The 20th-century German sociologist Niklas Luhmann managed to publish 70 books.

we too often forget that we’re actually swimming in water.

You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way.

Generally I’ll pull up a short review or two to see what the topic broadly covers as well as to see how others are associating it to their own areas of work. I’ll usually do a quick inspectional flip through the table of contents and index to highlight any thing I think is particularly relevant to me.

Different types of notes and use cases

Can they really do all of them at once? While some may come close and do well enough, the added complexity and overreach of all these functionalities may be diluting the base power of what the zettelkasten is capable.

While it can be used as a productivity tool specifically for writing, some are adapting and using it (and tools built for it) for productivity use writ-large. This includes project management or GTD (Getting Things Done) functions. Some are using it as a wiki, digital garden, or personal knowledge management system for aggregating ideas and cross linking them over time. Others are using it as a journal or diary with scheduling and calendaring functions tacked on. Still others are using it to collect facts and force the system to do spaced repetition. These additional functionalities can be great and even incredibly useful, but they’re going far beyond the purpose-fit functionality of what a zettelkasten system was originally designed to do.

Zettelkasten Overreach

The key questions at play here are where is the work of a keeping a zettelkasten done and how is represented?

ACTIVELY WORK AGAINST YOUR NATURAL URGE TO USE YOUR ZETTELKASTEN NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS! MIX IT UP INSTEAD.

A hack for using Hypothes.is to annotate on mobile

Richard Carter says: November 16, 2023 at 5:38 am   (Edit) Mortimer Adler read books more than once? I guess that made sense from someone whose name was an anagram of ‘Mr Read-More-Lit’!

“historical method” laid out by Ernst Bernheim and later Seignobos/Langlois in the late 1800s.

Simon Winchester describes the pigeonhole and slip system that professor James Murray used to create the Oxford English Dictionary. The editors essentially put out a call to readers to note down interesting every day words they found in their reading along with examples sentences and references. They then collected these words alphabetically into pigeonholes and from here were able to collectively compile their magisterial dictionary.

A zettelkasten with no quotes—by definition—shouldn’t carry the name. So let’s lay to rest that dreadful idea that quotes aren’t allowed in a zettelkasten.

Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens’ delineation of Luhmann’s method

I think it would be massively helpful if users had stronger examples of what these explicit creation workflows looked like, particularly at the longer end of creation of chapters or even book length spaces.

in posting online they still seem lost in attempting to put the lowest level ideas into active practice.

Ahrens’ generally excellent book

I’ve seen Eminem demo his slip box to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes.

If you feel the need to categorize and separate them in such a surgical fashion, then let your index be the place where this happens.

Perhaps the overlap of math and history is exactly the interdisciplinary topic you’re working toward? If this is the case, just put cards into the slip box closest to their nearest related intellectual neighbor—and by this I mean nearest related to your way of thinking, not to Melvil Dewey’s or anyone else.

My own anecdotal experience of research and note taking with index cards dates to 1985 when, in sixth grade, I was admonished to take my notes on index cards so that I could later string them together in outline form to create a narrative.

Now I can take an article from almost anywhere on my phone (reading services like Pocket, my feed readers, or even articles within the browser themselves), click share, choose “URL Forwarder” from the top of the list, select “Hypothesize” and the piece I want to annotate magically opens up with Hypothes.is ready to go in my default browser. Huzzah!

http:

slip box

One can’t help but notice the proliferation of specific method names for slightly different practices within the now growing space. These specific names for practices literally give both a name and power to the space and help to make it grow. Some of these names include: Zettelkasten itself as a name for Luhmann’s method; Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens’ delineation of Luhmann’s method, Linking Your Thinking (aka LYT, Nick Milo’s method); Building a Second Brain (BaSB, Tiago Forte’s method); ANTInet (Scott P. Scheper’s analog branded version of Luhmann’s method); and even Pile of Index Cards (PoIC, Hawk Sugano’s productivity-based method from 2006). The naming tends to expand here as many of these examples have a commercial need to differentiate these practices to make them sellable to a larger audience. Should one really consider it a coincidence that Obsidian is so heavily used by those in Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain camp when Obsidian’s tag line on their home page boldly declares “A second brain, for you, forever.”? This naming craze even extends to a proliferation of names for note types within each system including fleeting notes, permanent notes, literature notes, atomic notes, evergreen notes, source notes, point notes, concept notes, claim notes, etc. Of course the power of naming begins to wane here as the over-proliferation of names causes semantic collisions and worries when these systems and their adherents talk about related ideas online in broader overlapping publics. One would presume that over time this list of names will settle down and roughly standardize around a much smaller (dare I say atomic?), possibly mutually exclusive set.

Using Niklas Luhmann’s rough average of six zettels per day working full time for 8 hours a day

As an example, in The Crown season 1 episode 4 “Act of God” (Netflix, 2016) there is a scene portraying former British Prime Minister Clement Atlee in his office in which he is prominently bookended in the background by two four drawer card indexes: one 3 x 5″ and the other 4 x 6″.

It bears mention that Vannevar’s influential essay “As We May Think” in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic is entirely underpinned by the commonplace book and zettelkasten traditions pervading Western thought and culture. Rather than acknowledge this tradition tacitly, he creates the neologism “Memex” which stands in for a networked and connected zettelkasten

Additionally Colleen Kennedy has an excellent 12 page primer she developed for classroom use on how to actively implement and create one’s own commonplace book which takes into account some of the historical practices seen in the literature.

One can’t help but notice the proliferation of specific method names for slightly different practices within the now growing space

branded method

author Steven B. Johnson who wrote frequently about his experiences with note taking, commonplaces, and DevonThink in the early 2000s in The New York Times as well as his blog. 5

TiddlyWiki, first released on September 20, 2004, is a card-based user interface software built by Jeremy Ruston

Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas (1998)

writer, scientist, and engineer Mark Bernstein who created Tinderbox in 2002 as a note taking tool, outliner, and publishing software

Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis.

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

the commonplace tradition

commonplace book kept using index cards

compounded by the lack of appropriate history and context,

There’s a specific set of objects (cards and boxes or their digital equivalents), but there’s also a spectrum of methods or practices which can be split into two broad categories.

around 2018 during the COVID-19 pandemic

The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten

Editor’s note: I wrote this essay of approximately 7,000 words in about half a day’s work, including outlining, footnoting, and editing by drawing material directly from my own hybrid commonplace books/Luhmann-based Zettelkasten.

hiding

the power of naming begins to wane here as the over-proliferation of names causes semantic collisions and worries when these systems and their adherents talk about related ideas online in broader overlapping publics

guild

tacitly

Do it until you have between 500 and 1000 cards (based on some surveys and anecdotal evidence), and you should begin seeing some serendipitous and intriguing results as you use your system for your writing.

Introduction to the Study of History

Lehrbuch der historischen Methode mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hülfsmittelzum Studium der Geschichte

“500 and 1000 cards” is a long way before perceiving some benefit. Maybe this is necessary because “mine is more textual and less visual than his [Michalsky’s]”. For me, benefit is visible after approx. 40 new notes, dropped on the canvas of my tool, rearranged and connected.

If this fits your style and you don’t get any value out of having cards with locators like 3a4b/65m1, then don’t do that (for you) useless make-work. Make sure your system is working for you and you’re not working for your system.

I’d be interested in hearing more about the ways oral cultures did their thinking, if you have resources on that handy. Otherwise if you recall your source for that could you pass it on?

Hypothes.is, a web annotation tool, as an off-label zettelkasten?!

Who’s up for a public, social zettelkasten practice?

Hypothes.idian for Obsidian to do just this.)

One could go further still and highlight a word or words on one’s browser screen and use these as a custom search query.

The language of the amendment, Anderson says, was crafted to ensure that slave owners could quickly crush any rebellion or resistance from those whom they’d enslaved.

racial distinctions in Americans’ treatment of gun ownership

https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?wildcard_uri=https://www.example.org/*

There’s  definitely a way

As was highlighted (pun intended)

One thing I have noticed, however, is a dramatic lack of continuity in the history of note taking within the longue durée of Western civilization. (Other cultures including oral cultures have similar traditions, but for our purposes here, I won’t go into them except to say that they’re highly valuable, spectacularly rich, and something of which we should all be aware.)

@chrisaldrich@mastodon.social @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com @alcinnz your blog is the first place I’ve seen since 2015 that is using hypothes.is I was super passionate about it but when I saw the lack of interest in development by their devs and after few messages with them, I finally let go of my account in 2019. Good to see someone is using it anyways 👍🏼

You might have gone down the rabbit hole on note taking practice nerdery

I’ll also note that there’s the potential of a reply on Hypothes.is to a prior reply to a canonical URL source. In that case it could be either marked up as a reply to the “parent” on Hypothesis and/or a reply to the canonical source URL, or even both so that webmentions could be sent further upstream.

Webmention functioning properly will require this canonical URL to exist on the page to be able to send notifications and have them be received properly

all the data on this particular page seems to be rendered using JavaScript rather than being raw HTML

I suspect that a reasonable WordPress user could probably set up a free Hypothes.is account and use the RSS feed from it (something like https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=username) to create an IFTTT.com recipe to post it as a public/draft to their WordPress website.

I created a video overview/walkthrough of how I take highlights and annotations on Hypothes.isHypothes.is and feed them through to my WordPress Website using RSS and IFTTT.com.

What follows may tend toward the jargon-y end of programming, but I’ll endeavor to explain it all and go step-by-step to allow those with little or no programming experience to follow along and use the tools I’m describing in a very powerful way.  I’ll do my best to link the jargon to definitions and examples for those who haven’t run across them before. Hopefully with a bit of explanation, the ability to cut and paste some code, or even make some basic modifications, you’ll be able to do what I and others have done, but without having to puzzle it all out from scratch.

It also bears noting that one could view the first stage of Cornell notes in light of the practice of keeping a waste book and then later transferring their more permanent and better formed ideas into their commonplace book.

Americanism: Using money you haven’t earned to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like. —Robert Quillen

“If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”.

The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for “fast” posting which can too often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

Perhaps it would help more people’s contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating)?

Wikis allowed multiple users to author and edit pages on the web with a basic web browser.

Slips of paper which were moveable within books or files and later on index cards were a significant innovation in terms of storing and organizing a commonplace book.

collector’s fallacy

focus on finely honing a small handful of questions and ideas each day from your reading

Introductory Articles

Hi Chris, I checked Chavigny’s book on the BNF site. He insists on the use of index cards (‘fiches’), how to index them, one idea per card but not how to connect between the cards and allow navigation between them. Mind that it’s written in 1919, in Strasbourg (my hometown) just one year after it returned to France. So between students who used this book and Luhman in Freiburg it’s not far away. My mother taught me how to use cards for my studies back in 1977, I still have the book where she learn the method, as Law student in Strasbourg “Comment se documenter”, by Roland Claude, 1961. Page 25 describes a way to build secondary index to receive all cards relatives to a topic by their number. Still Luhman system seems easier to maintain but very near. I’m not a fan of ZK myself. It was great before computers and Internet but it’s a lot of work and adds a lot of friction.

Below are a few potential creative “hacks” that some might try.

I already find it difficult to annotate heavily annotated pages that all use the same color, much less a rainbow of others’ colors

colors may be slightly better indicators of different users’ annotations of a particular text as a means of differentiating one annotator from another more subtly, particularly on texts that are extensively marked up.

What if your color meanings aren’t the same as those of another?, for example

if ever.

While colors can be useful for individuals, do they have the same place in a social annotation product?

While colored highlights is a seemingly “simple” sounding feature in the analog world where a single document is only annotated by one user, mapping it into a digital shared context is a difficult engineering problem to navigate and solve for

A fluorescence of note taking tools

Antonin Sertillanges’ book The Intellectual Life

Perhaps it would help more people’s contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating)?

I broke out the URL Forwarder app which uses the ubiquitous share functionality of most phone platforms and adds a thin layer of program-ability.

Digital garden design can often use the gardening metaphor to focus attention on an active tending and care of one’s personal knowledge base and building toward new knowledge or creations.

I’m using some experimental technology to make my website appear as an instance in the Fediverse

Social Media, Fast and Slow

For those who don’t have a subscription, Alan has kindly and pleasantly provided a samizdat version on his site in .pdf format.

The Art of Memory

I’ve been researching into the history of mnemotechniques in Western culture.

If you’re generalizing Zettelkasten to “All Non-Linear Knowledge Management Strategies” You should include Mortimer Adler and the Syntopicon, and John Locke’s guide to how to set up a commonplace book

and bullet journal for more modern take on commonplace books

This isn’t a game of calling “dibs”

Your post says nothing at all to suggest Luhman didn’t “invent” “Zettelkasten” (no one says he was only one writing on scraps of paper), you list two names and no links

Not all the ancients are ancestors.

Would love links to any descriptions of the systems used by Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) or Johann Jacob Moser (1701–1785)

I can only presume that modern education is failing us all dramatically. People are “taught” (maybe told is the better verb) to take notes in school, but they’re never told why, what to do with them, or how to leverage them for maximum efficiency.

The Atlantic, 1945

A fluorescence of note taking tools

Ultimately, my dream—similar to that of Bush’s—is for individual commonplace books to be able to communicate not only with their users in the Luhmann-esqe sense, but also communicate with each other.

IndieWeb friendly building blocks like Webmention, feeds (RSS, JSON Feed, h-feed), Micropub, and Microsub integrations may come the closest to this ideal.

The idea of planting a knowledge “seed” (a note), tending it gradually over time with regular watering and feeding in a progression of Seedlings → Budding → Evergreen is a common feature.

Mike Caulfield’s essays including The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

Second brain is a marketing term

one might consider some of the ephemeral social media stream platforms like Twitter to be a digital version of a waste book

They have generally been physical books written by hand that contain notes which are categorized by headings (or in a modern context categories or tags. Often they’re created with an index to help their creators find and organize their notes.

dates and other taxonomies or serialized numbers as a means of linking them to other cards

Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia by <img class="u-photo" src="https://i0.wp.com/farm9.staticflickr.com/8366/8537324028_666427ea9f_o.jpg" alt="Cory Doctorow" width= 32 height= 32 />Cory Doctorow (well.com)

Planning for Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp pop-up session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, online Commonplace Books, and note taking

Who else at #I⁠Anno21 has a practice of public annotation using Hypothes.is? Or perhaps on your own website, or other platform? Please share your usernames, URLs, and feeds so we can all have a richer group of examples.

Perhaps if everyone reads and writes from their own home on the web, they’re less likely to desecrate their neighbor’s blog because it sticks to their own identity? There’s lots of work to be done certainly, but perhaps we’ll get there by expanding things, opening them up, and giving ourselves some more space to communicate?

one can subscribe to an RSS/ATOM feed of annotations

I’ve come across some scholarship of commonplace books that attempt to contextualize notes

Is anyone studying these contextual aspects of digital annotation?

A reflection on annotations and context at OLC Innovate & Liquid Margins

Hypothes.is UI had some better means of indicating time periods of annotation.

The Post Kinds plugin, essentially an extended version of WordPress’s core Post Formats functionality, allows one to make a variety of types of posts on one’s website that mirrors the functionality provided in a huge variety of social media platforms. This is useful if you’re owning all of your own data and syndicating it out to social silos, but it’s also great for providing others better user interface for reading and consuming what you’re posting.

It works exceptionally well for both web pages and when reading .pdf texts within a browser window.

Web Annotation as Conversation and Interruption.

How can I also connect this to the Jeremy Dean‘s idea of it helping to facilitate a conversation with texts.

ThreadReaderApp now has beta support for the Micropub Spec so you can publish Twitter threads directly to your blog

Examples of this in the wild

There are definitely ways around this

Genius or Hypothes.is.

The Webmention spec allows for resending notifications and thus subsequent re-parsing and updating of content. This could be a signal sent to any links to the content that it had been updated and allow any translcuded pages to update if they wished.

I can easily process them all at a later date/time if necessary.

aggregating my note data

mobile

time and effort

quick methods

Livescribe pen

going through my notes, reformatting them (if necessary), tagging them and expanding on them

highlights, annotations, and notes

tool that treats this method the same as the general online modality.

I’d rather be able to highlight, type some thoughts and have it appear in my notebook.

too painful

One thing I find myself wanting is a discovery-based follow button for Microsub that would allow me to input either my own following list or even my Twitter account

OPML files for categories within WordPress’s Links Manager

Matthias Pfefferle - A weblog about the open, portable, interoperable, social, synaptic, semantic, structured, distributed, decentralized, independent, microformatted and federated social web

I use all the data I capture online using Hypothes.is to port my annotations, highlights, and notes I make online into my commonplace book.

They both obviously point to the same specific page, and their beginnings are identical. The second one has a # followed by the words “I’m not looking” with some code for blank spaces and an apostrophe. Clicking on the fragmention URL will take you to the root page which then triggers a snippet of JavaScript on my site that causes the closest container with the text following the hash to be highlighted in a bright yellow color. The browser also automatically scrolls down to the location of the highlight.

Create an IFTTT.com recipe to port your Hypothesis RSS feed into WordPress posts. Generally chose an “If RSS, then WordPress” setup and use the following data to build the recipe: Input feed: https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=username (change username to your user name) Optional title: {{EntryTitle}} Body: {{EntryContent}} from {{EntryUrl}} <br />{{EntryPublished}} Categories: Highlight (use whatever categories you prefer, but be aware they’ll apply to all your future posts from this feed) Tags: hypothes.is Post status (optional): I set mine to “Draft” so I have the option to keep it privately or to publish it publicly at a later date.

I’ll get you something Chris. That’s the old logo

I’m not looking for just a “hipster-web”, but a new and demonstrably better web.

So today, as a somewhat limited experiment, I played around with my Hypothes.is atom feed (https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich, because you know you want to subscribe to this) and piped it into IFTTT. Each post creates a new document in a OneDrive file which I can convert to a markdown .md file that can be picked up by my Obsidian client.

Two key constituencies for social movements are also early adopters: activists and journalists

Plurality, diversity, and tolerance were celebrated

Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and blocking of information the newer methods include demonizing online mediums, and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information glut, doubt, confusion, harrasment, and dis-traction, making it hard for ordinary people to navigate the networked pub-lic sphere, and sort facts from fiction, truth from hoaxes.

His weak-tie networks had been politically activated

Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was on-line, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversa-tions among people who had never been on the site.

hanks to a Facebook page, perhaps for the first time in history, an in-ternet user could click yes on an electronic invitation to a revolution

As Ali explained it to me, for him, January 25, 2011, was in many ways an ordinary January 25—officially a “police celebration day,” but traditionally a day of protest. Although he was young, he was a veteran activist. He and a small group of fellow activists gathered each year in Tahrir on January 25 to protest police brutality. January 25, 2011, was not their first January 25 pro-test, and many of them expected something of a repeat of their earlier protests—perhaps a bit larger this year.

 turned on the television only once, wanting to see how networks were covering the historic moment of Mubarak’s resignation. CNN was broad-casting an aerial shot of the square. The camera shot from far above the square was jarring because I had been following it all on Twitter, person by person, each view necessarily incomplete but also intimate. On television, all I could see was an undifferentiated mass of people, an indistinct crowd. It felt cold and alienating. The television pictures did not convey how today’s networked protests operate or feel

Clay Shirky’s influential book on collective action in the digital age, Here Comes Everybody, had an important subtitle: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.

As sociologist Doug McAdam and others have explored, tactical innovation is crucial for movements over the long term.

These others may challenge the de facto spokespersons, but the movements have few means to resolve their issues or make deci-sions. In some ways, digital technologies deepen the ever-existing tension between collective will and individual expression within movements, and between expressive moments of rebellion and the longer-term strategies requiring instrumental and tactical shifts.

Similar-looking moments and activities—large marches, big protests, occu-pations—do not represent the same points in the trajectories of the net-worked movements as they did in movements organized along traditional models and without digital tools.

adho-cratic,

Political scientist Benedict An-derson called this phenomenon of unification “imagined communities.”

They also found themselves unable to sustain and organize in the long term in a manner proportional to the energy they had been able to attract initially and the legitimacy they enjoyed in their demands.

If anyone is aware of people or groups working on the potential integration of the IndieWeb movement (webmentions) and web annotation/highlighting, please include them in the comments below–I’d really appreciate it.

Boffo Socko Now Supports Hypothes.is Annotations

Therefore it is a great valuefor fixing a memory-image that when we read books, we strive to impress onour memory through the power of forming our mental images not only thenumber and order of verses or ideas, but at the same time the color, shape,position, and placement of the letters, where we have seen this or that writ-ten, in what part, in what location (at the top, the middle, or the bottom)we saw it positioned, in what color we observed the trace of the letter or theornamented surface of the parchment

Having learned the Psalms [as a whole], I then devise the same sort ofscheme for each separate psalm, starting with the beginning words of theverses just as I did for the whole Psalter starting with the first words of thepsalms, and I can thereafter easily retain in my heart the whole series one verseat a time; first by dividing and marking off the book by [whole] psalms andthen each psalm by verses, I have reduced a large amount of material to suchconciseness and brevity

Now indeed endeavor to imprintin this fashion in your memory the matters which are written out below, ac-cording to the method and diagram for learning by heart demonstrated toyou earlier, so that by experience you can know the truth of my words, whenyou perceive how valuable it is to devote study and labor not just to havingheard the lectures on the Scriptures or to discussion, but to memory-work.

Further, as stated, by merely glancing at the pictorially indicated recipe of the present invention the cook can ascertain at a glance the required ingredients, can ascertain whether such ingredients are on hand, and, if not, the needed articles will be more easily remembered in purchasing the days supply of groceries, etc.

Fourteenth-century recipe collections that have survived to today, such as Viandier pour appareiller toutes manières de viandes, Libre de sent sovi, Daz bûch von gûter spîse, and Forme of Cury, were written by professional cooks to use as an aide-mémoire for themselves or other professional cooks.

Mount: A cooking technique where small pieces of butter are quickly incorporated in a hot, but not boiling, sauce to give bulk and a glossy appearance.

Earlier today I created a read post with some highlights and marginalia related to a post by Ian O’Bryne. In addition to posting it and the data for my own purposes, I’m also did it as a manual test of sorts, particularly since it seemed apropos in reply to Ian’s particular post. I thought I’d take a stab at continuing to refine my work at owning and controlling my own highlights, notes, and annotations on the web. I suspect that being able to better support this will also help to bring more self-publishing and its benefits to the halls of academe.