https://fs.blog/feynman-learning-technique/

Published: 2021-02-22T12:59:36+00:00

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/making-notes-about-my-own-book/

This sounds a bit like the idea of reverse outlines I'd heard about recently but haven't fully looked into yet.

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/keep-a-writing-journal/

Example of someone getting the crap and worries out so that their writing can begin apace. Its sort of like writers' therapy and closely akin to those who talk about morning pages.

Also similar to teachers of young children who encourage their students to get their "wiggles out" so that they can focus on the classwork at hand.

https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/10fzdm6/do_you_guys_journal_in_your_commonplace_book_too/

http://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me/

https://www.toptools4learning.com/

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2022

https://wildrye.com/roundup-of-67-tools-for-thought-to-build-your-second-brain/

List of tools for thought apps

https://wildrye.com/tools-for-thought-need-a-purpose/

https://wildrye.com/let-your-notes-dictate-the-purpose-of-your-pkm-system/

How painfully true this may have been in 1899, it's now much worse in 2023!

Specialization of knowledge tends to fit the lifeways of the people who hold and maintain it. Changing lifeways means one must lose one or more domains and begin using or curating different domains of knowledge.

In a global world of specialization, humans who specialize are forced to rely more heavily on the experience and veracity of those around them who have also specialized. One may be able to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but their knowledge of the state of the art in anthropology or economic policy may be therefore utterly undeveloped. As a result they will need to rely on the knowledge and help of others in maintaining those domains.

This knowledge specialization means that politicians will need to be more open about what they think and say, yet instead politicians seem to be some of the least knowledge about almost anything.

This is just the start of a somewhat well-formed thesis I've developed elsewhere, but not previously written out... more to come...

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10h23fm/wildly_aspirational/

https://www.catholic.org/saints/patron.php

Potential patron saints of note takers, writers, knowledge workers, tools for thought, etc.

• Apothecaries - Cosmas and Damian
• archives - Laurent (Lawrence)
• archivists, librarians, libraries - Catherine of Alexandria, Jerome, Laurent (Lawrence)
• cabinetmakers - Anne, Joseph, Vincent de Paul
• contemplatives, contemplative life - John of the Cross, Mary Magdalene
• Craftworkers - Luke
• Editors John Bosco, Francis de Sales
• enlightenment - Holy Spirit, Our Lady of Good Counsel
• file makers - Theodosius the Cenobriarch
• Information Workers - Archangel Gabriel
• inquisitors - Peter of Verona
• Joiners - Joseph, Thomas, Apostle
• knowledge - Holy Spirit
• Learning - Ambrose, Catherine of Alexandria
• liberal arts - Catherine of Bologna
• linguists - Gotteschalk
• net makers - Peter the Apostle
• Notaries - Luke, Mark, Ivo of Kermartin
• pencil makers - Thomas Aquinas
• Scholars - Bridgid of Ireland, Thomas Aquinas
• scribes - Catherine of Alexandria
• Shorthand writers - Cassian of Imola
• Students - Catherine of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas, Gabriel Possenti
• Students (examinees) - Joseph of Cupertino

https://lobban.org/posts/2023/01/20/oh-hi/

WordPress vs JAMStack observations

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2023-01-20.html

On the Jokerzettel

9/8j Im Zettelkasten ist ein Zettel, der das Argument enthält, das die Behauptungen auf allen anderen Zetteln widerlegt.

Aber dieser Zettel verschwindet, sobald man den Zettelkasten aufzieht.

D.h. er nimmt eine andere Nummer an, verstellt sich und ist dann nicht zu finden.

Ein Joker.

—Niklas Luhmann, ZK II: Zettel 9/8j

Translation:

9/8j In the slip box is a slip containing the argument that refutes the claims on all the other slips. But this slip disappears as soon as you open the slip box. That is, he assumes a different number, disguises himself and then cannot be found. A joker.

Many have asked about the meaning of this jokerzettel over the past several years. Here's my slightly extended interpretation, based on my own practice with thousands of cards, about what Luhmann meant:

Imagine you've spent your life making and collecting notes and ideas and placing them lovingly on index cards. You've made tens of thousands and they're a major part of your daily workflow and support your life's work. They define you and how you think. You agree with Friedrich Nietzsche's concession to Heinrich Köselitz that “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.” Your time is alive with McLuhan's idea that "The medium is the message." or in which his friend John Culkin said, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

Eventually you're going to worry about accidentally throwing your cards away, people stealing or copying them, fires (oh! the fires), floods, or other natural disasters. You don't have the ability to do digital back ups yet. You ask yourself, can I truly trust my spouse not to destroy them?,What about accidents like dropping them all over the floor and needing to reorganize them or worse, the ghost in the machine should rear its head?

You'll fear the worst, but the worst only grows logarithmically in proportion to your collection.

Eventually you pass on opportunities elsewhere because you're worried about moving your ever-growing collection. What if the war should obliterate your work? Maybe you should take them into the war with you, because you can't bear to be apart?

If you grow up at a time when Schrodinger's cat is in the zeitgeist, you're definitely going to have nightmares that what's written on your cards could horrifyingly change every time you look at them. Worse, knowing about the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle, you're deathly afraid that there might be cards, like electrons, which are always changing position in ways you'll never be able to know or predict.

As a systems theorist, you view your own note taking system as a input/output machine. Then you see Claude Shannon's "useless machine" (based on an idea of Marvin Minsky) whose only function is to switch itself off. You become horrified with the idea that the knowledge machine you've painstakingly built and have documented the ways it acts as an independent thought partner may somehow become self-aware and shut itself off!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa9v8Z7Rac

And worst of all, on top of all this, all your hard work, effort, and untold hours of sweat creating thousands of cards will be wiped away by a potential unknowable single bit of information on a lone, malicious card and your only recourse is suicide, the unfortunate victim of dataism.

Of course, if you somehow manage to overcome the hurdle of suicidal thoughts, and your collection keeps growing without bound, then you're sure to die in a torrential whirlwind avalanche of information and cards, literally done in by information overload.

But, not wishing to admit any of this, much less all of this, you imagine a simple trickster, a joker, something silly. You write it down on yet another card and you file it away into the box, linked only to the card in front of it, the end of a short line of cards with nothing following it, because what could follow it? Put it out of your mind and hope your fears disappear away with it, lost in your box like the jokerzettel you imagined. You do this with a self-assured confidence that this way of making sense of the world works well for you, and you settle back into the methodical work of reading and writing, intent on making your next thousands of cards.

Worry about dropping a tray of slips and needing to reorganize them.

Pirsig, Robert. Lila: An Enquiry into Morals. London: Corgi Books, 1992.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gnh3u/box_update/

Example of a zettelkasten maintainer (u/A_Dull_Significance) who has shown a photo of their zettelkasten box with the superimposed words "My Baby!" over the box label as a means of indicating how valuable it is to them.

This is a great euphemism for the fun "work" of maintaining a zettelkasten.

via u/A_Dull_Significance at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gnh3u/box_update/

Example of someone who reports printed photos and even memes in their zettelkasten.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gn820/the_more_you_read_and_process_the_info_you_gather/

u/Kenwaldek reports at least a short term average of making 1 1/2 cards per day.

This sounds somewhat similar to Mark Robertson's method of "live Roaming" (using Roam Research during his history classes) as a teaching tool on top of other prior methods.

link to: Roland Barthes' card collection for teaching: https://hypothes.is/a/wELPGLhaEeywRnsyCfVmXQ

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/converting-my-notes-into-a-chapter/

A great example of a breakthrough moment in this example.

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/converting-my-notes-into-a-chapter/

Brilliant! And fantastic the way he tied the last line back into the earlier unrelated thought...

Because reading, annotating/note taking, and occasional outlining and writing can be broken down into small, concrete building blocks, each part of the process can be done separately and discretely with relatively easy ability to shift from one part of the process to another.

Importantly, one can be working on multiple different high level projects (content production: writing, audio, video, etc.) simultaneously in a way which doesn't break the flow of one's immediate reading. While a particular note within a piece may not come to fruition within a current imagined project, it may spark an idea for a future as yet unimagined project.

Aside: It would seem that Ryan Holiday's descriptions of his process are discrete with respect to each individual project. He's never mentioned using or reusing notes from past projects for current or future projects. He's even gone to the level that he creates custom note cards for his current project which have a title pre-printed on them.

Does this pre-titling help to provide him with more singular focus for his specific workflow? Some who may be prone to being side-tracked or with specific ADHD issues may need or be helped by these visual and workflow cues to stay on task, and as a result be helped by them. For others it may hinder their workflows and creativity.

This process may be different for beginning students or single project writers versus career writers (academics, journalists, fiction and non-fiction writers).

As a concrete example of the above, I personally made a note here about Darwin and Lamarck for a separate interest in evolution which falls outside of my immediate area of interest with respect to note taking and writing output.

Summary of Richard Carter's writing process from notes to product.

I've not seen this explicitly laid out as advice before though in most contexts people's note taking spaces have historically been divorced from their writing spaces for publication because slips and notes are usually kept physically separate from the working spaces or finished parts, but Richard Carter specifically separates the digital spaces in which he takes his notes and then uses them for creating end products. While he could both take notes in Obsidian, his tool of choice for notes, as well as write his finished pieces there, he actively changes contexts to use a different digital app to compose his notes into final pieces.

What affordances does this context shift provide? <br /> - blank slate may encourage reworking and expansion of original notes - is there a blank slate effect and what would it entail? - potentially moves the piece into a longer format space or tool which provides additional writing, formatting or other affordances (which? there don't seem to be any in this case aside from a potential "distraction free mode" which may tend to force one to focus only on the piece at hand rather than the thousands of other pieces (notes) hiding within the app)

What affordances does this remove?<br /> - He's forced to repeat himself (cut & paste / DRY violation)

Is it easier or harder (from a time/effort perspective) to provide citations with such a workflow? Carter does indicate that for him:

Having links to original sources in my outline makes the compilation of references for the chapter far easier than it used to be.

Multiple interesting things going on here with the use of "Micros✽ft W✽rd".

He's simultaneously: - Voldemorting the phrase to some extent so that it doesn't show up easily or at all in digital search. - He's visually marring the phrase to show active dislike of the software and its general use - By using the symbols, he's effectively turning the word into a form of profanity the way many have used the top row of symbols on typewriters to indicate swear words in the 20th century. Examples: sh@t, dmn, he!!, or any set of four symbols like &%^ to generally indicate a "four letter word" as many profane words typically have four letters.

To test out some potential ideas and flow of a particular chapter for which he already had a corpus of notes, Richard Carter created a mindmap outline of some of his ideas. This in combination with testing out further ideas in his writing journal "three weeks later" caused him to make some significant changes in the structure of his chapter.

Richard Carter uses his writing journal practice to "think out loud" to himself. Often, laying out extended arguments helps people to refine and reshape their thinking as they're better able to see potential holes or missing pieces of arguments. It's the same sort of mechanism which is at work in rubber duck debugging of computer code: by explaining a process one is more easily able to see the missing pieces, errors, or problems with the process at hand.

Carter's separate note taking and writing journal practice being used as a thought space or writing workshop of sorts is very similar to the process seen in my preliminary studies of Henry David Thoreau's work in which he kept commonplace books and separate (writing) journals which show evidence of his trying ideas on for size and working them before committing them to his published works.

Despite Darwin being thought of as having discredited Lamarckian inheritance, there are Lamarckian passages in portions of his work.

He's got a collection of ideas around the area with some useful history: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

His practical advice is usually to quit reading about the theory and do the thing. Choose the simplest path and stick with it a while. See what happens. What's useful? What's not? Practice, practice, practice.

Sometimes collecting some sorts of data in one's notes (even, and particularly in digital notes) is not a useful practice as one eventually realizes that they remain unsearched and unused.

One thing which may not come under this heading is the difference in what others say versus what you write yourself, especially as it relates to plagiarism.

As humans we're good at separating things based on categories. The Dewey Decimal System systematically separates mathematics and history into disparate locations, but your zettelkasten shouldn't force this by overthinking categories. 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 you, not to Melvil Dewey or anyone else. Over time, through growth and branching, ideas will fill in the interstitial spaces and neighboring ideas will slowly percolate and intermix. Your interests will slowly emerge into various bunches of cards in your box. Things you may have thought were important can separate away and end up on sparse branches while other areas flourish.

If you make the (false) choice to separate math and history into different "sections" it will be much harder for them to grow and intertwine in an organic and truly disciplinary way. Universities have done this sort of separation for hundreds of years and as a result, their engineering faculty can be buildings or even entire campuses away from their medical faculty who now want to work together in new interdisciplinary ways. This creates a physical barrier to more efficient and productive innovation and creativity. It's your zettelkasten, so put those ideas right next to each other from the start so they can do the work of serendipity and surprise for you. Do not artificially separate your favorite ideas. Let them mix and mingle and see what comes out of them.

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. This is what indices are for! Put the locations into the index to create the semantic separation. Math related material gets indexed under "M" and history under "H". Now those ideas can be mixed up in your box, but they're still findable. DO NOT USE OR CONSIDER YOUR NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!! Don't make the fatal mistake of thinking this. The numbers are just that, numbers. They are there solely for you to be able to easily find the geographic location of individual cards quickly or perhaps recreate an order if you remove and mix a bunch for fun or (heaven forfend) accidentally tip your box out onto the floor. Each part has of the system has its job: the numbers allow you to find things where you expect them to be and the index does the work of tracking and separating topics if you need that.

The broader zettelkasten, tools for thought, and creativity community does a terrible job of explaining the "why" portion of what is going on here with respect to Luhmann's set up. Your zettelkasten is a crucible of ideas placed in juxtaposition with each other. Traversing through them and allowing them to collide in interesting and random ways is part of what will create a pre-programmed serendipity, surprise, and combinatorial creativity for your ideas. They help you to become more fruitful, inventive, and creative.

Broadly the same thing is happening with respect to the structure of commonplace books. There one needs to do more work of randomly reading through and revisiting portions to cause the work or serendipity and admixture, but the end results are roughly the same. With the zettelkasten, it's a bit easier for your favorite ideas to accumulate into one place (or neighborhood) for easier growth because you can move them around and juxtapose them as you add them rather than traversing from page 57 in one notebook to page 532 in another.

If you use your numbers as topical or category headings you'll artificially create dreadful neighborhoods for your ideas to live in. You want a diversity of ideas mixing together to create new ideas. To get a sense of this visually, play the game Parable of the Polygons in which one categorizes and separates (or doesn't) triangles and squares. The game created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case based on the research of Thomas Schelling provides a solid example of the sort of statistical mechanics going on with ideas in your zettelkasten when they're categorized rigidly. If you rigidly categorize ideas and separate them, you'll drastically minimize the chance of creating the sort of useful serendipity of intermixed and innovative ideas.

It's much harder to know what happens when you mix anthropology with complexity theory if they're in separate parts of your mental library, but if those are the things that get you going, then definitely put them right next to each other in your slip box. See what happens. If they're interesting and useful, they've got explicit numerical locators and are cross referenced in your index, so they're unlikely to get lost. Be experimental occasionally. Don't put that card on Henry David Thoreau in the section on writers, nature, or Concord, Massachusetts if those aren't interesting to you. Besides everyone has already done that. Instead put him next to your work on innovation and pencils because it's much easier to become a writer, philosopher, and intellectual when your family's successful pencil manufacturing business can pay for you to attend Harvard and your house is always full of writing instruments from a young age. Now you've got something interesting and creative. (And if you must, you can always link the card numerically to the other transcendentalists across the way.)

In case they didn't hear it in the back, I'll shout it again: ACTIVELY WORK AGAINST YOUR NATURAL URGE TO USE YOUR ZETTELKASTEN NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!!

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10fn1vb/i_made_a_script_to_turn_obsidian_files_into_tiny/

Reply to Will at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2490/what-ideas-are-you-wrestling-with-this-week-january-19-2023#latest

There's so much great looking material here, it's almost overwhelming on where to start. I almost feel like I should be reading all this in addition to everything else I've got on my list.

Some of the direction with respect to writing, writing practice, and even your woodworking makes me think you'd appreciate the subtle idea hiding in this old blogpost I ran into in April 2021: https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary.

https://www.kestrelcreek.com/rakusu-rings

https://www.amazon.com/Margins-Pleasures-Reading-Writing/dp/1609457374 In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante – 2022-03-15

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Will Simpson </span> in What ideas are you wrestling with this week? January 19, 2023 — Zettelkasten Forum (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2023 18:31:33</time>)</cite></small>

reply to IvanFerrero at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1740/anybody-using-this-approach-to-manage-contacts-how#latest

Many of the digital note taking tools that run off of text allow you to add metadata to your basic text files (as YAML headers, inline with a key:: value pair, or via #tags). Many of them have search functionality or use other programmatic means like query blocks, DataView, DataViewJS, etc. for doing queries on your files to get back lists, tables, charts, etc. of the data you're looking for.

The DataView repository has some good examples of how this works with something like Obsidian. Fortunately if you're using simple text files you can usually put them into one or more platforms to get the data and affordances you want out of them individually.

As an example, I have a script block in my daily note in Obsidian for birthdays in my notes that fall on today's date:

```dataview LIST birthday FROM "Lists/People" WHERE birthday.day = date(2023-01-18).day ```

If I put the text birthday:: 1927-12-08 into a note about Niklas Luhmann, his name and birthday would appear in my daily note on his birthday. One can use similar functionality to create tables of books they read with titles, authors, ratings, dates read, etc. or a variety of other data input which parses through your plaintext files. Services like Obsidian, Logseq, et al. are getting better about allowing these types of programmatic searches for users without backgrounds in programming and various communities usually provide help for pre-made little snippets like the one above that one can cut and paste into their notes to get the outputs that they need. Another Obsidian based example that uses text files for tracking academic journal articles can be found at https://nataliekraneiss.com/your-academic-reading-list-in-obsidian/; I'm sure there are similar versions for other text-based platforms.

In pre-digital times, for a manual version of a rolodex like this in paper, one could use different color cards as pseudo-tags (doctors are on yellow cards, family members on blue cards, friends on green cards, etc.) or adding edge notches or even tabs to represent different types of metadata. See for example the edge colored cards in Hawkexpress' Pile of Index Cards: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122

https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers

This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).

This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/18/1139783203/what-makes-songs-swing-physicists-unravel-jazz-mystery

Spaces in both language, text, and music help to create the texture of what is being communicated (and/or not).

Link to Edward Tufte's latest book in section entitled "Spacing enhances complex meaning, encourages slow, thoughtful reading":

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #meta 2023-01-19 (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2023 11:32:19</time>)</cite></small>

Link to Indigenous astronomy example of negative spaces (like the Great Emu)

https://wptavern.com/classicpress-community-votes-to-re-fork-wordpress

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/

—Brian W. Kernighan, 1974 “UNIX for Beginners” [PDF] as Bell Labs Technical Memorandum 74-1273-18 on 29 October 1974.

For easier editing and reuse of sentences, or even portions of lines of text, one can (and should) write sentences or sentence fragments on their own lines in digital contexts.

This way future edits or the ability to more easily cut and paste will far easier in addition to keeping your version control files simpler and easier to read and visually track your changes. (That is in many version control systems, instead of a change appearing to affect an entire paragraph, it will only show on the single line that was changed thereby making the change easier to see.)

This particular affordance may be a particularly useful one for note takers who expect to regularly reuse their notes in other contexts. Many forms of software (including Tex, LaTeX, and even markdown) will autowrap newlines so that a sentence broken up into clauses on multiple lines will properly wrap back into a proper looking single line when printed. Take care that in many Markdown versions adding two spaces at the end of a line will automatically create a newline in your text.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/plan9-bell-labs/7thEdMan/index.html<br /> Unix Seventh Edition Manual

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Brandon Rhodes</span> in Semantic Linefeeds (<time class='dt-published'>12/27/2022 11:35:19</time>)</cite></small>

https://whalebird.social/en/desktop/contents

Whalebird is a Mastodon, Pleroma, and Misskey client for desktop application

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/marjorie-taylor-greene-congress-georgia-election-background/672229/

panpsychism: the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.

panexperientialism: The doctrine, related to panpsychism, that all matter is capable of experience.

Could refuting the idea of accumulation without limits (and thus capitalism for capitalism's sake) help give humans more focus on what is useful/valuable?

I'm not sure I like that Graeber waves away the question "why play?" here. I don't think there's an equivalency to the "why life?" question.

It will take some additional thinking to build something up to refute this idea however.

Perhaps play helps to provide social lubrication, communication, and bonding between animals which may help in creating cooperation which improves survival or reproduction?

Neo-Darwinism: a modern version of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, incorporating the findings of genetics.

Was this referenced in the Selfish Gene?

Things working at the level of the gene vs. species...

https://www.dalekeiger.net/just-an-image-and-an-explanation/?ref=the-joggled-mind-newsletter

https://ncase.me/polygons/

An interesting interactive model for segregation here. See also https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-10/an-immersive-game-shows-how-easily-segregation-arises-and-how-we-might-fix-it for press coverage.

https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb

We become what we behold, a game by Nicky Case.

A commentary on news cycles and social media.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160325224838/http://www.nic-las.com/

Suter, Beat. “From Theo Lutz to Netzliteratur. The Development of German-Language Electronic Literature.” Cybertext Yearbook, 2012. https://elmcip.net/critical-writing/theo-lutz-netzliteratur-development-german-language-electronic-literature.

Giannakis, Georgios K., Christoforo Charalambakis, Franco Montanari, and Antonios Rengakos, eds. Studies in Greek Lexicography. Studies in Greek Lexicography. Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes 72. De Gruyter, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622744.

Skimmed for portions relating to the Bauer zettelkasten

repetition of what appears on their primary web page in early 2023. the .pdf document doesn't appear to exist anymore (it redirects to https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/index.html

A digitized version of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten has been available online since 2015.

Better reference for the Bauer collection than the website due to publishing and peer review.

Katsikadeli, Christina. “Language Contact and Contact Induced Change in the Light of the (Digital) Lexicography of Greek Loanwords in the Non-Indo-European Languages of the Greco-Roman Worlds (Coptic, Hebrew/Aramaic, Syriac).” In Studies in Greek Lexicography, 21–40. Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes 72. Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622744-003.

Maxfield suggest drawing out a timeline as a possible visual cue for helping to remember dates. He seemingly misses any mention of ars memoria techniques here.

Apparently sharing/comparing notes was reasonable advice in 1910 including the idea of in-class signals for splitting up note taking amongst multiple people.

Compare this to shared notes (Google Docs, Etherpad, etc.) in modern context with multiple people doing simultaneous notes.

Here again he comes close to some of the methods and ideas of having flashcards for spaced repetition, but isn't explicitly aware of the words or techniques. Note that he also doesn't use the word flashcard. When was the word first used?

Rewriting things as flashcards also tends to be a part of the spaced repetition itself.

By cutting the notes up he's specifically decontextualizing them so as to make one's memory be better tested in coming up with the solutions/answers as they are more likely to appear on a test, decontextualized from the original lecture.

The suggestion of visual highlighting making ideas stand out, but without the idea of their location within the notes being a helpful part of the mnemonic technique.

Notice the advice for shorthand here in 1910. When was it a dead technology for students? Certainly by the 1980s when it was less frequently taught in schools.

Even with the ability to do shorthand and get things verbatim, he suggests against it for the sheer volume of material to go over.

Link to/compare with: - https://hypothes.is/a/gqSGbpVaEe2pmiuwPwm8Vw from 1892

"insert-eaves" !!

I've heard of interleaved books, but was unaware of the practice of book shops selling "insert-leaves" being specifically sold for the purpose of inserting notes into books.

Rewriting one's notes soon after they are written will be easier because they are fresher in one's mind and any issues with them can be more easily remedied. There's also the space repetition effect to be had.

Note here that Maxfield suggests the sort of value behind the idea of spaced repetition, but writing in 1910 doesn't have the word or the effect related to it yet.

One should strive to become fluent with their note taking materials and tools to the point that both having them at hand and using them them are as second nature as breathing, walking, or speaking.

When it comes to productivity gains, this one thing can be the most helpful. Have a process; know it intimately enough that it is second nature.

Dramatically important in mathematics, but also in every other area.

ha!

I've been heavily focused on note making while reading to the detriment of the different form of note making for lectures.

Maxfield, Ezra Kempton. “Suggestions for Note Taking.” Delaware College Bulletin 6, no. 4 (December 1910).

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Suggestions_for_Note_Taking/pacaAAAAYAAJ?hl=en

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpvEY-2dSdU

In this episode, I explain the memory system I created in order to expand my memory to new heights. I call it the Sirianni Method and with it, you can learn how to create an intentional photographic memory.

Who the hell is the Sirianni this is named for, himself? (In the comments he mentions that "it's my italian grandpa's last name, I always liked it and a while back started naming things after it)

tl;dr: He's reinvented the wheel, but certainly not the best version of it.

What he's describing isn't remotely related to the idea of a photographic memory, so he's over-hyping the results, which is dreadful. If it were a photographic memory, he wouldn't need the spaced-repetition portion of his practice. While he mentions how he's regularly reviewing his cards he doesn't mention any of the last century+ of research and work on spaced repetition. https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm is a good place to start for some of this.

A lot of what he's doing is based on associative memory, particularly by drawing connections/links to other things he already knows. He's also taking advantage of visual memory by associating his knowledge with a specific picture.

He highlights emotion and memory, but isn't drawing clear connections between his knowledge and any specific emotions that he's tying or associating them to.

"Intentional" seems to be one of the few honest portions of the piece.

Overview of his Sirianni method: pseudo-zettelkasten notes with written links to things he already knows (but without any Luhmann-esque numbering system or explicit links between cards, unless they're hiding in his connections section, which isn't well supported by the video) as well as a mnemonic image and lots of ad hoc spaced repetition.

One would be better off mixing their note taking practice with associative mnemonic methods (method of loci, songlines, memory palaces, sketchnotes, major system, orality, etc.) all well described by Lynne Kelly (amongst hundreds before her who got smaller portions of these practices) in combination with state of the art spaced repetition.

The description of Luhmann's note taking system here is barely passable at best. He certainly didn't invent the system which was based on several hundred years of commonplace book methodology before him. Luhmann also didn't popularize it in any sense (he actually lamented how people were unimpressed by it when he showed them). Popularization was done post-2013 generally by internet hype based on his prolific academic output.

There is nothing new here other than that he thinks he's discovered something new and is repackaging it for the masses with a new name in a flashy video package. There's a long history of hucksters doing this sort of fabulist tale including Kevin Trudeau with Mega Memory in the 1990s and going back to at least the late 1800s with "Professor" Alphonse Loisette and the system he sold for inordinate amounts to the masses including Mark Twain.

Most of these methods have been around for millennia and are all generally useful and well documented though the cultural West has just chosen to forget most of them. A week's worth of research and reading on these topics would have resulted in a much stronger "system" more quickly.

Beyond this, providing a fuller range of specific options and sub-options in these areas so that individuals could pick and choose the specifics which work best for them might have been a better way to go.

Content research: D- Production value: A+

{syndication link](https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10ehrbd/comment/j4u495q/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

he [Luhmann] popularized method of expanding your memory called the zettelkasten method (04:49)

At least he doesn't go with the invention myth, but it's also false that he was the one who popularized it... others online popularized it.

Levine, Emily J. “Aby Warburg and Weimar Jewish Culture: Navigating Normative Narratives, Counternarratives, and Historical Context.” In The German-Jewish Experience Revisited, edited by Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska, 1st ed., 117–34. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 3. De Gruyter, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbkjwr1.10.

Aschheim, Steven E., and Vivian Liska, eds. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 3. De Gruyter, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110367195.

Skimmed for references with respect to Aby Warburg and his zettelkasten.

Apparently Aby Warburg "obsessively kept" notes on antisemitic incidents on the Eastern front in his zettelkasten.

This piece looks at Warburg's Jewish identity as supported or not by the contents of his zettelkasten, thus placing it in the use of zettelkasten or card index as autobiography.

Might one's notes reflect who they were as a means of creating both their identity while alive as well as revealing it once they've passed on? Might the use of historical method provide its own historical method to be taken up on a meta basis after one's death?

https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/24570

Some interesting programming and structured data with relationship to the Gertrud Bauer Zettelkasten Online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_R._Gottschalk

Richter, Tonio Sebastian. “Whatever in the Coptic Language Is Not Greek, Can Wholly Be Considered Ancient Egyptian”: Recent Approaches towards an Integrated View of the Egyptian-Coptic Lexicon.” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies. Journal de La Société Canadienne Pour Les Études Coptes 9 (2017): 9–32. https://doi.org/10.11588/propylaeumdok.00004673.

Skimmed for the specifics I was looking for with respect to Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten.

This repeats chunks of prior notes from https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/bauer-db/index.html, but is a better published/referenceable verion of it than just the web page.

Link to : - https://hypothes.is/a/nrqq3JXqEe2i5TOTRdgmQg - https://hypothes.is/a/uCcDTJXnEe2nZFtz8Aa_LQ

As a complete aside I can't help but wonder if Tami Gottschalk is related to Louis R. Gottschalk, the historian who wrote Understanding history; a primer of historical method?

61 Available online at http://research.uni-leipzig.de/ddglc/bauerindex.html. The Work on this parergon to the lexicographical labors of the DDGLC project was funded by the Gertrud-und Alexander Böhlig-Stiftung. The digitization of the original card index was conducted by temporary collaborators and volunteers in the DDGLC project: Jenny Böttinger, Claudia Gamma, Tami Gottschalk, Josephine Hensel, Katrin John, Mariana Jung, Christina Katsikadeli, and Elen Saif. The IT concept and programming were carried out by Katrin John and Maximilian Moller.

Digitization of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten was underway in 2017 to put the data into a MySQL database with the intention of offering it as an online user interface sometime in 2017.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Peter Smith</span> in Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>01/17/2023 16:52:31</time>)</cite></small>

Peter Smith calls his website his commonplace book.

https://petersmith.org/blog/2022/12/10/zettelkasten/

https://petersmith.org/blog/2022/12/10/zettelkasten/

Peter Smith was introduced to Niklas Luhmann at an European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Conference in the early 2000s, ostensibly a business related group.

I came across this via an IndieWeb reference and webmention.

A lovely quote I ran into this morning, perhaps for a future 3 pack, potentially featuring Thoreau, Thoreau and writing, Thoreau and nature, the Concord writing group, etc., etc.:

"Might not my Journal be called 'Field Notes?'" —Henry David Thoreau, March 21, 1853 via The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. Original edition. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009. https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Thoreau-1837-1861-Review-Classics/dp/159017321X/

There's also another writerly tie-in here as when he returned to Concord, Thoreau worked in his family's pencil factory(!!), which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life. Replica Thoreau factory pencils anyone?!

Given the fact that he was an inveterate journaler as well as someone who who kept multiple commonplace books, perhaps a tie-in to a larger journal or commonplace book format product? (I'm reminded that the famous printer, publisher and typeface designer John Bell published blank commonplace books along with instructions from John Locke on how to keep and index them. See an example: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Bell_s_Common_Place_Book/3XCFtwAACAAJ?hl=en )

At a minimum I'm pretty sure we all want this Thoreau quote on a Field Notes brand t-shirt...

Thanks for all the years of solid design and great paper!

Warmest regards, Chris Aldrich

—Henry David Thoreau, March 21, 1853

I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. They are translated from earth

—Henry David Thoreau February 18, 1852

Rather than have two commonplaces, one for facts and one for poetry, if one can more carefully and successfully translate one's words and thoughts, they they might all be kept in the commonplace book of poetry.

www.library.ucsb.edu/thoreau/writings_journals.html

Unabridged versions of Thoreau's journals, though note editing of some.

Fascinating to think that Damion Searls edited this edition of Thoreau's journals almost as if they were his (Searls') own commonplace book of Thoreau's journals themselves.

Very meta!

Henry David Thoreau repeated himself frequently in his journals. Damion Searls who edited an edition of his journals suggested that some of this repetition was for the beauty and pleasure of the act, but that in many examples his repetition was an act of drafting, revising, and constructing.

Scott Scheper has recommended finding the place in one's zettelkasten where one wants to install a card before writing it out. I believe (check this) that he does this in part to prevent one from repeating themselves, but one could use the opportunity and the new context that brings them to an idea again to rewrite or rework and expand on their ideas while they're so inspired.

Thoreau's repetition may have also served the idea of spaced repetition: reminding him of his thoughts as he also revised them. We'll need examples of this through his writing to support such a claim. As the editor of this volume indicates that he removed some of the repetition, it may be better to go back to original sources than to look for these examples here.

(This last paragraph on repetition was inspired by attempting to type a tag for repetition and seeing "spaced repetition" pop up. This is an example in my own writing practice where the serendipity of a previously tagged word auto-populating/auto-completing in my interface helps to trigger new thoughts and ideas from a combinatorial creativity perspective.)

him.

!!!!

Henry David Thoreau from 1852

Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal: 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. Original edition. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009.

reply to u/phil98f at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10dbza7/equations_and_formulas_in_mathematics_physics_and/

Perhaps you've not gotten far enough in your studies to see the pattern yet, but most advanced mathematics texts (Hungerford's Algebra or Rudin's Real Analysis for example) and many physics texts are written as if they were pre-numbered zettelkasten. Generally every definition, theorem, corollary, proposition, and lemma in the text will be written out succinctly with its own unique number and arranged in some sort of branching order. Most of these texts you could generally cut up and paste onto cards and have something zettelkasten-like without any additional work.

I generally follow this same pattern and usually separate proofs on cards behind their associated theorems (typically only for those I've written out myself). Individual equations can be numbered, but I rarely give an equation its own card and instead reference them by card number with a particular equation line in parenthesis when necessary. I can then cross reference definitions, theorems, etc. easily as I continue building things up. Over time you can eventually cross reference various branches of math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. For example I've got a dozen different proofs and uses of Schwartz' inequality in six different branches of mathematics which goes toward showing how closely knit various disparate branches of math can be.

In most cases I might also suggest against too heavy a focus on the equations, but on what they may say/mean, and what you can use it for. Alternately drawing diagrams or pictures of the relationships can be valuable. Understand it first then write it down. As an example you can look at Boyle's Law, Charles' law, Avogadro's Law and Gay-Lussac's law, but if you know and understand them properly then you should be able to write down and understand the more generic Ideal Gas Law, which shows how they're interlinked. Later in your studies you might also then be able to derive it from microscopic kinetic theory with statistical mechanics as well, then you'll be able to link up those concepts at that time.

https://github.com/artisticat1/obsidian-latex-suite

Arthur introduces the topic of Robert Pirsig and slips into the GTD conversation on 2004-05-19.

Was this a precursor link to the Pile of Index Cards in 2006?

Note that there doesn't seem to be any discussion of any of the methods with respect to direct knowledge management until the very end in which arthur returns almost four months later to describe a 4 x 6" card index with various topics he's using for filing away his knowledge on cards. He's essentially recreated the index card based commonplace book suggested by Robert Pirsig in Lila.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/9357/#Comment_9357

I just love this perspective! They've gotten so many parts "correct"!

slip box vs zettelkasten vs card file index (or card catalog)

Sometimes having examples of others' work can be helpful. In your case, perhaps perusing some zettelkasten work by previous users within the art/image space? In this respect some of the work by Aby Warburg may be interesting to you. I might suggest starting with his archive here: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/archive-collections/verknüpfungszwang-exhibition/mnemosyne-materials

https://omnivore.app/<br /> Open source version of readwise

Originally bookmarked from phone on Sun 2023-01-15 11:25 PM

updated: 2023-01-17 with tag: "accounts"

https://www.levenger.com/collections/pocket-briefcases/products/bomber-jacket-int-pkt-briefcase-w-pocketini-clip?variant=42636956237973

After browsing through a variety of the cards in Gertrud Bauer's Zettelkasten Online it becomes obvious that the collection was created specifically as a paper-based database for search, retrieval, and research. The examples and data within it are much more narrowly circumscribed for a specific use than those of other researchers like Niklas Luhmann whose collection spanned a much broader variety of topics and areas of knowledge.

This particular use case makes the database nature of zettelkasten more apparent than some others, particularly in modern (post-2013 zettelkasten of a more personal nature).

I'm reminded here of the use case(s) described by Beatrice Webb in My Apprenticeship for scientific note taking, by which she more broadly meant database creation and use.

https://userpage.fu-berlin.de/johnkatrin/bauer1/index.html

The digitized and online version of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten.

Search fields: - simple search - ID - Lemma - card type - Dialect - Use

https://github.com/CopticScriptorium<br /> Tools and technologies for digital and computational research into Coptic language and literature

Coptic Dictionary Online<br /> https://coptic-dictionary.org/search.cgi

Multiple dialects, scriptorium tags, and definitions in English, German, and French.

In the 1990s Professor Alexander Böhlig of the University of Tuebingen gave Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten to Professor Peter Nagel of Bonn. He in turn forwardd the seven cardboard boxes of slips to the Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC) office for their use.

What was the nature of the hierarchical structure of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten?

Some of the structure may be understandable by the nature of the digital database.

The Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC) has scanned and placed the original slips from Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten into a database for scholarly use. The database allows the replication of the hierarchical structure of Bauer's original compilation.

Gertrud Bauer produced her zettelkasten as part of a loanword project overseen by professor Alexander Böhlig at the University of Tuebingen.

Gertrud Bauer used her zettelkasten on Coptic and Greek to write Konkordanz der nichtflektierten griechischen Wörter im bohairischen Neuen Testament, Göttinger Orientforschungen VI/6, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1975, a work on borrowed function words.

Gertrud Bauer maintained a zettelkasten in the 1970s and 1980s in which she compiled "about 15,000 attestations (tokens) of almost 150 types of reek prepositions, conjunctions and particles in Coptic, from virtually all Coptic dialects and types of texts, arranged on the basis of a detailed analysis of their semantic and syntactic properties."

Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC) https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/index.html

https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/index.html

https://optimize.google.com/

alternative: https://www.inspectlet.com/

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/ykPEMJXhEe2yst-vhvqBzg

https://www.inspectlet.com/

I've used this briefly before, but it's also something Scott Scheper swears by.

alternative: https://optimize.google.com/

Interesting advice...

Were notebooks of the time generally poorly bound and prone to falling apart? The focus on longevity of notes is interesting here...

Verbatim notes are not the goal.

The idea of note taking as a means of sensemaking and understanding is underlined in an 1892 article in a shorthand magazine whose general purpose was to encourage shorthand and increasing one's writing speed, often to create verbatim records:

To be useful, the notes taken at medical lectures should be a summary only; no attempt should be made to take a verbatim report.

There's an interesting parallel between this example and that of the character of Socrates in Plato with respect to writing and memory.

Some take notes to increase understanding, while others might suggest that note taking decreases understanding. The answer to remedying the discrepancy is in using the proper process.

“Note-Taking in Medical Study and Practice.” The Phonetic Journal, September 24, 1892, in The Phonetic Journal for the Year of 1892, Volume 51, 609–10.

Try Kaitiaki or Rite in the Rain. If you search for "index card wallet" you'll likely find a variety of others, including some custom made versions on sites like Etsy. 3 x 5" are relatively common, but 4 x 6" are much harder to come by.

https://www.riteintherain.com/index-card-wallet