. You're doing it much more naturally than you think.

I find that having an idea of the broader space, what various practices look like, and use cases for them provides me a lot more flexibility for what may work or not work for my particular use case. I can then pick and choose for what suits me best, knowing that I don't have to spend as much time and effort experimenting to invent a system from scratch but can evolve something pre-existing to suit my current needs best.

It's like learning to cook. There are thousands of methods (not even counting cuisine specific portions) for cooking a variety of meals. Knowing what these are and their outcomes can be incredibly helpful for creatively coming up with new meals. By analogy students are often only learning to heat water to boil an egg, but with some additional techniques they can bake complicated French pâtissier. Often if you know a handful of cooking methods you can go much further and farther using combinations of techniques and ingredients.

What I'm looking for in the reading, note taking, and creation space is a baseline version of Peter Hertzmann's 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot combined with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Generally cooking is seen as an overly complex and difficult topic, something that is emphasized on most aspirational cooking shows. But cooking schools break the material down into small pieces which makes the processes much easier and more broadly applicable. Once you've got these building blocks mastered, you can be much more creative with what you can create.

How can we combine these small building blocks of reading and note taking practices for students in the 4th - 8th grades so that they can begin to leverage them in high school and certainly by college? Is there a way to frame them within teaching rhetoric and critical thinking to improve not only learning outcomes, but to improve lifelong learning and thinking?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-HSJc

I'm curious if you knew if Nelson, Engelbart or any of their contemporaries had/maintained/used commonplace books or card indexes as precursors of their computing work? That is, those along the lines of those most commonly used by academics, for example as described by Markus Krajewski in Paper Machines (MIT Press, 2011) or even Beatrice Webb's Appendix C on Note Taking in My Apprenticeship (Longmans, 1926) in which she describes a slip (or index card)-based database method of scientific note taking. I've always felt that Vannevar Bush held things back unnecessarily by not mentioning commonplace book traditions in As We May Think.

https://mastodon.social/@tbeseda@indieweb.social/109368520955574335

At a base level, the Fediverse is a subset within the bigger IndieWeb. Parts of the Fediverse, have and support some of the IndieWeb building blocks, but none that I'm aware of support them all. Example: Mastodon has microformats markup, but doesn't support sending webmentions or have micropub support. Currently it's easier for the IndieWeb to communicate into and read the Fediverse, but the Fediverse doesn't do a good job of seeing or interacting with things outside it.

reply to thread: https://mastodon.social/@mathew@campaign.openworlds.info/109371453439113339

Perhaps underneath the My Library you need to have an alternate path labeled "Antilibrary". Perhaps that will alleviate a lot of your cognitive dissonance and guilt.

https://micro.blog/JohnPhilpin/14165886

@JohnPhilpin Recommendations can often come cheap, particularly on iTunes where everyone begs for reviews. I prefer hearing about what people actually listened to. What did you invest your time in/on? This is why I sporadically maintain what I call a faux-cast or a feed of podcasts and audio I've actually listened to: https://boffosocko.com/2018/03/08/podcasts-of-things-ive-listened-to-or-want-to-listen-to/

https://johnjohnston.info/blog/feedreaderfriday-1/?unapproved=219279&moderation-hash=55729efd4574d8ca6035df0c3a66bdb5#comment-219279

Thanks for the follow within FeedLand today btw. I saw it pop up in the group list. 🙂

https://micro.blog/manton/14045523

@manton When I was looking at Fediverse instances the other day I noticed that one of the biggest platforms within it was Write.as, which are more blog centric. Is there a better/easier way for m.b. to federate/interact or serve as a reader for that part of the ecosystem? Perhaps worth exploring?

https://analogoffice.net/2022/10/28/a-life-in.html

@Guy Reminds me instantaneously of this collection of farm themed pocket notebooks which inspired Field Notes: https://fieldnotesbrand.com/from-seed 📓

@danielsantos Almost everyone in the space exclusively associates ZK with Luhmann, in part because of the use of the foreign (unfamiliar) German word and the lost cultural memory of the use of card indexes as note taking tools or as commonplace books in index card form. Hopefully we can change this misperception which also opens up these practices to a lot more people with a lot less confusion.

@jessekelber @collin I'll second the Diamond 580, though if they're completely new, the ECO T may be a useful choice as the grip design helps to nudge a better grip for beginners. It's also a little less expensive (if they have fear of breaking or losing their nice new pen), and gives them space to dream upwards without breaking their own bank when you've turned them into a lifelong collector.

@danielsantos @jean I almost included the brain emoji, but I feel like it's far too closely associated with Tiago Forte's commercial/paid Second Brain courses and book, and doesn't have the feel of written (or even typed/digital) representation of note taking the way the card file box 🗃️ does historically. I've seen many in the zettelkasten space use the card file box emoji regularly and it generally doesn't have any negative connotations that I've seen or am aware of. I've also seen some in the digital gardening spaces make use of some of the plant-related emoji for their notes, but those generally have a more clear cut gardening use case on the web and might otherwise cause confusion. Some of the other logical choices of pens, pencils, and journals are already either in use for those topics or ought to be kept for them if necessary.

https://bavatuesdays.com/theres-a-ds106-social-going-on-in-mastodon/comment-page-1/#comment-358946

Is there a way to search for your replies to someone's public annotations?

Currently, they don't show up when I search my user name and the tag I used in the reply. Is there an elegant way to search for these annotations and my reply to them?

reply to u/sscheper<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/yka3ro/vintage_yawman_and_erbe_card_index_filing_systems/

These were commonly used for what we now call CRM as well as for accounting, general filing, and all sorts of business and back office use cases in the early 20th century which are now handled by computers. A dozen or so companies made large wooden and metal index card filing cabinets and sold them by the truckload to businesses of every sort.

A lot of the digiterati are just repeating and attempting to reinvent these sorts of ideas using Obsidian, Notion, etc.

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yibchw/zettelkasten_for_technical_sciences/

Presumably you've been the member of or seen a journal club/discussion group for scientific articles, and if not, you could start your own journal club (with yourself) using a zettelkasten by excerpting ideas from what you read, annotating them, writing down open questions, thoughts about what researchers get right/wrong, what could be done better, etc. A zettelkasten practice can be highly fruitful in the sciences. Carl Linnaeus, Newton, and Leibnitz (among many others) had similar looking practices.

Given your talents, if you've not explored some of the experimental fiction side of things (like Mark Bernstein's hypertext fiction http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Fiction.html, Robin Sloan's fish http://www.robinsloan.com/fish/ or Writing with the Machine https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/, or a variety of others https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22experimental+fiction%22), perhaps it may be fun and allow you to use some of your technology based-background at the same time?

reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/ye3bvk/workflow_for_capturing_and_processing_online/

While it's possible that some set of tools will work best for you and potentially be more "fun" than other combinations, the upper limit you'll find on efficiency and productivity in this area is limited.

As a result, I'd recommend looking at the quality of the material you're putting into your stream as potentially the best means of improvement at your disposal. The quality of your ideas and thought will increase if you're reading and conversing with the highest quality sources you can get your hands on. Well-researched, long form material (books, journal articles) will have likely done a lot of the filtering and heavy work for you, so use those as input when you can.

Unless you're a sociologist or cultural anthropologist looking for examples of behaviors and material in social media, it may not be the best place to turn. Before I open social media apps I remind myself of note #1267 from Goethe's slipbox (Maxims and Reflections): "Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago."

Similarly, upon hearing the words "firehose", "drowning", or "information overload", I'm reminded that, presuming you'd even want to make the effort, there's only one way to eat a whale: one bite at a time.

I've used Livescribe pens/paper for note taking (including with audio) before, and they've got OCR software to digital workflows. Or for the paper motivated, one could use their larger post it notes and just stick them to index cards as a substrate for your physical ZK with digitally searchable back ups? Now that I've thought about it and written this out, I may have to try it to see if it's better than my prior handwritten/digital experiments.

For those interested in the research on the "Write Every Day" mantra:

Sword, Helen. “‘Write Every Day!’: A Mantra Dismantled.” International Journal for Academic Development 21, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 312–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2016.1210153.

reply to dhXcol https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yc35nl/comment/itlmjbn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

You might appreciate the pre-Luhmann zettelkasten (or commonplace book traditions) which could serve this purpose, and most of the applications that you can use for ZK will work for these purposes if you're not an index card person. Some differentiation and pointers here: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/

los2pollos reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y5un81/comment/it667sq/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

There are a wide variety of methods of organizing and sorting one's note cards including by topic (usually alphabetical), by date, by idea, by author, by title, etc.

If you're using it as a diary, you'd probably keep that subsection in order by date written, and then potentially have it cross indexed by subject if those things were important to you.

If you kept other information like mood, health, activities, exercise, glasses of water per day (for example) on them, you could resort and re-order them by those data as well if you liked. And naturally, this ability to resort/reorder one's notes has been one of the greatest features and affordances to these systems historically.

in reply to los2pollos<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y5un81/comment/it4jy3c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

You're not the only one to think of a card index as diary. Roland Barthes practiced this as well. His biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call it his fichierjournal.

There's research to support that thinking in a non-native language has benefits for your thought processes and decision making. E.g.: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/thinking-foreign-language-helps-economic-decision-making

episcopal-orthodox reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y77414/comment/isyqc7b/

As long as you're not using flimsy, standard paper for your slips like Luhmann (they deteriorate too rapidly with repeated use), you can frame your carrying them around more positively by thinking that use over time creates a lovely patina to your words and ideas. The value of this far outweighs the fear of loss, at least for me. And if you're still concerned, there's always the option that you could use ars memoria to memorize all of your cards and meditate on them combinatorially using Llullan wheels the way Raymond Llull originally did. 🛞🗃️🚀🤩

u/LBHO https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y77414/worried_about_paper_cards_being_lost_or_destroyed/

As a firm believer in the programming principle of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), I can appreciate the desire not to do the work twice.

Note card loss and destruction is definitely a thing folks have worried about. The easiest thing may be to spend a minute or two every day and make quick photo back ups of your cards as you make them. Then if things are lost, you'll have a back up from which you can likely find OCR (optical character recognition) software to pull your notes from to recreate them if necessary. I've outlined some details I've used in the past. Incidentally, opening a photo in Google Docs will automatically do a pretty reasonable OCR on it.

I know some have written about bringing old notes into their (new) zettelkasten practice, and the general advice here has been to only pull in new things as needed or as heavily interested to ease the cognitive load of thinking you need to do everything at once. If you did lose everything and had to restore from back up, I suspect this would probably be the best advice for proceeding as well.

Historically many have worried about loss, but the only actual example of loss I've run across is that of Hans Blumenberg whose zettelkasten from the early 1940s was lost during the war, but he continued apace in another dating from 1947 accumulating over 30,000 cards at the rate of about 1.5 per day over 50 some odd years.

reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/y2pzuu/does_anyone_else_work_in_projectbased_systems/

Historically, many had zettelkasten which were commonplace books kept on note cards, usually categorized by subject (read: "folders" or "tags"), so you're not far from that original tradition.

Similar to your work pattern, you may find the idea of a "Pile of Index Cards" (PoIC) interesting. See https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089 and https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122 (read the descriptions of the photos for more details; there was also a related, but now defunct wiki, which you can find copies of on Archive.org with more detail). This pattern was often seen implemented in the TiddlyWiki space, but can now be implemented in many note taking apps that have to do functionality along with search and tags. Similarly you may find those under Tiago Forte's banner "Building a Second Brain" to be closer to your project-based/productivity framing if you need additional examples or like-minded community. You may find that some of Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking (LYT) is in this productivity spectrum as well. (Caveat emptor: these last two are selling products/services, but there's a lot of their material freely available online.)

Luhmann changed the internal structure of his particular zettelkasten that created a new variation on the older traditions. It is this Luhmann-based tradition that many in r/Zettelkasten follow. Since many who used the prior (commonplace-based) tradition were also highly productive, attributing output to a particular practice is wrongly placed. Each user approaches these traditions idiosyncratically to get them to work for themselves, so ignore naysayers and those with purist tendencies, particularly when they're new to these practices or aren't aware of their richer history. As the sub-reddit rules indicate: "There is no [universal or orthodox] 'right' way", but you'll find a way that is right for you.

I would echo Bob's sentiment here and would recommend you keep that material like this in a separate section or box all together.

If it helps to have an example, in 2006, Hawk Sugano showed off a version of a method you may be considering which broadly went under the title of Pile of Index Cards (or PoIC) which combined zettelkasten and productivity systems (in his case getting things done or GTD). I don't think he got much (any?!) useful affordances out of mixing the two. In fact, from what I can see looking at later iterations of his work and how he used it, it almost seems like he spent more time and energy later attempting to separate and rearrange them to get use out of the knowledge portions as distinct from the productivity portions.

I've generally seen people mixing these ideas in the digital space usually to their detriment as well—a practice I call zettelkasten overreach.

reply to https://www.reddit.com/user/kf6gpe/

Thanks. Having edited large parts of that page, and particularly the history pieces, I'm aware of it. It's also why I'm asking for actual examples of practices and personal histories, especially since many in this particular forum appear to be using traditional notebook/journal forms. :)

Did you come to ZK or commonplacing first? How did you hear about it/them? Is your practice like the traditional commonplacing framing, closer to Luhmann's/that suggested by zettelkasten.de/Ahrens, or a hybrid of the two approaches?

Hello u/sscheper,

Let me start by thanking you for introducing me to Zettelkasten. I have been writing notes for a week now and it's great that I'm able to retain more info and relate pieces of knowledge better through this method.

I recently came to notice that there is redundancy in my index entries.

I have two entries for Number Line. I have two branches in my Math category that deals with arithmetic, and so far I have "Addition" and "Subtraction". In those two branches I talk about visualizing ways of doing that, and both of those make use of and underline the term Number Line. So now the two entries in my index are "Number Line (Under Addition)" and "Number Line (Under Subtraction)". In those notes I elaborate how exactly each operation is done on a number line and the insights that can be derived from it. If this continues, I will have Number Line entries for "Multiplication" and "Division". I will also have to point to these entries if I want to link a main note for "Number Line".

Is this alright? Am I underlining appropriately? When do I not underline keyterms? I know that I do these to increase my chances of relating to those notes when I get to reach the concept of Number Lines as I go through the index but I feel like I'm overdoing it, and it's probably bloating it.

I get "Communication (under Info. Theory): '4212/1'" in the beginning because that is one aspect of Communication itself. But for something like the number line, it's very closely associated with arithmetic operations, and maybe I need to rethink how I populate my index.

Presuming, since you're here, that you're creating a more Luhmann-esque inspired zettelkasten as opposed to the commonplace book (and usually more heavily indexed) inspired version, here are some things to think about:<br /> - Aren't your various versions of number line card behind each other or at least very near each other within your system to begin with? (And if not, why not?) If they are, then you can get away with indexing only one and know that the others will automatically be nearby in the tree. <br /> - Rather than indexing each, why not cross-index the cards themselves (if they happen to be far away from each other) so that the link to Number Line (Subtraction) appears on Number Line (Addition) and vice-versa? As long as you can find one, you'll be able to find them all, if necessary.

If you look at Luhmann's online example index, you'll see that each index term only has one or two cross references, in part because future/new ideas close to the first one will naturally be installed close to the first instance. You won't find thousands of index entries in his system for things like "sociology" or "systems theory" because there would be so many that the index term would be useless. Instead, over time, he built huge blocks of cards on these topics and was thus able to focus more on the narrow/niche topics, which is usually where you're going to be doing most of your direct (and interesting) work.

Your case sounds, and I see it with many, is that your thinking process is going from the bottom up, but that you're attempting to wedge it into a top down process and create an artificial hierarchy based on it. Resist this urge. Approaching things after-the-fact, we might place information theory as a sub-category of mathematics with overlaps in physics, engineering, computer science, and even the humanities in areas like sociology, psychology, and anthropology, but where you put your work on it may depend on your approach. If you're a physicist, you'll center it within your physics work and then branch out from there. You'd then have some of the psychology related parts of information theory and communications branching off of your physics work, but who cares if it's there and not in a dramatically separate section with the top level labeled humanities? It's all interdisciplinary anyway, so don't worry and place things closest in your system to where you think they fit for you and your work. If you had five different people studying information theory who were respectively a physicist, a mathematician, a computer scientist, an engineer, and an anthropologist, they could ostensibly have all the same material on their cards, but the branching structures and locations of them all would be dramatically different and unique, if nothing else based on the time ordered way in which they came across all the distinct pieces. This is fine. You're building this for yourself, not for a mass public that will be using the Dewey Decimal System to track it all down—researchers and librarians can do that on behalf of your estate. (Of course, if you're a musician, it bears noting that you'd be totally fine building your information theory section within the area of "bands" as a subsection on "The Bandwagon". 😁)

If you overthink things and attempt to keep them too separate in their own prefigured categorical bins, you might, for example, have "chocolate" filed historically under the Olmec and might have "peanut butter" filed with Marcellus Gilmore Edson under chemistry or pharmacy. If you're a professional pastry chef this could be devastating as it will be much harder for the true "foodie" in your zettelkasten to creatively and more serendipitously link the two together to make peanut butter cups, something which may have otherwise fallen out much more quickly and easily if you'd taken a multi-disciplinary (bottom up) and certainly more natural approach to begin with. (Apologies for the length and potential overreach on your context here, but my two line response expanded because of other lines of thought I've been working on, and it was just easier for me to continue on writing while I had the "muse". Rather than edit it back down, I'll leave it as it may be of potential use to others coming with no context at all. In other words, consider most of this response a selfish one for me and my own slip box than as responsive to the OP.)

taurusnoises https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xyhpq4/2015_exhibition_of_roland_barthes_zettelkasten/

Me too. This is one of the reasons I'm not the biggest fan of the "fleeting note" framing of Ahrens, as it's more likely to marginalize these sorts of smaller daily ideas and discourage people from placing some of these types of things into their zettelkasten as potentially "unimportant". I feel like from what I see and hear anecdotally his framing encourages too many to only put in things which are significant, deep, academic, or which have a certain sense of gravitas.

Posted by u/ivanZalevskiy https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/y0k076/apply_zettelkasten_at_school/

From a historical perspective, education is broadly the reason zettelkasten principles were created and evolved. In the late 1400s and early 1500s Agricola, Erasmus, and Melanchthon wrote handbooks for students and teachers to spread these methods specifically for learning and building knowledge. Here's a reasonable example of someone using them for their Ph.D. work, and I suspect they, like many, wish they'd started sooner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiol2oJAh6.

I've remarked in the past that zettelkasten methods very closely mimic the various levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, which outlines broadly how people learn and grow: https://hypothes.is/a/c8jzkLHgEeyUhBs5w48csg

One might suggest that the freedom, flexibility, and customization of these systems is actually an unuseful time suck for many users which only encourages shiny object syndrome. From a design perspective, try starting out building a system that works for you before beginning on design for others. Research and looking at the user interfaces offered by the competition will helpful as well. Which are the most popular? fun to use? Why? What actual affordances do those interfaces and functionalities allow? are they truly productive?

Possibly more productive, what sorts of standards can you leverage to make people's pre-existing notes more useful? Can you take pre-existing stores of .txt or .md files and provide different views or perspectives on them? This will allow people to pick and choose which applications might work with their stores of data to provide different views or perspectives on them. Why reinvent a text editor or tools like Logseq or Obsidian when you can leverage the local stores of data to provide the sorts of services you're not seeing in the broader space? For example, on the "social media" side, there are existing solutions for taking your locally stored notes, putting them into the cloud and displaying them on the web, but the various steps are highly technical and require a relatively large amount of work and admin tax to maintain. A service that allows one to point at their local store of data and automatically host it on a website and keep it synced would be a major boon for the non-technical user.

Separately, Matuschak did not invent evergreen notes. The first clear cut instantiation I've seen in the literature is from Konrad Gessner in 1548, and honestly even his idea really stems from a longstanding tradition of working with commonplace sententiae preceding his work. (see https://hypothes.is/a/uEboYlOwEeykkotYs594LA) Matuschak simply applied the definition/idea of "evergreen" (meaning easily reusable) articles or content from journalism to describe his notes which could be reused in various contexts. (Example: Why rewrite an article on how to decorate and entertain for the holidays, when you can reuse the same article you've been publishing for years, perhaps along with some updated photos?) "Atomic" notes is another variation on this same theme, but is one which underlies the ability to re-use notes in combination with one or more other notes to generate new ideas.

Pardon my use of English. I'm curious if you ultimately found the best research method for yourself? Did you publish it? Being interested in reading practices and annotation myself I can't wait to read your thesis, though it may take some time given the dreadful state of my French capabilities.

Thank you for your reflection on Barthes' particular method (and especially the photos)! If you're interested to dig further I found a few references that expand significantly on Barthes' fichier boîte method in the following short journal articles: - Hollier, Denis. “Notes (On the Index Card).” October, vol. 112, no. Spring, 2005, pp. 35–44. - Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine, vol. 11, 2010, pp. 7–30.

Having delved into it reasonably, it stems from the commonplace book tradition which moved to slips of paper (index cards) in the late 1500s with Konrad Gessner. Ernst Bernheim (German) and shortly after Charles Langlois & Charles Seignobos (French) wrote about some of their research methods in popular textbooks about historical method in the late 1800s. Paul Chavigny also wrote a manual in French in the early 1920s. One of the best versions of this method I've seen is by Umberto Eco (How to Write a Thesis (1977, 2015) though there are also German and English editions of Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes (2017) which describes a similar zettelkasten method used by prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, about whom there is a significant archive: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/. It would be helpful to have more written methods like these, but apparently much of these traditions is handed down orally. Having glanced at some of your other methods posts, it almost looks like you've recast the general tradition using colorful Post-It Notes.

If you did finally outline your ultimate method, I'd love to read it.

Thanks again!

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I posted a follow up question in the NaNoWriMo forum, which may get some additional traction: https://forums.nanowrimo.org/t/linking-up-zettelkasten-or-card-index-method-writers/433719

I'm more of a "pantser" (vs planner) when it comes to NaNoWriMo, but if you think about it, zettelkasten provides a solid structure that builds your plan for you as you go.

Broadly the zettelkasten tradition grew out of commonplacing in the 1500s, in part, because it was easier to arrange and re-arrange one's thoughts on cards for potential reuse in outlining and writing. Most zettelkasten are just index card-based forms of commonplaces, though some following Niklas Luhmann's model have a higher level of internal links, connections, and structure.

I wrote a bit about some of these traditions (especially online ones) a while back at: https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/03/differentiating-online-variations-of-the-commonplace-book-digital-gardens-wikis-zettlekasten-waste-books-florilegia-and-second-brains/

Thanks for the pointer @Will and for sharing your notes! We definitely need better and easier ways of sharing notes like this.

I get the gist of what you're saying and I prefer putting things into my own collection in my own words as well. However, there is a history of folks putting other materials into their systems like this. Johannes Heyde, in particular, mentioned that German publishers used to mail promo details for forthcoming books on A6 size postcards that one might place directly into their bibliographic index without needing to recopy.

I know I've suggested to u/sscheper before that he ought to release his forthcoming book in index card format, if only as an interesting means of showing an example of what a zettelkasten looks like and how it might work.

Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

I agree with many that the black and red are overwhelming on many and make the book a bit less approachable. Warm tones and rich wooden boxes would be more welcome. The 8.5x11" filing cabinets just won't fly. I did like some with the drawer frames/pulls, but put a more generic idea in the frame (perhaps "Ideas"?). From the batch so far, some of my favorites are #64 TopHills, #21 & #22 BigPoints, #13, 14 D'Estudio. Unless that pull quote is from Luhmann or maybe Eco or someone internationally famous, save it for the rear cover or maybe one of the inside flaps. There's an interesting and approachable stock photo I've been sitting on that might work for your cover: Brain and ZK via https://www.theispot.com/stock/webb. Should be reasonably licensable and doesn't have a heavy history of use on the web or elsewhere.

While it may be slightly more difficult to find larger metal/wood cases for the 4x6 or 5x8 cards, it's a minor nuisance and anyone who wants them will eventually find the right thing for them. Beyond this, choose the card size that feels right to you.

If you don't have an idea of what you need or like, try things out for 10-20 cards and see how it works for you, your handwriting size, and general needs. People have been using 3x5, 4x6, and even larger for hundreds of years without complaining about any major issues. If Carl Linnaeus managed to be okay with 3x5, which he hand cut by the way, I suspect you'll manage too.

Of course I won't mention to the Americans the cleverness of the A6, A5, A4 paper standards which allows you to fold the larger sizes in half to get the exact next smaller size down. Then you might get the benefit of the smaller size as well as the larger which could be folded into your collection of smaller cards, you just have to watch out for accidentally wrapping ("taco-ing") a smaller card inside of a larger one and losing it. I suppose you could hand cut your own 5" x 6" larger cards to do this if you found that you occasionally needed them.

For the pocketbook conscious, 3x5 does have the benefit of lower cost as well as many more options and flexibility than larger sizes.

At least commercial card sizes are now largely standardized, so you don't have deal with changing sizes the way Roland Barthes did over his lifetime.

My personal experience and a long history of so many manuals on the topic saying "cards of the same size" indicates that you assuredly won't have fun mixing different sized slips together. I personally use 3x5" cards in a waste book sense, but my main/permanent collection is in 4x6" format. Sometimes I think I should have done 3 x 5, but it's more like jealousy than regret, particularly when it comes to the potential of a restored fine furniture card catalog. But then again...

Thanks for this! I like the framing and general concept of the book.

It seems like its a good follow on to Dan Allosso's OER text How to Make Notes and Write https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/ or Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes https://amzn.to/3DwJVMz which includes some useful psychology and mental health perspective.

Other similar examples are Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) or Gerald Weinberg's The Fieldstone Method https://amzn.to/3DCf6GA These may be some of what we're all missing.

I'm reminded of Mark Robertson's (@calhistorian) discussion of modeling his note taking practice and output in his classroom using Roam Research. https://hyp.is/QuB5NDa0Ee28hUP7ExvFuw/thatsthenorm.com/mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue/ Perhaps we need more of this?

Early examples of this sort of note taking can also be seen in the religious studies space with Melanchthon's handbook on commonplaces or Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, though missing are the process from notes to writings. https://www.logos.com/grow/jonathan-edwards-organizational-genius/

Other examples of these practices in the wild include @andy_matuschak's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 and TheNonPoet's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdp0jo2Fe4 Though it may be better for students to see this in areas in which they're interested.

Hypothes.is as a potential means of modeling and allowing students to directly "see" this sort of work as it progresses using public/semi-public annotations may be helpful. Then one can separately model re-arranging them and writing a paper. https://web.hypothes.is/

Reply to: https://twitter.com/BenjaminVanDyne/status/1571171086171095042

I've been spelunking through your posts from roughly the decade from 2005 onward which reference your interest in index cards. Thanks for unearthing and writing about all the great index card material from that time period. Have you kept up with your practices?

I noticed that at least one of your posts had a response by MK (Manfred Kuehn, maintainer of the now defunct Taking Note blog (2007-2018). Was it something you read at the time or kept up with?

Have you been watching the productivity or personal knowledge management space since roughly 2017 where the idea of the Zettelkasten (slip box or card index) has taken off (eg. https://zettelkasten.de/, Sonke Ahren's book How to Take Smart Notes, Obsidian.md, Roam Research, etc.?) I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on them or even what your practice has meant over time.

Thanks again.

Cheers! -CJA

They may not necessarily specifically include Luhmann-esque linking, numbering, and indexing, but some broad interesting examples within the tradition include: Comedians: (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten for references/articles) - Phyllis Diller - Joan Rivers - Bob Hope - George Carlin

Musicians: - Eminem https://boffosocko.com/2021/08/10/55794555/ - Taylor Swift: https://hypothes.is/a/SdYxONsREeyuDQOG4K8D_Q

Dance: - Twyla Tharpe https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SEOWBG/ (Chapter 6)

Art/Visual - Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/archive-collections/verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang-exhibition/mnemosyne-materials

Creative writing (as opposed to academic): - Vladimir Nabokov https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html - Jean Paul - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00168890.2018.1479240 - https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC34721 (German) - Michael Ende https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Endes-Zettelkasten-Skizzen-Notizen/dp/352271380X

Andy, I take that much broader view you're describing. I definitely wouldn't say I'm keen to trace things through one (or even more) historical traditions, and to be sure there have been very many. I'm curious about a broad variety of traditions and variations on them; giving broad categorization to them can be helpful. I study both the written instructions through time, but also look at specific examples people have left behind of how they actually practiced those instructions. The vast majority of people are not likely to invent and evolve a practice alone, but are more likely likely to imitate the broad instructions read from a manual or taught by teachers and then pick and choose what they feel works for them and their particular needs. It's ultimately here that general laziness is likely to fall down to a least common denominator.

Between the 8th and 13th Centuries florilegium flouished, likely passed from user to user through a religious network, primarily facilitated by the Catholic Church and mendicant orders of the time period. In the late 1400s to 1500s, there were incredibly popular handbooks outlining the commonplace book by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melancthon that influenced generations of both teachers and students to come. These traditions ebbed and flowed over time and bent to the technologies of their times (index cards, card catalogs, carbon copy paper, computers, internet, desktop/mobile/browser applications, and others.) Naturally now we see a new crop of writers and "influencers" like Kuehn, Ahrens, Allosso, Holiday, Forte, Milo, and even zettelkasten.de prescribing methods which are variously followed (or not), understood, misunderstood, modified, and changed by readers looking for something they can easily follow, maintain, and which hopefully has both short term and long term value to them.

Everyone is taking what they want from what they read on these techniques, but often they're not presented with the broadest array of methods or told what the benefits and affordances of each of the methods may be. Most manuals on these topics are pretty prescriptive and few offer or suggest flexibility. If you read Tiago Forte but don't need a system for work or project-based productivity but rather need a more Luhmann-like system for academic writing, you'll have missed something or will only have a tool that gets you part of what you may have needed. Similarly if you don't need the affordances of a Luhmannesque system, but you've only read Ahrens, you might not find the value of simplified but similar systems and may get lost in terminology you don't understand or may not use. The worst sin, in my opinion, is when these writers offer their advice, based only on their own experiences which are contingent on their own work processes, and say this is "the way" or I've developed "this method" over the past decade of grueling, hard-fought experience and it's the "secret" to the "magic of note taking". These ideas have a long and deep history with lots of exploration and (usually very little) innovation, but an average person isn't able to take advantage of this because they're only seeing a tiny slice of these broader practices. They're being given a hammer instead of a whole toolbox of useful tools from which they might choose. Almost none are asking the user "What is the problem you're trying to solve?" and then making suggestions about what may or may not have worked for similar problems in the past as a means of arriving at a solution. More often they're being thrown in the deep end and covered in four letter acronyms, jargon, and theory which ultimately have no value to them. In other cases they're being sold on the magic of productivity and creativity while the work involved is downplayed and they don't get far enough into the work to see any of the promised productivity and creativity.

reply to: https://twitter.com/jmeowmeow/status/1568736485171666946

I've only seen a few people notice the similarities between zettelkasten and fieldstones. Among them I don't think any have noted that Luhmann and Weinberg were both systems theorists.

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Repy to https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/16382/#Comment_16382

@Jeremy I certainly take your point on that score. I had read through a previous edition of just the writing portion which was originally written by S.J. Allosso from a prior generation, so I didn't read through all of the second half of this edition of the book. I haven't compared them, so I'm not sure how much revision, if any, has happened in the writing advice part of the text. I was definitely more interested in his take on note making in the first half.

It's tough to do your own marketing and naming is hard. If you have an obscure short title, be sure to have a sharply defined subtitle, both for definition but to hit the keywords you'll want for discovery and search (SEO) purposes. Though be careful with keyword stuffing, if for no other reason than that Luhmann had a particularly sparse index.

Zettelkasten doesn't have much value for for native search (yet). Who besides a student that doesn't really want to buy it searches for a book on note taking?! Creativity, Productivity, and Writing are probably most of your potential market, so look at books in those areas for words to borrow (aka steal flagrantly). Other less common keywords to consider or throw into your description of the book, though not the title: research, research methods, literature review, thesis writing, Ph.D., etc.

Perhaps you've limited the question Scott. Instead ask everyone: What title would you want to see on such a book that would make you want to buy and read it? Everyone should brainstorm for 3 minutes and write down a few potential titles.

I'll start:

Antinet Method: Thought Development for Creativity and Productive Writing

Antinet Zettelkasten: A Modern Approach to Thought Development

Antinet: The Technique of Unreasonably Productive Intellectual Work (and Fun) [h/t F. Kuntze]

Mix and match away...

reply on: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wzblc9/card_storage/

The smaller 1 to 3 drawer vintage metal card files are readily available on eBay usually between $15 and $40. This isn't bad given how expensive new files can run. Many were made with small fittings that allow them to be stackable. Usually these are sturdy, but light enough for relatively inexpensive shipping.

The larger multi drawer full cabinets can run a couple hundred, but their bigger issue is that they're so large and heavy that they can be in the range of $800 or more to ship anywhere. If you want something like this, your best bet is to try to find something local that you can drive to and pick up locally. If you're into 4x6" cards, double check with the seller to make sure that they'll fit. Often even the somewhat larger cabinets are a 1/4" too short for 4x6 cards, much less the slightly taller tabbed cards (A-Z) you might use for separating sections. I've refinished some old steel furniture like this in the past and it's not easy or cheap, but if someone is desperate...

https://www.ebay.com/b/Index-Card-File-Cabinet-In-Office-Filing-Cabinets/3299/bn_7022123911

Those who might want something new might also look into Bisley which makes some reasonably nice card index files with and without locks, though you might have to order them directly through their New York Offices. https://www.bisley.sk/userfiles/bisley/product/e84b22bf2d7156d048ad076ff74f895d.pdf

This might help:<br /> Zettelkasten Overreach https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wv9hvq/digitizing_and_compressing_notes_question/

I've got a process I still use, though less frequently, that does both photos as well as optical character recognition (OCR) to digitize the words: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/20/handwriting-my-website-with-a-digital-amanuensis/ The comments have some rich commentary with related ideas as well.

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wvn38a/using_notebooks_with_your_antinet/

Ross Ashby, a systems theorist like Luhmann, had a sophisticated hybrid notebook/index card system that some here might find an interesting and usable model, particularly if they're enamored of the notebook format. It's been digitized and is online for perusal: http://www.rossashby.info/

The razor thin margins argument only works from the bookseller's perspective, and this is primarily due to excessive competition from Amazon. Beyond this, sure the product would be slightly more expensive, but (pun intended) only marginally so. Revenue margins on classics written before 1924 (which most of this class of books is) are also significantly higher because they're public domain and the company isn't paying royalties on them. Additionally, at scale, a company with a series like Penguin Classics has a pretty solid understanding of print runs and demand to more easily allow them to innovate like this. Take the Penguin Classics copy of Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War which lists for $20 in paperback and sells for $12.00 on Amazon. (You'll notice that Amazon is essentially giving away their entire discount (aka margin, usually a 40% discount on the list price) here. At a 10,000 copy print run, the cost of the print/paper/print run is in the $2.00 per copy range or lower. Amazon is taking a razor margin for the sale, but Penguin is pocketing almost $10 in pure profit as I'm sure their marketing budget is very near zero here.<br /> They could easily still do very close to this with either larger book margins or even the same text printed on 6 x 9" instead of 5 x 8.25 (or even smaller pulp sizes) so they don't have to reset the entire book for pennies on the dollar at the publisher level. Given that the majority of this market is targeted at students, who could directly use these affordances (and often do but in more cramped space) for the small mark up (particularly in comparison to the $80 copies, which still don't fit the bill, when they exist), I would attribute their non-existence to laziness and lack of imagination on the part of the publishers. Perhaps a smaller publishers like Dover might take on such a project as a means of cheaply, but profitably improving their position in the market? Those making the argument for not marking up these sorts of copies to keep the book pristine for the next reader are missing the point. I also suspect that they haven't recently purchased these sorts of used copies that often go for under $4 on the used market. Even when treated well and not heavily annotated by the first reader, these books are not in good shape and really aren't designed to be read by more than three people. It's also the reason that most libraries don't purchase them. I might buy their argument for the more expensive hardcover collector's market, but not for the pulp mass market books which hold almost no value on the secondary market. Additionally the secondary market for this class of books doesn't usually reflect large value differences between heavily annotated/highlighted texts and those that aren't. Whether they mark them up or not, the first owner is responsible for the largest proportion of depreciated value. Tangentially, I find myself lamenting the cultural practices of prior generations who valued sharing annotated copies of texts with friends and lovers as tokens of their friendship and love. I'm guessing those who vitiate against annotation have never known these practices existed.

Louis Menand had an interesting article on great books courses recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates.

If you look closely at those photos of Adler, you'll notice that one is in context and the other is the same image of him cut and pasted onto a set of books.

Those who are into this broader topic may also appreciate Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books". A while back I remember going though Lawrence Principe's Great Courses lecture series on the History of Science to 1700 which I suspect might help contextualize a tour through the great courses.

I'm curious if you're adding any other books that Adler et al left off their list?

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wrytqj/comment/ilax9tc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Index card systems were insanely popular in the early 1900's for note taking and uses of all other sorts (business administration, libraries, etc.). The note taking tradition of the slip box goes back even further in intellectual history with precedents including miscellanies, commonplace books, and florilegia. Konrad Gessner may have been one of the first to have created a method using slips of rearrangeable paper in the 1500s, but this general pattern of excerpting, note taking and writing goes back to antiquity with the concept of locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

What some intellectual historians are hoping for evidence of in this particular source is a possible origin of the idea of the increased complexity of direct links from one card to another as well as the juxtaposition of ideas which build on each other. Did Luhmann innovate this himself or was this something he read or was in general practice which he picked up? Most examples of zettelkasten outside of Luhmann's until those in the present, could be described reasonably accurately as commonplace books on index cards usually arranged by topic/subject heading/head word (with or without internal indices).

Perhaps it was Luhmann's familiarity with Aktenzeichen (German administrative "file numbers") prior to his academic work which inspired the dramatically different form his index card-based commonplace took? See: https://hyp.is/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA/www.wikiwand.com/de/Aktenzeichen_(Deutschland)

Is it possible that he was influenced by Beatrice Webb's ideas on note taking from Appendix C of My Apprenticeship (1924) which was widely influential in the humanities and particularly sociology and anthropology? Would he have been aware of the work of historians Ernst Bernheim followed by Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/DLP52hqFEe2nrIMdrd4U7g) Did Luhmann's law studies expose him to the work of jurist Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) who wrote about his practice in his autobiography and subsequently influenced generations of practitioners including Jean Paul and potentially Hegel?

There are obviously lots of unanswered questions...

If you've not come across the examples, one of the precursors of the slip box tradition was the widespread use of florilegia from the 8th through the 13th centuries and beyond, and they were primarily used for religious study, preaching, and sermon writing.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florilegium
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
• https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3Aflorilegium

A major example of early use was by Philip Melanchthon, who wrote a very popular handbook on how to keep a commonplace. He's one of the reasons why many Lutheran books are called or have Commonplace in the title.

A fantastic example is that of American preacher Jonathan Edwards which he called by an alternate name of Miscellanies which is now digitized and online, much the way Luhmann's is: http://edwards.yale.edu/research/misc-index Apparently he used to pin slips with notes on his coat jacket!

If I recall, u/TomKluender may have some practical experience in the overlap of theology and zettelkasten.

(Moved this comment to https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wth5t8/bible_study_and_zettelkasten/ as a better location for the conversation)

I've got a few slips/references to Wittgenstein's practice available here: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=Wittgenstein

Thanks for this additional piece of Data Matthias! I have a feeling that some of the benefit will also come down to the level of quality of the notes and how well interlinked they may be. Those doing massive dumps of raw, unelaborated, and unlinked data using services like Readwise into their collections will certainly take longer than those who have more refined ideas well linked. My number is presuming something closer to the former while something along the lines of a tenth of that (an order of magnitude) would seem to fall in line with my current working model. It would be nice to have a larger body of data to work with though.

syndication link

Below are some sources to give you a start on orality. I've arranged them in a suggested watching/reading order with some introductory material before more technical sources which will give you jumping off points for further research.

• Modern Memory, Ancient Methods. TEDxMelbourne. Melbourne, Australia, 2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/lynne_kelly_modern_memory_ancient_methods.
• Kelly, Lynne. The Memory Code. Allen & Unwin, 2016.
• Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444973.
• Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Taylor & Francis, 2007.
• Parry, Milman, and Adam Parry. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Neale, Margo, and Lynne Kelly. Songlines: The Power and Promise. First Knowledges, 1.0. Thames & Hudson, 2020.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wsb1ff/iam_stressed_about_relearning_every_thing_about/

If it helps to frame things in smaller building blocks with progressive enhancement as you progress, this outline may be of help: https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/

Start small and you can evolve and revise as things progress, but you'll at least have a start.

I too wished for more sources, especially on some of the great quotes.

Admittedly, for those who're already eyeball deep in note taking practice, there may not be much new, but for some who are confused or confounded by some of Ahrens' descriptions and presentation, this cuts through some of the details and gets more quickly to the point.

Will you also be traveling and singing with y fari lwyd? 🐴💀

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wjigq6/how_do_you_increase_your_permanent_note_output

In addition to all the other good advice from others, it might be worth taking a look at others' production and output from a historical perspective. Luhmann working at his project full time managed to average about 6 cards a day.1 Roland Barthes who had a similar practice for 37 years averaged about 1.3 cards a day.2 Tiago Forte has self-reported that he makes two notes a day, though obviously his isn't the same sort of practice nor has he done it consistently for as long.3 As you request, it would be useful to have some better data about the output of people with long term, consistent use.

Given even these few, but reasonably solid, data points at just 90 minutes a day, one might think you're maybe too "productive"! I suspect that unless one is an academic working at something consistently nearly full time, most are more likely to be in the 1-3 notes a day average output at best. On a per hour basis Luhmann was close to 0.75 cards while you're at 0.53 cards. Knowing this, perhaps the best advice is to slow down a bit and focus on quality over quantity. This combined with continued consistency will probably serve your enterprise much better in the long run than in focusing on card per hour or card per day productivity.

Internal idea generation/creation productivity will naturally compound over time as your collection grows and you continue to work with it. This may be a better sort of productivity to focus on in the long term compared with short term raw inputs.

Another useful tidbit that some neglect is the level of quality and diversity of the reading (or other) inputs you're using. The better the journal articles and books you're reading, the more value and insight you're likely to find and generate more quickly over time.

reply to TurnipMonkey

They're not as easy to come by as you might think, though they pop up from time to time. Given shipping costs, you're definitely better off finding something locally if you can.

OCLC started digital shared cataloging in 1971. The peak for pre-printed library catalog cards was in 1985, and they quit printing cards in bulk in 2015 after shipping more than 1.9 billion cards during that time.^[1]

reply to GnauticalGnorman

Don't frown at cardboard. Everyone starts their journey with a single card and a humble box. Filling up a first box is an accomplishment that gives you time to dream about the box you want to have.

Of potential interest, the cost of index cards to fill these files will be almost the investment in the box itself. Is this similar to the rule of thumb in the art world that the price of the frame should reflect the investment in the artwork?

Continuing on the bouba/kiki effect thread, I thought some might appreciate this visualization, though I'm unsure of a more concrete method for tying it into my own practice (yet).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYCX1WpXEAcYphG?format=jpg&name=small

via

pic.twitter.com/xDfBj3mxon

— Alex Tomlinson 🪶 (@hootalex) July 19, 2022

I haven't delved into McPherson's work yet, but it's in my pile. She's one of the few people who've written about both note taking and memory, so I'm intrigued. I take it you like her perspective? Does she delve into any science-backed methods or is she coming from a more experiential perspective?

I'll push back on this a bit. I suspect that even though one might create multiple links to digital notes in all directions like this, it really doesn't happen happen at scale like this in practice.

I'd be willing to guess that very few people in the digital space are linking their ideas to more than two or three others. In fact, I suspect that if you looked at many digital ZKs you'd find a lot of orphaned notes floating around.

Separately, even in the analog space, the two links (down or forward) isn't always correct either. I cross link all over the place. The one constant benefit of the analog is that you're generally required to create at least one link because you have to place the card somewhere, and this isn't the case in most digital contexts/tools.

I'd posit that it's a lot of work to link a new idea into your system once much less in multiple places. Generally the more ideas you can link/cross-link it to, the more likely you'll run across it in the future and have potential to reuse it. I'd also suggest that the more links it's got, the better you'll "own" it. These addition links will also allow you to better compare/contrast various ideas by juxtaposing them in the future.

Theorem: more (good/great) links = more complexity which yields more "life", serendipity, and surprise to be found in your slip box for future use.

Historically, following a tradition from accounting ledgers, people kept small, convenient pocket notebooks called "waste books" for quickly capturing notes and ideas in daily life. Later, they'd either expand on them or copy them out in better detail and usually in a nicer hand with sources/citations, and indexing/cross referencing in their permanent commonplaces. When you're done with it, you'd simply dispose of or throw away the waste book.

As for arrangement or organization, it's been common for people to use something roughly similar to John Locke's indexing method from 1706 for arranging and finding material. Others use a card index file and index cards to be able to rearrange pieces or to more easily index and cross reference portions.

I often recommend https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book as a pretty solid resource with some history, books, articles, and lots of examples (both digital and analog/paper-based) one might look at to find what they think would be best for themselves.

👋🏼@carterb5 ! I learned all my best tricks from @jgmac1106. And out of nostalgia, it's sometimes fun revisiting all my old notes: boffosocko.com/tag/edu52... Has it already been 4 years?!

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/te80rv/how_do_you_capture_fleeting_notes_in_your_workflow/

I broadly take most of my (online) notes using Hypothes.is for web pages and .pdf files. I then use the Hypothesidian set up with Templater to import all the pieces: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225

So far it's been pretty helpful and I spend a huge amount of time in Hypothes.is.

Glad I'm not the only one...

Depending on my particular mood, I'll call mine "Konrad" after Gessner, "Beatrice" after Webb, or "Bruce" (a quirky hat tip to The West Wing S7 E2: "His name is Bruce. He's a flight attendant on Aer Lingus. They've got a connecting hub out of Hamburg. You know, at first it was long walks along the Reeperbahn...")

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/w0x1m6/give_your_antinet_a_pen_name/

Thanks! Robert Greene's method has also been heavily written about by Ryan Holiday who worked for him, used it subsequently, and has delineated the process in reasonable detail in several posts on his own blog and in Lifehacker in 2013/2014: - https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137 - https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/ - https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

Commonplacing goes back over two millenia and was very popular in the 1500-1800s. I'm specifically more interested in examples of refined heavily linked zk techniques as one "comes down the stretch". Thus far there are incredibly few public examples in the space...

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/comment-page-1/#comment-4960

I love that you're adding links to the responses back and forth for future reference. I remember doing this manually several years back, but its a practice I rarely see. Both Stephen and I are using the Webmention spec to do this for our selves in an automatic fashion. (Mine display on my site in the comments, though I don't think Stephen does presently.) On wordpress.com you'd likely need to have a higher paid tier to add the plugins to enable this for WordPress, though depending on how often you do this it may be worth it?

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vzertk/using_the_antinet_for_professional_conferences/

Thanks /ultwalt This seems to underline the aphorism, that the more you put into something, the more you'll get out of it. It's something that many miss as an underlying benefit to these processes in general.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547390915689566211.html via https://twitter.com/nicolas_gatien/status/1547390946156969984

Nicolas, I broadly agree with you that many of these factors of reading and writing for understanding and retention are at play and the research in memory and spaced repetition underlines a lot of this. However in practice, one needs to be revisiting and actively using their notes for some particular project to remember them better. The card search may help to create both visual and physical paths that assist in memory too.

Reliance solely on a physical zettelkasten however may not be enough without active use over time, particularly for the majority of users. It's unlikely that all or even many may undertake this long term practice. Saying that this is either the "best", "optimum", or "only" way would be disingenuous to the diversity of learners and thinkers.

Those who want to add additional strength to these effects might also use mnemonic methods from indigenous cultures that rely on primary orality. These could include color, images, doodles (drolleries anyone?), or other associative methods, many of which could be easily built into an (antinet) zettelkasten. Lynne Kelly's work in this area can be highly illuminating. For pure practical application and diversity of potential methods, I recommend her book Memory Craft https://amzn.to/3zdqqGp, but she's got much more academic and in depth work that is highly illustrative.

With this background on orality and memory in mind we might all broadly view wood and stone circles (Stonehenge), menhir, standing stones, songlines, and other mnemonic devices in the archaeological and sociological records as zettelkasten which one keeps entirely in their memory rather than writing them down. We might also consider, based on this and the historical record concerning Druids and their association with trees that the trees served a zettelkasten-like function for those ancient societies. This continues to extend to lots of other cultural and societal practices throughout history. Knowledge from Duane Hamacher et al's book The First Astronomers and Karlie Noone and Krystal De Napoli's Astronomy: Sky Country will underline these theories and practices in modern indigenous settings.

If it's continuing on 15a, then 15b would make most sense to me. Perhaps this example description helps? https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/8350/8270#the-system-of-numbering Try not to think "between" as it indicates links forwards and backwards, but what does this thought "continue on" or "follow"?

Scott, I'm not looking for outputs themselves (there are many of these floating about, though they're infrequently seen or talked about in our spaces), but more the unseen work between having a deck of cards and how one pulls them out, potentially orders them around, and physically manufactures the text itself. I'm looking for the (likely) droll videos of the enthusiastic zettelmacher(in) crawling around on the floor moving cards about to actually form the content. Or photos or video of their living room covered with several hundred cards ordering them into the form of the ultimate output which they've already written down, but just need to put into a reasonable logical linear form. What do these look like in digital and analog form?

Sadly I think we're talking past each other somehow; I broadly agree with all of your original thread. Perhaps there's also some context collapse amidst our conversations across multiple platforms which doesn't help.

Maybe my error was in placing my comment on your original thread rather than a sub branch on one of the top several comments? I didn't want to target anyone in particular as the "invented by Luhmann myth" is incredibly wide spread and is unlikely to ever go away. It's obvious by some of the responses I've seen from your thread here in r/antinet that folks without the explicit context of the history default to the misconception that Luhmann invented it. This misconception tends to reinforce the idea that there's "one true way" (the often canonically presented "perfect" Luhmann zettelkasten, rather than the messier method that he obviously practiced in reality) when, instead, there are lots of methods, many of which share some general principles or building blocks, but which can have dramatically different uses and outcomes. My hope in highlighting the history was specifically to give your point more power, not take the opposite stance. Not having the direct evidence to the contrary, you'll noticed I hedged my statement with the word "seems" in the opening sentence. I apologize to you that I apparently wasn't more clear.

I love your comparison of LYT and zettelkasten by the way. It's reminiscent of the sort of comparison I'm hoping to bring forth in an upcoming review of Tiago Forte's recent book. His method—ostensibly a folder based digital commonplace book, which is similar to Milo's LYT—can be useful, but he doesn't seem to have the broader experience of history or the various use cases to be able to advise a general audience which method(s) they may want to try or for which ends. I worry that while he's got a useful method for potentially many people, too many may see it and his platform as a recipe they need to follow rather than having a set of choices for various outcomes they may wish to have. Too many "thought leaders" are trying to "own" portions of the space rather than presenting choices or comparisons the way you have. Elizabeth Butler is one of the few others I've seen taking a broader approach. A lot of these explorations also means there are multiple different words to describe each system's functionality, which I think only serves to muddy things up for potential users rather than make them clearer. (And doing this across multiple languages across time is even more confusing: is it zettelkasten, card index, or fichier boîte? Already the idea of zettelkasten (in English speaking areas) has taken on the semantic meaning "Luhmann's specific method of keeping a zettelkasten" rather than just a box with slips.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vy4abk/interesting_thread_on_twitter_about_the_need_and/

Thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547208663768748032.html

That thread by u/taurusnoises (Bob Doto aka @thehighpony) seems to explicitly buy into the rumor that Luhmann invented the zettelkasten. He assuredly did not and was most likely taught it or some version of it by one or more teachers or colleagues in his lifetime. We're unlikely to know if he tweaked or modified it extensively from the version he was taught, but studying the methods of others may be illustrative. How did Wittgenstein use it? Newton? Georg Christoph Lichtenberg? John Locke? Barthes? Marcel Mauss? Claude Lévi-Strauss? Heck, even comedian George Carlin, dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp, and battle rapper/musician Eminem have slip box systems that they explicitly used for their creativity and work.

People have been using zettelkasten, commonplace books, florilegium, and other similar methods for centuries, and no one version is the "correct" one. What is useful is finding a system that works for you (and not finding a system that you work for). Everyone here is assuredly doing exactly as Luhmann did, you're taking a tool with a broad set of ideas, principles, and practices and putting it to use in a way that works for you. This is part of the reason why there are so many people with so many questions about the what and why in this and other fora.

We approach these methods from such a top down manner, in part, because our culture has broadly lost the thread of how these note taking practices were done historically. Instead of working with something that has always existed and been taught in our culture, and then using it to suit our needs, we're looking at it like a new shiny toy or app and then trying to modify it to make it suit our needs.

Of course to be sure, Luhmann's version of the tool as he used it is one of the most powerful forms of commonplacing we've seen, but this doesn't mean that someone doesn't change or innovate on the methods to make something even more powerful or emergent. (I'd caution against low level attempts as this ground has been heavily tread by millions of people over time.)

To add onto Nicolas-Gatien and dynodiaper's list, how about? 4. Idea generation/creation and innovation

And for those who want the bumper sticker version: https://www.zazzle.com/niklas_luhmann_bumper_sticker-128462770354241554 Or maybe, for Scott, the coffee mug version? 😁☕https://www.zazzle.com/niklas_luhmann_mug-168394795838388324

Instead of building a comments section, why not build it to send/accept Webmentions? (Webmention.io and Webmention.js with some help from Brid.gy) could implement this pretty quickly without much additional work.) This would allow your digital garden to communicate directly with others' as well as other sites online including Twitter?

https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/comments/lvtvko/what_is_the_difference_between_digital_garden_and/

Asked in March 2021, there's some interesting nascent differentiation between the two forms of note taking and display. Almost all zettelkasten were private at this point and digital gardens were an emerging phenomenon.

There's some indication of the difference delineated on the IndieWeb wiki, particularly for digital versions: - https://indieweb.org/Zettelk%C3%A4sten - https://indieweb.org/digital_garden

Stephen, to get a general grip on note taking practices, I've been collecting rough numbers of notes per day over spans of time from people. You mention 35,669 posts here. Over what span of time (years/days) does that currently represent?

Realizing that my prior separate advice wasn't as actionable or specific, I thought I'd take another crack at your question.

Some seem to miss the older techniques and names for this sort of practice and get too wound up in words like categories, tags, #hashtags, [[wikilinks]], or other related taxonomies and ontologies. Some become confounded about how to implement these into digital systems. Simplify things and index your ideas/notes the way one would have indexed books in a library card catalog, generally using subject, author and title.

Since you're using an approach more grounded in the commonplace book tradition rather than a zettelkasten one, put an easy identifier on your note (this can be a unique title or number) and then cross reference it with any related subject headings or topical category words you find useful.

Here's a concrete example, hopefully in reasonable detail that one can easily follow. Let's say you have a quote you want to save:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

In a paper system you might give this card the identification number #237. (This is analogous to the Dewey Decimal number that might be put on a book to find it on the shelves.) You want to be able to find this quote in the future using the topical words "power", "information", "connections", and "quotes" for example. (Which topical headings you choose and why can be up to you, the goal is to make it easier to dig up for potential reuse in future contexts). So create a separate paper index with alphabetical headings (A-Z) and then write cards for your topical headings. Your card with "power" at the top will have the number #237 on it to indicate that that card is related to the word power. You'll ultimately have other cards that relate and can easily find everything related to "power" within your system by using this subject index.

You might also want to file that quote under two other "topics" which will make it easy to find: primarily the author of the quote "Umberto Eco" and the title of the source Foucault's Pendulum. You can add these to your index the same way you did "power", "information", etc., but it may be easier or more logical to keep a bibliographic index separately for footnoting your material, so you might want a separate bibliographic index for authors and sources. If you do this, then create a card with Umberto Eco at the top and then put the number #237 on it. Later you'll add other numbers for other related ideas to Eco. You can then keep your card "Eco, Umberto" alphabetized with all the other authors you cite. You'll effect a similar process with the title.

With this done, you now have a system in which you don't have to categorize a single idea in a single place. Regardless of what project or thing you're working on, you can find lots of related notes. If you're juggling multiple projects you can have an index file or document outline for these as well. So your book project on the History of Information could have a rough outline of the book on which you've got the number #237 in the chapter or place where you might use the quote.

Hopefully this will be even more flexible than Holiday's system because that was broadly project based. In practice, if you're keeping notes over a lifetime, you're unlikely to be interested in dramatically different areas the way Ryan Holiday or Robert Greene were for disparate book projects, but will find more overlapping areas. Having a more flexible system that will allow you to reuse your notes for multiple settings or projects will be highly valuable.

For those who are using digital systems, ask yourself: "what functions and features allow you to do these analog patterns most easily?" If you're using something like Obsidian which has #tagging functionality that automatically creates an index of all your tags, then leverage that and remove some of the manual process. The goal is to make sure the digital system is creating the structure to allow you to easily find and use your notes when you need them. If your note taking system doesn't have custom functionalities for any of these things, then you'll need to do more portions of them manually.

If these are the types of things that are interesting, you might also try a shared bibliography that a handful of readers/researchers share and contribute to: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought

I've spend a lot of time in the education, pedagogy, and instructional design spaces in the past decade. I can guarantee you that he hasn't solved the problem. People have been talking about education reform for centuries and it's still no where close to being solved. If anything perhaps it's even gotten worse, particularly in Western culture.

If this is your area, I'd recommend taking a look at some of Andy Matuschak's work on mnemonic medium and Lynne Kelly's work on orality and memory which take some non-standard approaches to some of these wholly unsolved questions. Annie Murphy Paul's recent book The Extended Mind will also outline some fun recent work and potentially show you gaping holes in the thought enterprise.

I wonder if Scott P. Scheper has done any videos on his writing/composing process for getting material out of his card file for creating his book for which I've seen portions of a few chapters floating around. I've loosely followed his YouTube channel and his r/antinet community on Reddit, but I haven't seen this portion of his process in any detail.

This (export) part also seems like one of the more intense, manual, and heaving lifting pieces of the process. I've yet to see any digital tools which automate or make this portion of the work easier.

Perhaps a graph view of connected nodes with titles in which one can highlight nodes as a selection method and then export them in some process to a space where they might be potentially reordered or shuffled into a linear order for further editing and ultimately publishing, might be useful? Even saying this takes forever much less doing it easily with an inspiring user interface..

Link to: https://hyp.is/9PV1jP5OEeyPumNKyckR1A/danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper

Syndication links: - https://danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper/comment/7610486

Marshall, in looking at your cards, I'm curious how easy/hard you feel it is to remember longer portions of full quotes like your H.L. Menken example using only spaced repetition? I usually find it far more taxing and not as long lasting as using other more classical mnemonic methods (method of loci/songlines).

Piotr Wozniak has some material on creating/designing more concrete cards for spaced repetition that I've found generally helpful. I know that Andy Matuschak and Soren Bjornstad have some ideas, experience, and research in the space but I've yet to see more deep research on the effectiveness of these more specific practices at scale or beyond the anecdotal.

https://marshallk.com/7-steps-i-take-to-get-value-from-what-i-read-notes-on-note-taking-review