reply to @jdm at https://micro.blog/jdm/19064665

Thanks! If you want sneak peaks of upcoming pieces, you might try subscribing to my "other" microblog: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich

Irish Soda Bread With Raisins

https://www.gristandtoll.com/the-simplest-things-and-two-treasures/

https://mockmill.us/product/mockmill-stone-grain-mill-attachment-for-stand-mixers/

$228.00

https://pleasanthillgrain.com/

Grain mills: - https://pleasanthillgrain.com/wondermill-grain-mill-wonder-mill-flour-grinder - Komo XL https://pleasanthillgrain.com/ - Komo Flour sifter https://pleasanthillgrain.com/komo-flour-sifter - Komo medium grinder https://pleasanthillgrain.com/komo-medium-grain-mill-flour-grinder

Bread proofer: - https://pleasanthillgrain.com/brod-and-taylor-bread-proofer

Commonplacing, florilegia, anthologies, miscellanies, zettelkasten are a ratchet for thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaHEgPk0tNM

Rowan Williams quote - not who I thought he was

• Read
• Write (collect)
• Reflect

Commonplace books begin with observation.

Jared Henderson writes excerpted ideas in block capital letters and his own observations and thoughts in small print as a means of distinguishing his own ideas from others.

Others might do this using other means: fonts, color, writing instrument, etc.

Jared Henderson defines commonplace books as only containing the thoughts of others collected while reading. In the following breath, he then says he writes summaries of his own ideas and then creates links between the ideas...

https://thoughtful.sandbox.google.com/about

https://hamlet.andromedayelton.com/

• Given a thesis, find out which other theses are most conceptually similar.

Weeknote 18, 2023<br /> by Mita Williams

https://on.substack.com/p/how-to-sell-a-book-on-substack

Overall measurements for Steelmaster Index Card file for 4 x 6" index cards are 16” deep x 12.25” wide x 5.25” tall.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125930697280

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256044173366

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1283073189/founding-member-level-membership-museum

Museum of Tiny Things, a museum of miniatures and scenes built into a repurposed library card catalog.

archive link

https://www.caseyliss.com/2015/9/10/siracusa-on-toasters

https://www.bobdornberger.com/about

http://centralmilling.com/

Why a Danish Dough Whisk Is My Go-To Baking Tool by Andrew Janjigian

The Danish dough whisk is known as a "brodpisker", a word which translates as "bread whipper".

Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project

Grist & Toll 990 S. Arroyo Pkwy #1,<br /> Pasadena, CA 91105<br /> 626-441-7400<br /> info@gristandtoll.com<br /> Retail Shop Hours: Wed-Sat 11-5<br /> https://www.gristandtoll.com/

How SoCal-Grown Flour And Grains Are Powering LA's Quarantine Baking<br /> by Jessica Ritz

https://truesourdough.com/full-guide-to-milling-your-own-flour-at-home-why-how-pros-cons/

https://truesourdough.com/mockmill-vs-komo-which-grain-mill-is-better/

https://truesourdough.com/best-grain-mill-for-bread-flour-full-buyers-guide/

https://kingsroost.com/

https://www.simply-bread.co/store

https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-seed-bakery-pasadena-20160118-story.html

https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-what-were-into-20160116-story.html

Opinion: I Got My Name From Connie Chung. So Did They. by Connie Wang

reply to Mark Dykeman at https://howaboutthis.substack.com/p/rethinking-the-notebook-snob-meets/comment/15885993

Given our overlap of topics, you most likely saw something via https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/. I may have been responsible for you trying out the digital annotation tool Hypothes.is once upon a time?

The price I quoted was for the ubiquitous and inexpensive Oxford index cards and not for the much higher quality Exacompta/Bristol cards which can run up to 10¢ a card or more—they're closer to the fountain pen quality papers you'd find in the higher end notebooks and are manufactured by the a subsidiary of the corporate parent that makes Rhodia/Clairefontaine.

https://wiki.earthmoonstars.space/

Discussed at Friends of the Lin 2023-05-10

Inspired by the Mondragon Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

and Lionsberg https://lionsberg.wiki/

https://kingarthur.fandom.com/wiki/King_Arthur_Wiki

—Gildas, Chapter 26 of De excidio et conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain)

We don't have a specific date or exact location for the siege of Mount Badon, roughly in the 5th century, but Gildas writes about the battle within the timeframe of his own life, and thus places a timeframe on the original Arthur.

Gildas also writes about Ambrosius Aurelianus, who he identifies as having Roman heritage. Some scholars believe that this is another name for King Arthur.

Is there any relation to the Mountbatten family from Battenberg in Hesse, Germany? (Unlikely due to distance, though Saxon invaders may have renamed a place location in Britain after a local Batten or Battenberg related name from their homeland.)

Or the location Mount Batten? Likely not, as the previously known How Stert in Plymouth Sound, Devon, England was renamed after Sir William Batten (c.1600-1667), MP and Surveyor of the Navy.

https://www.wondrium.com/king-arthur-history-and-legend?tn=632_tray_Course_1_0_2444&lec=3

https://againstthefuture.net/about/

https://micro.camp/

• May 19-20, 2023

https://analogoffice.net/2023/05/03/too-much-information.html

Your title made me think it was about a different, but related book...

I too bought Hess' book at Kimberly's recommendation, but I'm still plowing through the end of Ann M. Blair's Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know. You might find it interesting, but hopefully not overwhelming.

syndication link

https://us.dingbats-notebooks.com/

source: https://howaboutthis.substack.com/p/rethinking-the-notebook-snob-meets/comment/14924364

At Mark Dykeman's rate, to convert to cheap composition books, he's looking at $26/year for the equivalent paper consumption. On a per day basis, it's $0.071 per day in paper.

This can be compared with my per day cost of $0.421 per day for index cards, which is more expensive, though not $1-2 per day for more expensive notebooks.

Mark Dykeman indicates that at regular work, he fills up a 180 page notebook and at the relatively steep cost of notebooks, he's paying $1-2 a day for paper.

This naturally brings up the idea of what it might cost per day in index cards for some zettlers' practices. I've already got some notes on price of storage...

As a rough calculation, despite most of my note taking being done digitally, I'm going through a pack of 500 Oxford cards at $12.87 every 5 months at my current pace. This is $0.02574 per card and 5 months is roughly 150 days. My current card cost per day is: $0.02574/card * 500 cards / (150 days) = $12.78/150 days = $0.0858 per day which is far better than $2/day.

Though if I had an all-physical card habit, I would be using quite a bit more.

On July 3, 2022 I was at 10,099 annotations and today May 11, 2023 I'm at 15,259 annotations. At one annotation per card that's 5,160 cards in the span of 312 days giving me a cost of $0.02574/card * 5,160 cards / 312 days = $0.421 per day or an average of $153.75 per year averaging 6,036 cards per year.

(Note that this doesn't also include the average of three physical cards a day I'm using in addition, so the total would be slightly higher.)

Index cards are thus, quite a bit cheaper a habit than fine stationery notebooks.

https://howaboutthis.substack.com/p/the-knowledge-that-wont-fit-inside-6d3

Reasonable one page overview of zettelkasten, though it undersells some of they "why."

Has a good list of some of the more popular one-two page articles floating around the blogosphere at the bottom.

It can't be a good sign that an academic who has spent over a decade studying notebooks and note taking still hasn't found the "perfect" organization method.

Patricia Highsmith's Cahiers by [[Jillian Hess]]

Jillian Hess noted that Patricia Highsmith uses the German word Keime, meaning "germ of an idea" in her cahiers to indicate ideas which might be used in her novels or short stories.

from Patricia Highsmith's diaries

this seems similar to Ralph Waldo Emmerson's journals/commonplaces where he collected interesting phrases for use in his writing. Here she's explicitly stating her desire to do this for her writing work.

The "Alone, in the quite." quote seems to mirror her appreciation and stated desire to be alone at home in the 1978 Good Afternoon interview.

from Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

Patricia Highsmith | American Author | Good Afternoon | 1978

Patricia Highsmith talks a bit about her writing process. She talks about her early family life and her current personal life, but doesn't mention her sexuality at all.

The tail end of the interview mentions the prevalence for murder within one's family. (When did this truism emerge within culture or at least within the crime space?)

quote is from Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

I love the concept of "slender ideas" as small, fleeting notes which might accumulate into something if written down. In saying "Close the notebook and think about it for a few days" Patricia Highsmith seems to be suggesting that one engage in diffuse thinking, passive digesting, or mulling rather than active or proactive thinking.

She also invokes the magic word "presto!" (which she exclaims) as if to indicate that magically the difficult work of writing is somehow no longer difficult. Many writers seem to indicate that this is a phenomenon, but never seem to put their finger on the mechanism of why it happens. Some seems to stem from the passive digestion over days with diffuse thinking, with portions may also stem from not starting from a blank page and having some material to work against instead of a vacuum.

From Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 (Swiss Literary Archives)

Noted, a welcome by [[Jillian Hess]]

Loving Highsmith (2022)<br /> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15239466/

recommended by Patricia Highsmith's Cahiers by [[Jillian Hess]]

What's with the bees? by [[Jillian Hess]]

A tipping out of Hess' zettelkasten on the theme of bees (apes) in note taking.

Cross reference with Seneca's note taking metaphors with apes.

In addition to the honeybee metaphor, Seneca compared note taking and collecting sententiae to a stomach digesting food and a choir producing a harmonized sound out of many voices.

(Sources from these last two? Potentially Epistle LXXXIV?)

Her own translation?

https://substack.com/notes

Yet another status update-like product, this time from Substack as Twitter is heavily waning...

notespired

reply to Jillian Hess at https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/noted-a-welcome/comments

At last, my sort of alveary! No longer need I flit about as all the flowers to be culled are being aggregated for me. I look forward to reading your work as you (as our Vergil says) "pack close the flowering honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUWlZ7yoQmc

Has a somewhat touchy-feely approach, but there are some interesting touchstones worth exploring here from a cultural perspective.

reply to u/atrebatian at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13dsj8v/celtic_druid_history/

I've only scratched the surface of the Druids, but have gotten pretty deep into Celtic history over the past few years, including becoming reasonably fluent in colloquial Welsh and working on old Welsh for some research.

As an excellent set of introductions, I'd recommend:

Paxton, Jennifer. The Celtic World. Great Courses, 2251. The Teaching Company, Chantilly, VA, 2018. Cunliffe, Barry. The Celts: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.<br /> ———. Druids: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

You'll also probably appreciate the following:

Aldhouse-Green, Miranda. Animals in Celtic Life and Myth. Routledge, 1993.<br /> ———. Caesar’s Druids: An Ancient Priesthood. Yale University Press, 2010.<br /> ———. The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames and Hudson, 2015.<br /> ———. The Celtic World. Routledge, 2012.<br /> Avalon, Annwyn. Water Witchcraft: Magic and Lore from the Celtic Tradition. Red Wheel Weiser.<br /> Bridgman, Timothy P. Hyperboreans: Myth and History in Celtic-Hellenic Contacts.<br /> Chadwick, Nora. The Celts: Second Edition. Revised edition. London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 1998.<br /> Conway, D. J. Celtic Magic. LLewellyn’s World Magic Series, 1.0, 2011.<br /> Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. 1st edition. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.<br /> Fagan, Edited by Brian M., ed. The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. Oxford Companions. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.<br /> Fimi, Dimitra. Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, 1.0, 2017.<br /> Forest, Danu. Celtic Tree Magic: Ogham Lore and Druid Mysteries. Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD., 2014.<br /> Hughes, Kristoffer. The Book of Celtic Magic: Transformative Teachings from the Cauldron of Awen. Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD., 2014.<br /> King Arthur: History and Legend. Streaming Video. Vol. 2376. The Great Courses: Literature and Language. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2015. https://www.wondrium.com/king-arthur-history-and-legend.<br /> Rutherford, Ward. Celtic Mythology: The Nature and Influence of Celtic Myth from Druidism to Arthurian Legend. Red Wheel Weiser.

One of my favorites on memory which underpins early Celtic life and is likely related to Druids, (but which doesn't cover them directly, but is likely similar to their memory practice) is the anthropology text:

Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444973.

I've also got lots of research on henges and wooden/stone circles and related archaeology in early British isles history, but this may be afield from your interests.

https://www.exaclair.com/

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13cqnsk/comment/jjkwc05/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Definitely history in service of the present and the future. Too many people are doing some terribly hard work attempting to reinvent wheels which have been around for centuries.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13cqnsk/do_you_suffer_from_verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang_the/

original source?

reply for Fidel at https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-sunday-may-7-2023-video-connect-with-sonke-ahrens-live-the-author-of-how-to-take-smart-notes/6659

@fidel (I'm presuming you're the same one from the meetup on Sunday, if not perhaps someone might tag the appropriate person?), I was thinking a bit more on your question of using physical index cards for writing fiction. You might find the examples of both Vladimir Nabokov and Dustin Lance Black, a screenwriter, useful as they both use index card-based workflows.

Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura . Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments . Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't. Taking a look at this might give you some ideas of how Nabokov worked and how you might adapt the style for yourself. Another interesting resource is this article with some photos/links about his method with respect to writing Lolita: https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html

You might also find some useful tidbits on his writing process (Bristol cards/Exacompta anyone?) in: Gold, Herbert. “Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40.” The Paris Review, 1967. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov.

Carl Mydans photographed Nabokov while writing in September 1958 and some of those may be interesting to you as well.

Dustin Lance Black outlines his index card process in this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrvawtrRxsw

If you dig around you'll also find Michael Ende and a variety of other German fiction writers who used index cards on the Zettelkasten page on Wikipedia, but I suspect most of the material on their processes are written in German.

Index cards for fiction writing may allow some writers some useful affordances/benefits. By using small atomic pieces on note cards, one can be far more focused on the idea and words immediately at hand. It's also far easier in a creative and editorial process to move pieces around experimentally.

Similarly, when facing Hemmingway's "White Bull", the size and space of an index card is fall smaller. This may have the effect that Twitter's short status updates have for writers who aren't faced with the seemingly insurmountable burden of writing a long blog post or essay in other software. They can write 280 characters and stop. Of if they feel motivated, they can continue on by adding to the prior parts of a growing thread.

However, if you can, try to use a card catalog drawer with a rod so that you don't spill all of your well-ordered cards the way the character in Robert M. Pirsig's novel Lila (1991) did.

via https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17819#Comment_17819

Zettelkasten tutorials for use with Tana: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaScw0zHBuE By Kent Langley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkYPlN82LRc By Theo Koppen - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FufUz1EWJVA by Andre Foeken - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvvsTD2RzKE by Cortex Futura - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzC62nIhq1s by Ev Chapman

"[What] I like about the [zettlekasten] system is that it's a constant reminder to to make up your mind and to specify what you what you're thinking."<br /> —Sönke Ahrens, [Tinderbox Meetup - May 7, 2023 00:30:36]

Tinderbox Meetup - May 7, 2023: A Discussion with Sönke Ahrens, Author of How to Take Smart Notes. Tinderbox Meetup, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx1Ax8z_eDY.

Within the pantheon of types of notes there are: - paraphrasing notes, which one can use to summarize ideas for later recall and review as well as to check one's own knowledge and understanding of what an author has said. - commentary notes, which take the text and create a commentary on them, often as part of having a conversation with the text. These can be seen historically in the Midrashim tradition of commenting on Torah.

[23:12 - 24:47]

separately also: - productivity notes - to do lists, reminders of work to be done, often within or as part of a larger complex project

link to: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/14/55804938/ - Aby Warburg's coinage of Verknüpfungszwang

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/archive-collections/verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang-exhibition

reply to u/ruthlessreuben at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/w5yz0n/comment/ihxojq0/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/ruthlessreuben, as a historian, you're likely to appreciate some variations which aren't as Luhmann-centric. Try some of the following:

• Victor Margolin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI
• Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
• S. D. Goitein used a (non-Luhmann-esque) zettelkasten to write many things including the magisterial A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–1993). Incidentally he took 1/3 less notes and had 1/3 more output than Luhmann: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/.

The following note taking manuals (or which cover it in part) all bear close similarities to Luhmann's system, but were written by historians and related to the ideas of "historical method":

• Barzun, Jacques. The Modern Researcher. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992. http://archive.org/details/modernresearcher00barz_1.
• Dow, Earle Wilbur. Principles of a Note-System for Historical Studies. New York: Century Company, 1924.
• Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.
• Langlois, Charles Victor, and Charles Seignobos. Introduction to the Study of History. Translated by George Godfrey Berry. First. New York: Henry Holt and company, 1898. http://archive.org/details/cu31924027810286.

Although she's a sociologist, you might also appreciate Beatrice Webb's coverage which also has some early database collection flavor:

Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/zkefis/is_the_concept_of_personal_knowledge_management/

Note taking should serve a specific purpose; it should be a means to some end.

Note taking can also be done to create a database (a la Beatrice Webb's scientific note taking).

The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.

Of course many writers will end up (or should end up) properly contextualizing individual ideas and example directly into their finished writing. As a result, one's notes can certainly be rough and ready and don't need to be highly polished because the raw idea will be encapsulated somewhere else and then refined and rewritten directly into that context.

Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.

For context I may make 40 - 60 highlights and annotations on an average day of reading. Of these, I'll review most and refine or combine a few into better rougher shape. Of this group maybe 3 - 6 will be interesting enough to turn into permanent/evergreen notes of some sort that might be reused. And even at this probably only one is interesting enough to be placed permanently into my zettelkasten. This one will likely be an aggregation of many smaller ideas combined with other pre-existing ideas in my collection; my goal is to have the most interesting and unique of my own ideas in my permanent collection. The other 2 or 3 may still be useful later when I get to the creation/writing stage when I'll primarily focus on my own ideas, but I'll use those other rougher notes and the writing in them to help frame and recontextualize the bigger ideas so that the reader will be in a better place to understand my idea, where it comes from, and why it might be something they should find interesting.

Thus some of my notes made while learning can be reused in my own ultimate work to help others learn and understand my more permanent/evergreen notes.

If you think that every note you're making should be highly polished, refined, and heavily linked, then you're definitely doing this wrong. Hopefully a few days of attempting this will disabuse you of the notion and you'll slow down to figure out what's really worth keeping and maintaining. You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.

If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?

Notes can be used for different purposes.

• productivity
• Knowledge
  • basic sense-making
  • knowledge construction and dispersion

The broad distinction is between productivity goals and knowledge. (Is there a broad range I'm missing here within the traditions?) You can take notes about projects that need to be taken care of, lists of things to do, reminders of what needs to be done. These all fall within productivity and doing and checking them off a list will help one get to a different place or location and this can be an excellent thing, particularly when the project was consciously decided upon and is a worthy goal.

Notes for knowledge sake can be far more elusive for people. The value here generally comes with far more planning and foresight towards a particular goal. Are you writing a newsletter, article, book, or making a video or performance of some sort (play, movie, music, etc.)? Collecting small pieces of these things on a pathway is then important as you build your ideas and a structure toward some finished product.

Often times, before getting to this construction phase, one needs to take notes to be able to scaffold their understanding of a particular topic. Once basically understood some of these notes may be useless and not need to be reviewed, or if they are reviewed, it is for the purpose of ensconcing ideas into long term memory. Once this is finished, then the notes may be broadly useless. (This is why it's simple to "hide them with one's references/literature notes.) Other notes are more seminal towards scaffolding ideas towards larger projects for summarization and dissemination to other audiences. If you're researching a topic, a fair number of your notes will be used to help you understand the basics while others will help you to compare/contrast and analyze. Notes you make built on these will help you shape new structures and new, original thoughts. (note taking for paradigm shifts). These then can be used (re-used) when you write your article, book, or other creative project.

Example of someone falling prey to shiny object syndrome, switching tools incessantly, then focusing on too many of the wrong things/minutiae and getting lost in the shuffle.

Don't get caught up into this. Understand the basics of types of notes, but don't focus on them. Let them just be. Does what you've written remind you of the end goal?

u/ittspelledsindi

https://medium.com/@fairylights_io/the-zettelkasten-method-examples-to-help-you-get-started-8f8a44fa9ae6

reply to u/jordynfly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13b0b5c/comment/jjcu3cn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm curious what your area of research is? What are you studying with respect to Zettelkasten?

Caveat notetarius. Note collections are highly idiosyncratic to the user or intended audience, thus quality will vary dramatically on the creator's needs and future desires and potential uses. Contemporaneous, very simple notes can be valuable for their initial sensemaking and quite often in actual practice stop there.

Ultimately, only the user can determine perceived quality and long term value for themselves. Future generations of historians, anthropologists, scholars, and readers, might also find value in notes and note collections, but it seems rare that the initial creators have written them with future readers and audiences in mind. Often they're less useful as the external reader is missing large swaths of context.

For my own personal notes, I consider high quality notes to be well-sourced, highly reusable, easily findable, and reasonably tagged/linked. My favorite, highest quality notes are those that are new ideas which stem from the combination of two high quality notes. With respect to subjectivity, some of my philosophy is summarized by one of my favorite meta-zettels (alt text also available) from zettelmeister Umberto Eco.

Anecdotally, 95% of my notes are done digitally and in public, but I've only got scant personal evidence that anyone is reading or interacting with them. I never write them with any perceived public consumption in mind (beyond the readers of the finished pieces that ultimately make use of them), but it is often very useful to get comments and reactions to them. I'm only aware of a small handful of people publishing their otherwise personal note collections (usually subsets) to the web (outside of social media presences which generally have a different function and intent).

Intellectual historians have looked at and documented external use cases of shared note collections, commonplace books, annotated volumes, and even diaries. There are even examples of published (usually posthumously) commonplace books, waste books, etc., but these are often for influential public and intellectual figures. Here Ludwig Wittgenstein's Zettel, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Waste Books, Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Ronald Reagan's card index commonplace, Stobaeus' Anthology, W. H. Auden's A Certain World, and Robert Southey’s Common-Place Book come quickly to mind not to mention digitized scholarly collections of Niklas Luhmann, W. Ross Ashby, S.D. Goitein, Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, and Aby Warburg's notes. Some of these latter will give you an idea of what they may have thought quality notes to have been for them, but often they mean little if nothing to the unstudied reader because they lack broader context or indication of linkages.

reply to u/jordynfly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13b0b5c/how_big_is_your_zettelkasten/

The idea of notes per day comes up occasionally, here's some discussion on the last go-round: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11z08fq/comment/jdbnchv/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Many people, especially when getting started, get wrapped up in the idea of doing this for "increased productivity" or the goal of being as prolific as Niklas Luhmann. I would submit (and think others would back me up anecdotally) that there's far more to the practice than raw (or measurable) productivity as the single, driving value. Perhaps approach it as a way to sharpen and improve your thinking instead? If you're seeing life-like behavior already, that's a good sign of appreciating some of the hidden benefits which are difficult to describe and which are likely more valuable than the "productivity" goals many may have.

I've noted before that S.D. Goitein had 1/3 less index cards than Luhmann over an equivalent research lifetime, but produced a 1/3 more written output (in terms of books and journal articles). Others like Aby Warburg and Gotthard Deutsch (70,000 notes) had significant practices, but their writing output was marginal at best, though their impact and influence were outsized, in part, I would suggest as a result of their zettelkasten work.

Others like Roland Barthes (generally low card output of \~12,500) and Deutsch also used their fichier boîte/card index/zettelkasten as teaching tools, so while their written outputs may have varied considerably, their teaching practices were incredibly influential for the students and generations they encountered afterwards.

This being said, I'll share my current easily countable lower bound dating roughly from 2016 as:

• 15,200 notes
• 32,000+ links
• 2.1M words

(Having a zk in digital form makes it reasonably easy to do these sorts of counts versus analog methods of note making.)

Some additional pathways to learning and practicing, including my own, can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11ay28d/how_did_you_teach_yourself_zettelkasten/

Why are folks so obsessed with notes per day? Perhaps a proxy for toxic capitalism and productivity issues? Is the number of notes the best measure or the things they allow one to do after having made them? What is the best measure? Especially when there are those who use them for other purposes like lecturing, general growth, knowledge acquisition, or even happiness?

r/Zettelkasten - How big is your ZettelKasten?

explore relationships here with body doubling, observer effect (physics), and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle...

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

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. First Edition. St. Paul, Minn: Hungry Mind Press, 1995. https://www.amazon.com/Book-Ones-Own-People-Diaries/dp/1886913021

Recommended by Mark Bernstein at Tinderbox Meetup.

example of Will's notes output

931447 total word count<br /> 16190 total link count<br /> 3279 total zettel count

11 new zettel in the last 10 days<br /> 156 new zettel in the last 100 days<br /> 2.03 zettel created on average since day zero.

Is there a word or phrase in the advertising space which covers the filtering out of websites and networks which have objectionable material one doesn't want their content running against?

Contextual intelligence seems to be one...

Apparently the platforms Verity and Grapeshot (from Oracle) protect against this.

https://jetpack.com/blaze/

Looks like Jetpack is getting into the ad space leveraging WordPress.com and Tumblr.com with a product called "Blaze".

Saw this by an ad in my own website back end as a result of the Jetpack plugin with a text ad that read:

Reach more people across millions of sites. Promote your content on the WordPress.com and Tumblr ad network using Blaze.

Tagging and linking with AI (Napkin.one) by Nicole van der Hoeven

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2E3gRXiLYY

Nicole underlines the value of a good user interface for traversing one's notes. She'd had issues with tagging things in Obsidian using their #tag functionality, but never with their [[WikiLink]] functionality. Something about the autotagging done by Napkin's artificial intelligence makes the process easier for her. Some of this may be down to how their user interface makes it easier/more intuitive as well as how it changes and presents related notes in succession.

Most interesting however is the visual presentation of notes and tags in conjunction with an outliner for taking one's notes and composing a draft using drag and drop.

Napkin as a visual layer over tooling like Obsidian, Logseq, et. al. would be a much more compelling choice for me in terms of taking my pre-existing data and doing something useful with it rather than just creating yet another digital copy of all my things (and potentially needing sync to keep them up to date).

What is Napkin doing with all of their user's data?

reply to cristinadias7 at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17804/#Comment_17804

@cristinadias7 If you're interested in the overlap of zettelkasten and art or even zettelkasten for art, I've got a small collection available digitally if you think it would be useful/helpful.

Some artworks are difficult to index on physical cards because of their physical nature, so if it helps and you don't have pictures available to file away, you can index their storage locations the way libraries would index "realia" and keep your notes on them there. Twyla Tharpe kept actual objects in larger boxes by categories which is another fascinating way of doing things.

https://www.napkin.one/

Yet another collection app that belies the work of taking, making, and connecting notes.

Looks pretty and makes a promise, but how does it actually deliver? How much work and curation is involved? What are the outputs at the other end?

Circling back around to this after a mention by Tim Bushell at Dan Allosso's Book Club this morning. Nicole van der Hoeven has been using it for a while now and has several videos.

Though called Napkin, which conjures the idea of (wastebook) notes scribbled on a napkin, is a card-based UI which has both manual and AI generated tags in a constellation-like UI. It allows creating "stacks" of notes which are savable and archivable in an outline-esque form (though the outline doesn't appear collapsible) as a means of composition.

It's got a lot of web clipper tooling for saving and some dovetails for bringing in material from Readwise, but doesn't have great data export (JSON, CSV) at the moment. (Not great here means that one probably needs to do some reasonably heavy lifting to do the back and forth with other tools and may require programming skills.)

At present, it looks like just another tool in the space but could be richer with better data dovetailing with other services.

Johnson, Dirk. “Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins.” The New York Times, February 21, 2011, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html.

suggested by The Margins of Marginalia by Tom Peters, ALA TechSource on 2011-05-02

This is a fascinating bit of reading practice.

A book can't only be about the text, it has to be about the reader's interaction with it and thoughts about it. Without these, the object has no value.

Annotations are the traces left behind of how one valued a book as they read and interacted with it.

An association copy is a copy of a book which belonged to the author or someone connected to them or a copy of a book that once belonged to someone particularly associated with its contents, often annotated.

I've got association copies of some information theory texts...

The Margins of Marginalia by Tom Peters, ALA TechSource on 2011-05-02

Peters talks about his own reading practices and his annotation habits throughout his life. There's some discussion of the oncoming annotation functionality in the digital space in 2011.

readum.com no longer resolves in 2023. It was apparently a annotation tool in 2011...

this last bit is poetry of a fascinating sort...

Marginalia is a form of literary expression.

https://amanote.com/

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/728-how-a-library-of-america-book-is-born

Book pages should be printed in the direction of the paper's grain. This does three things: improves the durability of the binding, allows the book to lie completely flat, and keeps the binding from crackling when opened.

https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooks/comments/x45frr/i_hole_punch_standard_index_cards_to_use_in_my/

https://baronfig.com/products/strategist?variant=39787199529043

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

Schmidt's zettelkasten (the direct English translation would be slip box thought card index is more appropriate) (or most likely only portions of it) was featured in the 2013 "Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie" exhibition in Marbach: https://www.dla-marbach.de/presse/presse-details/news/pm-11-2013/. For the interested, the exhibition did publish a book which will likely have more details, but when I looked about a year ago, it was only available in German.

There is a lot of research on zettelkasten methods, which are most often variations of the commonplace book method transferred into the index card or slip form rather than books/notebooks. I've not looked intensively at Schmidt's practice (yet), but it was likely similar to that of Victor Margolin outlined here, though in Margolin's case it was non-fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI. Vladimir Nabokov and Michael Ende are other writers who used similar methods.

There's some more examples/detail about the idea of zettelkasten (aka card indexes) in general on Wikipedia.

An important question here: her identity may not have been completely authentic, but is this a reason not to heed and consider her work on its own merit?

How do any of us really know our identities?

‘I am a White person:’ UC Berkeley scholar apologizes for wrongly claiming to be Native American her ‘whole life’ by Martha Ross

Example of someone using index cards as the core of their bullet journal practice on 2020-07-23 as opposed to a notebook/journal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bulletjournal/comments/hwdwld/notecard_bullet_journal/

also posted to https://www.reddit.com/r/indexcards/comments/it3uj9/notecard_bullet_journal/

Sunday, May 7, 2023, 12:00 noon Eastern Time (US and Canada)<br /> 9 AM Pacific Time<br /> Zoom link for the meetup: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8850659900?pwd=ZE9ROUs1czNiK2FTTStjTUJuVkIydz09 4

Agenda This one is going to be fun! Sönke Ahrens, the author of How to Take Smart Notes 12 will join our meetup on May 7th. Let’s start a thread on what we’d like to review with him. The meetup is not for a couple of weeks. If you have the time, I highly suggest you grab a copy and give it a read.

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-sunday-may-7-2023-connect-with-sonke-ahrens-live-the-author-of-how-to-take-smart-notes/6636/1

https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/the-key-to-removing-a-rod/

There are broadly five types of card catalog rod configurations: - no rod - threaded rod - friction fit rod - lift and pull rod - hidden release rod