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.

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&

This list is a great framework for showing students what they don't know, so they can actively work and practice at becoming better at their craft.

I feel like actively annotating and "reading with a pen in hand" has been a great way to practice many of these points. Questioning texts, marking open problems, etc. goes a long way toward practicing these methods.

How to become a successful ~~physicist~~ problem solver

There I fixed it for you...

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.5082

Wieman, Carl. “How to Become a Successful Physicist.” Physics Today 75, no. 9 (September 2022): 46–52. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.5082

The details here are also good in teaching almost all areas of knowledge, particularly when problem solving is involved.

How might one teach the practice of combinatorial creativity?

To help fight cognitive bias, one should actively think about potential failure modes of one's decisions and think about alternative conclusions which aren't part of the findings one might have hoped for. Watching out for these can dramatically help increase solution spaces and be on the watch out for innovative alternate or even better solutions.

Confirmation bias can be detrimental when making solid reflective decisions.

Of the 29 problem solving decisions identified as important the three "reflection decisions" (23-26 in the list) may be the most difficult to learn as they require metacognition and self-evaluation.

Rather than teaching broad knowledge first and then presenting problems for practice, teachers may be better off presenting the problems first so that the student might struggle with them and then present the knowledge they need to figure it out. This provides better motivation for the student to understand and absorb that knowledge, seeing that it has value for the current problem as well as related problems.

Breakthroughs in problem solving and basic research often come from recognizing the significance of overlooked information.

How is this additional information gleaned in these cases? Through combinatorial creativity, chance, other? Can methods for pushing these sorts of additional information be created in the problem solving process?

Though interviews with scientists and engineers, researchers have identified a list of 29 commonly occurring decisions made during problem solving processes.

The master-apprentice model of teaching and learning in which the master breaks down a problem into a set of subskills which the apprentice solves and practices with regular feedback for improvement is broadly similar to best pathways shown in cognitive science research on improving learning efficiency for building expertise.

(restatement)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/movies/sacheen-littlefeather-dead.html

https://archive.org/details/refiningreadingw0000meij/page/256/mode/2up?q=index+card

Refining, reading, writing : includes 2009 mla update card by Mei, Jennifer (Nelson, 2007)

Contains a very generic reference to note taking on index cards for arranging material, but of such a low quality in comparison to more sophisticated treatments in the century prior. Apparently by this time the older traditions have disappeared and have been heavily watered down into just a few paragraphs.

https://archive.org/details/cardindexsystema00dart/mode/2up

The card index system applied to the writing of specification for building construction by Dart, Whitman (University of Illinois, 1905)

https://archive.org/details/MyInnerWorkingsTheCommonplaceBookOrKnowledgeBoxNoteCardSystem

Cattell, J. McKeen. “Methods for a Card Index.” Science 10, no. 247 (1899): 419–20.

Columbia professor of psychology calls for the creation of a card index of references to reviews and abstracts for areas of research. Columbia was apparently doing this in 1899 for the psychology department.

What happened to this effort? How similar was it to the system of advertising cards for books in Germany in the early 1930s described by Heyde?

https://www.amazon.com/English-3200-Programed-Course-Grammar/dp/0155226754

Dwyer, Edward J. “File Card Efficiency.” Journal of Reading 26, no. 2 (1982): 171–171.

Ease of use in writing and grading with short assignments by using 4 x 6" index cards in classrooms.

This sounds like some of the articles from 1912 and 1917 about efficiency of card indexes for teaching.

I'm reminded of some programmed learning texts that were card-based (or really strip-based since they were published in book form) in the 1960s and 1970s. Thse books had small strips with lessons or questions on the front with the answers on the reverse. One would read in strips through the book from front to back and then start the book all over again on page one on the second row of strips and so on.

Rotzel, Grace. “Card File.” The English Journal 6, no. 10 (December 1917): 691–691. https://doi.org/10.2307/801092.

Follow up note to prior article indicating some sorter term benefits of filing student work and taking notes on it for helping to create improvement over time.

https://doi.org/10.2307/801508

See also: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A991b743f2525d208ec93184fcfa93f08

Sutherland, Lois Gilbert. “The English Teacher’s Card File.” The English Journal 6, no. 2 (1917): 111–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/801508.

Lois Gilbert Sutherland suggests using a card index system for multiple uses in the classroom including notes, administration, and general productivity.

There are so many parallels from this to how people are using platforms like Obsidian, Roam Research, and Notion in 2022.

Sounds like magic, n'cest pas? 😜

Breitenbach, H. P. “The Card Index for Teachers.” The School Review 20, no. 4 (1912): 271–72.

Apparently in 1912, the card index was little known to teachers... this isn't the sort of use case I was expecting here...

The general gist of this short note is an encouraging one to suggest that instead of traditional grade books, which are still used heavily in 2022, teachers should use rolodex like cards for keeping attendance and notes on a student's progress.

Presumably this never caught on. While some elementary teachers still use older paper gradebooks, many others have transferred to digital LMS platforms.

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.

Note taking is a means of rendering large volumes of non-portable sources of information into a nearly infinitely portable source. This is particularly true when done in digital form.

(p4, Why take notes?)

Goutor's description is offered as an outline of a mechanical method which he hopes will provide a greater level of efficiency, but which might be adapted to each researcher's work and needs. He also specifically offers it as a method to be used for "constructing some sort of final product". He considers it as serving the functions of gathering, organizing, storing and retrieving information.

(p3, Introduction)

Goutor indicates that "a certain amount of individual in methods is commendable, and indeed necessary." but that "it soon becomes apparent that there are some ways of doing things more efficient and ultimately more productive than others". But he goes on to bemoan that how to manuals offer little help.

(p3, Introduction)

https://archive.org/details/chamberlain-card-file.-kem-mur/mode/2up

https://medium.com/workings/how-i-take-notes-when-doing-research-90a649f10098

Stowe Boyd looks at Clive Thompson's note taking process which uses Scrivener.

Nothing new here for me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/xsq3ga/good_welsh_learners_dictionary_with_entomologies/

https://www.welsh-dictionary.ac.uk/android-ios-apps/app-support/

https://ymlaenwelsh.com/2018/11/11/on-word-field-farming/

Creating world fields (groups of words related to a particular area or field of knowledge) can be helpful for acquiring vocabulary in a new language. There's no research here to back up the claim, but it's an interesting word game and method for familiarize oneself with a small area and acquire new words related to an area or various related stem words.

https://ymlaenwelsh.com/2020/08/31/my-top-6-welsh-dictionaries/

https://geiriaduracademi.org/

I get the gist of what you're saying and I prefer putting things into my own collection in my own words as well. However, there is a history of folks putting other materials into their systems like this. Johannes Heyde, in particular, mentioned that German publishers used to mail promo details for forthcoming books on A6 size postcards that one might place directly into their bibliographic index without needing to recopy.

I know I've suggested to u/sscheper before that he ought to release his forthcoming book in index card format, if only as an interesting means of showing an example of what a zettelkasten looks like and how it might work.

Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

I saw this ad for Storyteller Tactics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiybhKcA3ZV/?hl=en. The pitchman indicates that he distilled down a pile of about 25 books into a deck of informative cards which writers can use in their craft. Rather than sell it as a stand alone book, it's a set of cards (in digital format too) that they're selling for a order of magnitude more than they could have gotten for a book format.

They're advertising for a product from https://pipdecks.com/. They're essentially selling custom zettelkasten collections of cards for niche topics! Who else is going to sell sets of cards like this? Anyone else seen examples of zettelkasten-like products like this?

In "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" (1952), C. Wright Mills talks about his methods for note taking, thinking, and analysis in what he calls "sociological imagination". This is a sociologists' framing of their own research and analysis practice and thus bears a sociological related name. While he talks more about the thinking, outlining, and writing process rather than the mechanical portion of how he takes notes or what he uses, he's extending significantly on the ideas and methods that Sönke Ahrens describes in How to Take Smart Notes (2017), though obviously he's doing it 65 years earlier. It would seem obvious that the specific methods (using either files, note cards, notebooks, etc.) were a bit more commonplace for his time and context, so he spent more of his time on the finer and tougher portions of the note making and thinking processes which are often the more difficult parts once one is past the "easy" mechanics.

While Mills doesn't delineate the steps or materials of his method of note taking the way Beatrice Webb, Langlois & Seignobos, Johannes Erich Heyde, Antonin Sertillanges, or many others have done before or Umberto Eco, Robert Greene/Ryan Holiday, Sönke Ahrens, or Dan Allosso since, he does focus more on the softer portions of his thinking methods and their desired outcomes and provides personal examples of how it works and what his expected outcomes are. Much like Niklas Luhmann describes in Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981), Mills is focusing on the thinking processes and outcomes, but in a more accessible way and with some additional depth.

Because the paper is rather short, but specific in its ideas and methods, those who finish the broad strokes of Ahrens' book and methods and find themselves somewhat confused will more than profit from the discussion here in Mills. Those looking for a stronger "crash course" might find that the first seven chapters of Allosso along with this discussion in Mills is a straighter and shorter path.

While Mills doesn't delineate his specific method in terms of physical tools, he does broadly refer to "files" which can be thought of as a zettelkasten (slip box) or card index traditions. Scant evidence in the piece indicates that he's talking about physical file folders and sheets of paper rather than slips or index cards, but this is generally irrelevant to the broader process of thinking or writing. Once can easily replace the instances of the English word "file" with the German concept of zettelkasten and not be confused.

One will note that this paper was written as a manuscript in April 1952 and was later distributed for classroom use in 1955, meaning that some of these methods were being distributed from professor to students. The piece was later revised and included as an appendix to Mill's text The Sociological Imagination which was first published in 1959.

Because there aren't specifics about Mills' note structure indicated here, we can't determine if his system was like that of Niklas Luhmann, but given the historical record one could suppose that it was closer to the commonplace tradition using slips or sheets. One thing becomes more clear however that between the popularity of Webb's work and this (which was reprinted in 2000 with a 40th anniversary edition), these methods were widespread in the mid-twentieth century and specifically in the field of sociology.

Above and beyond most of these sorts of treatises on note taking method, Mills does spend more time on the thinking portions of the practice and delineates eleven different practices that one can focus on as they actively read/think and take notes as well as afterwards for creating content or writing.

My full notes on the article can be found at https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0138200b4bfcde2757a137d61cd65cb8

Finding order and relations (and their particular types), is a form of linking ideas found in some of the more complex zettelkasten and knowledge management spaces. It's not as explicit here and he doesn't seem to be focusing on stating or writing explicit links within his notes. He does, however, place some focus on the quality and types of links he's making (or at least thinking about), something which isn't frequently seen in the current PKM space. For example, no one is creating user interfaces that show links between ideas which are opposite (or in opposition or antonym relation) to each other.

Evidence that Mills is talking specifically about papers and individual folders (potentially tagged or categorized) rather than a card index system.

Seems similar to the advice within Ahrens. Did he have a section on not needing to "start" writing or at least not starting with a blank page?

Compare and contrast these, if so.

Link to: https://hyp.is/DJd2hDUQEe2BMGv-WFSnVQ/www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1360144X.2016.1210153

C. Wright Mills delineates a rough definition of "sociological imagination" which could be thought of as a framework within tools for thought: 1. Combinatorial creativity<br /> 2. Diffuse thinking, flâneur<br /> 3. Changing perspective (how would x see this?) Writing dialogues is a useful method to accomplish this. (He doesn't state it, but acting as a devil's advocate is a useful technique here as well.)<br /> 4. Collecting and lay out all the multiple viewpoints and arguments on a topic. (This might presume the method of devil's advocate I mentioned above 😀)<br /> 5. Play and exploration with words and terms<br /> 6. Watching levels of generality and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts or building blocks. (This also might benefit of abstracting ideas from one space to another.)<br /> 7. Categorization or casting ideas into types 8. Cross-tabulating and creation of charts, tables, and diagrams or other visualizations 9. Comparative cases and examples - finding examples of an idea in other contexts and time settings for comparison and contrast 10. Extreme types and opposites (or polar types) - coming up with the most extreme examples of comparative cases or opposites of one's idea. (cross reference: Compass Points https://hypothes.is/a/Di4hzvftEeyY9EOsxaOg7w and thinking routines). This includes creating dimensions of study on an object - what axes define it? What indices can one find data or statistics on? 11. Create historical depth - examples may be limited in number, so what might exist in the historical record to provide depth.

The Technique of Controversy: Principles of Dynamic Logic by Boris B. Bogoslovsky https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technique_of_Controversy/P-rgAwAAQBAJ?hl=en

What was Dewey's contribution here?

The Gospel of Technology by C. E. Ayers https://archive.org/details/americanphilosop00kall/page/24/mode/2up

"Relaxed browsing and allowing the mind to wander" as a method of thinking and work is stated differently, but is highly related to the idea of diffuse thinking or working as a flâneur.

"deadbeat methods"... wowza!

Notice that it's not just notes, but data on IBM cards that he's using for research here. This sort of data analysis is much easier now, but is also of the sort detailed by Beatrice Webb in her scientific note taking.

curious...

Ha!

In a democracy, is it not just rule by majority, but rule by the most organized that ends up dominating the society?

Perhaps C. Wright Mills' work on the elite has some answers?

The Republican party's use of organization to create gerrymandering is a clear example of using extreme organization to create minority rule. Cross reference: Slay the Dragon in which this issue is laid out with the mention of using a tiny amount of money to careful gerrymander maps to provide outsized influences and then top-down outlines to imprint broad ideas from a central location onto smaller individual constituencies (state and local).

Intellectual work requires "surfaces" to work against, almost as an exact analogy to substrates in chemistry which help to catalyze reactions. The surfaces may include: - articles, books, or other writing against which one can think and write - colleagues, friends, family, other thinkers, or even imaginary characters (as suggested by C. Wright Mills) - one's past self as instantiated by their (imperfect) memory or by their notes about excerpted ideas or their own thoughts

Are there any other surfaces we're missing?

"loosening my imagination" !!

What a lot to unpack here.

He's actively looking through all parts of his files to find potential links and connections between ideas. He brings up the idea of "unsuspected connections" which touches on Luhmann's idea of serendipity, Llull's combinatorial arts, or what one might call combinatorial creativity.

By asking this question this way, Mills is explicitly indicating that his "file" is not a journal, and by implication probably doesn't take the form of a notebook, though we should be on the lookout for more evidence of this given the long tradition of the commonplace book.

It bears pointing out that Mills hasn't specifically described the form of his "file". Is he using note cards, slips, sheets of paper? Ostensibly one might suppose given his context and the word "file" which he uses that he may be referring to either hanging files, folders, and sheets of paper, or a more traditional index card file.

In his section on "Arrangement of File", C. Wright Mills describes some of the evolution of his "file". Knowing that the form and function of one's notes may change over time (Luhmann's certainly changed over time too, a fact which is underlined by his having created a separate ZK II) one should take some comfort and solace that theirs certainly will as well.

The system designer might also consider the variety of shapes and forms to potentially create a better long term design of their (or others') system(s) for their ultimate needs and use cases. How can one avoid constant change, constant rearrangement, which takes work? How can one minimize the amount of work that goes into creating their system?

The individual knowledge worker or researcher should have some idea about the various user interfaces and potential arrangements that are available to them before choosing a tool or system for maintaining their work. What are the affordances they might be looking for? What will minimize their overall work, particularly on a lifetime project?

Again he uses the idea of a "file" which I read and understand as similar to the concepts of zettelkasten or commonplace book. Unlike others writing about these concepts though, he seems to be taking a more holistic and integrative (life) approach to having and maintaining such system.

Perhaps a more extreme statement of this might be written as "zettelkasten is life" or the even more extreme "life is zettelkasten"?

Is his grounding in sociology responsible for framing it as a "social organization" of one's memory?

It's not explicit, but this statement could be used as underpinning or informing the idea of using a card index as autobiography.

How does this compare to other examples of this as a function?

The function of memory served by having written notes is what allows the serious researcher or thinker to have greater confidence in their work, potentially more free from cognitive bias as one idea can be directly compared and contrasted with another by direct juxtaposition.

The antecedent for "they" here is "accomplished thinkers".

Here Mills seems to be defining (in 1952) an "intellectual workman" as an academic, but he doesn't go as broad as a more modern "knowledge worker" (2022) which includes those who broadly do thinking in industry as well as in academia. His older phrase also has a more gendered flavor to it that knowledge worker doesn't have now.

Surely by "files" he means his written notes and ideas which he has filed away?

Thus articles and books are agglomerations of ideas within notes (or perhaps one's retained memory, as best as that might be done) which are then broken off from them and released to a wider readership.

We write to understand, to learn, to make knowledge our own.

We could use more of this in the current tools for thought space. Given neurodiversity, having a smorgasbord of options from which to choose from and then to be able to pick and choose or experiment on what works for you in particular seems to be the best route forward.

A description of the problem.

Also missing are concrete examples and modeling of behavior for students to see and follow.

Who is ILH?

1. Robert Dalleck, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Time, 1908–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 584.

Blacks are heavily overrepresented in news stories about poverty and welfare at an almost 2:1 ratio. (They account for 27 percent of people experiencing poverty, but 59 percent of the poor in news stories in 2015-2016 were African American.)

Is there evidence for this? Other confounding factors that prevent people from opening accounts?

Is it not coincidental that these life events are also some of the most stressful one will face in life? They're stressful enough on their own, but the added financial stressors add to the problems.

Saw this ad for Storyteller Tactics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiybhKcA3ZV/?hl=en

They're advertising for a product from https://pipdecks.com/. They're essentially selling custom zettelkasten collections of cards for niche topics!

This sort of institutionalized economic insecurity seems bound up in institutionalized racism and may have a relationship with recent abortion bans. Can we tease out the ways these ideas are tied together or compounded?

How can alleviating the perceptions of these effects help create societal changes and greater flexibility and more resiliency?

These are potential national security issues were the country to come to war with other major powers.

Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

The US penalizes those who don't complete high school to a higher degree than other countries and this can tend to lower our economic resiliency.

American exceptionalism at play?

Another factor at play with respect to https://hypothes.is/a/2uAmuEENEe2KentYKORSww

Presumably this is part of the reason for the problem mentioned above: https://hypothes.is/a/2uAmuEENEe2KentYKORSww

headship rates are are shares of people who are household heads

How did we get to this point and how do we move away from it?

What does David Brady's research indicate about the other countries that makes them more resilient to poverty despite these problems?

Is it a feature of institutional racism that causes this problem?

Why???

1. Federal Reserve Bank, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2019” (Washington DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2020).

I've read this statistic many times, but where is the original source?

It's here: Federal Reserve Bank, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2019” (Washington DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2020).

This fact is repeated several times throughout the book. At least 3 by my count.

Can poverty be modeled after a statistical thermodynamic framework? How might we move the set point for poverty up significantly to prevent the ill effects of regular, repeated poverty?

What does the complexity of poverty indicate? Within the web of potential indicators, what might be done to vastly mitigate the movement of people in and out of poverty? What sorts of additional resiliency can be built into the system?

Is it possible that the general American need to always be keeping up appearances confounds the facts that most poverty spells are short?

This is the second time I've noted a possible link to this effect. Is there a way to help unbundle it both perceptually and politically to better allow people to face their problems and fix the broader societal problem here?

Middle Americans, and particularly those in suburbia and rural parts of America that account for the majority of poverty in the country, tend to make their poverty invisible because of the toxic effects of extreme capitalism and keeping up appearances.

Has this effect risen with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and the idea of "living one's best life"? How about the social effects of television with shows like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" which encourage conspicuous consumption?

More interesting is the fact that most of these suburban and rural poverty stricken portions of the country are in predominantly Republican held strongholds.

Is there a feedback mechanism that is not only hollowing these areas out, but keeping them in poverty?

Is there a long term correlation between these rates and political parties? Is there a potential lag time between the two if there is?

It would seem that most of the large swaths of rural poverty in America are those with historical roots of slavery, colonization, and exploitation. These include: the Deep South and Mississippi Delta region where slavery, share cropping, and cotton plantations abounded; Appalachia (esp. West Virginia and Kentucky) where the coal mining industry disappeared; Texas-Mexico border where the Latinx populations have long been exploited; the Southwest and Northern Plains (including Alaska) with Native Americans who live on reservations after having been exploited, dealt with broken treaties and general decimation of their people and communities; central corridor of California with high numbers of exploited immigrant farm laborers.

Only 10 to 15 percent of people who live in poverty live in high-poverty, inner-city neighborhoods.

The savings indicated here is almost a factor of 10! How can we not be doing this?

Compare with statistics and descriptions from Why Fewer American Children Are Living in Poverty (New York Times, The Daily, 2022-09-26)

https://www.seanlawson.net/2017/09/zettelkasten-researchers-academics/

Hadn't heard of Mills before, but it looks interesing: C. Wright Mills, On Intellectual Craftsmanship, from The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. 1960.

Appendix to The Sociological Imagination (1959, 2000).

A 1952 draft was published as a stand alone journal article in 1980. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02700062

see also: https://hypothes.is/a/_dii9ED4Ee2l-B9ghcZqvA

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. 40th anniversary edition. Oxford University Press, 2000.