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.

Fiction transcends plentitude of generations

This idea of playing hopscotch#%22Table_of_Instructions%22_and_structure) through a text reminds me of some mathematics texts I've come across where the author draws out a diagram of potential readings and which portions are prerequisites so that professors using the book might pick and choose chapters to skip in their presentations.

Also reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from childhood too.

cross reference: [[John Barth]], [[Henry James Korn]] and [[experimental fiction]], and [[hypertext]]

Digital Social Reading · Works in Progress by [[Federico Pianzola]] (2021)

Federico mentioned this in the group chat at I Annotate 2021.

Link