One can query the text in closed-captioning from the Internet Archive to track trends, and particularly politics, on television news.

While Donald J. Trump seemed to hold say over what was trending and the media was discussing, Philip Bump notices that Ron DeSantis seems to be trailing or perhaps riding the trends rather than leading them.

Is this because he's only tubthumping one or two at a time while Trump floats trial balloons regularly and is pushing half a dozen or more at time?

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/act_course/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmccandless/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/henri-lipmanowicz-b3802b12/

https://www.liberatingstructures.com/

See also: Jerry's Brain: https://app.thebrain.com/brain/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/9ed44e44-3283-a4e1-c79d-c0847aad5c4c

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/smarter-living/failure-resume.html

reply to u/JeffB1517 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ulsye/comment/k2mb8s2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I've only seen some modest discussion of DDC and outside of Joseph Voros, vanishingly little discussion (much less usage) of Propædia as classification systems for zettelkasten id numbering. I'm wholly unaware of anyone actively using the Universal Decimal Classification, but would love to see examples of it in action if they exist. From where are you drawing your sampling of "lots of people"? Do you use Library of Congress classification for your own, and if so, can you provide an example of numbers and titles of half a dozen cards to demonstrate your specific method? Given the prevalence of its use in filing/ordering, I'd more likely place the ID at the top of the card over the bottom and put other links at the bottom. Is there a particular affordance that would encourage you to do it the opposite?

Perhaps you're including it in the idea of "related notes", but I also keep a separate reference section on each card for the source or related context of the main idea or excerpted quotation.

Custom Zettelkasten Stationery?

For those who have a significant paper-based practice, have you considered commissioning custom made cards? There are a variety of stationers who do custom work and one could also purchase directly from Chinese manufacturers to get costs down by buying in bulk.

Ryan Holliday is one of the few I've seen in the wild who has mentioned custom making cards, usually done on a per-project (book) basis where he'll put a header title at the top of his note cards. Example: https://www.instagram.com/p/CeWV6xBuZUN/?hl=en

Other options could include doing custom/personalized stamps. (I have a date stamp handy for quickly stamping the dates of creation/updating in the corner of cards.)

I'm curious what suppliers/manufacturers folks have researched/used? What were your experiences? What sort of templates or printing did you use on them? Paper weight? Did you go Grid, blank, dot, lined, or all of the above? If you were looking to purchase something for yourself, what would you want?

https://flyingleapgames.com/products/wing-it-the-game-of-extreme-storytelling-1

Recommended by Jesse Stommel.

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/community-health/patient-care/self-determination-theory.aspx

https://www.jessestommel.com/open-online-office-hours-ungrading-edition/

https://www.jessestommel.com/open-online-office-hours-ungrading-edition/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10jx7gg/wooden_antinet_zettelkasten/

Scott Scheper commissioned a two drawer solid wood (cedar) zettelkasten box similar to those from the early 20th century. He had it listed on his website initially for $995 and then later for a reduced $495.

He created a waitlist sign up for it, ostensibly to test the interest in manufacturing/selling them as a product. To my knowledge he never made any beyond the initial prototype.

The high cost likely dampened interest compared to the much cheaper primary and secondary markets for these sorts of storage containers.

See also:<br /> - $995 https://web.archive.org/web/20230124062200/https://www.antinet.org/wooden-antinet-waitlist - $495 reduction https://web.archive.org/web/20230306195625/https://www.antinet.org/wooden-antinet-waitlist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml43nNSUkIw

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204477690819

https://www.ebay.com/itm/266424945249

2023-09-25 offered for $1,350 + $200 shipping from Lawrenceburg, IN to Los Angeles.

12 drawer 2x6 configuration card index in filing cabinet configuration made of 6 modular/stackable 2x1 units with a small table stand.

Seller indicates it may have been a Macey, but the label has worn off. Red could potentially have been a Weiss or Macey-Wernicke label? Would need to cross check others. Very early 1900s in oak, all wood with thin metal card stops on rails, but otherwise no other card index rods.

13.5 x15x42 as measured, so like a 4 x 6" card index, but should double check.

Cost per drawer: $112.50

2023-09-27: Seller made a purchase price offer of $1000.

https://henribergotte.wordpress.com/

WordPress.com blog with examples of typecasting (blogging).

https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200375~3001080:The-Histomap-#

https://forgottenfiles.substack.com/p/that-histomap-on-mitt-romneys-wall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Interpretation

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/barbell-method-reading/

https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/16op0ss/anyone_else_using_their_typewriter_for_social/

Annotations at: https://docdrop.org/video/Y_rizr8bb0c/

Mortimer Adler gave oral examinations at St. Johns in which he would often ask a student to restate the ideas of writers in their own words and then ask for a concrete example of that idea. Being able to do these two things is a solid way of indicating that one fully understands an idea.

Adler and Van Doren querying each other demonstrate this once or twice in the video.

related: - https://hypothes.is/a/rh1M5vdEEeut4pOOF7OYNA - https://hypothes.is/a/iV5MwjivEe23zyebtBagfw

Where does this method sit with respect to the Feynman Technique? Does this appear in the 1940 edition of Adler's book and thus predate it all?

Based on Hobbes' definition of war, the left and the right in America are currently either at war or on the brink, because we are slowly coming to the point at which our differences can't or won't be decided by our recourse to law, which is actively moving against the will of the larger majority of Americans.

https://matthew-van-der-hoorn.notion.site/matthew-van-der-hoorn/Book-Reading-bc745728387b4369b5b63739292c9ce7

van der Hoorn's suggestions for reading

https://app.thebrain.com/brain/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/b3c77013-8ce4-29cd-95b9-18112649a306

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere

See also:<br /> - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for-thought - https://app.thebrain.com/brain/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/b3c77013-8ce4-29cd-95b9-18112649a306

https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for-thought

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game

https://wiki.openglobalmind.com/what%E2%80%99s_a_neobook_

Conference calls at 10:30 AM on Mondays. Search YouTube for past occurrences.

Relationship to wikis and zettelkasten for accumulating knowledge as a ratchet.

Creating a "signpost user interface" can help to uncover directions to take in digital contexts as out of sight is out of mind. Having things sit in your way within one's note taking workflow can remind them to either link things, or move in particular directions for discovering new avenues of thought.

Example: it would be interesting if Jerry's The Brain would have links directly to material in Flancian's Agora to remind him to search or find relevant material there. This could help with combinatorial creativity with inputs from others, though it needs to be narrow so as not to result in rabbit holes which draw away attention.

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/iQvo7l1zEe6dZ5_9d9rrVw

Jerry Michalski says that The Brain provides him with a "neighborhood perspective" of ideas when he reduces the external link number for his graph down to 1.

This is similar to Nicholas Luhmann's zettelkasten which provided neighborhoods of related notes based on distance from any particular note.

Also similar to oral cultures who relied on movement through their environment for encoding memories and later remembering them. [I'll use the tag "environmental memory" to track this until a better name comes along.]

https://www.jerrysbrain.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics

related to ideas I've had with respect to Werner R. Loewenstein?

https://www.uclaextension.edu/sciences-math/math-statistics/course/topics-ring-theory-and-modules-math-900

https://hypothes.is/users/M.AKilic50

https://www.ebay.com/itm/275465128542

Saw for sale on/around 2023-05-17 for $3,000, though willing to accept $2,500 (or lower). Still on offer 2023-09-24.

Gaylord Bros. 5 piece sectional library card catalog with two 5x3 sections of drawers, a pull out writing desk (with two pull outs), a top and a base table.

cost per drawer: $100

https://www.ebay.com/itm/285467601533

Vintage Y&E mixed card index. Listed in September 2023 for 199.00 with local pick up in Oregon City, OR.

Appears to be a wooden, quarter sawn oak modular card index with a row of 5 4x6" drawers and two rows of three 6x9 drawers.

Finish could use some TLC. 33" W x 21.25" H x 17.5" D<br /> 11 Drawers. Each drawer has a track with a working metal card holder that can be repositioned along the track. 2 stacked / stacking sections: Top section has 5 narrow drawers. Bottom section has 6 larger drawers.

cost per drawer: $18.09

reply to u/JonasanOniem at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ss0yu/comment/k2buxsc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

In digital contexts it is much easier and very common to create orphaned notes that aren't connected to anything. In a paper zettelkasten, you are forced to file your note somewhere and give it a number (only to be able to find it again—it's difficult, but try not to make the mistake of conflating your number with the idea of category). The physical act of placing it in your slipbox creates an implicit link to the things around it. As a result, your four notes would all initially seem to be directly related because they're nearby, but over time, they will naturally drift apart as you intersperse new notes between and among them. Though if they're truly directly interrelated, you can write down explicit links from notes at one end of your thought space to notes which seem distant.

In your example, you may see some sort of loose link between your first and fourth notes relating to music. While it may be a distant one, given what you have, putting marching band "next to" digestible music is really the only place to put it. Over time, you'll certainly find other notes that come between them which will tend to split them apart and separate them by physical distance, but for now, if it's what you've got, then place them into the same neighborhood by giving them addresses (numbers) to suggest they live nearby. (Some note applications like Obsidian make this much harder to do, and as a result orphaned notes will eventually become a problem.)

This physical process is part of the ultimate value of building knowledge from the bottom up. Like most people, you've probably been heavily trained to want to create a hierarchy from the top down (folder-based systems on computers of the late 20th century are a big factor here) which is exactly why you're going to have problems like this at the start. You'll want to place that music note somewhere else, or worse, orphan it. For some people who may not be able to immediately trust the process, it can be easier to create a few dozen or a hundred notes and then come back to them later to file and arrange them. This will allow you to seed some ground from which to continually build and help to bridge the gap between the desire to move top-down in a system designed to move from bottom-up.

Depending on one's zettelkasten application (Obsidian, Zettlr, Logseq, The Archive, et al.) some do a better job of allowing the creation of "soft links" versus the more explicit hard or direct links (usually using [[WikiLinks]]). The soft links are usually best done by providing a number that places one note into proximity with another, but not all systems work this way. As a result, it's much easier to build a traditional commonplace book with Obsidian than it is to build a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten (see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/). The concept of tags/categories in many systems is another form of soft link that can hold ideas together, so use this affordance if your application offers it as well. But also keep in mind that if sociology is your life's work, you'll eventually amass such a huge number of digital notes tagged with "sociology" that this affordance will become useless as it won't scale well for discovery and creating links.

reply to u/JonasanOniem at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ss0yu/linking_new_notes/

This sort of practice is harder when you start out in most digital apps because there is usually no sense of "closeness" of ideas in digital the way that is implied by physical proximity (or "neighborhood") found in physical cards sitting right next to or around each other. As a result, you have to create more explicit links or rely on using tags (or indexing) when you start. I've not gotten deep into the UI of Zettlr, but some applications allow the numbering (and the way numbered ideas are sorted in the user interface) to allow this affordance by creating a visual sense of proximity for you. As you accumulate more notes, it becomes easier and you can rely less on tags and more on direct links. Eventually you may come to dislike broad categories/tags and prefer direct links from one idea to another as the most explicit tag you could give a note . If you're following a more strict Luhmann-artig practice, you'll find yourself indexing a lot at the beginning, but as you link new ideas to old, you don't need to index (tag) things as heavily because the index points to a card which is directly linked to something in the neighborhood of where you're looking. Over time and through use, you'll come to recognize your neighborhoods and the individual "houses" where the ideas you're working with all live. As an example, Luhmann spent his life working in sociology, but you'll only find a few links from his keyword register/subject index to "sociology" (and this is a good thing, otherwise he'd have had 90,000+ listings there and the index entry for sociology would have been utterly useless.)

Still, given all this, perhaps as taurusnoises suggests, concrete examples may help more, particularly if you're having any issues with the terminology/concepts or how the specific application affordances are being presented.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iiXQKOXrZxfuMJXwAW-1aPtgoJ8rssfN/view

Mr. Hoorn's version of how I take notes.

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-use-camera-lucida-app-for-drawing/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpwpdGyx880

https://www.napkin.ai/

(Separate from https://www.napkin.one/)

The simple Zettelkasten Method:<br /> 1. Buy index cards 2. Buy a box 3. ??? 4. Profit

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to his zettelkasten on the other side!

But when he got there, he realized he had forgotten the slip of paper with his perfect evergreen note. So the chicken crossed the road once again to retrieve it. But almost as if it were a jokerzettel, on the way back, a gust of wind blew the slip right out of the chicken's beak!

The chicken tried to catch the runaway slip, but it kept evading him. He chased that slip all over the farm--through the pig sty, over fences, around the grain silo.

Finally, exhausted but triumphant, the chicken caught the slip and carefully filed it away.

Moral of the story: Don't count your slips before they're indexed!

A priest, a rabbi, and Nicholas Luhmann walk into a bar. They sit down, and the priest says, "Let's all share ideas from our florilegia." The rabbi responds by pulling out his own annotation of a gloss on the commentary of Rashi which comments on the Mishnah and the Gamara. To this Luhmann replies, "You're not practicing the one true note taking religion unless you're using alpha-numeric identifiers and have appropriately cross indexed at sheet 031-R with a link branching off of note 100(1) in ZK I.

Q: Why did the zettelkasten cross the road?

A: It didn't because Barbara Tuchman, Nicholas Luhmann, Jacques Goutor, Johannes Erich Heyde, and Keith Thomas all recommend only writing on one side.

Q: How many zettelkasten does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Only one, but it will require two dozen interconnected notes with citations on the history of illumination, the physics of filaments, and the impact of artificial light on circadian rhythms in the process.

A slip walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Hey, you look a little stiff. Need a drink to loosen up?"

The slip replies, "What do you think I am? An index card?!? I'm Zettel 9/8j, give me a Shirley Temple!

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.

It's possible that the process of note taking and excerpting may impose levels of analysis and synthesis on their users such that when writing and synthesizing their works that they more subtly expect their readers to do the same thing when their audiences may require more handholding and explanation.

Here, both the authors' experiences and that of the cultures in which they're writing will determine the relationship.

There's lots of analogies between thinking and digesting (rumination, consumption, etc), in reading and understanding contexts.

Source: https://hypothes.is/a/hhCGsljeEe2QlccJUQ55fA

Helbig, Daniela K. “Ruminant Machines: A Twentieth-Century Episode in the Material History of Ideas.” JHI Blog (blog), April 17, 2019. https://jhiblog.org/2019/04/17/ruminant-machines-a-twentieth-century-episode-in-the-material-history-of-ideas/.

I've seen this quote earlier today, but interesting seeing another source quote it.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/335030637598 (The card catalog here appears to be late 1970s/ early 80s and looks dreadful)

Free standing low table unit with no legs and a single 5x3 section offered in September 2023 for opening bid of $600 and a buy now price of $785.00 with free local pick up in Eugene, OR.

2023-09-22: Relisting https://www.ebay.com/itm/335040502888

Cost per drawer: $40 (bid); 52.33 (purchase)

In the mid to late 1900s, the Buckstaff Company manufactured wooden library card catalogs.

They still make library carrels and other related furniture, though they no longer appear to make card catalogs.

See also: http://www.buckstaff.com/index.html

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256231658514

60 drawer library card catalog unit with 2 sections of 6x5 drawers separated by three pull out writing drawers with a solid "skirt" base in what appears to be oak with polished metal fittings. Missing all the card catalog rods. Likely 70s, possibly from Remington Rand(?).

Offered for $1,700 as straight purchase on 2023-09-25

By labelling it appears to have been used for craft supply storage. Ex-library Cal State Chico.

Cost per drawer: $28.33

aka:<br /> - Mr. Hoorn (Asp. Learning Expert) - Odd-Job_Man https://www.reddit.com/user/Odd-Job_Man/ - Mind Academy (w/ Discord channel) - Hypothes.is account: https://hypothes.is/users/MrHoornTheScholar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva

There are hints here of what Bob Doto was writing about recently with respect to literary theory development, lots of which wouldn't have been seen/known by Adler/Van Doren in 1972. You might appreciate the ideas in intertextuality and rhizomatic philosophy he touches on. There are also hints of connections to Whitney Trettien's work in Cut/Copy/Paste which I'm reminded of as well.

Doto, Bob. “Inspired Destruction: How a Zettelkasten Explodes Thoughts (So You Can Have New Ones).” Writing by Bob Doto (blog), September 13, 2023. https://writing.bobdoto.computer/inspired-destruction-how-a-zettelkasten-explodes-thoughts-so-you-can-have-newish-ones/.

Trettien, Whitney. Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/cut-copy-paste.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/how-to-read-a-book-chapter-2

Sometimes one reads for raw information and background details that one can excerpt or use--things which an author may use to support their own arguments, but which the reader doesn't care about at all.

Doto, Bob. “Inspired Destruction: How a Zettelkasten Explodes Thoughts (So You Can Have New Ones).” Personal blog. Writing by Bob Doto (blog), September 13, 2023. https://writing.bobdoto.computer/inspired-destruction-how-a-zettelkasten-explodes-thoughts-so-you-can-have-newish-ones/.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)

Hamacher, Duane, Patrick Nunn, Michelle Gantevoort, Rebe Taylor, Greg Lehman, Ka Hei Andrew Law, and Mel Miles. “The Archaeology of Orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal Oral Traditions to the Late Pleistocene.” Journal of Archaeological Science, August 10, 2023, 45pp.

Pre-print.

See also: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000997

Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:d4ccd0952073ac59932f4638381e6b69

Popular press coverage: https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/august/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus

literal Latin translation: boundary before which

the latest possible date for something

There's some interesting work on the "archaeology of orality" which indicates that there's much better continuity of oral traditions than Westerners may admit, in large part because we're only familiar with how our memories are trained versus how oral societies actually operate. Transmission methods are much stronger/better than we might generally think and go back further than our literary records.

Here's an interesting recent article that provides a bit of flavor here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000997

And a popular press synopsis: https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/august/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/how-to-read-a-book-chapter-1

Knight, Anna. “Tasmanian Aboriginal Oral Traditions among the Oldest Recorded Narratives.” News. University of Melbourne, August 14, 2023. https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/august/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives.

Popular press synopsis of journal article; see: https://hypothes.is/a/5qru3Fu7Ee62eZPHP6EAyw

The scientific validation of oral traditions aids in creating a third archive which fuses the value of Indigenous knowledges and Western ways of knowing.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/155778259293

Unbranded four drawer 2x2 desktop card index in oak. See on 2023-09-24 offered for $124.99 plus $92.53 shipping from Hobart, IN. Overall 12" H x 15" W x 15" D, so likely for 4 x 6" cards though the listing says "The inside of the drawers are 3 inches deep, 6 inches wide, and 13 inches long."

Medium condition.

Cost per drawer: $31.25

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/12620128861463

https://lacountylibrary.libnet.info/event/9097350

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMF37TXAV5w

Presenter Lawrence Mak broke down types of notes into the following three categories:<br /> - general notes (projects, ideas, journals, recipes, budgeting, homework, etc.)<br /> - lists (groceries, reading, gifts, to dos, assignments) - reminders (birthdays, bills, maintenance, health)

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/7338941576/how-two-photographers-captured-the-same-millisecond-in-time

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/16ilfgj/my_antinet_zettelkasten_setup/

A great walkthrough of the physical pieces that a zettelkasten user is using.

It almost borders on some of the productivity porn that is seen in the planner/productivity space.

Not seen before: some pre-made templates for placing data on physical cards.

https://keyway.com.tw/content/product/pro_cont.aspx?SiteID=1&MSid=711725301405576515&SID=712134524606134016

Plastic zettelkasten boxes used as described by u/-Angz in https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/16ilfgj/my_antinet_zettelkasten_setup/

The importance of handwriting is becoming better understood

Nothing new here; just spitting out @Mueller2014 with minor commentary and no concrete evidence or details beyond that.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276059372112

Vintage wooden card catalog. No brand name listed. Appears to be a grouping of 8 3x2 card indexes with relatively wide spacers between each drawer.

Total of 48 drawers listed in September 2023 for $1,500 for free pick up in Chicago, IL. <br /> Dimensions 64.75" x 41.6 x 17.5

cost per drawer: $31.25

Seller lists it as:

Blonde maple wood brushed bronze hardware. Approximately 64" x 40" x 18" deep. 3 solid wood slide out writing surfaces Solid wood frame / cabinet and drawer fronts heavy plastic drawer body / inside. All drawers open close, needs cleaning, some handles missing a few screws, has some flaws / damage, see pictures. Sides are not finished. For local pickup located in Chicago 60606.

Though it looks more like oak than maple and the photos don't indicate any pull out writing drawers. No photo indication of catalog drawer rods on the exterior, but the interior looks like it may have an internal rod for a card stop.

drawers approx 7.5" high x 5.9" so not sure if they're made for standard sized index cards of a particular type. If the Rubbermaid containers inside are the 6 qt size with Outside Dimensions 13. 375 in. L x 8. 375 in. W x 4. 75 in. H

https://offerup.com/item/detail/aa30b5cf-993e-3077-9c86-5b36b7d7fee9?q=library+card+catalog

Offered circa July 2023 for $200 and sold circa September 2023.

Gaylord brothers three piece modular library card catalog circa 1950's. Acquired by seller prior to a school demolition. Top cover appears to be homemade and covered with cloth. Other pieces are standard 5x3 grouping of 15 drawers and lower table unit. Missing all the catalog rods.

cost per drawer: $13.30

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/703509757975742/

Remington Rand Library Card Catalog Cabinet $3,500 · In stock<br /> Listed in Altadena, CA, circa May 2023

Solid unit with base containing two small cabinet compartments and two sections of 6x5 for a total of 60 drawers and three writing drawers. Rods look intact

62.5"H x 41"W x 19"D 60 drawers and large storage cabinet below. On casters/wheels! Vintage 1950-1960 from Cal Poly Library. Maple Wood Very few blemishes. All drawers with working parts, super clean. No history of any damage. I've reduced the price!

Cost per drawer: $58.33

reply to u/SouthernEremite at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16r8k0b/i_dont_know_why_i_cant_do_evergreen_and_atomic/

If you're not using your notes to create or write material and only using them as a form of sensemaking, then perhaps you don't need to put as much work or effort into the permanent notes portion of the work? Ask yourself: "Why are you taking notes? What purpose do they serve?" Is the form and level you're making them in serving those purposes? If not, work toward practicing to make those two align so that your notes are serving an actual purpose for you. Anything beyond this is make-work and you could spend your time more profitably somewhere else.

Watch the scale and scope of what you're doing. If you read a book and make a hundred highlights and small notes, DO NOT attempt to turn all of these into permanent notes. You might fell like that is the thing to do, but resist it. A large portion are small things or potentially useful facts that you'll likely never use again or would easily remember, particularly once you've read a whole book.

Find the much smaller subset (5-10% or less of the overall total of notes and highlights as a ballpark rule of thumb) of the most interesting and potentially long term useful ones, and turn those into your permanent notes. Anything beyond this is sure to cause overwhelm. Also don't think that your permanent notes need to be spectacular, awesome, or even bordering on "perfect". They just need to be useful enough for you.

If you own the books or keep your brief notes and highlights written down and need them in the future, you'll still have those to search/find and do something with later as a backstop just in case.

(~6:00) Discussion of messiness as a record of working - notes don't need to be "perfect".

(9:08) He shows the wikipedia page for waste book with my additions :)

(late) quote from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's waste books about waste books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdeOHF-fu9I

A brief overview of Newton's note taking in his waste book

"... I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculair to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written."—George Orwell

check source and verify text <br /> (8:42)

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Philosophical Writings. Edited and translated by Steven Tester. SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 1.0. State University of New York Press, 2012.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook E, #46, 1775–1776

In this single paragraph quote Lichtenberg, using the model of Italian bookkeepers of the 18th century, broadly outlines almost all of the note taking technique suggested by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes. He's got writing down and keeping fleeting notes as well as literature notes. (Keeping academic references would have been commonplace by this time.) He follows up with rewriting and expanding on the original note to create additional "explanations" and even "connections" (links) to create what Ahrens describes as permanent notes or which some would call evergreen notes.

Lichtenberg's version calls for the permanent notes to be "separated and ordered" and while he may have kept them in book format himself, it's easy to see from Konrad Gessner's suggestion at the use of slips centuries before, that one could easily put their permanent notes on index cards ("separated") and then number and index or categorize them ("ordered"). The only serious missing piece of Luhmann's version of a zettelkasten then are the ideas of placing related ideas nearby each other, though the idea of creating connections between notes is immediately adjacent to this, and his numbering system, which was broadly based on the popularity of Melvil Dewey's decimal system.

It may bear noticing that John Locke's indexing system for commonplace books was suggested, originally in French in 1685, and later in English in 1706. Given it's popularity, it's not unlikely that Lichtenberg would have been aware of it.

Given Lichtenberg's very popular waste books were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Reference: Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.) It would not be hard to imagine that Niklas Luhmann would have also been aware of them.

Open questions: <br /> - did Lichtenberg number the entries in his own waste books? This would be early evidence toward the practice of numbering notes for future reference. Based on this text, it's obvious that the editor numbered the translated notes for this edition, were they Lichtenberg's numbering? - Is there evidence that Lichtenberg knew of Locke's indexing system? Did his waste books have an index?

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1tuc9c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/atomicnotes, this is an excellent question. (Though I'd still like to come to terms with people who don't think it acts as a knowledge management system, there's obviously something I'm missing.)

Some of your distinction comes down to how one is using their zettelkasten and what sorts of questions are being asked of it. One of the earliest descriptions I've seen that begins to get at the difference is the description by Beatrice Webb of her notes (appendix C) in My Apprenticeship. As she describes what she's doing, I get the feeling that she's taking the same broad sort of notes we're all used to, but it's obvious from her discussion that she's also using her slips as a traditional database, but is lacking modern vocabulary to describe it as such.

Early efforts like the OED, TLL, the Wb, and even Gertrud Bauer's Coptic linguistic zettelkasten of the late 1970s were narrow enough in scope and data collected to make them almost dead simple to define, organize and use as databases on paper. Of course how they were used to compile their ultimate reference books was a bit more complex in form than the basic data from which they stemmed.

The Mundaneum had a much more complex flavor because it required a standardized system for everyone to work in concert against much more freeform as well as more complex forms of collected data and still be able to search for the answers to specific questions. While still somewhat database flavored, it was dramatically different from the others because of it scope and the much broader sorts of questions one could ask of it. I think that if you ask yourself what sorts of affordances you get from the two different groups (databases and word processors (or even their typewriter precursors) you find even more answers.

Typewriters and word processors allowed one to get words down on paper quicker by a magnitude of order or two faster, and in combination with reproduction equipment, made it easier to spin off copies of the document for small scale and local mass distribution a lot easier. They do allow a few affordances like higher readability (compared with less standardized and slower handwriting), quick search (at least in the digital era), and moving pieces of text around (also in digital). Much beyond this, they aren't tremendously helpful as a composition tool. As a thinking tool, typewriters and word processors aren't significantly better than their analog predecessors, so you don't gain a huge amount of leverage by using them.

On the other hand, databases and their spreadsheet brethren offer a lot more, particularly in digital realms. Data collection and collation become much easier. One can also form a massive variety of queries on such collected data, not to mention making calculations on those data or subjecting them to statistical analyses. Searching, sorting, and making direct comparisons also become far easier and quicker to do once you've amassed the data you need. Here again, Beatrice Webb's early experience and descriptions are very helpful as are Hollerinth's early work with punch cards and census data and the speed with which the results could be used.

Now if you compare the affordances by each of these in the digital era and plot their shifts against increasing computer processing power, you'll see that the value of the word processor stays relatively flat while the database shows much more significant movement.

Surely there is a lot more at play, particularly at scale and when taking network effects into account, but perhaps this quick sketch may explain to you a bit of the difference you've described.

Another difference you may be seeing/feeling is that of contextualization. Databases usually have much smaller and more discrete amounts of data cross-indexed (for example: a subject's name versus weight with a value in pounds or kilograms.) As a result the amount of context required to use them is dramatically lower compared to the sorts of data you might keep in an average atomic/evergreen note, which may need to be more heavily recontextualized for you when you need to use it in conjunction with other similar notes which may also need you to recontextualize them and then use them against or with one another.

Some of this is why the cards in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae are easier to use and understand out of the box (presuming you know Latin) than those you might find in the Mundaneum. They'll also be far easier to use than a stranger's notes which will require even larger contextualization for you, especially when you haven't spent the time scaffolding the related and often unstated knowledge around them. This is why others' zettelkasten will be more difficult (but not wholly impossible) for a stranger to use. You might apply the analogy of context gaps between children and adults for a typical Disney animated movie to the situation. If you're using someone else's zettelkasten, you'll potentially be able to follow a base level story the way a child would view a Disney cartoon. Compare this to the zettelkasten's creator who will not only see that same story, but will have a much higher level of associative memory at play to see and understand a huge level of in-jokes, cultural references, and other associations that an adult watching the Disney movie will understand that the child would completely miss.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how this all plays out for your way of conceptualizing it.

reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1l8lyk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

How is it that you're defining knowledge management or knowledge management system?

I would argue that any zettelkasten of any stripe is taking knowledge/ideas from either content or one's own brain and transferring them into some sort of media by which they are managed or structured in some way for later linking, combination, or other reuse. By base definition this is clearly knowledge management. I don't know how one defines it otherwise except by pure denial.

Your view of zettelkasten seems remarkably narrow. As a small sample the original Maschinen der Phantasie Marbach exhibition in 2013, which broadly prefigured the popularization of zettelkasten (and in particular the launch of zettelkasten.de) which we see today featured six zettelkasten of which Luhmann's was the only one with reference numbers or what we might now consider explicit HTML-like links. Most of the others contained either explicit groupings or implied links, but that doesn't diminish the value they held for their creators for creating a conversation of ideas for them. Incidentally most of the zettelkasten featured there prefigured Luhmann's and only two were roughly contemporaneous with his.

If you look more closely at Adler, et al. you'll notice that the entire purpose of their enterprise was to create and nurture a conversation between themselves and their readers with texts and authors spanning over 2,500 years, a point which is underlined by the introductory volume which preceded the two volumes of the Syntopicon. Not coincidentally, that first volume of the 54 book series was entitled "The Great Conversation."

Specifically from Adler's "How to Read a Book", the first edition of which predated the Great Books of the Western World:

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.

This is a process which is effectuated by

Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

and later,

That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

(As an aside, why aren't more people talking about the nature of dialectical notes, which seem far more important and useful than either fleeting notes and permanent notes?)

In your link to Holiday, he doesn't say his system isn't a zettelkasten, a word which an English speaker was highly unlikely to have used in 2013 in any case, even when referencing Manfred Kuehn from 2007. It simply indicates that "[Luhmann's] discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered".

The Goitein source (which I wrote) may use commonplace book as a descriptor but that doesn't mitigate the fact that the entirety of the zettelkasten tradition arises from it (the primary difference being things written (usually) on bound pages versus slips of paper). Before these there was the closely related idea of florilegia stemming from the earlier locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1fn8w4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 and

Well, Zettelkasten is not a knowledge management system. [...] Update: I mean digital ZK. Shoe-box ZK is a combination of knowledge management system of that time and "thought system" of Niklas Luhmann. u/Aponogetone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1f23nj/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm curious to see some evidence for why both you and u/Aponogetone say that a slip box (analog, digital or otherwise) is not a knowledge management system? Perhaps you don't think of it that way or use it solely to that end, but I find it difficult to see in light of the way I use mine and others have in the past. I suspect that if I had access to either of yours I could use it as a knowledge management system and it would tell me a lot about your interests and what you know and with a bit of work I could continue using it as one.

Even an argument against the more encompassing group nature versus personal or individual knowledge management systems is blunted by the use of a Zettelkasten by Adler, Hutchins, et al. to create the Syntopicon, the group uses by the Mundaneum effort (which went to great lengths to standardize information to be findable), the Oxford English Dictionary compilation, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, or even the academics who still use photocopies or microfilm versions of S.D. Goitein's zettelkasten.

What are the rest of us missing in your argument?

reply to u/TeeMcBee and u/taurusnoises at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1ic0ot/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

And two more big yeses.

There is a growing amount of literature in the educational social annotation space in which teachers/professors are using it specifically to encourage their students to interact with class material and readings. The mechanics on the front end are exactly the same as in most ZK set ups, the difference is what happens with the annotations one makes.

An entry point into some of this research:

• General: https://web.hypothes.is/social-annotation-in-english-and-composition/
• Bibliography: https://web.hypothes.is/education/annotated/bibliography/

https://notsubrand.com/

Notsu has a variety of 3 x 5" index card products for productivity and planning.

Many mnemonists often recommend that one should understand an idea fully before committing it to memory, usually because it is much easier to memorize if it's fully understood first.

suggested by: https://hypothes.is/a/Jme3bFmlEe6_VYfaZGQf9Q

Does this idea exist in the 1940 edition of the book?

Very similar to the advice inherent in the Feynman technique or that suggested by the research summarized by Sonke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes.

cross reference: - https://hypothes.is/a/iV5MwjivEe23zyebtBagfw - https://hypothes.is/a/B3sDhlm5Ee6wF0fRYO0OQg (Adler testing using statement in own words and a concrete example.)

And of course, somehow Tiago Forte encourages people to highlight and pay attention to those that interest them.

Quote for "reformulating writing"? Date? Does it predate the so-called Feynman technique?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Van_Doren

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/29/jenna-karvunidis-i-started-gender-reveal-party-trend-regret

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society/37643/wildfires-alligators-and-jelly-the-brief-chaotic-history-of-the-gender-reveal-party

What a lovely example of H5P! I keep my eye open for them floating around in the wild, but don't often see them.

It reminds me of a 1906 advertisement I ran into earlier this year. I should have thought to make my own H5P out of it. https://boffosocko.com/2023/03/09/satelite-combination-card-index-cabinet-and-telephone-stand/

Syndication Link

https://cathieleblanc.com/2023/09/22/student-work-in-media-and-cultural-studies/

https://saragoldrickrab.com/

http://www.libraryhistorybuff.org/cardcatalog.htm

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3495731A/en

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-51

Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten system doesn't impose a heirarchy upon it's contents and in some ways its structure anticipates the ideas of hypertext and the internet's structure.

Also similar to the idea from Umberto Eco: https://hypothes.is/a/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw

Zweitgedächtnis, the German Word for secondary memory, might also have been translated as "second brain" and thus the root of this word in the note taking space.

ref: https://hyp.is/hV9LKm71Eeq9s_f_oWRkEg/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

Originally 2021-12-31 at https://hypothes.is/a/3tjzWGqjEeyDSae3OLOEWw

Fascinating to see Ryan Holiday referencing Manfred Kuehn blogposts from 2007 here.

Specifically it was a link to http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

Given the popularity of this original Thought Catalog post and the alternate which appeared on Holiday's site, this reference would likely have helped to push the popularity of Luhmann and his Zettelkasten in English speaking territories after 2013-12-23.

https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/12/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

This was the original post which Holiday copied to his own site at: https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

Cross reference notes there.

Robert Greene used a color code for his index cards which also helped him to realize gaps in certain areas. He also liked them because "It also made the shoebox look pretty cool."

via SAMUEL MORNINGSTAR comment on August 14, 2014 at 5:22 pm

According to Patton: Blood, Guts, and Prayer by Michael Keene, General George Patton used a 4x6" index card system for note taking.

via SAM on January 15, 2017 at 8:54 pm

Apparently Will Durant and Ariel Durant used a form of commonplace book set up in which they used "classification slips".

Ryan Holiday's system puts some of the work farther from the note taking origin compared with Nicholas Luhmann's system which places more of it up front.

How, if at all, do the payoffs from doing each of these vary for the end user of the system?

Doto, Bob. “Folgezettel Mechanics.” Bobdoto.Computer (blog), March 1, 2022. https://bobdoto.computer/folgezettel-mechanics.

There's an interesting dichotomy which seems to be arising here. It's almost as if he's defining a folgezettel note in opposition to orphaned notes, most often seen in digital settings when importing lots of "stuff" but which Doto indicates can happen in analog systems as well.

Orphaned notes in an analog space, however are still linked by proximity even though they're not as densely linked (even from a mathematical topology perspective.)

Strong agree with Bob here.

Quite often collecting can create huge value in slowly building a substrate for serendipity to do its work. Some of the key to overcoming this is in the affordances of one's system to find or discover these tidbits in one's collection.

"So long as it happens." And here lies the rub: when will you put in the work to make the note useful and actionable? Will it be now or later?

Some notes are certainly more mission critical than others. Some work towards one's life's work while others are tidbits which may be useful at a later time. Distinguishing along this spectrum isn't always easy, particular in build a bottom up view of one's research.

There is a difference between the sorts of links one might make when placing an idea into an (analog) zettelkasten. A folgezettel link is more valuable than a simple tag/category link because it places an idea into a more specific neighborhood than any handful of tags. This is one of the benefits of a Luhmann-artig ZK system over a more traditional commonplace one, particularly when the work is done up front instead of being punted to a later time.

For those with a 1A2B3Z linking system (versus a pure decimal system), it may be more difficult to insert a card before other cards rather than after them because of the potential gymnastics of numbering and the natural tendency to put things into a continuing linear order.

See also: - https://hypothes.is/a/ToqCPq1bEe2Q0b88j4whwQ - https://hyp.is/WtB2AqmlEe2wvCsB5ZyL5A/docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/Introduction-to-Luhmanns-Zette---Ludecke-Daniel-h4nh8.pdf

https://bobdoto.computer/folgezettel-mechanics