What would schooling look like if it had been historically developed as child-centered rather than subject-centered.

Apparently one couldn't ever force children to learn anything...

ephebic • \ih-FEE-bik\ • adjective. : of, relating to, or characteristic of a youth of ancient Greece or a young man.

It's worth keeping in mind that schools and education aren't necessarily linked.

Gary Thomas posits that it's our cleverness which birthed education. Isn't it more likely our extreme ability to mimic others which is more likely from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective?

Were early peoples really "teaching" each other how to make primitive hand axes? Or did we first start out by closely mimicking our neighbors?

Is he falling trap to the lure of literacy as the only means of crystallizing knowledge here? He starts with a literate Aristotle and specifically mentions 30,000 years ago instead of oral cultures which we know could do this sort of work orally almost 65,000 years ago.

Education: A Very Short Introduction. Second Edition. Very Short Introductions. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/education-a-very-short-introduction-9780198859086?cc=us&lang=en&

taurusnoises https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xyhpq4/2015_exhibition_of_roland_barthes_zettelkasten/

Me too. This is one of the reasons I'm not the biggest fan of the "fleeting note" framing of Ahrens, as it's more likely to marginalize these sorts of smaller daily ideas and discourage people from placing some of these types of things into their zettelkasten as potentially "unimportant". I feel like from what I see and hear anecdotally his framing encourages too many to only put in things which are significant, deep, academic, or which have a certain sense of gravitas.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xyhpq4/2015_exhibition_of_roland_barthes_zettelkasten/

Johanna Daniel has some interesting reflections (in French) about Barthes' reading, note taking, and writing processes: http://johannadaniel.fr/isidoreganesh/2015/06/archives-roland-barthes/ Perhaps most importantly she's got some photos from an exhibition of his work which includes portions of his note cards and writing. Roland Barthes' note cards on the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. And you thought your makeshift cardboard boxes weren't "enough"? Want more about Barthes' practice? Try my digital notes: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22Roland+Barthes%22

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/taurusnoises</span> in One of the ways I use my zettelkasten (though Obsidian) to write essays : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>08/10/2022 12:28:58</time>)</cite></small>

Posted by u/ivanZalevskiy https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/y0k076/apply_zettelkasten_at_school/

From a historical perspective, education is broadly the reason zettelkasten principles were created and evolved. In the late 1400s and early 1500s Agricola, Erasmus, and Melanchthon wrote handbooks for students and teachers to spread these methods specifically for learning and building knowledge. Here's a reasonable example of someone using them for their Ph.D. work, and I suspect they, like many, wish they'd started sooner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiol2oJAh6.

I've remarked in the past that zettelkasten methods very closely mimic the various levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, which outlines broadly how people learn and grow: https://hypothes.is/a/c8jzkLHgEeyUhBs5w48csg

Much like Umberto Eco (How to Write a Thesis), in the closing paragraphs of his essay, Goutor finally indicates that note cards can potentially be reused for multiple projects because each one "contains a piece of information which does not depend on a specific context for its value." While providing an example of how this might work, he goes even further by not only saying that "note-cards should never be discarded" but that they might be "recycled" by passing them on to "another interested party" while saying that their value and usefulness is dependent upon how well they may have adhered to some of the most basic note taking methods. (p35)

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw

Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout

I love that he closes the pamphlet again with a nod to comfort and ease of use.

...what this pamphlet has sought to do is to make it possible for the researcher to develop a way of doing things which will be as productive and as comfortable as possible.

...the historian is only as good as his card-file.<br /> —Jacques Goutor, (p360

Goutor only mentions two potential organizational patterns for creating output with one's card index: either by chronological order or topical order. (p34) This might be typical for a historian who is likely to be more interested in chronologies and who would have likely noted down dates within their notes.

Goutor doesn't specifically cover the process, but ostensibly after one has categorized content notes, they are filed together in one's box under that heading. (p34) As a result, there is no specific indexing or cross-indexing of cards or ideas which might be filed under multiple headings. In fact, he doesn't approach the idea of filing under multiple headings at all, while authors like Heyde (1931) obsess over it. Goutor's method also presumes that the creation of some of the subject headings is to be done in the planning stages of the project, though in practice some may arise as one works. This process is more similar to that seen in Robert Greene's commonplacing method using index cards.

I love the phrasing of the title of his penultimate section "Making the card-file work", which makes it seem like the card file is ultimately doing the work of writing. Ultimately however, it's the work that was put into it that makes the card file useful, a sentiment that Jacques Goutor emphasizes when he says "How well this succeeds depends partly upon what was put into the file, and partly on how it was put in." (p34)

Thesis to bear out (only tangentially related to this particular text):

Part of the reason that index card files didn't catch on, especially in America, was that they didn't have a solid/concrete name by which they went. The generic term card index subsumed so much in relation to library card catalogues or rolodexes which had very specific functions and individualized names. Other cultures had more descriptive names like zettelkasten or fichier boîte which, while potentially bland within their languages, had more specific names for what they were.

Goutor recommends cross-referencing or linking ideas between cards "at the bottom of the note-card, as soon as the note itself is completed." Links shouldn't be trusted to memory and should be noted as soon as possible. Further he recommends periodically sorting through cards and adding adding additional cross references as one ruminates. While he indicates that cross-referencing may seem "cumbersome at first sight, experience will show that it enhances the usefulness of the card file when the time comes to retrieve the information it contains." (p32-33)

Beyond this he doesn't indicate any additional benefits of creativity or serendipity that have been seen in similar treatises.

...the usefulness of a note-taking system has an ultimate limit beyond which it becomes self-defeating. [...] After all, the ultimate purpose of the exercise is not to produce beautiful notes displaying the researcher's technical prowess, but rather usable notes to build the mosaic.<br /> —Jacques Goutor (p33)

Unlike many manuals on note taking, Goutor suggest a few methods of note categorization beyond adding typical headwords. These include adding top or side edge notches using a paper punch, colored cards, or adding colored flags. However he does note some potential problems and limitations of these methods including being cumbersome or limiting (by colors available, for example). (p31-32)

Goutor breaks down the post-processing of notes into two phases: "coding" (tagging or categorization) and "cross-referencing". (p31).

Goutor mentions that the innovation of photocopying, while potentially useful in some cases, isn't a replacement for actual reading and proper note taking. (p30) These same sorts of affordances and problems might be similar in the newer digital/online realm for people who rely on either whole scale copy/pasting or highlight capturing of texts, but who don't do the actual work of reading, processing, and creating good notes.

Some of the benefits like portability, ease of access, ability to work with delicate primary materials, better facsimiles of things like maps or tables, etc. are still true.

Unlike many note taking manuals, Goutor advises that within the small list of rules and standards which he's laid out, one should otherwise default to maximizing the comfort of their note taking system. This may be as small as using one's favorite writing instruments or inks. (p28)

It's nice to see him centering self-care and small things which contribute to the researchers' mental health within note taking design and user interface.

For the second time Goutor mentions using different size cards for different note types, but doesn't specifically advise for it or provide a reason. Perhaps his advice for consistency and card size applies only to cards of particular types? (p28)

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/XPphjkNZEe2s3i9VV4qt1g

Incidentally he also specifically mentions 7x9" cards here too. How frequently used were these as a standard?

Unlike many note taking manuals, Goutor advises for consistency in method and use as a means of improving efficiency. He extends this specifically to choosing card sizes (though this only goes as far as particular note types: i.e. bibliographic notes versus content notes), card colors, layout of cards, and card classification. (p28)

It's frequent in practice, however, that many people make small incremental changes in their workflows and systems over time. In some cases, people have been known to make dramatic changes, like changes in platforms, or start over from scratch (example: that of Luhmann who started ZKII after many years of building ZKI).

As is common in the tradition of the zettelkasten, Goutor advises "that each note-card should contain only one item of information, whether a quotation, a summary, or anything else". (p28) He ascribes this requirement to his earlier need for clarity. (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/SfWFwENIEe2KfGMbR5n7Qg)

He indicates that while it may seem wasteful to have only one item on each card that the savings in time, efficiency in handling, classification, and retrieval will more than compensate for the small waste.

This sort of small local waste being compensated for by a larger global savings and efficiency can be seen in the design of the shipping container industry as discussed in Mark Levinson's The Box (Princeton University Press, 2008). Was this the exact sort of efficiency mentioned by Ahrens'? (Compare at https://hypothes.is/a/t4i32IXoEeyF2n9jQxu6BA)

The design of Goutor's note taking method is such that each note should have "a life of its own, so that it can stand independently of every other one in the file." (p28) This concept is broadly similar to the ideas of both atomic notes and evergreen notes in related contexts.

Goutor says that a note's life stems from its identity by means of its bibliographic source, its unique content, and its ultimate purpose. Here he uses the singular "purpose" and doesn't explicitly use "purposes" thereby indicating that an individual note can have multiple potential lives in different places within one's lifetime of work. It seems most likely that he may not have thought of using ideas in multiple different locations, but again, his particular audience (see: https://hypothes.is/a/8jKcTkNPEe2sCntTfNWf2Q) may have also dictated this choice. One could argue that it would have been quite easy for him to have used the plural to suggest the idea simply and tangentially, but that his use of the singular here is specifically because the idea wasn't part of his note taking worldview.

Goutor defines self-help notes as notes which one would use to refresh their memory about what remains to be done or researched, problems that remain to be solved, or information which is needed to be researched or found. (p26) These are akin in some sense to what I call "open questions". He also indicates that these notes might be triggered by one's daily activities or occasional musings which relate to one's project but occur outside of its active pursuit. In this sense, they have a similar feel to the idea of Ahrens' fleeting notes, but in Goutor's practice they aren't defined as occurring while one is doing active reading or research.

He suggests that one keeps these notes in a separate area so that they might be systematically and regularly visited for review, further research, or answering as the opportunities to do so present themselves. Once the questions have been answered and appropriate notes updated or added, these self-help notes can be discarded.

On page 24, Goutor cross references one note to another, but only does so at the level of the bigger book or text and not at the level of the individual notes themselves.

Was this on purpose?

Goutor recommended using subject headings as a marginal annotations on one's note cards to "indicate[s] the preliminary coding to be used in classifying" a note. (p21)

While he previously recommended using note cards of the same size, the examples in Goutor (1980) have 3x5" cards for bibliographic notes and 5x7" or larger cards for content notes. (p19, 21)

Is there a reason stated anywhere here for this discrepancy or change? One would ostensibly keep them in different places/sections of one's card index, but does the size difference help to differentiate the two to aid in sorting? Is the larger card intended to hold more long form writing?

Goutor is in Canada, so were 5x7" cards more common or standardized there in the late 1970s and early 80s?

A5 measures 148 × 210 millimeters or 5.83 × 8.27 inches, so is a bit larger than 5x7".

5x7" is a more standard photo size, so was this chosen as the result of storage options from the photography space?

5x7" is scantly available in America in 2022, but only from Hamilco. A few others make cardstock in that size but not specifically as index cards.

Jacques Goutor defines content notes as those that "are drawn in one way or another from the actual contents of the sources." He considers them the most important part of note taking as "they will eventually constitute the pieces of the mosaic." (p20)

He further breaks this type down into generally self-explanatory "quote notes" and "summary notes". (p20) He does advise that one writes out careful summaries so that one needn't do additional future work of writing notes on one's own notes. While he doesn't state it directly, the presumption in his presentation is that a well written summary can be directly used in one's future written project.

Compare this type of note to others like evergreen or permanent notes.

Noting the dates of available materials within archives or sources can be useful on bibliography notes for either planning or revisiting sources. (p16,18)

Similarly one ought to note missing dates, data, volumes, or resources at locations to prevent unfruitfully looking for data in these locations or as a note to potentially look for the missing material in other locations. (p16)

When interviewing subjects, one should not only note the date, time, and location, but get (preferably written) permission to (record) or quote them. Notes about their memory, recall, or behavior may be useful, if nothing else as a reminder for crossing checking their information with other potential sources.

Not mentioned in any other sources I've consulted (yet), Goutor recommends adding notes about the physical location of bibliographic sources to bibliographic notes. This should include details about not only the library and even call numbers, to minimize needing to look them up again in the future, but to have notes about arrangements and contacts which may needed to revisit harder to access resources. (p14) This can also be useful for sources like maps which may be needed for higher quality reproduction in the final text. (p15)

Goutor recommended the use of bibliographic cards not only for their standard uses as sourcing, information, and footnotes, but for creating potential scopes of work and research for planning purposes, especially in planning out one's reading and note taking using various archives and resources to make more effective and productive use of one's time. (p13) This can be potentially very useful for visiting archives and sources for which one does not have easy or frequent access.

Goutor acknowledges that there are a variety of note types, but focuses on bibliographic notes, content notes, and self-help notes as being the most common and most important. (p12)

These first two are broadly self-explanatory, but the third should be intriguing given the other literature in which this type is rarely, if ever, used. We'll see what comes of it...

Having an easily repeatable, mechanical process of note taking can free up the cognitive space one might otherwise spend on making sure that it works for them in the long run.

Simple and sometimes dull activities like always starting by writing down sources of material in full, can save one immeasurable amounts of time in tracking down these pieces at a later date when they will be needed, especially in relation to the miniscule time and effort doing so takes upfront. (p12)

Perhaps in large part because of his narrow local audience of amateur historians, Goutor's detailing of note taking method included several pages on early research preparation before taking any notes at all. Some of this was to ensure that extant potential materials for one's subject actually existed, in cases where a researcher might run into issues of availability. It also took into account the public audiences they might be serving and what those audiences would expect in terms of level of detail, resources, photos, maps, charts, etc. (p 9-11)

This is in marked contrast with the broader audiences of writers like Eco and Ahrens who presumed either extended research needs for either masters or Ph.D. theses, or, in Ahrens' case, life long researchers at universities or journalists, though Eco did make a nod in this direction at the end of his work. With a broader area of applicability, one's collection of notes might also help to guide their particular interests into a variety of tangential or related areas. Goutor either didn't see this longer term value, or curtailed his efforts here because of the scope of his audience.

There is a difference between various modes of note taking and their ultimate outcomes. Some is done for learning about an area and absorbing it into one's own source of general knowledge. Others are done to collect and generate new sorts of knowledge. But some may be done for raw data collection and analysis. Beatrice Webb called this "scientific note taking".

Historian Jacques Goutor talks about research preparation for this sort of data collecting and analysis though he doesn't give it a particular name. He recommends reading papers in related areas to prepare for the sort of data acquisition one may likely require so that one can plan out some of one's needs in advance. This will allow the researcher, especially in areas like history or sociology, the ability to preplan some of the sorts of data and notes they'll need to take from their historical sources or subjects in order to carry out their planned goals. (p8)

C. Wright Mills mentions (On Intellectual Craftsmanship, 1952) similar research planning whereby he writes out potential longer research methods even when he is not able to spend the time, effort, energy, or other (financial) resources to carry out such plans. He felt that just the thought experiments and exercise of doing such unfulfilled research often bore fruit in his other sociological endeavors.

The goals of a note taking system or method should be that the resulting notes are clear, concise, complete, searchable, and easily manipulated for creating end-products.

If these criteria aren't met, then the work involved in making them may be wasted or require additional (unnecessary) time and effort to make them manageable and useful.

(p7)

For physical note taking on index cards or visualizations provided by computer generated graphs, one can physically view a mass of notes and have a general feeling if there is a large enough corpus to begin writing an essay, chapter, or book or if one needs to do additional research on a topic, or perhaps pick a different topic on which to focus.

(parts suggested by p7, though broadly obvious)

Much like Gerald Weinberg's fieldstone metaphor for note taking and writing, Jacques Goutor frames the process as creating a mosaic of information "fit [...] into meaningful patterns" whether they be narratives, charts, or other forms.

(p6)

Goutor comments, like many before him, that it is common to take notes on notebook paper in longer form, but that this is inadvisable as it is much harder to impose a useful order or classification on such work. He does mention scissors as a means of cutting up such notes, but comments that "a mass of slips of paper of varying sizes [can be] difficult to arrange and potentially useless unless care has been taken to note the source of each separate entry."

He also repeats the frequent admonitions that one should take notes only on one side and to use cards of a uniform size.

(p6)

The act of note taking acts as a filter between original sources of information and the potential outputs the individual note taker may have an interest in creating.

(rephrasing from p4)

me: This level of interest and filtering for potential outputs is part of what creates the individuality of each person's ultimate notes, and in part, is why attempts at creating some sort of universal excerpting project are doomed to failure in the end. No one can excerpt all the pieces from a text that future readers may find interesting, intriguing, or particularly useful, especially when future interests may not yet be delineated or even known at the time of excerpting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ27r6YGpAs

Mary Oliver, poet

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/mary-olivers-poetry-captures-our-relationship-technology/589039/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Will</span> in Review of “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” (1952) by C. Wright Mills — Zettelkasten Forum (<time class='dt-published'>10/04/2022 10:44:44</time>)</cite></small>

Read 2022-10-10 00:35

https://www.folia.com/iannotate/

This annotation application appears to be only for iOS platforms only at the moment.

https://venturebeat.com/business/box-is-shutting-down-crocodoc-personal-and-webnotes-on-november-1/

https://www.zettlr.com/

https://cosma.graphlab.fr/<br /> https://cosma.graphlab.fr/en/

When did this come out?

Appears to be a visualization tool for knowledge work. They recommend it for use with Zettlr, but it looks like it would work with other text based tools. Point it at markdown files to create graphs apparently.

This looks like the sort of standards based tool that would allow greater flexibility when using various data stores that we talk about in Friends of the Link.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Arthur Perret </span> in And you, what are you doing? (<time class='dt-published'>08/31/2022 02:40:03</time>)</cite></small>

@flancian

https://www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2022-05-20-et-toi-qu-est-ce-que-tu-fiches.html

http://www.greyroom.org/issues/60/20/the-dialectic-of-the-university-his-masters-voice/

“The Indexers pose with the file of Great Ideas. At sides stand editors [Mortimer] Adler (left) and [William] Gorman (right). Each file drawer contains index references to a Great Idea. In center are the works of the 71 authors which constitute the Great Books.” From “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog,” Life 24, no. 4 (26 January 1948). Photo: George Skadding.

Photos from

"The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog," Life, 26 January 1948, 92–3.

https://screencast-o-matic.com/

Recommended by Greg McVerry

Index cards for commonplacing?

I know that Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday have talked about their commonplace methods using index cards before, and Mortimer J. Adler et al. used index cards with commonplacing methods in their Great Books/Syntopicon project, but is anyone else using this method? Where or from whom did you learn/hear about using index cards? What benefits do you feel you're getting over a journal or notebook-based method? Mortimer J. Adler smoking a pipe amidst a sea of index cards in boxes with 102 topic labels (examples: Law, World, Love, Life, Being, Sin, Art, Citizen, Change, etc.)

The Empire of Cards sounds like such an interesting epitaph for a well-practiced scholar. https://books.openedition.org/pressesenssib/6247

syndication link

rhoi<br /> gweithio<br /> meddwl<br /> i fi<br /> i ti<br /> yn galed<br /> am hynny<br /> Bydda i'n<br /> Fydda' i ddim yn<br /> Fory<br /> amdani<br /> diolch<br /> Byddi di'n...<br /> Fyddi di ddim yn...<br /> Fyddi di'n...?<br /> Byddaf, bydda i'n...<br /> Na (fyddaf), fydda'i ddim yn...<br /> Helo<br /> Bore da<br /> Ti'n iawn?<br /> Ydw, diolch yn fawr.<br /> Mae'n ddrwg 'da fi.<br /> Dw i ddim yn siarad Cymraeg yn dda iawn.<br /> Paid siarad Saesneg gyda fi, plîs.<br /> Ti'n siarad braidd yn glou.<br /> Siarada'n arafach, plîs.<br /> Siwd mae'r gwaith?<br /> Fel 'na mae.<br /> ...yndefe.<br /> Ti'n moyn coffi / dishgled o de?<br /> Dere 'mlaen 'te.<br /> 'Na ddigon!<br /> Mae isie i ni siarad Saesneg nawr!

Llaeth<br /> bara<br /> cig<br /> caws<br /> ci<br /> cath<br /> mae<br /> gyda<br /> ifanc<br /> hen<br /> heno<br /> y<br /> yr<br /> 'r<br /> Mae ... gyda fi / ti<br /> Does dim ... gyda fi / ti<br /> Oes ... gyda ti?<br /> Oes, mae ... gyda fi.<br /> Nag oes, does dim ... gyda fi.<br /> Mae isie i fi / ti...<br /> Oes isie i fi / ti...<br /> Oes, mae isie i fi...<br /> Nag oes, does dim isie i fi...

a<br /> ac<br /> ond<br /> neu<br /> yn dda<br /> yn barod<br /> yn hapus<br /> Wnest ti...<br /> Wnest ti ddim...<br /> Wnest ti...?<br /> Do, wnes i...<br /> Naddo, wnes i ddim...

To finish - cwpla<br /> To buy - prynu<br /> To come - dod<br /> To sleep - cysgu<br /> To take - cymryd<br /> To see - gweld<br /> I'm going to speak - Dw i'n mynd i siarad<br /> I'm not going to speak - Dw i ddim yn mynd i siarad<br /> You're going to speak - Ti'n mynd i siarad<br /> You're not going to speak - Ti ddim yn mynd i siarad<br /> I spoke - Wnes i siarad<br /> I didn't speak - Wnes i ddim siarad

How - sut<br /> What - beth<br /> Something - rhywbeth<br /> Nothing - dim byd<br /> Why - pam<br /> Because - achos<br /> Him - fe, e<br /> You're speaking - Ti'n siarad<br /> You're not speaking - Ti ddim yn siarad<br /> Are you speaking? Wyt ti'n siarad?<br /> Yes, I'm speaking - Yndw, dw i'n siarad<br /> No, I'm not speaking - Nac ydw, dw i ddim yn siarad

I'm trying - dwi'n trio<br /> I'm not trying - dwi ddim yn trio<br /> To like - hoffi<br /> To speak - siarad<br /> Welsh - Cymraeg<br /> To go - mynd<br /> To stay - aros<br /> To do - gwneud<br /> To say - dweud<br /> To be able - gallu<br /> To know - gwybod<br /> To want - moyn<br /> You're speaking - ti'n siarad

https://youtu.be/ILuSxUYYjMs

Luhmann zettelkasten origin myth at 165 second mark

A short outline of several numbering schemes (essentially all decimal in nature) for zettelkasten including: - Luhmann's numbering - Bob Doto - Scott Scheper - Dan Allosso - Forrest Perry

A little light on the "why", though it does get location as a primary focus. Misses the idea of density and branching. Touches on but broadly misses the arbitrariness of using the comma, period, or slash which functions primarily for readability.

One might suggest that the freedom, flexibility, and customization of these systems is actually an unuseful time suck for many users which only encourages shiny object syndrome. From a design perspective, try starting out building a system that works for you before beginning on design for others. Research and looking at the user interfaces offered by the competition will helpful as well. Which are the most popular? fun to use? Why? What actual affordances do those interfaces and functionalities allow? are they truly productive?

Possibly more productive, what sorts of standards can you leverage to make people's pre-existing notes more useful? Can you take pre-existing stores of .txt or .md files and provide different views or perspectives on them? This will allow people to pick and choose which applications might work with their stores of data to provide different views or perspectives on them. Why reinvent a text editor or tools like Logseq or Obsidian when you can leverage the local stores of data to provide the sorts of services you're not seeing in the broader space? For example, on the "social media" side, there are existing solutions for taking your locally stored notes, putting them into the cloud and displaying them on the web, but the various steps are highly technical and require a relatively large amount of work and admin tax to maintain. A service that allows one to point at their local store of data and automatically host it on a website and keep it synced would be a major boon for the non-technical user.

Separately, Matuschak did not invent evergreen notes. The first clear cut instantiation I've seen in the literature is from Konrad Gessner in 1548, and honestly even his idea really stems from a longstanding tradition of working with commonplace sententiae preceding his work. (see https://hypothes.is/a/uEboYlOwEeykkotYs594LA) Matuschak simply applied the definition/idea of "evergreen" (meaning easily reusable) articles or content from journalism to describe his notes which could be reused in various contexts. (Example: Why rewrite an article on how to decorate and entertain for the holidays, when you can reuse the same article you've been publishing for years, perhaps along with some updated photos?) "Atomic" notes is another variation on this same theme, but is one which underlies the ability to re-use notes in combination with one or more other notes to generate new ideas.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089155/characters/nm0823462

Frank, Thomas. The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. Metropolitan Books, 2020, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250220110/thepeopleno

Dan Allosso mentioned favorably in [[Dan Allosso Book Club]] week 2 of reading Poorly Understood.

https://social.ayjay.org/2022/09/30/collections-on-microblog.html

http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2017/12/tuchman-on-mechanics-of-research.html

archive copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20180201144612/http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2017/12/tuchman-on-mechanics-of-research.html

http://johannadaniel.fr/isidoreganesh/2014/12/ecriture-connectee-experience-redaction-memoire/

Files and reading sheets around the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe

And you thought your slip boxes were DIY?!?

Pardon my use of English. I'm curious if you ultimately found the best research method for yourself? Did you publish it? Being interested in reading practices and annotation myself I can't wait to read your thesis, though it may take some time given the dreadful state of my French capabilities.

Thank you for your reflection on Barthes' particular method (and especially the photos)! If you're interested to dig further I found a few references that expand significantly on Barthes' fichier boîte method in the following short journal articles: - Hollier, Denis. “Notes (On the Index Card).” October, vol. 112, no. Spring, 2005, pp. 35–44. - Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine, vol. 11, 2010, pp. 7–30.

Having delved into it reasonably, it stems from the commonplace book tradition which moved to slips of paper (index cards) in the late 1500s with Konrad Gessner. Ernst Bernheim (German) and shortly after Charles Langlois & Charles Seignobos (French) wrote about some of their research methods in popular textbooks about historical method in the late 1800s. Paul Chavigny also wrote a manual in French in the early 1920s. One of the best versions of this method I've seen is by Umberto Eco (How to Write a Thesis (1977, 2015) though there are also German and English editions of Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes (2017) which describes a similar zettelkasten method used by prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, about whom there is a significant archive: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/. It would be helpful to have more written methods like these, but apparently much of these traditions is handed down orally. Having glanced at some of your other methods posts, it almost looks like you've recast the general tradition using colorful Post-It Notes.

If you did finally outline your ultimate method, I'd love to read it.

Thanks again!

syndication link

http://johannadaniel.fr/isidoreganesh/2015/06/archives-roland-barthes/

Translation:

There is one point in particular that strikes me more every day: what the archive of yesterday's researcher can teach today's researcher, in terms of methodology.

With the rarer exceptions of writers like Erasmus, Melanchthon, Agricola, U. Eco, and G. Weinberg who wrote manuals or others like John Locke (on Indices), E. Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, and B. Webb who tucked reasonable advice on research and note taking methods in their texts or appendices one of the benefits of of researcher archives is not just the historical record of the researcher's evolving thought, but to actually show specific types of methodology and changes through time.

https://tana.inc/

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/a-tinderbox-solution-to-organising-a-zettelkasten/3073

https://social.ayjay.org/2022/09/27/the-workshop.html

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ayjay/an-announcement-1407661

Tinderbox really is a fantastic name for a note taking / personal knowledge management system. Just the idea makes me want to paint flames on the sides of my physical card index. https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

syndication link

https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/

Mastodon.technology is shutting down by 2022-12-01 due to personal and admin tax related reasons. Sounds like it's being done in an ethical and reasonably kind way.

https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc78608x

Just as in Jason Lustig's paper about Gotthard Deutsch's zettelkasten, here is an example of an outside observer bemoaning the idea of things not done with a deceased's corpus of notes.

It's almost like looking at the "corpus" of notes being reminiscent of the person who has died and thinking about what could have bee if they had left. It gives the impression that, "here are their ideas" or "here is their brain and thoughts" loosely connected. Almost as if they are still with us, in a way that doesn't quite exist when looking at their corpus of books.

The Fonds Roland Barthes (English: The Roland Barthes Fund) at the Bibliothèque National De France refers to his card index or fichier boîte written from 1968-1980 as the 'Grand fichier'.

See also: https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc78608x/cN77017

Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary.

Are there examples of this practice before this time? Certainly in the commonplace book tradition, the ideas of journal, diary, and commonplace had been mixed before.

Roland Barthes began using index cards as a student.

1. BNF, NAF 28630, ‘Grand fichier’, 3 January 1975.

Roland Barthes' biographer Tiphaine Samoyault quotes portions of what he calls Barthes' card index diary.

This can also be seen in the published cards which comprise Barthes' Mourning Diary about the period following his mother's death.

Are there other people who've used their card index as a diary the way that some use it for productivity?

syndication link

Samoyault, Tiphaine, and Jonathan Culler. Barthes: A Biography. Translated by Andrew Brown, 1st edition, Polity, 2017.

Barbara Tuchman analogized stopping one's research to going out on a date: one should leave off a half-hour before you really want to.

Liink to: This sounds suspiciously like advice about when to start writing, but slightly in reverse: https://hypothes.is/a/WeoX9DUOEe2-HxsJf2P8vw

One might also liken these processes to the idea of divergence and convergence as described by Tiago Forte and others.

For creating narrative, Barbara Tuchman apparently relied on grouping her note cards by subject, person, or chronological sequence.

Barbara Tuchman recommended using the smallest sized index cards possible to force one only to "extract the strictly relevant" because copying by hand can be both "a chore and a bore".

In the same address in 1963, she encourages "distill[ing] from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one's own mind, so to speak." This practice is similar to modern day pedagogues who encourage this practice, but with the benefit of psychology research to back up the practice.

This advice is two-fold in terms of filtering out the useless material for an author, but the grinder metaphor indicates placing multiple types of material in to to a processor to see what new combinations of products come out the other end. This touches more subtly on the idea of combinatorial creativity encouraged by Raymond Llull, Matt Ridley, et al. or the serendipity described by Niklas Luhmann and others.

When did the writing for understanding idea begin within the tradition? Was it through experience in part and then underlined with psychology research? Visit Ahrens' references on this for particular papers to read.

Link to modality shift research.

Tuchman, Barbara W. Practicing History. Ballantine, 1982.

Religions are ever-evolving ideas and practices, and like rivers, which are broadly similar and recognizable even over spans of time, can never be practiced or experienced the same way twice.

Active historical amnesia is a feature that can dramatically disrupt and change human culture. Naturally this can be either a good or a bad thing depending on the subsequent changes with respect to broader society. Given stronger historical context, however, one might better plan for future changes and benefits.

Historical amnesia is harder to implement in smaller, close knit Indigenous oral communities, but with the right conditions in highly connected and dramatically diverse world wide communities it can be implemented at mass scale as has been shown by recent social media and political shifts creating a post-truth society.

Religion co-evolves with the people, places, and times in which it exists. Much like human genes, it works at the level of the individual, the local group, the larger groups and communities (of both the religion itself as well as the polities around it), and when applicable at the scale of all people on the planet.

The Selfish Religion: How far might we take this religion/gene analogy with respect to Richard Dawkins' thesis (1976). Does religion act more like a gene that is part of the particular person or is it more like a virus which inserts itself? The latter may be closer as one can pick and choose a religion rather than it being a core part of their genetic identity.

(highlight: anchor only)

Johnson, Luke Timothy. The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation. The Teaching Company, 2012, https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-history-of-christianity-from-the-disciples-to-the-dawn-of-the-reformation

http://collections.americanjewisharchives.org/ms/ms0123/ms0123.html

https://jan.boddez.net/notes/77092796ed

🤩

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/notes-against-note-taking-systems

The writer rails against note taking systems, and then suggests a note taking system (commonplace books)?!? What a sad circular argument.

Of course, far too many get stuck in the idea of productivity porn and that is a problem... rail against that...

The cards in Deutch's zettelkasten were well cited, typically using abbreviations which appeared in the bottom right of each card, and often with multiple citations.

Deutch's zettelkasten is well cross-referenced and he showed a preference for doing these in red type.

While many of Deutsch's cards were initially written by hand, the majority of them are typewritten and included blank spaces for Hebrew words when required.

I quite like the wording of this sentence.

This would seem to contradict his statements about some of the orderings and chaos earlier.

One must also ask the question about use and curation of the collection following his death?

According to Lustig, Gotthard Deutsch's zettelkasten had limited metadata and cross-references didn't always connect to concrete endings. (p12)

This fact can help to better define the Wikipedia page on zettelkasten.

Lustig provides a description of some of the order of Gotthard Deutsch's zettelkasten. Most of it seemed to have been organized by chronological, geographical and thematic means, but often there was chaos. This could be indicative of many things including broad organization levels, but through active use, he may have sorted and resorted cards as needs required. Upon replacing cards he may not have defaulted to some specific order relying on the broad levels and knowing what state he had left things last. Though regular use, this wouldn't concern an individual the way it might concern outsiders who may not understand the basic orderings (as did Lustig) or be able to discern and find things as quickly as he may have been able to.

Deutsch used flimsy copy paper, much like Niklas Luhmann, and as a result some are on the verge of disintegration through use over time.

The wear of the paper here, however, is indicative of active use over time as well as potential care in use, a useful historical fact.

Deutsch's zettelkasten consisted of about 50 boxes and was done in alphabetical and chronological order.

Deutsch's zettelkasten seems to have been done in index style using headwords as was common in the older commonplace tradition.

a photograph.

Deutsch's zettelkasten has a variety of patterns including cuttings from newspapers, photos, excerpts, some were handwritten while others were typed, (and some showing many of these all at once!).

Zettelkasten, if nothing else, are a close reflection of the interests of the author who collected them.

link: Ahrens mentions this

Just as people chided Niklas Luhmann for his obtuseness in writing based on his zettelkasten, Gotthard Deutsch's critics felt he didn't write enough using his.

Translation: 'The historian cares about the smallest things.'

Look up these references to confirm scope of numbers.

This sounds similar to the variety of calls to do collaborative card indexes for scientific efforts, particularly those found in the fall of 1899 in the journal Science.

This is also very similar to Mortimer J. Adler et al's group collaboration to produce The Syntopicon as well as his work on Propædia and Encyclopædia Britannica.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/nvWZnuApEeuKR--5AeBv8w

Find this quote and context!

This scientific viewpoint of history was not unique to the time and can be seen ensconced in popular books on historical method of the time, including Bernheim and Langlois/Seignobos.

Deutsch's encyclopedia work here sounds similar to that of Mortimer J. Adler who used a card index in much the same way.

first-century rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (Mishnah Avot 2:9) and alluded to what some termed on other occasions his ‘marvelous memory for detail’, ‘encyclopedic mind’, or ‘inexhaustible stores of memory’ that allowed him to furnish his ‘convincing array of facts’ 5 (Heller, 1916; L. F., 1919; Mendelsohn, 1916; Schulman, 1922; Stolz, 1921). However, it was perhaps not Deutsch himself who was a ‘cistern’ but instead his card catalogue where he stored drops of data growing to a sea of erudition and which served as a prosthesis for his legendary recall (see Figure 1).

While the practice with his zettelkasten may have been helpful, it's quite likely that given these quotes about his memory that they're evidence of the use of the major system which would have been quite popular and well known at his time, but which isn't now.

The author is going to need to provide evidence one way or another, but I suspect they're not aware of the mnemonic traditions of the time to make the opposite case.

Given the late 1880's time and German and US locations, it's quite likely that Gotthard Deutsch practiced mnemonics and in particular the major mnemonic system.

This quote is tangential evidence of this.

Max Raisin indicated that Gotthard Deutsch read several events with dates out of a little notebook during lectures. Was this really a notebook or possibly a small stack/deck of index cards? The could certainly be easily mistaken....

Check these references

Apparently a colleague wrote about Deutsch's "game of cards" as a description of hit use of a zettelkasten. The play here is reminiscent of the joy Ahrens talks about when doing research/reading/writing (2017).

Lustig is calling an academic zettelkasten a "useless exercise" and a "delusional preoccupation"!! He also indicates that it "represented a certain forward-facing openness to new ways of managing information", something which is patently wrong within the history of information.

Hebrew University Jewish mysticism scholar Gershom Scholem's zettelkasten has its own reading room at the National Library of Israel.

Gershom Scholem (1897-1982)

reference for this quote? date?

Walter Benjamin's fantastic re-definition of a book presaged the invention of the internet, though his instantiation was as a paper based machine.

It would seem that Lustig is calling the practice of keeping a zettelkasten as an "illogical extreme" and "plainly outmoded".

(His reference to "illogical extreme" may be a referent to the truth portion, but "outmoded" can only refer to the zettelkasten itself as applying that to truth either then or now just doesn't track.)

From where did Deutsch learn his zettelkasten method? And when? Bernheim's influential Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889) was published long after Deutsch entered seminary in October 1876 and 9 years before he received his Ph.D. in history in1881.

One must potentially posit that the zettelkasten method was being passed along in (at least history circles) long before Bernheim's publication.

I'm hoping that Lustig isn't referring to zettelkasten when he says "novel methods", as they weren't novel, even at that time. Deutsch certainly wasn't the first to have comprehensive encyclopedic visions, as Zettelkasten practitioner Konrad Gessner preceded him by several centuries.

I'm starting to severely question Lustig's familiarity with these particular traditions....

Gotthard Deutsch, Divine and Writer, Dies of Pneumonia’, 21 Oct. 1921, American Jewish Archives (AJA), Cincinnati, OH, MS-123 Oversize Box 313; Chicago Rabbinical Association, ‘Gotthard Deutsch Memorial Resolutions’, 31 Oct. 1921, AJA MS-123 1/17.

An obituary calling a Zettelkasten "mere chips from his workshop" seems more indicative of the lack of knowledge of what one is and how it is used than a historian of information or academic with knowledge of the tradition calling it such.

This quote from 1921 is also broadly indicative of the potential fact that the idea of zettelkasten for academic use was not widely known by the general public, if in fact, it ever had been.

Is it appropriate to call a zettelkasten of 70,000 a "cabinet of curiosities"? They really are dramatically different forms of media, though a less discerning modern viewer might conflate the two to make a comparison.

Cross reference notes on article: urn:x-pdf:6053dd751da0fa870cad9a71a28882ba

https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A6053dd751da0fa870cad9a71a28882ba

Where does this fit with respect to the zettelkasten tradition and Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos?

Given the time period (1859-1921), what was the potential influence, if any, on Deutsch and his methods by historical methods writers and the evolution of the science of history by Ernst Bernheim or Seignobos/Langlois from that same period?

Curious how Deutsch's 70,000 facts would be middling compared to Luhmann's 90,000? - How many years did Deutsch maintain and collect his version?<br /> - How many publications did he contribute to? - Was his also used for teaching?

Otlet didn't create his collection alone did he? Wasn't it a massive group effort?

Check into Gershom Scholem's collection and use. I've not come across his work in this space.

From his bibliography, it appears that Deutsch was a prolific writer and teacher, so how will Lustig (or others he mentions) make the case that his card index was useless "chips from his workshop"? Certainly he used them in writing his books, articles, and newspaper articles? He also was listed as a significant contributor to an encyclopedia as well.

It'd be interesting to look at the record to see if he taught with them the way Roland Barthes was known to have done.

Gotthard Deutsch (1859-1921) had a card index of 70,000 items relating to Jewish history.

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

Leopold von Ranke's argument that God gazes over history and finds all periods equal is very similar to a framing of history from the viewpoint of statistical thermodynamics: it's all the same material floating around, it just takes different states at different times.

link to: https://hyp.is/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw/3stages.org/c/gq_title.cgi?list=1045&ti=Foucault%27s%20Pendulum%20(Eco)

Who is the father of the method of historical understanding?

https://academic.oup.com/book/9329/chapter-abstract/156108952?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Does Droysen cover any note taking or academic research methods the way Bernheim or Langlois and Seignobos did?

I posted a follow up question in the NaNoWriMo forum, which may get some additional traction: https://forums.nanowrimo.org/t/linking-up-zettelkasten-or-card-index-method-writers/433719

I'm more of a "pantser" (vs planner) when it comes to NaNoWriMo, but if you think about it, zettelkasten provides a solid structure that builds your plan for you as you go.

https://forums.nanowrimo.org/t/linking-up-zettelkasten-or-card-index-method-writers/433719

Looking for writers who are using an index card-based, Zettelkasten (German translation: slip box), or fichier boîte method for writing. Both traditional methods in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Ende, Anne Lamott, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, or Robert Pirsig as well as Niklas Luhmann-esque methods (perhaps better for non-fiction) are fine.

Commonplace book practitioners are also welcome.

How many index cards will it take you to get to 50,000 words? (Reminder: It’s easier to write a few sentences or an index card at a time than focusing on thousands of words a day…)

Even if your raw typing is 60+ wpm, it doesn't help if you're actively composing at the same time. If the words and ideas come to you at that speed and you can get it out, great, but otherwise focus on what you can do in 15 minute increments to get the ideas onto the page. If typing is holding you back, write by hand or try a tape recorder or voice to text software.

https://www.researchrabbit.ai/

Broadly the zettelkasten tradition grew out of commonplacing in the 1500s, in part, because it was easier to arrange and re-arrange one's thoughts on cards for potential reuse in outlining and writing. Most zettelkasten are just index card-based forms of commonplaces, though some following Niklas Luhmann's model have a higher level of internal links, connections, and structure.

I wrote a bit about some of these traditions (especially online ones) a while back at: https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/03/differentiating-online-variations-of-the-commonplace-book-digital-gardens-wikis-zettlekasten-waste-books-florilegia-and-second-brains/

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/card-file-robert-morris-11090

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/robert-morris-1931-2018-card-file

card file as art!

Sophie Stévance and Catrina Flint de Médicis. “Marcel Duchamp’s Musical Secret Boxed in the Tradition of the Real: A New Instrumental Paradigm.” Perspectives of New Music, vol. 45, no. 2, 2007, pp. 150–70. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25164661

Thanks for the pointer @Will and for sharing your notes! We definitely need better and easier ways of sharing notes like this.