Doctorow analogizes his reading and writing in the same sort of chemistry/statistical mechanics method as I have in the past.

reply to u/cosmic-magistra at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g8diq4/any_books_about_how_someone_used_zettelkasten_to/lt4en6f/

Dude, you're taking too narrow a view at what's going on as each person uses the stored work in their particular set of "cards". Everyone is going to be different based on their particular needs. I've sketched an outline of a fairly broad spectrum of users from Eminem (low organization) to Luhmann (high organization). If putting in the level of work Luhmann did upfront isn't working for you, why follow his exact recipe?

Nabokov is an outlier in the larger group. Does he really need a heavily linked system to write what is linear fiction? Did he even need to index his cards at all? Separate boxes per book worked well enough for him, much the way they do for both Robert Greene and Ryan Halliday who follow some of this pattern as well. Nabokov generally did both research on characters and laid out the outline of his plot. Following this he'd dictate drafts to his wife Vera from the cards and edit from there. In '58 Carl Mydans got photos of some of this process. (See: https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/tlFRyEZcBnGmBDStKWdpR1cXt0Q=/750x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/the-nabakovs-at-work-96793854-468f6ab40e914e45abdd1542fa370872.jpg ) In The Original of Laura, you're seeing the rawest, earliest outline of Nabokov's process. He hasn't gotten to the dictation/typescript level yet. As a result, it's surely not going to make much sense, and assuredly the reason he didn't want it published. Again, you have to either discover or imagine the broader process each person used. If I gave you a similar tranch of Luhmann's cards without any additional context, would they mean much to you? Could you turn them into something concrete without a lot of additional work? Why would you expect the same from these excerpts from Nabokov? This doesn't mean that they don't provide the interested party a window into his work and methods.

Others broadly indexed their ideas as they filed them, a fact which creates the exact links you seem to indicate didn't exist. John Locke's method of indexing was incredibly widespread to the point that at the end of the 18th century, John Bell (1745–1831), an English publisher, mass produced books with the title Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke. The notebooks commonly included 550 pages, of which eight pages included instructions on John Locke's indexing method. There are many extant copies of these including one used by Erasmus Darwin, which was bequeathed to Charles Darwin.

OP certainly posed a fair question (and incidentally very similar to one I posed a few years back), but the answer was broadly sketched, so anyone interested in a full answer is going to need to delve a lot further into these examples to be able to get the full picture. I was providing a list of some additional evidence to show there's a lot more depth out there than is generally being talked about. There are hundreds of one page blog posts about Luhmann's method in the last five plus years, but do any of them really encompass what he was doing? Ahrens wrote a whole book about it, but obviously people are still full of questions about the process. I gave less than a few sentences about a couple dozen well-known people as examples, so your expectations may be a little on the high side. It's pretty easy to find my own digital notes for those who want to skip some of the work, but if you want more, you're going to need to do some of your own reading and research. My response was generally to say that, yes, there's some there, there, but as almost everyone here for the last several years can tell you, it's going to require some work and lots of practice on your part to get somewhere with it. There isn't a royal road, but the peasant's path will assuredly get you where you want to go.

Pierre Anton Grillet, in the preface to Abstract Algebra, 2nd Edition (Springer, 2007) said, "Algebra is like French Pastry: wonderful, but cannot be learned without putting one’s hands to the dough." Zettelkasten methods are much the same. 🗃️🥐

How to get round the idea of processing which is a stumbling block for fun?

processed notes are akin to the amount of nutritive value in processed food...

Notice that again he's emphasizing breaking down the problem into steps, and he's using a little analogy to do so, just like he had described previously.

(see: https://hypothes.is/a/NDArGoemEe-9BXcYJSUyMQ)

Aliens in the plot "hide between saccades".

We can equate this to the way politicians actively treat their constituents when they play the hypocratic game of "do as I say not as I do".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

quote via u/edward_slizzerhands

Stradavarius : violin : varnish :: West German Engineering : typewriter : cigarettes

original source?

This quote works well for individuals, but looking at tree stands in Alaska only thousands of years from glaciation, one sees incredibly tall trees that have shallow root systems, but they utilize each others' root systems to keep groups of trees strong and tall. This apparently even extends to groups of trees looking out for each other to keep the group strong.

via https://www.saschafast.de/

—David Lynch

This is from his book: see: https://hypothes.is/a/Swp61GITEe6dmD-RxxFY4w

Digging by [[Seamus Heaney]]<br /> via Poetry Foundation

Analogizing typewriters with musical instruments.

church:education:scholasticism::church:state:sinfonia

Ed Catmull analogizes the idea of pithy business statements and aphorisms as old, heavy suitcases and their handles. It's easy to grab onto the handle and walk of only with it, particularly when the weight and inconvenience of the suitcase and its actual contents are no longer attached. One needs to make sure that their comfortable old suitcase handle is still attached to the case and the valuable, hard-won wisdom of the contents inside.

read [[Harold Jarche]] in dead blog walking at 20

quoted section from:

St Augustine, Letters, trans. by Wilfrid Parsons, 5 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Catholic University of America Press, 1956), V, Letter 211, ‘To a Convent of Consecrated Virgins’, p. 43.

This analogy is kind of hilarious from the perspective of Luhmann's Zettelkasten.

Here would be a good place to give a solid definition of humanity? What makes it special beyond the "self"?

We are genetically very closely related to great apes and chimpanzees and less closely to dogs, cats, and even rats. Do we miss our dogicity? Or ratanity?

What if the robot/human mix is somehow even more interesting and transcendent than humanity? His negativity doesn't leave any space for this possible eventuality.

Just as mosquitoes can "acquire" (evolve) DDT resistance or bacteria might evolve antiobiotic-resistance, might not humans evolve AI resistance? How fast might we do this? On what timeline? Will the pressure be slowly built up over time, or will the onset be so quick that extinction is the only outcome?

from World Brain, double check with source

Sounds similar to Umberto Eco's admonition about photocopying: https://hypothes.is/a/U3Sg_r0ZEe25T2tD3U-nmw

This is quite similar to the advice by Sonke Ehrens and Nikolas Luhmann.

Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledge's dramatic form. —Mary Cappello, Lecture

via https://kfitz.info/mary-cappello-lecture/ on 2023-11-29

via https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/17pitv9/comment/k86tusz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

—epilepticrabbit @epilepticrabbit@social.coop on Nov 09, 2023, 11:51 at https://mastodon.social/@epilepticrabbit@social.coop/111382329524902140

Analogy of reading (and learning) to teaching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQGb3WFEhLQ

Similar to Eminem's "stacking ammo" or Gerald Weinberg's "fieldstone method", David Lynch gathers piles of "firewood" from which he can draw to fire his creativity.

In various places in the book, Lynch uses the idea of drawing on piles of ideas and using his feedback to draw out creativity: his collaboration on music with Angelo Badalamenti in which he draws out ideas through conversation and having the prop man bring in various props with similar feedback. The music and props here are both forms of creative "firewood".

Pulling this back on topic by querying my own zettelkasten...

I've got versions of most of @Will's excellent list in my notes as well, but here are a few other metaphors (and analogies) which I don't think have been mentioned:

• child rearing; perhaps @Sascha will have an experienced perspective on this now?
• Digestion / Diffusion / Filtering / Distillation
  • Niklas Luhmann compared his zettelkasten to a septic tank. On Zettel 9/8a2 Luhmann called the Zettelkasten "eine Klärgrube" or a "septic tank;" (perhaps even "cesspool"). Waste goes in, and gets separated from the clearer stuff. You put in a lot of material, a lot of seeming waste, and it allows a process of settling and filtering to allow the waste to be separated and distill into something useful.
  • Ruminant machines
  • Barbara Tuchman used the ideas of chewing and distillation
• Grist mills and crucibles
• @Will has previously suggested relationships with flywheels before
• Statistical mechanics
• a "wooden life partner"
• woodworking has been mentioned before, but here's an extended one on wood chips in a workshop.
• Paths through forests
• Thought clouds
• avalanches/whirlpools
• Manfred Kuehn analogizes a Zettelkasten to a library
• idea/index card:zettelkasten :: person:society (see: https://hypothes.is/a/nTNZRGb2EeyZys9wX_gNTQ)
• @Sascha has previously analogized the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars.
• Humanity is a zettelkasten in biological form.

T9 (text prediction):generative AI::handgun:machine gun

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/n6wXvkeNEe6DOFexaCD-Qg

Ingermanson, Randy. “The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel.” Advanced Fiction Writing, circa 2013. https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/.

Designing writing in ever more specific and increasing levels. Start with a logline, then a paragraph, then acts, etc.

Roughly the advice I've given many over the years based on screenplay development experience, but with a clever name based on the Koch snowflake.

Owen Edwards in 2007 compared Phyllis Diller's gag file to a safe.

This is one of the things that doesn't seem to be being explored enough presently, or at least I'm not seeing it outside of the SAG and WGA strikes where it seems to be a side issue rather than a primary issue.

This is an extreme statement which bundles together a lot without direct evidence.

Written in an era in which there was a lot of pro-Democracy and anti-Communist discussion, Hutchins is making an almost religious statement here which binds education and democracy in the ways in which the Catholic church bound education and religion in scholasticism. While scholasticism may have had benefits, it also caused a variety of ills which took centuries to unwind into the Enlightenment.

Why can't we separate education from democracy? Can't education of this sort live in other polities? Hasn't it? Does critical education necessarily lead to democracy?

What does the explorable solution space of admixtures of critical reasoning and education look like with respect to various forms of government? Could a well-educated population thrive under collectivism or socialism?

The definition of "natural slavery" here is contingent and requires lots of context, particularly of the ways in which Aristotle used it versus our current understanding of chattel slavery.

Might we coin "zettelkastenly" as a function of (box) composed with (manually+cerebrally)?

hand:manually::brain:cerebrally::box:zettelkastenly

I would use the LaTeX \boxtimes symbol for this composition I think....

I love the idea here of analogizing the abstract nature of category theory in math with the abstract nature of metaphor in writing!

Good job Dale Keiger!

original source?

reply to dandennison84 at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17921/#Comment_17921

I've written a bit before on The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten, the latter of which has been emerging since roughly 2013 in English language contexts. Some of it is similar to or extends @dandennison84's framing along with some additional history.

Because of the richness of prior annotation and note taking traditions, for those who might mean what we're jokingly calling ZK®, I typically refer to that practice specifically as a "Luhmann-esque zettelkasten", though it might be far more appropriate to name them a (Melvil) "Dewey Zettelkasten" because the underlying idea which makes Luhmann's specific zettelkasten unique is that he was numbering his ideas and filing them next to similar ideas. Luhmann was treating ideas on cards the way Dewey had treated and classified books about 76 years earlier. Luhmann fortunately didn't need to have a standardized set of numbers the way the Mundaneum had with the Universal Decimal Classification system, because his was personal/private and not shared.

To be clear, I'm presently unaware that Dewey had or kept any specific sort of note taking system, card-based or otherwise. I would suspect, given his context, that if we were to dig into that history, we would find something closer to a Locke-inspired indexed commonplace book, though he may have switched later in life as his Library Bureau came to greater prominence and dominance.

Some of the value of the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system stems from the same sorts of serendipity one discovers while flipping through ideas that one finds in searching for books on library shelves. You may find the specific book you were looking for, but you're also liable to find some interesting things to read on the shelves around that book or even on a shelf you pass on the way to find your book.

Perhaps naming it and referring to it as the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system or the Dewey-Luhmann Zettelkasten may help to better ground and/or demystify the specific practices? Co-crediting them for the root idea and an early actual practice, respectively, provides a better framing and understanding, especially for native English speakers who don't have the linguistic context for understanding Zettelkästen on its own. Such a moniker would help to better delineate the expected practices and shape of a note taking practice which could be differentiated from other very similar ones which provide somewhat different affordances.

Of course, as the history of naming scientific principles and mathematical theorems after people shows us, as soon as such a surname label might catch on, we'll assuredly discover someone earlier in the timeline who had mastered these principles long before (eg: the "Gessner Zettelkasten" anyone?) Caveat emptor.

"surrealist visual puns"

Perhaps there is a model for reading and note taking/writing with respect to both learning and creating new knowledge that follows an inverse mapping in a way similar to that seen in Galois theory?

Explore this a bit to see what falls out.

ChatGPT as an instrument that allows one to play text like an instrument.

Bad analogies can lead to poor decisions.

On Ahrens' shipping container analogy to the zettelkasten

@ZettelDistraction said Perhaps the shipping hub is a better analogy for the Zettelkasten than the shipping container (Ahrens, 40).

We should be careful to separate the ideas of analogy and metaphor. Analogies are usually more direct and well-defined in scope.

While there's an apt and direct correlation between shipping containers and zettelkasten as boxes, Ahrens was making the analogy with respect to the shift that shipping containers made to the overall system:

shipping containers : shipping industry and globalism :: zettelkasten : thinking and writing/content creation

As with many analogies, stretching it the way one might stretch metaphors isn't usually fruitful or even possible.

In hindsight, we know why they failed: The ship owners tried to integrate the container into their usual way of working without changing the infrastructure and their routines. They tried to benefit from the obvious simplicity of loading containers onto ships without letting go of what they were used to.

He's saying one needs to consider how one's note taking method fits into their work in a more integrative way. Without properly integrating it into one's workflow seamlessly the system will fail. This is also one of the most difficult problems many zettelkasten aspirants have. In addition to creating a zettelkasten, they're often also simultaneously trying to integrate new (digital) tools into their process at the same time and they get distracted by them rather than focusing on the move to increasing writing/creating and creativity overall (globalism).

To focus on Ahrens' analogy a bit, if Obsidian, for example, is your "ship", is it as custom built for your specific purpose the way a container ship would be for a cargo container? Might you be better off with something like The Archive, ZKN3, or simple index cards that help to limit you to only do the function you want rather than all the other possible functions (wiki, blog, to do list, calendar, journal, kanban, etc.)? Obsidian and many other applications can be a proverbial row boat, a yacht, a tugboat, a steamer, a cruise ship, and even a warship in addition to a container ship, so one has to be extra careful how they choose to use it.

Misreading of Ahrens. The shipping container wasn't a direct analogy to the zk. It was an analogy about process of building a system from the ground up to better effectuate a result.

Mull on this...

reply to Share the ideas dancing in your ZK with us. February 17, 2023

Congratulations @Will on the milestone! @ctietze's analogy with smithwork is fantastic. I might also liken it to the point in acquiring a new language when one begins dreaming in their new target language. So many talk about the idea of increased productivity associated with having a zk, but most spend an inordinate amount of time on shiny object syndrome or over complicating it and never get to the point of quickly writing things out, filing them, and being able to trust that their system will just work™. When you no longer notice it anymore and it has become second nature is when the real fun (and magic) begins to happen. It also seems easier and more natural to break the "rules" once you've internalized the basics. We should spend more time talking about the value of 'zettelkasten fluency'.

I'm excited this week to be doing some work in areas of the history of misinformation, cultural myths, and 'American exceptionalism' in preparation for Dan Allosso's upcoming book club on Kruse and Zelizer's new edited book. I suspect he'll announce it shortly at https://danallosso.substack.com/ if folks are interested in joining in the discussion/sensemaking.

Kruse, Kevin M., and Julian E. Zelizer. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Basic Books, 2023.

google translate:

So if you raise such a wooden life partner, you will get more and more interesting answers to your questions after a few years...

I love the idea of rearing a zettelkasten as a "wooden life partner".

reply to u/New-Investigator-623 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10r6uwp/comment/j6wy4mf/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Ideas, concepts, propositions, et al. in this context are just the nebulous dictionary definitions. Their roots and modern usage have so much baggage now that attempting to separate them into more technical meanings is difficult unless you've got a solid reason to do so. I certainly don't here. If you want to go down some of the rabbit hole on the differences, you might appreciate Winston Perez' work on concept modeling which he outlines with respect to innovation and creativity here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGQ-dW7yfPc.

I debated on a more basic framing of chemistry or microbiology versus statistical mechanics or even the closely related statistical thermodynamics, but for the analogy here, I think it works even if it may scare some off as "too hard". With about 20 linear feet of books in my library dedicated to biology, physics, math, engineering with a lot of direct focus on evolutionary theory, complexity theory, and information theory I would suggest that the underlying physics of statistical mechanics and related thermodynamics is precisely what allows the conditions for systems to evolve and emerge, for this is exactly what biological (and other) systems have done. For those intrigued, perhaps Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order (if you're technically minded) or At Home in the Universe (if you're less technically oriented) are interesting with respect to complexity and emergence. There's also an interesting similar analogy to be made between a zettelkasten system and the systems described in Peter Hoffman's book Life's Rachet. I think that if carefully circumscribed, one could define a zettelkasten to be "alive". That's a bigger thesis for another time. I was also trying to stay away from the broad idea of "atomic" and drawing attention to "atomic notes" as a concept. I'm still waiting for some bright physicist to talk about sub-atomic notes and what that might mean... I see where you're going with phenomics, but chemistry and statistical mechanics were already further afield than the intended audience who already have issues with "The Two Cultures". Getting into phenomics was just a bridge too far... not to mention, vastly more difficult to attempt to draw(!!!). 😉 Besides, I didn't want Carol Greider dropping into my DMs asking me why didn't I include telomeres or chancing an uncomfortable LAX-BWI flight and a train/cab ride into Baltimore with Peter Agre who's popped up next to me on more than one occasion.

Honestly, I was much less satisfied with the nebulousness of "solution of life"... fortunately no one seems to be complaining about that or their inability to grapple with catalysis. 🤷🏼

"caviar factories" brings to mind the OCD doodling of lots of small compact circles, which is what I suspect Hutchins was occupying himself with...

How can we better thing of card indexes as positive feedback mechanisms? Will describes it as the "Great Wheel of Positive Feedback" which reminds me a bit of flywheels for storing energy for later use.

Interesting parallelism here with the metaphysical actions of governments and specifically the actions of American soldiers' treatment of Luhmann in the prior section....

The one shining moment in the whole essay and they don't seem to realize where the benefit or use actually was. They finally had a reason to have taken notes and the ideas shone here. But they've written off the tools because they didn't understand when to use them.

Hammers are cool, but unless you're a professional carpenter, you don't carry it around all the time and use it constantly to hammer things. The same is true of note taking as a tool. You might use it regularly if you're a writer or an academic perhaps, but for hourly use in your day-to-day? Almost definitely not.

The authors analogize educational levels and unemployment rates to playing musical chairs to underline the zero sum game being played in the labor market.

This becomes a useful argument for why a universal basic income ought to be implemented, not to mention the bullshit job thesis which pairs with it.

There is a direct analogy to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to be drawn here.

Agile software development is akin to the design of the writing process.

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?

Since next example states local data is like an "apple", and global data is like "all apples from one tree", replace "vegetables" with "produce".

While the ancients thought of the commonplace as a storehouse of value or a treasury, modern knowledge workers and content creators might analogize it to a factory where one stores up ideas in a warehouse space where they can be easily accessed, put into a production line where those ideas can be assembled, revised, proofread, and then package and distributed to consumers (readers).

(summary)

what a great review...

another in a long line of using analogizing thinking to food digestion.... I saw another just earlier today.

France, Anatole. L’Île Des Pingouins. Project Gutenberg 8524. 1908. Reprint, Project Gutenberg, 2005. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8524/pg8524.html

Death by Zettelkasten!!

(Coming soon to a theater near you...)

In the preface to the novel Penguin Island (L'Île des Pingouins. Calmann-Lévy, 1908) by Nobel prize laureate Anatole France, a scholar is drowned by an avalanche of index cards which formed a gigantic whirlpool streaming out of his card index (Zettelkasten).

Link to: Historian Keith Thomas has indicated that he finds it hard to take using index cards for excerpting and research seriously as a result of reading this passage in the satire Penguin Island.<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rKAvtlQCEe2jtzP3LmPlsA

Translation via: France, Anatole. Penguin Island. Translated by Arthur William Evans. 8th ed. 1908. Reprint, New York, NY, USA: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Penguin_Island/6UpWAvkPQaEC?hl=en&gbpv=0

Small changes in the translation by me, comprising only adding the word "index" in front of the occurrences of card to better represent the historical idea of fiches used by scholars in the late 1800s and early 1900s, are indicated in brackets.

The walls of the study, the floor, and even the ceiling were loaded with overflowing bundles, paste board boxes swollen beyond measure, boxes in which were compressed an innumerable multitude of small [index] cards covered with writing. I beheld in admiration mingled with terror the cataracts of erudition that threatened to burst forth.

“Master,” said I in feeling tones, “I throw myself upon your kindness and your knowledge, both of which are inexhaustible. Would you consent to guide me in my arduous researches into the origins of Penguin art?"

“Sir," answered the Master, “I possess all art, you understand me, all art, on [index] cards classed alphabetically and in order of subjects. I consider it my duty to place at your disposal all that relates to the Penguins. Get on that ladder and take out that box you see above. You will find in it everything you require.”

I tremblingly obeyed. But scarcely had I opened the fatal box than some blue [index] cards escaped from it, and slipping through my fingers, began to rain down.

Almost immediately, acting in sympathy, the neighbouring boxes opened, and there flowed streams of pink, green, and white [index] cards, and by degrees, from all the boxes, differently coloured [index] cards were poured out murmuring like a waterfall on a mountain-side in April. In a minute they covered the floor with a thick layer of paper. Issuing from their in exhaustible reservoirs with a roar that continually grew in force, each second increased the vehemence of their torrential fall. Swamped up to the knees in cards, Fulgence Tapir observed the cataclysm with attentive nose. He recognised its cause and grew pale with fright.

“ What a mass of art! ” he exclaimed.

I called to him and leaned forward to help him mount the ladder which bent under the shower. It was too late. Overwhelmed, desperate, pitiable, his velvet smoking-cap and his gold-mounted spectacles having fallen from him, he vainly opposed his short arms to the flood which had now mounted to his arm-pits . Suddenly a terrible spurt of [index] cards arose and enveloped him in a gigantic whirlpool. During the space of a second I could see in the gulf the shining skull and little fat hands of the scholar; then it closed up and the deluge kept on pouring over what was silence and immobility. In dread lest I in my turn should be swallowed up ladder and all I made my escape through the topmost pane of the window.

machine translation (Google):

But regardless of whether the Zettelkasten resulted in a book, a work, or a thought cloud with varying degrees of precipitation - it is always more than the whole whose parts it has collected. Because there are always other texts in it than those that emerged from it.

There's something romantic about the analogy of a zettelkasten with a thought cloud which may have varying degrees of precipitation.

Link to other analogies: - ruminant machines - the disappointment of porn - others?

Barbara Tuchman analogized stopping one's research to going out on a date: one should leave off a half-hour before you really want to.

Liink to: This sounds suspiciously like advice about when to start writing, but slightly in reverse: https://hypothes.is/a/WeoX9DUOEe2-HxsJf2P8vw

One might also liken these processes to the idea of divergence and convergence as described by Tiago Forte and others.

Much like Gerald Weinberg's fieldstone metaphor for note taking and writing, Jacques Goutor frames the process as creating a mosaic of information "fit [...] into meaningful patterns" whether they be narratives, charts, or other forms.

(p6)

In the attention economy, social media is the equivalent of fast food. Just like going out for fine dining or even healthier gourmet cooking at home, we need to make the time and effort to consume higher quality information sources. Books, journal articles, and longer forms of content with more editorial and review which take time and effort to produce are better choices.

What specifically does she define "writing" to be? What exactly is she writing, and how much? What does her process look like?

One might also consider the idea of active reading and writing notes. I may not "write" daily in the way she means, but my note writing, is cumulative and beneficial in the ways she describes in her list. I might further posit that the amount of work/effort it takes me to do my writing is far more fruitful and productive than her writing.

When I say writing, I mean focused note taking (either excerpting, rephrasing, or original small ideas which can be stitched together later). I don't think this is her same definition.

I'm curious how her process of writing generates new ideas and creativity specifically?

One might analogize the idea of active reading with a pen in hand as a sort of Einsteinian space-time. Many view reading and writing as to separate and distinct practices. What if they're melded together the way Einstein reconceptualized the space time continuum? The writing advice provided by those who write about commonplace books, zettelkasten, and general note taking combines an active reading practice with a focused writing practice that moves one toward not only more output, but higher quality output without the deleterious effects seen in other methods.

Den analogizes their note taking system to computing on 2010-11-11 8:43 PM.

How is one to have an intimate conversation with a text if their annotations are not written in the margins? Placing your initial notes somewhere else is like having sex with your clothes on.

syndication link

Within mathematical contexts one of the major factors often at play is the idea of abstraction: how can one use a basic idea and then abstract it to other situations to see what results.

The idea of abstraction in mathematics is analogous to analogy and metaphor in literature.

This is an example about preparation for going into a conference (or battle, which is suggested by this particular conference's topic). The work provides a primer for what is about to happen and can be analogized to ancients taking the ark of the covenant into battle before them. It serves as a cultural talisman representing what they're fighting for, but it also likely served as a mnemonic device for their actual battle strategies and plans from the time. They take it with them as a physical review reminder and device.

Stephen Downes describes some of his note taking process for creation here. He doesn't actively reuse his notes (or in this case blog posts, bookmarks, etc.) which number a sizeable 35669, directly, at least in the sort of cut and paste method suggested by Sönke Ahrens. Rather he follows a sort of broad idea, outline creation, and search plan akin to that described by Cory Doctorow in 20 years a blogger

Link to: - https://hyp.is/_XgTCm9GEeyn4Dv6eR9ypw/pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/

Downes suggests that the "magic happens in the creation" of his notes. He uses them as "grist for pattern recognition". He doesn't mention words like surprise or serendipity coming from his notes by linking them, though he does use them "intuitively to form overarching themes or concepts not actually contained in the resources themselves." This is closely akin to the broader ideas ensconced in inventio, Llullan Wheels, triangle thinking, ideas have sex, combinatorial creativity, serendipity (Luhmann), insight, etc. which have been described by others.

Note that Downes indicates that his brain creates the links and he doesn't rely on his software to do this. The break is compounded by the fact that he doesn't find value in classifying or categorizing his notes.

I appreciate that Downes uses the word "grist" to describe part of his note taking practice which evokes the idea of grinding up complex ideas (the grain) to sort out the portions of the whole to find simpler ideas (the flour) which one might use later to combine to make new ideas (bread, cake, etc.) Similar analogies might be had in the grain harvesting space including winnowing or threshing.

One can compare this use of a grist mill analogy of thinking with the analogy of the crucible, which implies a chamber or space in which elements are brought together often with work or extreme conditions to create new products by their combination.

Of course these also follow the older classical analogy of imitating the bees (apes).

Humanity is a zettelkasten in biological form.

Our social ties (links) putting us into proximity with other humans over time creates a new links between us and our ideas, and slowly evolves new ideas over time. Those new ideas that win this evolutionary process are called innovation.

The general statistical thermodynamics of this idea innovation process can be "heated up" by improving communication channels with those far away from us (think letters, telegraph, radio, television, internet, social media).

This reaction can be further accelerated by actively permuting the ideas with respect to each other as suggested by Raymond Llull's combinatorial arts.

motivating reference: Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist

link to: - Mark Granovetter and weak ties - life of x

Tiago Forte frames the creative process in the framing of divergence (brainstorming) and convergence (connecting ideas, editing, refining) which emerged out of the Stanford Design School and popularized by IDEO in the 1980s and 1990s.

But this is just what the more refined practices of maintaining a zettelkasten entail. It's the creation of profligate divergence forced by promiscuously following one's interests and collecting ideas along the way interspersed with active and pointed connection of ideas slowly creating convergence of these ideas over time. The ultimate act of creation finally becomes simple as pulling one's favorite idea of many out of the box (along with all the things connected to it) and editing out any unnecessary pieces and then smoothing the whole into something cohesive.

This is far less taxing than sculpting marble where one needs to start with an idea of where one is going and then needs the actual skill to get there. Doing this well requires thousands of hours of practice at the skill, working with smaller models, and eventually (hopefully) arriving at art. It's much easier if one has the broad shapes of the entirety of Rodin, Michelangelo, and Donatello's works in their repository and they can simply pull out one that feels interesting and polish it up a bit. Some of the time necessary for work and practice are still there, but the ultimate results are closer to guaranteed art in one domain than the other.

Commonplacing or slipboxing allows us to take the ability to imitate, which humans are exceptionally good at (Annie Murphy Paul, link tk), and combine those imitations in a way to actively explore and then create new innovative ideas.

Commonplacing can be thought of as lifelong and consistent practice of brainstorming where one captures all the ideas for later use.

Link to - practice makes perfect

He uses the idea of "wealth" here for notes created in a commonplace instead of "treasure" or storehouse as is the historical tradition, this is an indication of a complete schism between the older traditions and the new.

Barzun analogies notes as "old friends". He, like many others, encourages note takers to put ideas into their own words.

Are self-help books with sentences that highlight the fact that one is already practicing the described/prescribed method really necessary?

Perhaps speaking about the process and making the steps discrete to assist people in actually "touching all the bases" will help them score their homeruns.

Sascha Fast analogizes the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars. Each worker on the assembly line has a limited bit of knowledge for their individual part of the process, but most of the knowledge and value is built into the overarching process itself. This makes the overall system quicker and more efficient.

Similarly with note taking, each individual portion of the process is simple and self-contained, but it allows the writer to create a much more creative and complex piece in the end. Here an individual can accomplish all of the individual steps in a self-contained way while focusing on individual steps without becoming lost in the subsequent steps which would otherwise require a tremendous additional amount of energy.

Jason Kleinberg takes basic tunes and then has a list of variations of practice styles which he runs through with each one (eg. single-finger, octave double stops scale, old-time, polkafy, blues, etc.) and he plays those tunes in these modified styles not only to practice, but to take these "musical conversations" and translate them into his own words. This is a clever way of generating new music and potentially even new styles by mixing those which have come before. To a great sense, he's having a musical conversation with prior composers and musicians in the same way that an annotator will have a conversation in the margins with an author. It's also an example of the sort of combinatorial creativity suggested by Raymond Llull's work.

This same analogy also works in advanced mathematics courses where students are often learning dense and technical vocabulary and then moments later applying it directly to even more technical ideas and proofs.

How might this sort of solution from law school be applied to abstract mathematics?

https://web.archive.org/web/20180217082313/http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2018/02/an-ordinary-zettlkasten.html

Niklas Luhmann analogized his zettelkasten to a septic tank. You put in a lot of material, a lot of seemingly waste, and it allows a process of settling and filtering to allow the waste to be separated and distill into something useful.

Blogs

Blogging is a form of public note sharing that isn't dissimilar to seventeenth-century note sharing practices in group settings.

tangential definition of a genex

zettels:zettelkasten::scrivenings:Scrivener::index card:index card file

Example of a neologism ("scrivenings") used specifically for marketing a feature of a technology product.

Much as coaches help their athletes become better, teachers are there to help students use their time and work efforts in the most effective ways.

This is a brilliant analogy.

Ahrens makes a useful analogy: the reason that early attempts at shipping containers failed was because their users tried to fit them into their own way of doing business instead of reorganizing their businesses to accommodate the shipping container. Similarly one needs to consider how one's note taking method fits into their work in a more integrative way. Without properly integrating it into one's workflow seamlessly the system will fail.

Note here how the author creates the acronym CBU out of central bibliographic unit as a means of creating a connection to computer jargon like CPU (central processing unit). I suspect that CBU was not an acronym used at the time.

bacrkonym?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ydqjJiQ4zs

Dan Allosso looks at the graph view of his Obsidian vault in an attempt to clean up orphaned notes and connect them into his larger knowledge base.

He uses a clever Kuiper belt comet analogy to describe bringing these notes into his his solar system.

72 Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico, 5th ed. (Venice, 1669), 83. On this inven-tion, see also Umberto Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto. Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (Milan, 2007), 45–7.

Emanuele Tesaurio's Indice Categorico was a tool for thought which aimed to discover new information by using metaphors and analogies with respect to the categories or taxonomies so as to draw links between them.

Adler is analogizing friendship to books here.