relationship with zettelkasten in the history of historical methods?

They write this, but was it before or after Luhmann wrote his essay on Communication with the Slip Box to suggest the idea? Presumably there was heavy influence here.

18 Von Bülow and Krusche, “Vorla ̈ ufiges,” 273.

Hans Blumenberg's first zettelkasten dates to the early 1940s, but was lost during the war though he continued the practice afterwards. The collection of his notes housed at Marbach dates from 1947 onward.

What sort of ordering did Blumenberg's zettelkasten exhibit?

17 “Bei Blumenberg haben nahezu alle Aspekte der Lektu ̈ re, der Interpretation und der Ordnung im Zettelkasten materielle Gestalt angenommen,” von Bu ̈ low and Krusche, “Vorla ̈ ufiges,” 275.

She quotes this from a second party rather than directly from Luhmann's zettelkasten: Niklas Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8,3 see: https://hypothes.is/a/LRCMnln_EeyW_OMPTJ3JiA

16 “Zuschauer kommen. Sie bekommen alles zu sehen, und nichts als das—wie beim Pornofilm. Und entsprechend ist die Entta ̈ uschung,” as quoted in Ju ̈ rgen Kaube, “Alles und noch viel mehr: Die gelehrte Registratur,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 6, 2013, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/geisteswissenschaften/zettelkaesten-alles-und -noch-viel-mehr-die-gelehrte-registratur-12103104.html.

This reference contains the posthumous publication of Blumenberg’s anthropological writings

Helbig indicates that Hans Blumenberg had a "near obsessive reliance on [his Zettelkasten as] writing machinery.

in Life without Toothache, Daniela K. Helbig looks at the role of Hans Blumenberg's Zettelkasten as the site of his theoretical development as a historian and philosopher.

Hans Blumenberg felt that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg had a more sophisticated conceptualization of the idea of "paradigm" than the one which Thomas Kuhn delineated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Cross reference the original mention of this:

9 Borck, “Begriffene Geschichte: Canguilhem, Blumenberg und die Wissenschaften,” in Borck, Blumenberg beobachtet, 168–95, 179, outlines Blumenberg’s criticism of Kuhn’s model of paradigm change as too schematic. On the notion of paradigm, Blumenberg, “Paradigma, grammatisch,” in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 157–62.

Hans Blumenberg didn't engage much with the Anglophone world of science outside of initiating the translation of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions into German.

Hans Blumenberg was cognizant of the potential of over-use of ideas in his own work and in at least one case accused Montaigne of having over used a Lucretius quote to illustrate a small point rather than saving it for a major point in his argument on the failure of states where Blumenberg thought it was "compulsory".

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/mT8Twk2cEe2bvj8lq2Lgpw

Hans Blumenberg had a habit of striking out note cards either once or twice in red ink as a means of indicating to himself that he had used them in his writing work. He also wrapped them up and hid them away to prevent the risk of over-using his ideas in publications.

Hans Blumenberg's zettelkasten of about thirty thousand typed and handwritten note cards is now kept at the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Blumenberg kept it in a wooden box which he kept in a fireproof steel cabinet.

https://hobohm.edublogs.org/2013/03/15/zettelkasten-maschinen-der-phantasie/

Short blogpost about the Marbach 2013 zettelkasten exhibition with a few photos:

Kaube, Jürgen. “Zettelkästen: Alles und noch viel mehr: Die gelehrte Registratur.” FAZ.NET, June 3, 2013. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/geisteswissenschaften/zettelkaesten-alles-und-noch-viel-mehr-die-gelehrte-registratur-12103104.html

machine translation (Google):

But regardless of whether the Zettelkasten resulted in a book, a work, or a thought cloud with varying degrees of precipitation - it is always more than the whole whose parts it has collected. Because there are always other texts in it than those that emerged from it.

There's something romantic about the analogy of a zettelkasten with a thought cloud which may have varying degrees of precipitation.

Link to other analogies: - ruminant machines - the disappointment of porn - others?

machine translation (Google):

Other collections have never been used for their intended purpose. The Germanist Friedrich Kittler, for example, created index cards for all the colors that were ascribed to the moon in poetry. Someone could write the book about it with the help of these slips of paper.

Germanist Friedrich Kittler collected index cards with all the colors that were ascribed to the moon in poetry. He never did anything with his collection, but it has been suggested that one could write a book with his research collection.

machine translation (Google)

Quite a few boxes have been created for just one book, Siegfried Kracauer's collections for his monograph on Jacques Offenbach, for example, the photo archive of the historian Reinhart Koselleck with sections of thousands of photos of equestrian monuments, for example, or the box by the Romanist Hans Robert Jauß, in which he wrote for his Habilitation dissertation bogged down medieval animal names and characteristics.

A zettelkasten need not be a lifetime practice and historically many were created for supporting a specific project or ultimate work. Examples can be seen in the work of both Robert Green and his former assistant Ryan Holiday who kept separate collections for each of their books, as well as those displayed at the German Literature Archive in Marbach (2013) including Siegfried Kracauer (for a monograph on Jacques Offenbach), Reinhart Koselleck (equestrian related photos), Hans Robert Jauß (a dissertation on medieval animal names and characteristics).

Blumenberg's Zettelkasten had 30,000 notes which he collected over 55 years averages out to 545 notes per year or roughly (presuming he worked every day) 1.5 notes per day.

For her online book clubs, Maggie Delano defines four broad types of notes as a template for users to have a common language: - terms - propositions (arguments, claims) - questions - sources (references which support the above three types)

I'm fairly sure in a separate context, I've heard that these were broadly lifted from her reading of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a book. (reference? an early session of Dan Allosso's Obsidian Book club?)

These become the backbone of breaking down a book and using them to have a conversation with the author.

https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae

Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.

These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.

It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.

These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.

Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.

Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships

One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.

If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.

The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.

Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?

https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/help/read

via

Inspired by @cicatriz's Fractal Inquiry and SuperMemo's Incremental Reading, I imported into @RoamResearch a paper I was very impressed (but also overwhelmed) by a few years ago: The Knowledge‐Learning‐Instruction Framework by @koedinger et al. pic.twitter.com/oeJzyjPGbk

— Stian Håklev (@houshuang) December 16, 2020

BBC: Will a new name give Wales' sparkling wine cheers?. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-62967258

https://nymag.com/strategist/article/sofia-coppola-favorite-pen.html

https://beta.scrintal.com/b/peppermint-kings--8gm31

https://en.forum.saysomethingin.com/t/hills-and-mountains-in-welsh/36923

• twyn - hill(ock), mound, knoll, hummock, heap, peak, dune, molehill
• tyle - hill(ock) (with a suggestion of steepness)
• allt - hill(side), steep gradient, cliff, wooded slope
• bryn - hill, hillock, mountain
• gallt - slope, hill, cliff, rock, wooded hillside
• garth - mountain ridge, promontory hill, wooded slope
• rhiw - steep slope, hill(side) (more commonly used in the SW)
• bryncyn - hillock, knoll, tump, mound, heap
• poncen/ponc/poncyn - hillock, tump, knoll, rising ground (more commonly used in the N)
• trip - steep hill (relating to a road or path) (more commonly used in SE)
• banc - rising ground, hillock, ridge, slope
• moel - bare mountain, treeless hill, summit, rounded mountain
• mynydd - mountain, large hill
• ban (pl. bannau) - top, tip, summit, crest, peak, beacon, hill, mountain, bare hill

https://www.betaworks.com/media

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

Stephanus pagination is a system of reference numbers used in editions of Plato based on the three volume 1578 edition of Plato's complete works published by Henricus Stephanus (Henri Estienne) and translated by Joannes Serranus (Jean de Serres).

See also: - Bekker numbering (for Aristotle) - Diels-Kranz numbering (for early pre-Socratics)

Mark Bernstein, the creator of Tinderbox, indicates that he read Niklas Luhmann's paper "Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account" (1992) in the late 1990s.

https://www.markbernstein.org/Mar20/TheNewZettelkasten.html

https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/curriculum

https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/events

I can't believe I read a tweet saying retrieval practice must be written. What about ...<br><br>- MFL?<br>- EYFS/KS1?<br>- Practical subjects?<br>- Cold calling?<br>- Students with SEND?<br>- EAL learners?<br>- Oracy?<br>- Think, pair & share?<br>- Flashcards?<br><br>Writing is so important, as is verbal recall.

— Kate Jones (@KateJones_teach) September 26, 2022

https://vimeo.com/753881107

Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (DEAF) is a dictionary built out of a slip box containing 1.5 million slipswith over 12 million references.

https://publicinfrastructure.org/2022/09/28/welcome-to-smalltown/

Fork of Mastodon based on Darius Kazemi's Hometown

https://www.flotsamandfork.com/collections/new/products/exacompta-heavyweight-index-cards?variant=39534626340963

https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/glasp-vs-matter/

https://twitter.com/syncretizm/status/1581264527336669184

So many in the tools for thought space either have shiny object syndrome or are focusing on "workflows". Eventually you have to quit looking at and building workflows to actually get some work done.

https://glasp.notion.site/Glasp-FAQs-ddb9cb747ddd4811ad155dc96a081b7a#6825e27cd0b34b6988fbca2de7b806e3

"TBD 🚀🚀🚀" is such a bad indication for the future of a product

https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/do-colleges-fulfill-the-promise-of-social-mobility/

https://hypothes.is/users/keisuke_w

This seems to be one of the cofounders of Glasp. Obviously using Hypothes.is for competitive intelligence.

https://www.loom.com/share/83f5034aed0a400a9289cadce02a53d4

Intro Loom video showing some basic functionality of Glasp for annotations.

https://glasp.co/home

Glasp is a startup competitor in the annotations space that appears to be a subsidiary web-based tool and response to a large portion of the recent spate of note taking applications.

Some of the first users and suggested users are names I recognize from this tools for thought space.

On first blush it looks like it's got a lot of the same features and functionality as Hypothes.is, but it also appears to have some slicker surfaces and user interface as well as a much larger emphasis on the social aspects (followers/following) and gamification (graphs for how many annotations you make, how often you annotate, streaks, etc.).

It could be an interesting experiment to watch the space and see how quickly it both scales as well as potentially reverts to the mean in terms of content and conversation given these differences. Does it become a toxic space via curation of the social features or does it become a toxic intellectual wasteland when it reaches larger scales?

What will happen to one's data (it does appear to be a silo) when the company eventually closes/shuts down/acquihired/other?

The team behind it is obviously aware of Hypothes.is as one of the first annotations presented to me is an annotation by Kei, a cofounder and PM at the company, on the Hypothes.is blog at: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/a-letter-to-marc-andreessen-and-rap-genius/

But this is true for Glasp. Science researchers/writers use it a lot on our service, too.—Kei

cc: @dwhly @jeremydean @remikalir

https://glasp.co/

Glasp is a recent entrant to the social web highlighting and note taking space.

https://ymlaenwelsh.com/

https://algorithmsbook.com/

https://twitter.com/JasonLustig

https://jungius.sub.uni-hamburg.de/schueler

Jungius worked for a long time on various calendar systems. In his letters one can see the problems it caused at the time that some areas followed the Gregorian calendar and others, including Hamburg, still followed the Julian.

Joachim Jungius worked on various calendar systems at a time when the Gregorian calendar was coming into use while his home city of Hamburg still followed the Julian calendar. Jungius used the Julian calendar as well, but generally only dated his notes with the month and the last two digits of the year and excluded the century.

https://www.sub.uni-hamburg.de/bibliotheken/projekte-der-stabi/abgeschlossene-projekte/jungius.html

machine translation (Google):

Classic editions can hardly depict Jungius' complex way of working and can never show all possible cross-connections. In particular, passages that belong together thematically have often been filed far apart from each other, so that even the printed catalog by Christoph Meinel, which extends down to the level of the smallest bundles of the collection (“Maniples” averaging around 15 pages in size), makes finding them only slightly easier. Nor are they able to adequately reproduce the role of drawings and tables or even the information on the backs of notes. Due to these special features, the estate of Joachim Jungius is particularly attractive for digitization.

It sounds here as if Christoph Meinel has collected and printed a catalog of Joachim Jungius' zettelkasten. (Where is this? Find a copy.) This seems particularly true as related cards could and would have been easily kept far apart from each other, and this could give us a hint as to the structural nature of his specific practice and uses of his notes.

It sounds as if Stabi is making an effort to digitize Jungius' note collection.

machine translation (Google):

The estate is not only a scientific-historical document, but also interesting because of the back: Jungius used sermon texts and devotional literature, school notes and old letters as note paper. In addition, much was left in the estate that was assigned to him at some point, including a number of manuscripts by someone else, e.g. B. to the astronomy of Nicolaus Reimers.

In addition to the inherent value of the notes which Jungius took and which present a snapshot of the state-of-the art of knowledge for his day, there is a secondary source of value as he took his notes on scraps of paper that represent sermon texts and devotional literature, school notes, and old letters. These represent their own historical value separate from his notes.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/m2izykwGEe2TaktJuW0Qgg

machine translation (Google):

His estate includes i.a. Notes on all important natural-philosophical questions of his time and correspondence with his students who stayed at the various universities in Protestant Germany and the Netherlands. He wrote excerpts from literature, observation notes, lecture preparations and other things on small pieces of paper, of which almost 42,000 are still preserved in the Stabi today.

Die Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky (Stabi) houses the almost 42,000 slips of paper from Joachim Jungius' lifetime collection of notes which include excerpts from his reading, observational notes, his lecture preparations, and other miscellaneous notes.

https://threadhelper.com/

Film making is like note taking

Incidentally, one should note that the video is made up of snippets over time and then edited together at some later date. Specifically, these snippets are much like regularly taken notes which can then be later used (and even re-used--some could easily appear in other videos) to put together some larger project, namely this compilation video of his process. Pointing out this parallel between note taking and movie/videomaking, makes the note taking process much more easily seen, specifically for students. Note taking is usually a quite and solo endeavor done alone, which makes it much harder to show and demonstrate. And when it is demonstrated or modeled, it's usually dreadfully boring and uninteresting to watch compared to seeing it put together and edited as a finished piece. Edits in a film are visually obvious while the edits in written text, even when done poorly, are invisible.

Ryan Holiday does touch on all parts of his writing process, but the majority of the video is devoted to the sorts of easier bikeshedding ideas that people are too familiar with (editing, proofreading, title choice, book cover choice). Hidden here is the process of researching, writing, notes, and actual organizing process which are the much harder pieces for the majority of writers. Hiding it does a massive disservice to those watching it for the most essential advice they're looking for.

https://pennoob.com/2021/10/28/tomoegawa-stops-making-tomoe-river-paper/

https://www.wellappointeddesk.com/2021/06/jesi-answers-all-your-questions-about-tomoe-river/

Apparently some suppliers are now specifying Tomoe River Sanzen paper, which presumably is the new manufacturer of the old paper brand which some are now calling Tomoe River Tomoegawa.

https://www.jetpens.com/Tomoe-River-Paper-Sanzen/ct/6678

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/63774/original-dates-of-publication

To include the original date of publication in a reference from within Zotero, add the following to the 'Extra field':

original-date: YYYY

https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/three-models-of-creativity-3a81a19cc063

Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, classifies creativity in three ways: interpolation, extrapolation, and "true invention". He defines the first two traditionally, but gives a more vague description of the third. What exactly is "true invention"?

How can one invent without any catalyst at all? How can one invent outside of a problem's solution space? outside of the adjacent possible? Does this truly exist? Or doesn't it based on definition.

reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/y2pzuu/does_anyone_else_work_in_projectbased_systems/

Historically, many had zettelkasten which were commonplace books kept on note cards, usually categorized by subject (read: "folders" or "tags"), so you're not far from that original tradition.

Similar to your work pattern, you may find the idea of a "Pile of Index Cards" (PoIC) interesting. See https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089 and https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122 (read the descriptions of the photos for more details; there was also a related, but now defunct wiki, which you can find copies of on Archive.org with more detail). This pattern was often seen implemented in the TiddlyWiki space, but can now be implemented in many note taking apps that have to do functionality along with search and tags. Similarly you may find those under Tiago Forte's banner "Building a Second Brain" to be closer to your project-based/productivity framing if you need additional examples or like-minded community. You may find that some of Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking (LYT) is in this productivity spectrum as well. (Caveat emptor: these last two are selling products/services, but there's a lot of their material freely available online.)

Luhmann changed the internal structure of his particular zettelkasten that created a new variation on the older traditions. It is this Luhmann-based tradition that many in r/Zettelkasten follow. Since many who used the prior (commonplace-based) tradition were also highly productive, attributing output to a particular practice is wrongly placed. Each user approaches these traditions idiosyncratically to get them to work for themselves, so ignore naysayers and those with purist tendencies, particularly when they're new to these practices or aren't aware of their richer history. As the sub-reddit rules indicate: "There is no [universal or orthodox] 'right' way", but you'll find a way that is right for you.

The original PoIC didn't include bi-directional links, but the idea was brought up and considered.

This post was via Den https://www.blogger.com/profile/15319877273178044093

What are these references to Umedao and Buhmann? Quck searches don't yield much. Need to look deeper.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708133632/http://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index-cards-poic-system/

Brief explanation of the Pile of Index Cards system, but without significant depth.

As is apparently often in describing new organizing systems (commonplace books, zettelkasten, PoIC, etc.), not everyone is going to understand it the first time, or even understand what is going on or why one would want to use it.

This post by Susan is such an example.

Susan does almost immediately grasp that this might be something one could transfer into a digital system however, particularly for the search functionality.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110714192833/http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php?title=43Tabs_System

Several months back I'd thought about adapting the 43 folders system to a zettelkasten sort of system. I'm obviously not the first to have done so.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594189436372

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aki_oda/2684257358/

Visual diagram of PoIC system, similar to 43 folders and GTD systems.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/36761543@N02/

Kf333 falls into the tradition of PoIC which they associated directly.

They photographed and saved their cards into Flickr.

https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089

LifeHacker covers the Hawk Sugano's Pile of Index Cards method, which assuredly helped promote it to the GTD and productivity crowd.

One commenter notices the similarities to Ryan Holiday's system and ostensibly links to https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/

Two others snarkily reference using such a system to "keep track of books in the library [,,,] Sort them out using decimal numbers on index cards in drawers or something..." and "I need to tell my friend Dewey about this! He would run with it." Obviously they see the intellectual precursors and cousins of the method, though they haven't looked at the specifics very carefully.

One should note that this may have been one of the first systems to mix information management/personal knowledge management with an explicit Getting Things Done set up. Surely there are hints of this in the commonplace book tradition, but are there any examples that go this far?

I would echo Bob's sentiment here and would recommend you keep that material like this in a separate section or box all together.

If it helps to have an example, in 2006, Hawk Sugano showed off a version of a method you may be considering which broadly went under the title of Pile of Index Cards (or PoIC) which combined zettelkasten and productivity systems (in his case getting things done or GTD). I don't think he got much (any?!) useful affordances out of mixing the two. In fact, from what I can see looking at later iterations of his work and how he used it, it almost seems like he spent more time and energy later attempting to separate and rearrange them to get use out of the knowledge portions as distinct from the productivity portions.

I've generally seen people mixing these ideas in the digital space usually to their detriment as well—a practice I call zettelkasten overreach.

An example of a ticker file in the vein of getting things done (GTD) documented using index cards and a card file from 1917. Sounds very familiar to the Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) from the early 2000s.

Interesting to see the first post on zettelkasten.de in 2013 has a photo of hawkexpress' Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) in it.

This obviously means that Christian Tietze had at least a passing familiarity with that system, though it differed structurally from Luhmann's version of zettelkasten.

https://smarthomeowl.com/eufy-robovac-not-charging/

This was revised in 1972, but this statement is sadly still broadly true today in 2022.

What other advanced reading teaching is broadly available outside of this particular text?

Just as predictive means may be used on the level of letters, words, and even whole sentences within information theory at the level of specific languages, does early orality sophistication in children help them to become predictive readers at earlier ages?

How could one go about testing this, particularly in a broad, neurodiverse group?

Hence, researchers are very active at the present time, and their work has resulted in numerous new approaches to reading instruction. Among the more important new programs are the so-called eclectic approach, the individualized reading approach, the language-experience approach, the various approaches based on linguistic principles, and others based more or less closely on some kind of programmed instruction. In addition, new mediums such as the Initial Teaching Alphabet ( i.t.a. ) have been employed, and sometimes these involve new methods as well. Still other devices and programs are the "total immersion method," the "foreign-language-school

Have we ultimately come to the conclusion that neurodiversity means there is no one-size-fits all solution? Should we also be placing some focus on orality and memory methods to allow those to flourish as well? Where is the literature on "orality pedagogy"? Is it a thing? It should be...

This would seem to indicate that reading's primary importance was to fuel capitalism and production. It certainly says a lot about American culture, particularly in a book that wants to focus on syntopical reading.

Did this approach have a categorical name?

When did phonics start as a practice historically? Presumably after Mortimer J. Adler's note here?

The great vowel shift and the variety of admixtures of languages comprising English make it significantly harder to learn to read compared to other languages whose orthography and sound systems (example: Japanese hiragana) are far simpler and more straightforward.

Read in juxtaposition with the knowledge of orality and along with Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, one could certainly argue that there are other ways of knowing which provide potentially better pathways to democracy.

Further, the simple fact of basic literacy doesn't necessarily encourage democracy. Take a look at the January 6th (2021) insurrectionists who were likely broadly literate, but who acted more like a damaged oral society and actively subverted democracy.

Literacy plus "other things" are certainly necessary for democracy. How do we define these other things, and then once we have, is literacy still part of the equation for democracy?

Depending on how it is done and the culture in which it is done, forcing literacy on a people, even when well-intentioned can be a devastating and colonialist act.

note that they're incorrectly capitalizing these types of reading to indicate their importance.

There are three goals of most reading: education, information, and understanding.

Are there others we're missing here?

What effect might this have on the learning process of purely oral cultures?

https://www.lydiawills.com/agency.html

This is particularly interesting in light of the research of Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell who within about 50 years dramatically changed the viewpoint of history.

Orality has something to say about this now too...

via https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/

If you want to try commonplacing digitally, u/Citrie is developing commonplaces.io — if you try it, please send them any feedback you have!

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/usj4dvF0Eeut6W8aTWJVaQ

reply to https://www.reddit.com/user/kf6gpe/

Thanks. Having edited large parts of that page, and particularly the history pieces, I'm aware of it. It's also why I'm asking for actual examples of practices and personal histories, especially since many in this particular forum appear to be using traditional notebook/journal forms. :)

Did you come to ZK or commonplacing first? How did you hear about it/them? Is your practice like the traditional commonplacing framing, closer to Luhmann's/that suggested by zettelkasten.de/Ahrens, or a hybrid of the two approaches?

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.)

Hello u/sscheper,

Let me start by thanking you for introducing me to Zettelkasten. I have been writing notes for a week now and it's great that I'm able to retain more info and relate pieces of knowledge better through this method.

I recently came to notice that there is redundancy in my index entries.

I have two entries for Number Line. I have two branches in my Math category that deals with arithmetic, and so far I have "Addition" and "Subtraction". In those two branches I talk about visualizing ways of doing that, and both of those make use of and underline the term Number Line. So now the two entries in my index are "Number Line (Under Addition)" and "Number Line (Under Subtraction)". In those notes I elaborate how exactly each operation is done on a number line and the insights that can be derived from it. If this continues, I will have Number Line entries for "Multiplication" and "Division". I will also have to point to these entries if I want to link a main note for "Number Line".

Is this alright? Am I underlining appropriately? When do I not underline keyterms? I know that I do these to increase my chances of relating to those notes when I get to reach the concept of Number Lines as I go through the index but I feel like I'm overdoing it, and it's probably bloating it.

I get "Communication (under Info. Theory): '4212/1'" in the beginning because that is one aspect of Communication itself. But for something like the number line, it's very closely associated with arithmetic operations, and maybe I need to rethink how I populate my index.

Presuming, since you're here, that you're creating a more Luhmann-esque inspired zettelkasten as opposed to the commonplace book (and usually more heavily indexed) inspired version, here are some things to think about:<br /> - Aren't your various versions of number line card behind each other or at least very near each other within your system to begin with? (And if not, why not?) If they are, then you can get away with indexing only one and know that the others will automatically be nearby in the tree. <br /> - Rather than indexing each, why not cross-index the cards themselves (if they happen to be far away from each other) so that the link to Number Line (Subtraction) appears on Number Line (Addition) and vice-versa? As long as you can find one, you'll be able to find them all, if necessary.

If you look at Luhmann's online example index, you'll see that each index term only has one or two cross references, in part because future/new ideas close to the first one will naturally be installed close to the first instance. You won't find thousands of index entries in his system for things like "sociology" or "systems theory" because there would be so many that the index term would be useless. Instead, over time, he built huge blocks of cards on these topics and was thus able to focus more on the narrow/niche topics, which is usually where you're going to be doing most of your direct (and interesting) work.

Your case sounds, and I see it with many, is that your thinking process is going from the bottom up, but that you're attempting to wedge it into a top down process and create an artificial hierarchy based on it. Resist this urge. Approaching things after-the-fact, we might place information theory as a sub-category of mathematics with overlaps in physics, engineering, computer science, and even the humanities in areas like sociology, psychology, and anthropology, but where you put your work on it may depend on your approach. If you're a physicist, you'll center it within your physics work and then branch out from there. You'd then have some of the psychology related parts of information theory and communications branching off of your physics work, but who cares if it's there and not in a dramatically separate section with the top level labeled humanities? It's all interdisciplinary anyway, so don't worry and place things closest in your system to where you think they fit for you and your work. If you had five different people studying information theory who were respectively a physicist, a mathematician, a computer scientist, an engineer, and an anthropologist, they could ostensibly have all the same material on their cards, but the branching structures and locations of them all would be dramatically different and unique, if nothing else based on the time ordered way in which they came across all the distinct pieces. This is fine. You're building this for yourself, not for a mass public that will be using the Dewey Decimal System to track it all down—researchers and librarians can do that on behalf of your estate. (Of course, if you're a musician, it bears noting that you'd be totally fine building your information theory section within the area of "bands" as a subsection on "The Bandwagon". 😁)

If you overthink things and attempt to keep them too separate in their own prefigured categorical bins, you might, for example, have "chocolate" filed historically under the Olmec and might have "peanut butter" filed with Marcellus Gilmore Edson under chemistry or pharmacy. If you're a professional pastry chef this could be devastating as it will be much harder for the true "foodie" in your zettelkasten to creatively and more serendipitously link the two together to make peanut butter cups, something which may have otherwise fallen out much more quickly and easily if you'd taken a multi-disciplinary (bottom up) and certainly more natural approach to begin with. (Apologies for the length and potential overreach on your context here, but my two line response expanded because of other lines of thought I've been working on, and it was just easier for me to continue on writing while I had the "muse". Rather than edit it back down, I'll leave it as it may be of potential use to others coming with no context at all. In other words, consider most of this response a selfish one for me and my own slip box than as responsive to the OP.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y1oqdj/features_of_the_antinet/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/14/bernard-comment-i-write-fiction-to-engrave-time

Bernard Comment

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.

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

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.