https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FX5SRQT/

https://www.amazon.com/CZUR-Shine-Ultra-Auto-Flatten-Compatible/dp/B08NSJQ65L

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fancy-pro-ultra-webcam-pro-book-scanner-in-1#/

https://dainty-sable-264aa3.netlify.app/project/measuring_thinking_tools.html

Openness should be broken out into smaller subsections to highlight the importance of supporting standards as a primary item by itself. Many of these axes are easier, low-hanging fruit that developers will iterate on anyway. Focusing on the harder and more subtle features like standards is a better way to go for the audience that can really use this now.

Many of these axes are better for a commercial market.

Leeson, R. A. Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries’ Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1979.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4467218-travelling-brothers

Suggested by Jerry Michalski on 2022-11-02

Language/location related Mastodon Instances:

• https://ailbhean.co-shaoghal.net/
  • This server is aimed at Gaelic speakers. Tha am frithealaiche seo ann do luchd na Gàidhlig.
• https://mastodon.scot
  • A community primarily intended for (but not limited to) people in Scotland or who identify as Scottish.
• https://mastodon.ie/
  • Irish Mastodon
• https://toot.wales
  • Twt is the free and open community for Wales and the Welsh, at home and abroad.

https://github.com/jazmichaelking/mastodon-near-me

https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/mastodon-near-me_828094#6/36.997/-108.198

https://www.thecut.com/article/all-of-the-allegations-against-actor-kevin-spacey.html

Can we all agree that Zettelkasten note-taking is probably WAY more complexity than we need as creators?<br><br>Here's how to take the best parts & leave the rest to the academics pic.twitter.com/LFnAeBkbpG

— ⚡️ Ev Chapman 🚢 | Creative Entrepreneur (@evielync) February 21, 2022

reply to u/sscheper<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/yka3ro/vintage_yawman_and_erbe_card_index_filing_systems/

These were commonly used for what we now call CRM as well as for accounting, general filing, and all sorts of business and back office use cases in the early 20th century which are now handled by computers. A dozen or so companies made large wooden and metal index card filing cabinets and sold them by the truckload to businesses of every sort.

A lot of the digiterati are just repeating and attempting to reinvent these sorts of ideas using Obsidian, Notion, etc.

https://hq.getmatter.com/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1587519501431717889.html

https://mycompanies.fandom.com/wiki/Yawman_%26_Erbe_Manufacturing_Company

Some fascinating advertisements for Yawman and Erbe

Yawman and Erbe Mfg. Co., - Criminal Identification - 1913<br /> https://scalar.chapman.edu/scalar/ah-331-history-of-photography-spring-2021-compendium/media/yawman-and-erbe-mfg-co---criminal-identification---1913

https://agincourtiowa.com/2015/06/02/yawman-erbe/

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/SILNMAHTL_34484

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125591176967?mkevt=1&mkpid=0&emsid=e11021.m43.l1120&mkcid=7&ch=osgood&euid=47f16005ebf04e3ca255c215366062fe&bu=45618614899&ut=RU&exe=0&ext=0&osub=-1%7E1&crd=20221102035021&segname=11021

https://www.newmarkettoday.ca/remember-this/in-its-heyday-office-specialty-employed-400-in-massive-complex-18-photos-1851941

https://roundup.reclaimhosting.com/a-special-spooky-roundup/

in relation to the character in the satire Penguin Island by Anatole France who dies by zettelkasten

Naturally a tapir is the nocturnal hoofed mammal with a stout body, sturdy limbs, and a short flexible proboscis, native to the forests of tropical America and Malaysia.

So the name Fulgence Tapir is essentially "a sparkling foraging pig".

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

Thomas F. Tout, one of the founders of the Historical Association, was one of the first professors to introduce original research into the undergraduate program in the early 1900s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Johnson_(historian)

Charles Johnson wrote a manual with some general advice about zettelkasten, note taking, and indexing:<br /> The Mechanical Processes of the Historian, Helps for Students of History (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1922)

Surely the fault of that savant was not neglect, but over-confidence in the virtue of the fiche [index card], and the true moral is that there is no necessary salvation in the fiche and the card-index [aka zettelkasten].

Here the author is referencing part of the preface of Anatole France's book Penguin Island (1908) where a scholar drowns in a whirlpool of index cards.

see: https://hypothes.is/a/rYHu0FQZEe2mm4_z4pvWLw

neglecting the mechanical side of historiography

the mechanical side of historiography is a round about way of saying note taking using a card index or zettelkasten.

What is this editor's actual name?

My first guess is "Tools for Thought", but that can't be right. 🤣

In the 1923 short notices section of the journal History, one of the editors remarked in a short review of "The Mechanical Processes of the Historian" that they wished that Charles Johnson had spent more than two pages of the book on note taking and "other aspects of the 'Plan and Arrangement of Collections'" as the zettelkasten "is a doctrine so practically important" to historians.

T., T. F., A. F. P., E. R. A., H. E. E., R. C., E. L. W., F. J. C. H., and E. J. C. “Short Notices.” History 8, no. 31 (1923): 231–37.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>atomicnotes </span> in Death by Zettelkasten: a haunting story of information overload! : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>11/01/2022 12:03:47</time>)</cite></small>

T., T. F., A. F. P., E. R. A., H. E. E., R. C., E. L. W., F. J. C. H., and E. J. C. “Short Notices.” History 8, no. 31 (1923): 231–37.

https://publish.obsidian.md/open-mind/Public/%C2%A7+'Introduction+to+the+Zettelkasten+Method'+(Sascha+Fast)

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1131936089/rudolph-red-nosed-reindeer-jules-bass-frosty-snowman

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/28/533979071/jerry-lee-lewis-dies

what a great review...

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/26/1131578207/writer-truck-driver-meatcutter-and-prophet-of-compassion-mike-davis-dies-at-76

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yibchw/zettelkasten_for_technical_sciences/

Presumably you've been the member of or seen a journal club/discussion group for scientific articles, and if not, you could start your own journal club (with yourself) using a zettelkasten by excerpting ideas from what you read, annotating them, writing down open questions, thoughts about what researchers get right/wrong, what could be done better, etc. A zettelkasten practice can be highly fruitful in the sciences. Carl Linnaeus, Newton, and Leibnitz (among many others) had similar looking practices.

Sascha Fast has translated section 9/8 of Luhmann's zettelkasten into English.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmanns-zettel-translated/

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmanns-zettel-translated/

Sascha's German to English translation of Luhmann's zettelkasten section ZK II / 9/8.

https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8_V

The best and most challenging communication partner you may experience is a version of your past self. A searchable set of notes is the closest approximation of this one is likely to find.

another in a long line of using analogizing thinking to food digestion.... I saw another just earlier today.

Sönke Ahrens roughly quoted this passage or one like it (check the reference), but I criticized it for not being inclusive of indigenous people or oral methods. Luhmann, however, went further and was at least passively more inclusive by saying that one needs to be able to "notch differences" to be able to think, and this is a much better framing.

Fascinating to see Ashby pop up in Luhmann's section on zettelkasten in part because Ashby had a similar note taking practice, though part notebook/part index card based, and was highly interested in systems theory.

https://werd.io/2022/the-blog-is-back

Pomeroy, Earl. “Frederic L. Paxson and His Approach to History.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 4 (1953): 673–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/1895394

read on 2022-10-30 - 10-31

There are lessons in Frederic L. Paxson's 1938 address to the American Historical Association for todays social media culture and the growing realm of cancel culture when he remarked that historians "needed Cheyney's warning... not to write in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 and 1928.

Even following his retirement in 1947, Paxson continued to take notes specifically on education for a project which he never got to finish before he died in hospital on October 24, 1948.

This statement makes it appear as if Paxson was aware of the movement in the late 1800s of the attempt to make history a more scientific endeavor by writers like Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, and others, but that Pomeroy is less so.

How scientific can history be as an area of study? There is the descriptive from which we might draw conclusions, but how much can we know when there are not only so many potential variables, but we generally lack the ability to design and run discrete experiments on history itself?

Recall Paxson's earlier comment that "in history you cannot prove an inference". https://hypothes.is/a/LIWSoFlLEe2zUtvMoEr0nQ

Had enough time elapsed up to this writing in 1953, that the ideal of a scientific history from the late 1800s had been borne out not to be accomplished?

you may carry on the inquiry for a lifetime without discovering other events inconsistent with the hypothesis which has caught your eye. But you can never get beyond a circumstantial case. . . .<br /> "A Footnote to the Safety-Valve," August 15, 1940, Paxson Papers (University of California Library, Berkeley)

Paxson would have considered it a failure in note taking to have only compiled but not to have synthesized one's accumulated knowledge.

Why take notes if one is not going to use them to some end, whether that be personally in one's life, or to extend and expand the depth and breadth of human knowledge by analyzing and synthesizing the ideas to create something new for others' benefit?

Examples of other historians who likely had a zettelkasten method of work.

Rhodes' method is tangentially mentioned by Earle Wilbur Dow as being "notebooks of the old type". https://hypothes.is/a/PuFGWCRMEe2bnavsYc44cg

One cannot excerpt their way into knowledge, simply cutting and pasting one's way through life is useless. Your notes may temporarily serve you, but unless you apply judgement and reason to them to create something new, they will remain a scrapheap for future generations who will gain no wisdom or use from your efforts.

relate to: notes about notes being only useful to their creator

Note, n.d. (probably made during the 1920's), unsorted, Paxson File.

One can easily leave out bits of evidence or cherry pick evidence to arrive at a given a priori conclusion. The truest thinker or historian will use the fullest context of evidence available at the time to arrive at their conclusion.

Naturally, additional evidence and emergent effects as history unfolds may change some of these conclusions over time.

Review of John B. Black, The Art of History; A Study of Four Great His- torians of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1926), New York Herald Tribune Books, December 12, 1926, p. 12.

Earl Pomeroy suggests that Paxson's note taking method freed his mind to better reflect and appraise his work. This allows a greater efficiency of work, particularly when it comes to easier search and recall as well as the overall process which becomes easier through practice.

The small size and portability of index cards make them easy to have at hand at a moment's notice.

Frederic Paxson took his note file from Wisconsin to Washington D.C. when he went into war service from 1917-1918, which Earl Pomeroy notes as an indicator of how little burden it was, but he doesn't make any notation about worries about loss or damage during travel, which may have potentially occurred to Paxson, given his practice and the value to him of the collection.

May be worth looking deeper into to see if he had such worries.

that he used it little in later years. His author-title entries usually went into the main file, after the appropriate subject index cards.

This is a curious pattern and not often seen. Apparently it was Paxson's practice to place his author-title entries into his main file following the related subject index cards instead of in a completely separate bibliographical file. He did apparently have one comprised of six scantily filled drawers which he kept in his coat closet, but it was little used in his later years.

What benefits might this relay? It certainly more directly relates the sources closer in physical proximity within one's collection to the notes to which they relate. This might be of particular beneficial use in a topical system where all of one's notes relating to a particular subject are close physically rather than being linked or cross referenced as they were in Luhmann's example.

A particular color of cards may help in this regard to more easily find these sources.

Also keep in mind that Paxson's system was topical-chronological, so there may also be reasons for doing this that fit into his chronological scheme. Was he filing them in sections so that the publication dates of the sources fit into this scheme as well? This may take direct review to better known and understand his practice.

notes on pretty much everything....

shows a more commonplace practice rather than just a zettelkasten focusing on his direct work.

Pomeroy suspects that Paxson may have kept to a strict work schedule to keep his mind sharp, but he doesn't propose or suspect that it may have been the case that Paxson's note taking practice was the thing which not only helped to keep his mind sharp, but which allowed him the freedom and flexibility to keep very regular work hours.

Ahrens and others following him have argued that there is a sort of lightness imbued both in one's thinking processes and life by making and accumulating notes. The cognitive load is lessened by offloading one's thoughts onto pieces of paper that can be revised, compared, and juxtaposed as a means of building some written or creative endeavor, even if it's slowly over time.

Frederic L. Paxson's mode of life made this seem to be the case for him. There is evidence that he was easier able to manage his daily life by his note taking system. He accumulated no work on his desk and carried none home and was able to more easily give his attention to others.

Is this a result of breaking things down into tiny, bite sized chunks that were difficult to actually interrupt?

Was it the system or his particular temperament? Are there other examples of this easier mode of life for note takers? Is there a pattern? What portions can be attributed to the system and one's ability to stick to it versus their particular temperaments?

Other than small examples in my own life, this may be one of the first examples I've seen of this mode of work. Definitely worth looking at others.

I wonder if others use the sense making features of a note card system to think through their voting decisions? This seems an interesting and useful exercise which Paxson has done.

Our president must be in equal measures a teacher, a leader, and a doer.

It's quite likely that one will take a large number of notes with no immediate goal or plan for use and this is completely acceptable. Often these notes go towards the more immediate goal of forming one's own understanding and setting of a broader tableau for material one will write in the future.

Paxson advised that one should completely know, understand, and own one's sources and materials so that they would be able to act as auteur when relaying those ideas in their own theses.

Review of James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States From Hayes to McKinley, 1877-1896 (New York, 1919), American Historical Review (New York), XXV (April, 1920), 525. Paxson sometimes filed notes handed in by students in the course of routine checks on their work (to about 1913), and he regularly took notes on students' oral seminar reports, but he apparently did not depend on such notes. On the other hand, he often went out of his way, in his own writings, to refer to related works by his students.

This almost sounds like he's proposing an auteur theory for historical studies rather than film studies.

Paxson doesn't directly indicate to rewrite for one's own digestion and understanding process, but hints at it strongly when he says that "Your sentences must be your own." By making and owning your sentences, you ought to have completely understood the ideas and made them a part of you prior to transmitting them back along to others.

Under Paxon's framing and knowing that he also sometimes held onto is notes for a while before forming final opinions, one's notes, even when public (like my own are), are still just partial truths of thought caught in the moment. It takes further digestion and juxtaposition with additional thoughts which are later rewritten in longer form to make articles, books, etc.

Note taking is a process of sense making seeking out the truth of a situation.

relatable to: https://hypothes.is/a/wIyvtm0oEeyNypNtc--Clw

1. Note headed "notes," n.d., Paxson File, unclassified.

Frederic L. Paxson frequently advised that a historian should work fully through the background material.

Owing to the size and complex nature of Paxson's note collection which he used and demonstrated to his students in his teaching and historical laboratory process, few of the sixty-five doctors who studied under him maintained files of their own.

Frederic L. Paxson kept a collection of 3 x 5 " slips of thin paper that filled eighty wooden file drawers which he organized using topical-chronologic headings spanning 4639 BCE to 1949.

In addition to an extensive note collection, Paxson kept a separate diary, indicating a different practicing in a different form.

span of note taking

half-century's accumulation of notes

The author seems to take for granted that we know who Turner is. Would have been nice to have his full name up front at least.

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

https://catalog.huntington.org/record=b1792186

Is it possible that this miscellany collection is of a zettelkasten nature?

Found via a search of the Huntington Library for Frederic L. Paxson's zettelkasten

Was sectionalism discussed or mentioned in Colin Woodard's American Nations (2011) as part of an underlying piece of his thesis about American history? It seems applicable.

Where did Turner's note cards and files end up? Are they housed at the Huntington Library? What other evidence or indication is there that this was an extensive zettelkasten practice here?

Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.

Historian Keith Thomas talks about his methods of note taking and work as a historian. A method which falls into the tradition of commonplacing and zettelkasten, though his was in note taking and excerpting onto slips which he kept in envelopes instead of notebooks or a card index.

Francesco Sacchini advised in 1615 that one should make two sets of notes: one to be cut up and filed, and the other kept in it's original form so as to keep the full context of the original author's context.

This is broadly one of the values of note taking in Hypothes.is. One can take broader excerpts of an authors' works as well as maintain links for fuller context to reconsult, but still have the shorter excerpts as well as one's own notes.

One's notes are an index of their intellectual progress. In sorting through and re-arranging them one "loosens their imagination".

Lord Acton read widely and collected notes which he kept in pigeonholed desks and cabinets with thousands of compartments. Sadly he died in 1902 without having written anything using them, and being only made sense of by the compiler were broadly useless.

Keith Thomas indicates that through his personal experience that Beatrice Webb was right in saying that "shuffling notes can be intellectually fertile."

For a variety of topics and interests there are not archives of information that can be consulted or referenced. As a result one must slowly, but methodically collect this sort of information over a lifetime to be able to analyze it and build theses.

Filing notes away in envelopes, while keeping them safely collected together, puts them both out of site and out of mind. It may also take longer to retrieve them and make them less accessible to use and reuse.

Relying on cut up slips of paper rather than the standard cards of equal size, Keith Thomas has relayed that his slips often "get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or cushion."

He also suspects that some of his notes have accidentally been thrown away by falling off his desk and into the nearby waste basket which camouflages his notes amongst similar looking trash.

Historian Keith Thomas describes his note taking method which is similar to older zettelkasten methods, though he uses larger sheets of paper rather than index cards and files them away in topic-based envelopes.

In Penguin Island, Anatole France describes a scholar drowned by an avalanche of their own index cards!

Keith Thomas wasn't taught, nor did he read (until much too late), methods on note taking, but still managed to puzzle out most of the specifics for his note taking practice in his historical work, or at least everything but taking notes on note cards instead of on sheets of paper.

Historian John Burrow brooded over the definition of the atomicity of an idea in his autobiography Memories Migrating (2009).

Individual facts link together into small networks to create context for each other.

According to Keith Thomas, "many of the great 19th-century historians employed professional copyists" as a means of keeping up with filing copies of their note slips under multiple subject headings.

I don't recall Langlois and Seignobos suggesting copying things several times over. Double check this point, particularly with respect to the transference to Luhmann.

In academia, the act of not taking notes can act as an external signal of superiority or even indifference.

Elizabethans called pocketbooks or small notebooks "tablets."

HIstorian Keith Thomas indicated in 2010 that he still regularly took scissors to his newspapers and magazines to excerpt material from them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hill_(historian)

Christopher Hill's practice of creating indices of topics of interest to him in the end papers of his books is similar to that of Mortimer J. Adler who attested this practice as well.

A line in the margin doesn't fit with any mnemotechniques I'm aware of, so it's more likely a method to indicate what he had read, and up to what point. Likely not an indicator of storage to memory.

By what method did Macaulay memorize Paradise Lost?

How does a medievalist reference "omnium gatherum" without an explicit mention of even florilegia which generally translates as "gatherings of flowers" as their method?!

Except that, seemingly, many historians have written and published about just this very topic!

People often talk about the "magic of note taking", but it's not frequent that they frame the methods as magician's secrets.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-dollar-stores-became-magnets-for-crime-and-killing

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yg2g8l/a_thought_experiment_what_if_luhmann_had_been_a/

reply (unsent)<br /> I appreciate where you're coming from, and it's an excellent thought experiment. However, knowing that there was a clear older prior zettelkasten tradition for several hundred years prior to Luhmann which also included a number of mathematician practitioners including not only Leibnitz but also Newton, who incidentally invented his version of calculus in his waste book (also a part of that tradition). (See also: https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/notebooks?sort=date&order=desc).

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/United_Syllabub515 </span> in Metacognitive Note-Taking For Creativity : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>10/29/2022 21:57:47</time>)</cite></small>

original source??

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

https://dictionary.apa.org/elaboration

https://dictionary.apa.org/

https://dictionary.apa.org/rehearsal

https://sagescienta.substack.com/p/cognitive-load-theory?sd=pf

introductory article with some interesting looking references

https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-201800110.html?src=rss

Amazon tracking their hourly workers and not their middle management's efficiency.

Originally read on Tue [[2022-10-18]] 1:25 PM

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation

Running Twitter is more complicated than you think.

Twitter's primary asset is not their technology, but their addicted user base.

We need a much needed and truer history of zettelkasten and thankfully Chris Aldrich is the person to provide us that. Stop reading all those other zettelkasten articles until you have a broader understanding of the historical perspective of where all this came from. I can't tell you how much I learned. There was more I didn't know than I did know by a... and it wasn't even close. So thank you Chris. You definitely need to read The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten.<br /> —Nick Milo, Linking Your Thinking, 2022-10-26,

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

Chavigny, Paul Marie Victor. Organisation Du Travail Intellectuel, Recettes Pratiques à l’usage Des Étudiants de Toutes Les Facultés et de Tous Les Travailleurs. Paris: Delagrave, 1918. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011209555

https://www.manton.org/2022/10/27/dear-elon-musk.html

http://drummer.this.how/AndySylvester99/Andy_Zettelkasten.opml

Andy Sylvester's experiment in building a digital zettelkasten using OPML and tagging. Curious to see how it grows and particularly whether or not it will scale with this sort of UI? On first blush, the first issue I see as a reader is a need for a stronger and immediate form of search.

RSS feeds out should make for a more interesting UI for subscribing and watching the inputs though.

http://oldschool.scripting.com/AndySylvester99/2022/10/24/205556.html?title=thinkingAboutStartingAnOpenZettelkasten

https://werd.io/2022/thinking-about-leaving-twitter

https://gabz.blog/2022/10/27/what-about-them.html

Why do people not have strong note taking practices or desire to do so? - Some of it may come down to lack of a practice (or model) to follow - some don't have a clearly stated need for why they're doing it in the first place - some spread their notes out over many tools and applications which prevents a quorum of power building up in one place, thus defeating a lot of the purpose. (This is why having all of one's notes in one place is so important as a rule.) - This particular post is a good example of this cardinal sin. - Lack of easy search defeats the ability to extract value back out of having made the notes in the first place. - Note repositories aren't always all of the value proposition. Often the fact of the work that went into making a note to learn and understand ideas is all of the value for a reasonable portion of notes.

https://fieldnotesbrand.com/from-seed

Some interesting history of notebooks in America.

https://www.indxd.ink/

A digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional).

It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears.

This could potentially be used by those who have analog zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>sgtstretch </span> in @Gaby @pimoore so a good friend of mine makes [INDXD](https://www.indxd.ink/) which is for indexing analog notebooks and being able to find things. I don't personally use it, but I know @patrickrhone has written about it before. (<time class='dt-published'>10/27/2022 17:59:32</time>)</cite></small>

https://micro.blog/pimoore/13567345

some interesting perspectives on note taking apps and note taking in general

Thoughts on Zettelkasten numbering systems

I've seen variations of the beginner Zettelkasten question:

"What happens when you want to add a new note between notes 1/1 and 1/1a?"

asked at least a dozen times in the Reddit fora related to note taking and zettelkasten, on zettelkasten.de, or in other places across the web.

Dense Sets

From a mathematical perspective, these numbering or alpha-numeric systems are, by both intent and design, underpinned by the mathematical idea of dense sets. In the areas of topology and real analysis, one considers a set dense when one can choose a point as close as one likes to any other point. For both library cataloging systems and numbering schemes for ideas in Zettelkasten this means that you can always juxtapose one topic or idea in between any other two.

Part of the beauty of Melvil Dewey's original Dewey Decimal System is that regardless of how many new topics and subtopics one wants to add to their system, one can always fit another new topic between existing ones ad infinitum.

Going back to the motivating question above, the equivalent question mathematically is "what number is between 0.11 and 0.111?" (Here we've converted the artificial "number" "a" to a 1 and removed the punctuation, which doesn't create any issues and may help clarify the orderings a bit.) The answer is that there is an infinite number of numbers between these!

This is much more explicit by writing these numbers as:<br /> 0.110<br /> 0.111

Naturally 0.1101 is between them (along with an infinity of others), so one could start here as a means of inserting ideas this way if they liked. One either needs to count up sequentially (0, 1, 2, 3, ...) or add additional place values.

Decimal numbering systems in practice

The problem most people face is that they're not thinking of these numbers as decimals, but as natural numbers or integers (or broadly numbers without any decimal portions). Though of course in the realm of real numbers, numbers above 0 are dense as well, but require the use of their decimal portions to remain so.

The tough question is: what sorts of semantic meanings one might attach to their adding of additional place values or their alphabetical characters? This meaning can vary from person to person and system to system, so I won't delve into it here.

One may find it useful to logically chunk these numbers into groups of three as is often done using commas, periods, slashes, dashes, spaces, or other punctuation. This doesn't need to mean anything in particular, but may help to make one's numbers more easily readable as well as usable for filing new ideas. Sometimes these indicators can be confusing in discussion, so if ever in doubt, simply remove them and the general principles mentioned here should still hold.

Depending on one's note taking system, however, when putting cards into some semblance of a logical sort-able order (perhaps within a folder for example), the system may choke on additional characters beyond the standard period to designate a decimal number. For example: within Obsidian, if you have a "zettelkasten" folder with lots of numbered and named files within it, you'll want to give each number the maximum number of decimal places so that when doing an alphabetic sort within the folder, all of the numbered ideas are properly sorted. As an example if you give one file the name "0.510 Mathematics", another "0.514 Topology" and a third "0.5141 Dense Sets" they may not sort properly unless you give the first two decimal expansions to the ten-thousands place at a minimum. If you changed them to "0.5100 Mathematics" and "0.5140 Topology, then you're in good shape and the folder will alphabetically sort as you'd expect. Similarly some systems may or may not do well with including alphabetic characters mixed in with numbers.

If using chunked groups of three numbers, one might consider using the number 0.110.001 as the next level of idea between them and then continuing from there. This may help to spread some of the ideas out as surely one may have yet another idea to wedge in between 0.110.000 and 0.110.001?

One can naturally choose almost any any (decimal) number, so long as it it somewhat "near" the original behind which one places it. By going out further in the decimal expansion, one can always place any idea between two others and know that there will be a number that it can be given that will "work".

Generally within numbers as we use them for mathematics, 0.100000001 is technically "closer" by distance measurement to 0.1 than 0.11, (and by quite a bit!) but somehow when using numbers for zettelkasten purposes, we tend to want to not consider them as decimals, as the Dewey Decimal System does. We also have the tendency to want to keep our numbers as short as possible when writing, so it seems more "natural" to follow 0.11 with 0.111, as it seems like we're "counting up" rather than "counting down".

Another subtlety that one sees in numbering systems is the proper or improper use of the whole numbers in front of the decimal portions. For example, in Niklas Luhmann's system, he has a section of cards that start with 3.XXXX which are close to a section numbered 35.YYYY. This may seem a bit confusing, but he's doing a bit of mental gymnastics to artificially keep his numbers smaller. What he really means is 3000.XXX and 3500.YYY respectively, he's just truncating the extra zeros. Alternately in a fully "decimal system" one would write these as 0.3000.XXXX and 0.3500.YYYY, where we've added additional periods to the numbers to make them easier to read. Using our original example in an analog system, the user may have been using foreshortened indicators for their system and by writing 1/1a, they may have really meant something of the form 001.001/00a, but were making the number shorter in a logical manner (at least to them).

The close observer may have seen Scott Scheper adopt the slightly longer numbers in the thousands (like 3500.YYYY) as a means of remedying some of the numbering confusion many have when looking at Luhmann's system.

Those who build their systems on top of existing ones like the Dewey Decimal Classification, or the Universal Decimal Classification may wish to keep those broad categories with three to four decimal places at the start and then add their own idea number underneath those levels.

As an example, we can use the numbering for Finsler geometry from the Dewey Decimal Classification wikipedia page shown as:

``` 500 Natural sciences and mathematics

510 Mathematics

    516 Geometry

        516.3 Analytic geometries

            516.37 Metric differential geometries

                516.375 Finsler geometry

```

So in our zettelkasten, we might add our first card on the topic of Finsler geometry as "516.375.001 Definition of Finsler geometry" and continue from there with some interesting theorems and proofs on those topics.

Of course, while this is something one can do doesn't mean that one should do it. Going too far down the rabbit holes of "official" forms of classification this way can be a massive time wasting exercise as in most private systems, you're never going to be comparing your individual ideas with the private zettelkasten of others and in practice the sort of standardizing work for classification this way is utterly useless. Beyond this, most personal zettelkasten are unique and idiosyncratic to the user, so for example, my math section labeled 510 may have a lot more overlap with history, anthropology, and sociology hiding within it compared with others who may have all of their mathematics hiding amidst their social sciences section starting with the number 300. One of the benefits of Luhmann's numbering scheme, at least for him, is that it allowed his system to be much more interdisciplinary than using a more complicated Dewey Decimal oriented system which may have dictated moving some of his systems theory work out of his politics area where it may have made more sense to him in addition to being more productive on a personal level.

Of course if you're using the older sort of commonplacing zettelkasten system that was widely in use before Luhmann's variation, then perhaps using a Dewey-based system may be helpful to you?

A Touch of History

As both a mathematician working in the early days of real analysis and a librarian, some of these loose ideas may have occurred tangentially to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716), though I'm currently unaware of any specific instances within his work. One must note, however, that some of the earliest work within library card catalogs as we know and use them today stemmed from 1770s Austria where governmental conscription needs overlapped with card cataloging systems (Krajewski, 2011). It's here that the beginnings of these sorts of numbering systems begin to come into use well before Melvil Dewey's later work which became much more broadly adopted.

The German "file number" (aktenzeichen) is a unique identification of a file, commonly used in their court system and predecessors as well as file numbers in public administration since at least 1934. We know Niklas Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, before beginning a career in Lüneburg's public administration where he stayed in civil service until 1962. Given this fact, it's very likely that Luhmann had in-depth experience with these sorts of file numbers as location identifiers for files and documents. As a result it's reasonably likely that a simplified version of these were at least part of the inspiration for his own numbering system. † ‡

Your own practice

At the end of the day, the numbering system you choose needs to work for you within the system you're using (analog, digital, other). I would generally recommend against using someone else's numbering system unless it completely makes sense to you and you're able to quickly and simply add cards to your system with out the extra work and cognitive dissonance about what number you should give it. The more you simplify these small things, the easier and happier you'll be with your set up in the end.

References

Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.

Munkres, James R. Topology. 2nd ed. 1975. Reprint, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1999.

https://supabase.com/

Found as presumably it's being used by https://www.explainpaper.com/ with improper configurations

https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/lytcon/nick-milo-keynote

https://lu.ma/NickMilo?past=1

List of past videos Nick Milo has made with regard to note taking, thinking, Obsidian, etc.

Given your talents, if you've not explored some of the experimental fiction side of things (like Mark Bernstein's hypertext fiction http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Fiction.html, Robin Sloan's fish http://www.robinsloan.com/fish/ or Writing with the Machine https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/, or a variety of others https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22experimental+fiction%22), perhaps it may be fun and allow you to use some of your technology based-background at the same time?

https://benwerd.substack.com/p/the-writerly-nerd

This quote is art... :)

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/

Related work leading up to this video: https://vimeo.com/232545219

https://www.explainpaper.com/

Another in a growing line of research tools for processing and making sense of research literature including Research Rabbit, Connected Papers, Semantic Scholar, etc.

Functionality includes the ability to highlight sections of research papers with natural language processing to explain what those sections mean. There's also a "chat" that allows you to ask questions about the paper which will attempt to return reasonable answers, which is an artificial intelligence sort of means of having an artificial "conversation with the text".

cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvxbl7Iwep4

Lots of levels here to pull apart, but this should be particularly interesting to novices.

Modes of note taking: * note taking for raw information * note taking (or writing) for understanding * note taking for relationships of and between knowledge * note taking for creating proficiency * note taking for productivity

Sung takes the viewpoint that linear note taking isn't as effective as mind mapping and drawing out relationships; in part this is why handwriting is more effective means of note taking compared to typing, particularly as most note taking apps force one into a linear pathway that doesn't mirror the affordances available within handwriting.

This video is definitely more about note taking than note making.

Noy, Natalya F, and Deborah L McGuinness. “Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology,” 2001, 25.

suggested via:

New @tana_inc folks seem hungry for in-depth books on ontologies & schemas.<br>Initial reaction was... books are overkill? There's not much to know? Just google it? But then tried googling. And it is *noisy* and poorly curated out there.<br><br>A few recommendations:

— Maggie Appleton (@Mappletons) October 21, 2022

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yd7t7u/creating_a_zk_dont_break_the_chain_calendar_in/\

Much like the way the Obsidian journal plugin counts words within one's daily journal page, this app counts zettels within a folder to help encourage one to maintain some level of output.

For those interested in the research on the "Write Every Day" mantra:

Sword, Helen. “‘Write Every Day!’: A Mantra Dismantled.” International Journal for Academic Development 21, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 312–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2016.1210153.