Texts are patient conversationalists always waiting for you to write your side of the conversation into the margin before they continue on with their side of the conversation. Sadly, too many readers (students especially) don't realize that there's a conversation going on.

Link to:<br /> - https://hypothes.is/a/bBwyhkN3Ee6nQNPI5xmSnQ - https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q

Margins in books and on paper are blank spaces for "dark ideas" asking to be filled in while "reading with a pen in hand" so that the reader can have a conversation with the text.

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q on dark ideas

Indigenous cultures can "see" dark constellations (example: the Australian emu in the sky) which are defined empty spaces which are explicitly visible.

Using this concept, one could think of or use blank index cards in a zettelkasten or even the empty (negative) spaces between cards as "dark ideas" (potential ideas which need to be thought of and filled in).

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/FlqusEN1Ee6XEr_9StPUlA

Lone child nodes cry out for siblings.

When I was in middle school a teacher told me only to put a sub-bullet point in an outline only if it wasn't an orphan (if you had one sub-point it should have at least one sibling, otherwise don't include it). This was miserable advice because it ended trains of thought which might otherwise grow into something.

On the other hand it could be better framed that if you have only one child, you should brainstorm to come up with others.

Notes about what you don't know (open questions), empty outline slots, red links as [[wikilinks]], and other "holes" in tools for thought provide a bookmark for where one may have quit exploring, but are an explicit breadcrumb for picking up that line of thought and continuing it at a future time.

Linear writing in one's notebooks, books they're reading, and other places doesn't always provide an explicit space which invites the reader or writer to fill them in. One has to train themselves to annotate in the margins to have a conversation with the text. Until one sees these empty spaces as inviting spaces they can be invisible to the eye.

abramdemski suggests starting with an idea you're interested in working on and fleshing out when you start your zettelkasten. This harkens back to Montessori teaching philosophies.

Making things messy from the start as advice for getting started.

I've seen this before in other settings, particularly in starting new notebooks. Some have suggested scrawling on the first page to get over the idea of perfection in a virgin notebook. I also think I've seen Ton Ziijlstra mention that his dad would ding every new car to get over the new feeling and fear of damaging it. Get the damage out of the way so you can just move on.

The fact that a notebook is damaged, messy, or used for the smallest things may be one of the benefits of a wastebook. It averts the internal need some may find for perfection in their nice notebooks or work materials.

Some users find that plastic book rings are easier to use than metal ones.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/ydzRlENvEe6dBU9X7RfPFw

Rather than using card index boxes, abramdemski prefers using book rings to hold his cards together in batches.

The numbering doesn't matter! (especially as much as people may want it to)

Zettelkasten grow their hierarchies from the bottom-up rather than from the top-down. It's easy to create a hierarchy from the top-down when you know the entire space to begin with, but when you're just exploring and discovering the space, this is impossible, but is build-able if one doesn't get too caught up in perfection from the start.

He's cleverly noticed that many books and articles use a decimal outlining scheme already, so why not leverage that here.

A statement of the common "one idea per card" (or per note). He doesn't state it, but links to an article whose title is "One Thought Per Note".

Who else has use this or similar phrasing in the historical record? - Beatrice Webb certainly came pretty close. - Others?

First reference I've seen for someone suggesting using half size 3 x 5" index cards so that they could use commercially available Magic: The Gathering (MTG) boxes.

Oxford and possibly other manufacturers already make 1/2 size 3 x 5" index cards.

quote ostensibly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA

Which others? where?

To my knowledge there weren't many (any?) examples floating around in 2019.

Another advising to use the analog method for learning even if one is going to switch to a digital zettelkasten.

He uses the word "good" here while others may have potentially used the word "magic", but writing in a space that values critical thinking, he would have been taken to task for having done so. In any case he's not able to put his finger on the inherent value of analog over digital.

nice recommendation here :)

I've seen people describing how many cards they think they need before the method is useful, but this is the first time I've seen someone use a timeframe to describe useful effects.

This article was likely a big boost to the general idea of zettelkasten in the modern zeitgeist.

Note the use of the phrase "Zettelkasten method of note-taking" which would have helped to distinguish it from other methods and thus helping the phrase Zettelkasten method stick where previously it had a more generic non-name.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1

A somewhat early, comprehensive one page description of the zettelkasten method from September 2019.

Using Magic: The Gathering boxes for younger children and teenagers might be a more palatable way to introduce the zettelkasten method of note taking to them, particularly when it's a game in which they have a pre-existing interest.

https://www.amazon.com/mtg-deck-box/s?k=mtg+deck+box

https://acritch.com/notepad/

ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 10:12:42)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T382CLwAjsy3fmecf/how-to-take-smart-notes-ahrens-2017

ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 10:12:42)

Niklas Luhmann indicates that it may take a number of years to reach critical mass. This may be different for everyone based on the number of ideas they place into it and the amount of work they do in creating connections.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, has indicated that he thinks it takes roughly 500 pages in a wiki for the value to begin emerging.†

How many notes and what level of links/complexity is a good minimal threshold for one to be able to see interesting and useful results?

† Quote in FedWiki session on 2021-12-29

https://www.reddit.com/r/Arno_Schmidt/comments/1267heb/arno_schmidt_compulsively_wrote_and_hoarded/

Lots of great anecdotal mentions here which should be tracked down for more authority.

http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/

Timmy Broderick in Evidence Undermines ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ Claims In Scientific American at 2023-08-24 (accessed:: 2023-08-25 09:26:00)

Indigenous Storytelling: Our Smallest Warriors, Our Strongest Medicine. Hopkins at Home. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2021. Indigenous Storytelling: Our Smallest Warriors, Our Strongest Medicine. Hopkins at Home. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2021. https://hopkinsathome.vhx.tv/humanities/videos/indigenous-storytelling. .

Storytelling functions as a tool to heal from and protect against historical trauma and ongoing challenges Indigenous communities experience. "It is medicine." —Beltran & Begun, 2013 (quoted in @Okeefe2021 video at 10:41)

Basic knowledge and understanding for me, but nice to have a source for it in particular.

REPORT: Executive Excess 2023 - Institute for Policy Studies by Sarah Anderson in August 2023

see article about this report at https://hypothes.is/a/D6qzfENbEe6qDg8H-IEo6g

Lauren Aratani in CEOs of top 100 ‘low-wage’ US firms earn $601 for every $1 by worker, report finds at 2023-08-24 (accessed:: 2023-08-25 08:20:02)

Journalist John Dickerson [https://twitter.com/jdickerson/status/1458036871531937798 indicates] that he uses [[Instagram]] as a commonplace: https://www.instagram.com/jfdlibrary/ where he keeps a collection of photo "cards" with quotes from famous people rather than photos. He also keeps collections there of photos of notes from scraps of paper as well as photos of [[annotation]]s he makes in books.

syndication links: https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/16118vy/john_dickersons_digital_commonplace/

This looks like the sort of structure note I might often make as I am a day or two into a literature review for a new area. It definitely helps to scaffold new ideas and identify specific areas which I may want to delve into more specifically. It's definitely been useful for me to begin linking things into other portions of my ZK to find areas of overlap with these new areas, so it's great to see you doing that with your Prometheus note already.

Coming from the science area you may want to look at cells or animals with autofluorescence or areas like green fluorescent protein (GFP) if that is of interest in the area of creatures which produce their own light.

Dan Allosso in Retrenchment, Day 22 at 2023-08-24 (accessed:: 2023-08-24 08:54:05)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/266338818001

Gaylord Bros. 30 drawer library card catalog listed for several months/several times, and finally sold 2023-07-24 for $999.99 (with only one bid) in Whitier California.

$33.33 per drawer

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256167582615

60 drawer library card catalog listed for $1,400 in late May 2023 Sold on 2023-08-11 for best offer (under $1,400)

Likely the same listing on Facebook for $1,100 at https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/271076511951674/

likely went for around $18/drawer

https://www.ebay.com/itm/266379648695

Globe Wernicke card catalog, 6 drawers listed for $250 in July 2023 is $42 per drawer

Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

Here Hutchins is again prefiguring C.P. Snow's "two cultures". He makes the argument that by having a shared base of knowledge and culture in our society's past history of knowledge (and especially early scientists and mathematicians), everyone, despite their individual interests and specializations, can be an active participant in a broader human conversation.

The commons as a social glue

Perhaps there's a framing of "the commons" as a larger entity from which we not only draw, but to which we contribute and in which we participate that glues us all together.

Link under: https://hypothes.is/a/mEgAiEIFEe6trVPf7HjFhQ

We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.

Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?

The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

These various shifts in culture and perspective were concurrent with the shift in education from the formal to the progressive.

See also Education: A Short Introduction

Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

It can be easy to deprive a generation of important pieces of their cultural heritage by omitting any focus on it.

• shiboleth
• philology
• disinterest
• overwhelm

Compare the loss of classical education and cultural heritage by "internal decay" as described by Hutchins in the early 1900s and the forced loss of cultural heritage of Indigenous Americans by the U.S. Government in roughly the same period by re-education and stamping out Indigenous language.

Certainly one was loss through lack of exposure, but the other was outright erasure due to the natures of orality and literacy.

Hutchins attributes the loss of classical education to both internal decay and external confusion, but I would suggest that some of the shift was also the need for industrialization and expanded access.

ouch!

This seems apropos to the situation in which I view Donald J. Trump.

Where does this wealth ultimately go in the long run? Not to the worker, but primarily to the corporation competing against them for the added value.

Writing in 1951, Hutchins is writing too close to the time period of post World War II to have a better view of this topic. He's fashioned far too simple a story as a result.

There was a lack of critical thinking and over-reliance on top down approval which was harmful in the Japanese story of this time period though.

A bulk of America was stuck in a form of economic slavery in the 1950s. See description of rural Texans in Robert Caro's LBJ biography for additional context --- washing/scrubbing, carrying water, farming, etc. without electricity in comparison to their fellow Americans who did have it.

In the 21st century there is a different form of economic slavery imposed by working to live and a culture of consumption and living on overextended credit.

Consider also the comedic story of the capitalist and the rural fisherman and the ways they chose to live their lives.

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World

Is this the same sort of shift in work noticed by Barak Obama in his four part documentary series Working: What We Do All Day which aired on Netflix in 2023?

Politicians should focus here especially.

Interesting history and possible solutions.

Dewey on the humanization of work front running the dramatic changes of and in work in an industrial age?

Note here the potential coupling of democracy and education as dovetailing ideas rather than separate ideas which can be used simultaneously. We should take care here not to end up with potential baggage that could result in society and culture the way scholasticism combined education and religion in the middle ages onward.

after the common good?

Vico? Giambattista Vico?

note use of "train up" which now seems more like British English usage in 2023

There is a subtle definition of the word "committed" here.

Current day book banners (2022-2023) wouldn't agree here.

definitions: illiberal

Purpose for the work involved or purpose for the worker? Does it show a shift to living to work or working to live here?

Hutchins indicates that John Dewey was misunderstood as a philosopher of education.

Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

"The educational ideas of John Locke" -- but where they actually his ideas though?

See: Graeber & Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything.

Uncommon use of "liberal artist" as one who uses or practices the liberal arts.

What is the original context of this quote? Which meaning of "the commonplace" does he mean? The generic or the commonplace book?

Dan Allosso in Retrenchment, Day 21 at 2023-08-23<br /> (accessed:: 2023-08-23 12:50:42)

https://highlightpoetry.com/

https://www.edelweiss.plus/#sku=1524879762&page=1

This looks like a fascinating illustrated edition from Andrews McMeel Publishing.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, eds. The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2002. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262232272/the-new-media-reader/.

↬ Detlef Stern (@t73fde@mastodon.social) (accessed:: 2023-08-23 12:55:47)

Eines der wunderbarsten Bücher, die ich in letzter Zeit studierte: "The New Media Reader". Sowohl inhaltlich (grundlegende Texte von 1940-1994, Borges, Bush, Turing, Nelson, Kay, Goldberg, Engelbart, ... Berners-Lee), als auch von der Liebe zum herausgeberischem Detail (papierne Links, Druckqualität, ...). Nicht nur für #pkm und #zettelkasten Fanatiker ein Muss. Man sieht gut, welchen Weg wir mit Computern noch vor uns haben. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262232272/the-new-media-reader/

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/onwriting

Oliver Burkerman, of Four Thousand Weeks fame, is testing out zettelkasten based on Ahrens' book.

Good writing is pointing out the interesting things you see to others. It's pre-literate, and even pre-oral.

As long as you know and understand what you're writing, use as many languages as you or your zettelkasten wants or needs.

I'm often working with ideas from other languages and cultures which have no direct translations into English, so I use those native words interspersed with English. Sometimes I don't have words in any language and make up a shorthand phrase in English until I can come up with a better word. Often I'll collect examples of the same "foreign" words in multiple contexts to tease out their contextual meanings as was comprehensively done with large group zettelkasten like the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. I also frequently use mathematical symbols, equations, and other scientific notations, graphs, drawings, color, etc. to make my meanings clear.

I've also worked with historical figures who have had names in multiple languages over the centuries and cross index them in a variety of different languages based on context. As an example, I've got at least 11 different variations of names for Ramon Llull in almost as many languages and variations of transliterations. I try to keep each one in its original context, but link them in my index.

There are certainly zettelkasten out there written in four and more languages as suited the needs of their users. S.D. Goitein certainly used Hebrew, English, German, Arabic, Aramaic in his and may have likely had other languages (Yiddish, Coptic, Egyptian?) interspersed to lesser extents. Adolph Erman certainly used Egyptian hieroglyphs along with German in his. It can easily be argued that their zettelkasten and work required multiple languages.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317im_/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/abb08.jpg A example zettelkasten slip showing a passage of text from the victory stele of Sesostris III at the Nubian fortress of Semna. The handwriting is that of Adolf Erman, who had "already struggled with the text as a high school student".

At the end of the day, they're your notes, so write them as you like.

Thanks Sascha for an excellent primer on the internal machinations of our favorite machines beyond the usual focus on the storage/memory and indexing portions of the process.

Said another way, a zettelkasten is part of a formal logic machine/process. Or alternately, as Markus Krajewski aptly demonstrates in Paper Machines (MIT Press, 2011), they are early analog storage devices in which the thinking and logic operations are done cerebrally (by way of direct analogy to brain and hand:manually) and subsequently noted down which thereby makes them computers.

Just as mathematicians try to break down and define discrete primitives or building blocks upon which they can then perform operations to come up with new results, one tries to find and develop the most interesting "atomic notes" from various sources which they can place into their zettelkasten in hopes of operating on them (usually by juxtaposition, negation, union, etc.) to derive, find, and prove new insights. If done well, these newly discovered ideas can be put back into the machine as inputs to create additional newer and more complex outputs continuously. While the complexity of Lie Algebras is glorious and seems magical, it obviously helps to first understand the base level logic before one builds up to it. The same holds true of zettelkasten.

Now if I could only get the printf portion to work the way I want...

category theory + zettelkasten... hmmm... feels a bit like Leibniz chasing a universal language

what is a zettelkasten monad?

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

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

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

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/reading-is-searching/

Not a bad piece, but likely obvious for those with any work in formal logic or mathematics. For those without it who are working in nascent zettelkasten, a good introduction.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-20?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=40880&post_id=136303009&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

Zettelkasten advice:

1. Have a goal in mind
2. Really... have a goal. Write it down.
3. Practice at it, a lot
4. When stuck, read some of the bits below
5. Practice, practice, practice.

Here are a list of some of the strongest books which focus on the topic or cover things from various interesting perspectives: - Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017. - Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/. (Specifically the first half of the book.) - Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse. - Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html. - Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis. - Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout. - Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062. - Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Especially chapter seven). - Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.

Read one (or two) and then dive in and actually practice (and practice and practice some more) things for a while.

For some of the smaller subtleties which aren't covered in books, try one of the two following collections for individual bits of advice and insight: - https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/ - https://zettelkasten.de/posts/ - https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

https://thesaurus.badw.de/en/tll-digital/tll-open-access.html

https://kilcullenbridge.blogspot.com/2023/07/castlemartin-owners-company-bids-for.html

https://scrambledgregs.com/fucked-up-shit/sssttteeellllllaaaaaaa/

The sub mention of the other woman was likely Amanda Cavallacci, Myrna Jacoby's assistant in the early 2000s.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZMZez3AoadHUJS9RPmukRAtpe3DJuFv5/view

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/InterWiki

InterWiki is the idea of having one unified Wiki system distributed across many servers.

https://2023.wpcampus.org/schedule/

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6960074M/La_phytographie

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6960074M/La_phytographie

Alphonse de Candolle's La phytographie, ou, L'art de décrire les végétaux considérés sous différents points de vue

https://www.erinroseglass.com/

https://bilge.world/text-fuck

https://github.com/ContextLab/human-memory

https://web.archive.org/web/20220926154335/https://patrickrhone.com/2006/05/12/org-fu-uberpost-productivity-whitepaper/

https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-trickle-list/

https://web.archive.org/web/20210726040837/https://lifehacker.com/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626

Jerry Seinfeld used a calendar and crossed off days on which he wrote as a productivity tool. After marking off a few days with "x"s his goal was to not break the chain of work.

https://www.attorneyatwork.com/analog-attorney-5-best-index-cards/

Article about general usefulness of index cards written by a lawyer and for them, though not specific to them as a subgroup.

Makes not of Nock's Dot-Dash cards which were apparently 3 x 5" dash gridded cards similar to Midori's grid notebooks. The website for the company is no longer active. Archived site: https://web.archive.org/web/20171007102414/https://nockco.com/paper/dotdash-3-x-5-note-cards

https://jamesclear.com/ivy-lee

Ivy Lee method: Write down a list of six items to do. Prioritize them and do them sequentially in order until complete. Rinse and repeat.

https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus

Eliminate the inessential.

https://www.printables.com/model/558873-zettelkasten-index-boxes-slip-box

Someone has designed a DIY printer project for making your own stackable zettelkasten boxes.

See post at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15wkuel/zettelkasten_index_boxes_slip_box_make_your_own/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/13mfuez/just_downloadedtried_obsidian_for_the_first_time/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13nmcym/i_read_the_top_ten_zettelkasten_articles_on/

A list of some popular one-pagers on the Zettelkasten Method.

Read contemporaneously in May 2023

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

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-18?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=40880&post_id=136245201&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

An interesting example of academic administrative bloat discussed here.

Allosso, Dan. “Kuhn’s Paradigms.” Substack newsletter. MakingHistory (blog), August 17, 2023. https://danallosso.substack.com/p/kuhns-paradigms.

As a result of Kuhn's scientific revolutions perspective, historians of science will need to uncover the frameworks and lenses by which prior generations saw the world to be able to see the world the same way. This will allow them to better piece together histories

How is this related to the ways that experts don't appreciate their own knowledge when trying to teach newcomers their subjects? What is the word/phrase for this effect?

Lego theory of science.

Individual bricks are facts which can be assembled in a variety of ways, each of which is a particular paradigm. Ultimately, the optimal structure is one which dovetails with the neighborhoods of structures around them while each having the best minimized structure of it's own.

With only handfuls of individual facts, it can be difficult to build them up into an interesting or useful structure to start. Doing this may help to discover other facts. As these are added, one may reshape the overall structure of the theory as the puzzle begins to reveal itself and allow the theorist the ability to best structure an overall theory which minimizes itself and allows dovetailing with other external theories. All the theories then eventually form their own pieces which can then be pieced together for the next structural level up.

See also Simon Singh, Thomas Kuhn, topology.

This feels like the sort of flavor of historical method of Ernst Bernheim mixed with Gerald Weinberg's Fieldstone Method.

Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was directed to scientific thought over time, but he was aware of it potentially being applied, potentially improperly, to other areas. As a result, he narrowed down his definitions and made his assumptions more explicit.

This sort of misapplication can be seen in Social Darwinism, the uncertainty principle, relativity, and memes.

It also happened with Claude Shannon's information theory which resulted in his publication of The Bandwagon (IEEE, 1956).

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/open-education

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-15

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/wvu-cuts-higher-education/

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-14

If done solely from a business perspective, the administration ought to be looking very closely on what their "product" actually is and the quality of what they're directly selling and to whom. It sounds like they ought to re-evaluate their priorities and might benefit from reading The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg. Is it worthwhile to get a bulk discount and buy a couple hundred copies to send to the deans and senior administration?

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-13

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-12

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-11

Modern day issues of town and gown.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-10

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-9

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-8

What is it that colleges are actually selling that they can so easily cut faculty over staff?

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-6

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-5

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-4

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-16

Almost every well known writer/composer/creative throughout history had some sort of note taking or knowledge system of one sort or another (florilegium, commonplace books, notebooks, diaries, journals, zettelkasten, waste books, mnemonic techniques, etc.), which would put them into your "active" category. I think you'd be hard put to come up with evidence of a "sudden" emergence of an "active" PKM system beyond the choice of individual users to actively do something with their collections or not.

If you want to go more distant than Eminem, try looking closely at Ramon Llull's practice in the 11th century, or Homer in the c. 8th century BCE. Or to go much, much farther back, there's solid evidence that indigenous peoples in Australia had what you call both passive and active PKM systems as far back as 65,000 years ago. These are still in use today. Naturally these were not written, but used what anthropologists call orality. (See Walter Ong, Milman Parry, Lynne Kelly, Margo Neale, Duane Hamacher, et al.)

@pgrhowarth @MartinBB @tevka and other historians (and sociologists, anthropologists, humanists, etc.) who want to delve into some of the ideas of historical method, zettelkasten, note taking, intellectual craftsmanship outside of Luhmann's version, I've compiled a list of various primary sources who have written on a variety of related methods throughout the past few hundred years: https://www.zotero.org/chrisaldrich/tags/note%20taking%20methods/items/KTZXN3EV/item-list

Historians in particular have used indexing their notes as a means of creating analog databases for individual facts outside of their other writing/compiling practices. Thus a mixture of methods may suit your working needs.

To help frame it one might also consult the following: * Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary. * Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.

I've got a relatively short overview of some of these methods and examples of users at https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.

Context:

Damit hatte der 84-jährige Mommsen ein Projekt initiiert, an dem Profanwie Kirchenhistoriker in Deutschland auch noch lange nach seinem Tode arbeiteten und das gute Fortschritte machte: Al s Jülicher, der nach dem Tode Seecks 1921 die alleinige Leitung übernahm, auf Grund seines Augenleidens 1929 von seinen Verpflichtungen entbunden wurde, Ubergab er der Kommission etwa 75000 Zettel, deren Systematisierung allerdings nicht zum Abschluß kam74. Von einer Veröffentlichung des Materials sah man ab, da «weder der Zustand des Manuskripts noch die inzwischen völlig veränderte wissenschaftliche Lage es gestatteten, die Prosopographie zum Druck zubringen75».

Nachdem nur einige Zettelkästen im Zweiten Weltkrieg verloren gegangen waren, wurde 1951 ein Teil der Materialien leihweise dem von A.H.M. Jones, John Morris und H.-I. Marrou in Cambridge und Paris begründeten Unternehmen, das sich zum Ziel gesetzt hatte, eine weltliche und eine kirchliche Prosopographie der Spätantike zu erarbeiten, zur Verfügung gestellt76. Während wir heute aus technischen und organisatorischen Gründen mit zweiverschiedenen Prosopographien -einer weltlichen und einer kirchlichen- zu arbeiten haben, die beide noch nicht abgeschlossen sind, hatte Mommsen die Nützlichkeit, ja die Notwendigkeit einer spätantiken Prosopographie erkannt, die weltliche und kirchliche Würdenträger gemeinsam erschließt und aufführt.

1. Ibid.: Schreiben H. LlETZMANNs vom 6.10.1936.
2. Weder die Prosopography oflhe Later Roman Empire (= PLRE) noch die Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire erwähnen diesen Sachverhalt; während in PLRE I (hrsg. v. A.H.M. JONES, J.R. MARTINDALE, J. MORRIS), Cambridge 1971, V zu lesen ist: «The project of a prosopographical dictionary of the Later Roman Empire was originated by Theodor Mommsen but... it failed of fruition, largely through the Intervention of the two World Wars. The bulky archives representing the work of many German seholars lay in Berlin during the second war when they were damaged and in part destroyed, together with essential records, during an Allied bombing raid. Consequently when the prqject was taken up in England after the war, the work had to be restarted from the very beginning. The present volume therefore represents the first stage of fulfilment of Mommsen's original project», heißt es im ersten Band der Prosopographie chretienne: A. MANDOUZE (Hrsg.), Prosopographie de l'Afrique chretienne (303-533), Paris 1982, 7: «On sait qu'ä la fin du siecle dernier, sur l'initiative de Th. Mommsen et d'Ad. Harnack, l'Academie des Sciences de Berlin avait commence' ä preparer un vaste dictionnaire prosopographique du Bas-Empire. Sans doute concu de facon trop ambitieuse, victime aussi des sequelles de la Premiere Guerre mondiale, ce projet fut definitivement abandonne" en 1933»; cf. hierzu auch H. CHANTRAINE, Ein neues Hilfsmittel zur Erforschung der Spätantike: Die Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire, in: Francia 11, 1984,697ff., v.a. 697f.

Machine translation:

The 84-year-old Mommsen had thus initiated a project on which both profane and church historians in Germany continued to work long after his death and which made good progress: Al s Jülicher, who took over the sole management after Seeck's death in 1921 due to his eye problems in 1929 was relieved of his obligations, he handed over around 75,000 slips of paper to the Commission, the systematisation of which, however, was not completed ^74. The material was not published because "neither the condition of the manuscript nor the scientific situation, which had meanwhile completely changed, allowed the prosopography to be printed^75".

After only a few card boxes had been lost in World War II, some of the materials were loaned to A.H.M. Jones, John Morris and H.-I. Marrou in Cambridge and Paris, which had set itself the goal of developing a secular and an ecclesiastical prosopography of late antiquity. While today, for technical and organizational reasons, we have to work with two different prosopographies - one secular and one ecclesiastical - both of which have not yet been completed, Mommsen recognized the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of a late antique prosopography that explores secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries together and performs.

1. Ibid.: Letter from H. LlETZMANN dated October 6, 1936.
2. Neither the Prosopography oflhe Later Roman Empire (= PLRE) nor the Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire mention this fact; while in PLRE I (ed. by A.H.M. JONES, J.R. MARTINDALE, J. MORRIS), Cambridge 1971, V one can read: «The project of a prosopographical dictionary of the Later Roman Empire was originated by Theodor Mommsen but... it failed of fruition, largely through the Intervention of the two World Wars. The bulky archives representing the work of many German scholars lay in Berlin during the second war when they were damaged and in part destroyed, together with essential records, during an Allied bombing raid. Consequently when the project was taken up in England after the war, the work had to be restarted from the very beginning. The present volume therefore represents the first stage of fulfillment of Mommsen's original project," says the first volume of the Prosopographie chretienne: A. MANDOUZE (ed.), Prosopographie de l'Afrique chretienne (303-533), Paris 1982, 7: "On said qu'a la fin du siecle dernier, sur l'initiative de Th. Mommsen et d'Ad. Harnack, l'Academie des Sciences de Berlin avait commence' a preparer un vaste dictionnaire prosopographique du Bas-Empire. Sans doute concu de facon trop ambitieuse, victime aussi des sequelles de la Premiere Guerre mondiale, ce projet fut definitivement abandonne" en 1933"; cf. on this also H. CHANTRAINE, A new tool for researching the Late antiquity: The prosopography chretienne du Bas-Empire, in: Francia 11, 1984, 697ff., especially 697f.

This would seem to indicate that Theodor Mommsen potentially had a zettelkasten which he was using to compile his work, but there is some ambiguity here that the slips and boxes may have been those of scholars who came after him and were working on his notes and systematizing them for future publication. Perhaps they were Mommsen's and others were arranging them for potential publication as they only had subject heading orderings, which would have been the most likely mode of the day (versus a more Luhmann-artig ordering.)

syndication link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2649/theodor-mommsens-zettelkasten/

Rebenich, Stefan. “Theodor Mommsen and the Relationship of Age History and Patristic (Theodor Mommsen und das Verhältnis von Alter Geschichte und Patristik).” In Patristique et antiquité tardive en Allemagne et en France de 1870 à 1930 : Influences et échanges: Actes du colloque franco-allemand de Chantilly (25-27 octobre 1991), edited by Jacques Fontaine, R. Herzog, and Karla Pollmann, 131–54. Paris: Brepols, 1993. https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/46/1/Rebenich_Mommsen_1993.pdf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8OTapyT-YM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome_(Mommsen)

What was Mommsen's historical method?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185985395193?nma=true&si=tZ39vmfpbS6wdLM7dhTlouRYk9g%253D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

9 Drawer library card catalog sold for $299 or $33/drawer<br /> Sold circa August 2023

https://www.studyebooks.com/2023/07/harvard-classics-pdf.html

Downloadable .zip from Archive.org with full collection.<br /> https://archive.org/compress/Harvard-Classics/formats=TEXT%20PDF&file=/Harvard-Classics.zip

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/books/review/the-author-of-squirrel-seeks-chipmunk-would-like-to-go-back-in-time-and-collect-kindling-for-flannery-oconnor.html

—David Sedaris

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/books/review/the-author-of-squirrel-seeks-chipmunk-would-like-to-go-back-in-time-and-collect-kindling-for-flannery-oconnor.html#:~:text=Notewise%2C%20whenever%20I%20read%20a,learn%20what%20excellence%20feels%20like.

Jillian Hess makes her own journals as a means of elevating her note-taking experience.

Eric Hoffer apparently had a collection of quotes which he kept on index cards in boxes.

Potentially mentioned in one of his biographies. Possibly:<br /> - American Iconoclast: The Life and Times of Eric Hoffer by Tom Shachtman https://www.amazon.com/American-Iconoclast-Life-Times-Hoffer/dp/1933435380<br /> - Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher by Tom Bethell https://www.amazon.com/Eric-Hoffer-Longshoreman-Philosopher-Institution/dp/0817914153

https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/lets-talk-notes-how-do-you-organize/comments

https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/lets-talk-notes-how-do-you-organize

reply to u/SunghoYahng at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15sqiq2/zettelkasten_for_normies_what_normies_really_need/

u/SunghoYahng, some of your article sounds like a pared down digital version of a commonplace book which allows for links, so it fits into the older zettelkasten tradition, just not into the more Luhmann-artig version on which this subreddit is generally more focused. Perhaps yours is closer to a digital version of the analog commonplace using index cards that Billy Oppenheimer describes having learned from Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene?

Often people focus too much on Luhmann's prodigious output and then immediately imply or say you should adopt his very specific system without describing what his system did or why it worked so well for him and his particular needs. Very few focus on what it is that they want to accomplish and how they might use his system or the thousands of variations on it throughout history to come to those goals as quickly and easily as they can.

You commit a version of this sin in your opening lines:

The content about Zettelkasten is mostly too long and practically useless. The purpose of this text is to write only what normies really need to know.

Who are these so-called "normies" and what specifically are they trying to accomplish? You don't define either of them, and possibly worse do it in a negative framing. The system you're describing might be a great one, but for whom? What do you expect them to use it for? What will they get out of it?

Many people talk about the "magic" of a zettelkasten and then wave their hands at some version of a workflow of what they think it is or what they think it should be. Perhaps what we all really need is a list of potential affordances that different methods allow and how one might leverage those affordances. How might they be mixed and matched? Then users can decide what outcomes they wish to have (writing, thinking, aggregation, bookmarking, collecting, creativity, artificial memory, serendipity, productivity, wiki, spaced repetition, learning, time wasting, etc., etc.) and which affordances are necessary within their workflow/system to effectuate those specific goals? Finally they can pick and choose a specific version of a methodology/workflow and either an analog substrate (index cards, notebooks, memory palace, etc.) or digital tool/application (Obsidian, Roam Research, The Archive, etc.) to save it all in. Of course once you've chosen that analog or digital tool, does it actually have the affordances you want or need in actual practice? Are they easy to use? Practical? Do they save you time? Are they simple or over-engineered? What happens when they scale to a year of regular use or even a lifetime?

As a simple example, many writers would love a seriously good outliner functionality in their system to pull out the materials they want to work with and then appropriately order them for a potential final written output. In practice, index cards on a big table are fantastic for this process while most (all?) current digital tools are miserable at it. And of course once you've gotten the outline you like in an analog space you have to type it all out to print/publish in a final form, something which the digital affordance of cut and paste would make much simpler. Who wouldn't love a tool that could give you all of these affordances, presuming you needed them?

​

While we're on outlining, very few talk about the ease-of-use that some professional outliners like Dave Winer's Drummer or Little Outliner have versus some of the more text-editing focused tools like Obsidian which are generally poor as outliners (if you could even call them that) in comparison.

If you're interested in folgezettel and outlining, you might appreciate some subtleties in Bob's piece: https://writing.bobdoto.computer/folgezettel-is-not-an-outline-luhmanns-playful-appreciation-of-disfunction/

cross reference https://hypothes.is/a/OhcWSjxyEe6V8DP9P6WNQQ

https://sunghoyahng.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-for-normies-what-normies

A VERY slim version.

https://www.amazon.com/Ferguson-Report-Erasure-Nicole-Sealey/dp/0593535995

cc: remikalir

https://alexandrianpl.org/comfort-cabinet/

A library has repurposed their library card catalogs as a comfort cabinet to provide their community with necessities like toothbrushes, combs, band aids, socks, etc.

https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/tea-infusers/products/core-sample-tea-infuser?variant=12762095878221