https://climbtothestars.org/archives/2022/07/13/22-years-ago/

https://minicomp.github.io/wax/

This web project was mentioned to me by Jim Groom.

See also: - https://mcgrawect.princeton.edu/tool/wax/

https://triz.org/principles/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vy4abk/interesting_thread_on_twitter_about_the_need_and/

Thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547208663768748032.html

That thread by u/taurusnoises (Bob Doto aka @thehighpony) seems to explicitly buy into the rumor that Luhmann invented the zettelkasten. He assuredly did not and was most likely taught it or some version of it by one or more teachers or colleagues in his lifetime. We're unlikely to know if he tweaked or modified it extensively from the version he was taught, but studying the methods of others may be illustrative. How did Wittgenstein use it? Newton? Georg Christoph Lichtenberg? John Locke? Barthes? Marcel Mauss? Claude Lévi-Strauss? Heck, even comedian George Carlin, dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp, and battle rapper/musician Eminem have slip box systems that they explicitly used for their creativity and work.

People have been using zettelkasten, commonplace books, florilegium, and other similar methods for centuries, and no one version is the "correct" one. What is useful is finding a system that works for you (and not finding a system that you work for). Everyone here is assuredly doing exactly as Luhmann did, you're taking a tool with a broad set of ideas, principles, and practices and putting it to use in a way that works for you. This is part of the reason why there are so many people with so many questions about the what and why in this and other fora.

We approach these methods from such a top down manner, in part, because our culture has broadly lost the thread of how these note taking practices were done historically. Instead of working with something that has always existed and been taught in our culture, and then using it to suit our needs, we're looking at it like a new shiny toy or app and then trying to modify it to make it suit our needs.

Of course to be sure, Luhmann's version of the tool as he used it is one of the most powerful forms of commonplacing we've seen, but this doesn't mean that someone doesn't change or innovate on the methods to make something even more powerful or emergent. (I'd caution against low level attempts as this ground has been heavily tread by millions of people over time.)

To add onto Nicolas-Gatien and dynodiaper's list, how about? 4. Idea generation/creation and innovation

And for those who want the bumper sticker version: https://www.zazzle.com/niklas_luhmann_bumper_sticker-128462770354241554 Or maybe, for Scott, the coffee mug version? 😁☕https://www.zazzle.com/niklas_luhmann_mug-168394795838388324

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl1PIagzgUoe

http://www.tricki.org/

archive copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20220326200254/http://www.tricki.org/

a Wiki-style site with a large store of useful mathematical problem-solving techniques.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCT_92.htm

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

TRIZ (/ˈtriːz/; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadatch), literally: "theory of inventive problem solving " is “the next evolutionary step in creating an organized and systematic approach to problem solving. The development and improvement of products and technologies according to TRIZ are guided by the objective Laws of Engineering System Evolution. TRIZ Problem Solving Tools and Methods are based on them.” In another description, TRIZ is "a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature".

It was developed by the Soviet inventor and science-fiction author Genrich Altshuller (1926-1998) and his colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as the theory of inventive problem solving, and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS.

https://www.bookstackapp.com/

mentioned by Jim Groom as one of the most popular wiki software available on Github

BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information

https://collectionbuilder.github.io/

CollectionBuilder is a set of flexible, static web templates for creating digital collection websites. These templates are driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology. Using three primary components—a spreadsheet of metadata, a directory of assets, and a configuration file—CollectionBuilder helps users to build and customize sustainable, digital collections and exhibits for free, learning valuable development practices in the process.

https://udcsummary.info/php/index.php?lang=en

Interesting defined vocabulary and concatenation/auxiliary signs for putting ideas into proximity.

Could be useful for note taking. Probably much harder to get people to adopt this sort of thing with shared notes/note taking however.

Somewhat similar to the Dewey Decimal classification system.

Instead of building a comments section, why not build it to send/accept Webmentions? (Webmention.io and Webmention.js with some help from Brid.gy) could implement this pretty quickly without much additional work.) This would allow your digital garden to communicate directly with others' as well as other sites online including Twitter?

https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/comments/lvtvko/what_is_the_difference_between_digital_garden_and/

Asked in March 2021, there's some interesting nascent differentiation between the two forms of note taking and display. Almost all zettelkasten were private at this point and digital gardens were an emerging phenomenon.

There's some indication of the difference delineated on the IndieWeb wiki, particularly for digital versions: - https://indieweb.org/Zettelk%C3%A4sten - https://indieweb.org/digital_garden

https://dysgucymraeg.cymru/

I may be insane, but somehow text search here makes me wonder that Calibre might actually make an interesting interface for keeping one's notes?

Document management, text search, tagging, reference management capabilities, open source, custom meta data, server potential, etc. What's missing to prevent such an off-label use case?

https://liliputing.com/2022/07/calibre-6-0-ebook-manager-gains-full-text-search-arm-cpu-support-and-read-aloud-to-the.html

Syndication link: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1547689914078179328

https://twinery.org/

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

Heard referenced in Reclaim Hosting community call as a method for doing "clue boards".

Could twinery.org be used as a way to host/display one's linked zettelkasten or note card collection?

https://openmentions.com/

A community site in the form of HackerNews, Reddit, et al or IndieNews or IndieWeb.xyz that runs on material submitted by webmention.

I thought I'd bookmarked it earlier this year when it opened up.

Run by Matt: https://lordmatt.co.uk/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/business/media/evan-williams-leaving-medium.html

People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzXQu8ErVNv

This idea can be extrapolated to a much larger set of practitioners. It could be termed "the curse of the influencer".

link to: - aphorism: "Those who can't do, teach", from the original line ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’ in George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 stage play Man and Superman.

https://werd.io/2022/a-new-ceo-for-medium

https://werd.io/2022/my-indieweb-real-estate-website-part-two

https://github.com/nothingislost/obsidian-query-control

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1857/zettelkasten-work-literature-driven-and-problem-driven

amen!

Reference to the museum exhibit: Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1857/zettelkasten-work-literature-driven-and-problem-driven

Roland Barthes accumulated a card index of more than 12,250 note cards beginning in 1943 which were held after his death in 1980 at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in France.

Barthes' dates 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980 age 64

He started his card index at roughly age 28 and at around the same time which he began producing written work. (Did he have any significant writing work or publications prior to this?)

His card collection spanned about 37 years and at 12,250 cards means that was producing on average 0.907 cards per day. If we don't include weekends, then he produced 1.27 cards per day on average. Compare this with Ahrens' estimate of 6 cards a day for Niklas Luhmann.

With this note I'm starting the use of a subject heading (in English) of "card index" as a generic collection of notes which are often kept in one or more boxes. This is to distinguish it from the more modern idea of zettelkasten in the Luhmann framing which also connotes a dense set of links between the cards themselves, though this may not have been the case historically. Card index is also specifically separate from 'index card' which is an individual instance of an item that might be found in a card index. At present, I'm unaware of a specific word in English which defines the broader note taking context or portions thereof relating to index cards in the same way that a zettelkasten implies. This may be the result of the broad use of index cards for so many varying uses in the early 20th century. For these other varying uses I'll try to differentiate them henceforth with the generic 'index card files' which might also be used to describe the containers in which cards might be found.

While one can take a lot of notes in two weeks, even just six quality notes a day (Niklas Lumann's pace was six per day while Roland Barthes was closer to 1 and change per day) only provides about 84 cards or zettels. This isn't enough to make anything distressing or unintelligible. It's also incredibly far short of creating any useful links to create anything. He should have trimmed things down and continued for about 24 weeks to see any significant results. (Of course this also begs the question: what was his purpose in pursuing such a system in the first place?)

Somewhere I think I read that Luhmann only added about 6 cards a day to his zettelkasten. (I suspect they averaged his 90K output over the span of years he said he used it....)

My fleeting note output right now is potentially too much, and I certainly should be spending more time refining and building on my (note-based) thoughts.

It's not how many thoughts one has, but their quality and even more importantly, what one does with them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/jho1em/i_found_a_gem/

Stephen Downes describes some of his note taking process for creation here. He doesn't actively reuse his notes (or in this case blog posts, bookmarks, etc.) which number a sizeable 35669, directly, at least in the sort of cut and paste method suggested by Sönke Ahrens. Rather he follows a sort of broad idea, outline creation, and search plan akin to that described by Cory Doctorow in 20 years a blogger

Link to: - https://hyp.is/_XgTCm9GEeyn4Dv6eR9ypw/pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/

Downes suggests that the "magic happens in the creation" of his notes. He uses them as "grist for pattern recognition". He doesn't mention words like surprise or serendipity coming from his notes by linking them, though he does use them "intuitively to form overarching themes or concepts not actually contained in the resources themselves." This is closely akin to the broader ideas ensconced in inventio, Llullan Wheels, triangle thinking, ideas have sex, combinatorial creativity, serendipity (Luhmann), insight, etc. which have been described by others.

Note that Downes indicates that his brain creates the links and he doesn't rely on his software to do this. The break is compounded by the fact that he doesn't find value in classifying or categorizing his notes.

I appreciate that Downes uses the word "grist" to describe part of his note taking practice which evokes the idea of grinding up complex ideas (the grain) to sort out the portions of the whole to find simpler ideas (the flour) which one might use later to combine to make new ideas (bread, cake, etc.) Similar analogies might be had in the grain harvesting space including winnowing or threshing.

One can compare this use of a grist mill analogy of thinking with the analogy of the crucible, which implies a chamber or space in which elements are brought together often with work or extreme conditions to create new products by their combination.

Of course these also follow the older classical analogy of imitating the bees (apes).

Stephen, to get a general grip on note taking practices, I've been collecting rough numbers of notes per day over spans of time from people. You mention 35,669 posts here. Over what span of time (years/days) does that currently represent?

I've not looked directly at Wittgenstein's note collection before, but it could be an interesting historical example.

Might be worth collecting examples of what has happened to note collections after author's lives. Some obviously have been influential in scholarship, but generally they're subsumed by the broader category of a person's "papers" which are often archived at libraries, museums, and other institutions.

Examples: - Vincentius Placcius' collection used by his students - Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten which is being heavily studied by Johannes F.K. Schmidt - Mortimer J. Adler - was his kept? where is it stored?

Posthumously published note card collections - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project - Ronald Reagan's collection at his presidential library, though it is more of an commonplace book collection of quotes which was later published - Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary - Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura - others...

Just as note collections serve an autobiographical function, perhaps they may also serve as an intellectual autobiographical function? Wittgenstein never managed to complete his 'big book', but in some sense, doesn't his collection of note cards serve this function for those willing to explore it all?

I'd previously suggested that Scott P. Scheper publish not only his book on note taking, but to actually publish his note cards as a stand-alone zettelkasten example to go with them. What if this sort of publishing practice were more commonplace? The modern day equivalent is more likely a person's blog or their wiki. Not enough people are publicly publishing their notes to see what this practice might look like for future generations.

https://soranews24.com/2022/07/10/japanese-bookstore-dares-to-be-different-with-common-sense-fix-to-weird-industry-hassle/

Apparently many Japanese bookstores sort and arrange their books by Publisher rather than by author name!

While this may make some esthetic sense on behalf of publishers in a commercial space, it isn't necessarily easy for customers to find books this way.

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/

In response to my call for zettelkasten output examples, Matthias Melcher comes up to the border of what I was looking for but doesn't cover the actual output portion.

He focuses instead about some of the processing and the pruning portions, but not use for actual content creation. Is this because he doesn't actively use his notes for the creation portion? Or does he use his branching tree space as recollections of notes, perhaps to create outlines for creation?

Note specifically that he doesn't mention any sort of surprise or serendipity with respect to linking ideas nor is there any mention of "inventio" portions of the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7XbgD4VVa4

Matthias Melcher's note taking process. Quick capture as text. Linking and categorizing later, and then import into a private WordPress space.

No indication here what happens after, though ostensibly some of it is covered here: https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/

https://searx.github.io/searx/

Mentioned by Taylor Jadin.

https://manage.kmail-lists.com/subscriptions/web-view?a=Vc5bVr&c=01FM1J43DPQ7Z364Z8K8CX8XD5&k=8a739d0b524d1452c6bb9dcf67fb51f9&g=WQd6TQ&m=QSAze3&r=QiCJM9j

Earliest extant public use of Barbiecore on Twitter 2009-09-01

@hannahnahnah1 :P because were too barbiecore to be anything else :D

— jules (@coolworrier) September 2, 2009

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Barbiecore

https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare/

Cool web slider to compare the Hubble Space Telescope with the James Webb Telescope

Your practice sounds akin to that of the idea of progressive summarization which many do in their overall note taking work.

I generally leave the title for last as well for just this reason. I find these titles are also incredibly helpful in reorganizing slips into broader outline forms for creating new articles.

https://www.pasadenanow.com/main/new-mural-turning-heads-in-altadena

The associative emblematic worldview prevalent prior to the seventeenth century began to disappear within Western culture as the rise of the early modern period and the beginning of the scientific revolution began to focus on more descriptive modes of thought and representation.

Have any researchers done specific work on this shift from emblematic to the descriptive? What examples do they show which support this shift? Any particular heavy influences?

This section cites:<br /> William B. Ashworth, Jr. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westfall, eds #books/wanttoread<br /> which could be a place to start.

Note that this same shift from associative and emblematic to descriptive and pedantic coincides not only with the rise of the scientific revolution but also with the effects of rising information overload in a post-Gutenberg world as well as the education reforms of Ramus (late 1500s) et al. as well as the beginning of the move away from scholasticism.

Is there any evidence to support claims that this worldview stemmed from pagan traditions and cultures and not solely the art of memory traditions from ancient Greece? Could it have been pagan traditions which held onto these and they were supplemented and reinforced by ecclesiastical forces which used the Greek traditions?

Examples of emblematic worldview: - particular colors of flowers meant specific things (red = love, yellow = friendship, etc.) We still have these or remants - Saints had their associative animals and objects - anniversary gifts had associative meanings (paper, silver, gold, etc.) We still have remnants of these things, though most are associated with wealth (gold, silver, platinum anniversaries). When did this tradition actually start? - what were the associative meanings of rabbits, turtles, and other animals which appear frequently in manuscript marginalia? (We have the example of the bee (Latin: apes) which where frequently used this way as being associated with the idea of imitation.) - other broad categories?

Medieval culture had imbued its perspective of the natural world with a variety of emblematic associations. Plants and animals were not simply specimens or organisms in the world but were emblematic representations of ideas which were also associated with them.

example: peacock / pride

Did this perspective draw from some of the older possibly pagan forms of orality and mnemonics? Or were the potential associations simply natural ones which (re-?)grew either historically or as the result of the use of the art of memory from antiquity?

Pliny's work had been the standard text for natural history since antiquity. The early humanist movement including critiques by Ermolao Barbaro and Niccolò Leoniceno in the mid 1400s began to erode his stature in the area. Interestingly however, it wasn't new discoveries or science that was displacing Pliny so much as comparison of Pliny with even earlier Greek texts.

D. J. Levitin, The organized mind: thinking straight in the age of information overload. New York, N.Y: Dutton, 2014. #books/wanttoread

A general truism in my experience, but I'm curious what else Levitin has to say on this subject.

https://quiescent.us/2022/06/listen-with-a-pen/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDBiW9Y-lqc

brief example; nothing exceptional about technique here.

https://quiescent.us/2022/06/think-external/

Brief example of someone who says they have an antinet zettelkasten note taking approach.

Nothing exceptional here beyond this.

https://wptavern.com/classicpress-on-the-rocks-directors-resign-new-leadership-installed

Following interruptions by colleagues or phone calls at work, people may frequently ask themselves "where was I?" more frequently than "what was I doing?" This colloquialism isn't surprising as our memories for visual items and location are much stronger than actions. Knowledge workers will look around at their environments for contextual clues for what they were doing and find them in piles of paper on their desks, tabs in their computer browser, or even documents (physical or virtual) on their desktops.

Kidd indicates that knowledge workers may prefer to take notes in physical notebooks because they're not forced to classify them immediately, but they can use their physical presence and location as a means of indicating that some sort of follow up is required. Comparing this to most digital notes which don't have this same sort of location, one is more worried that the computer filing them away will mean that they become lost almost instantaneously. Some notes like diary dates and phone numbers which may have very specific locations for noting them don't fall under these auspices, but other longer and more detailed notes certainly would.

A digital zettelkasten or commonplace may help to alleviate this as individual ideas are linked and indexed in multiple ways which make them easier to both find, use and expand upon.

I'm reminded here of the old aphorism "Out of sight is out of mind."

This harkens back to the idea of oral cultures using their environments as memory palaces to remember their culture, laws, and knowledge. Things being within sight mean that they were immediately brought to mind.

For an office worker, filing an item is tantamount to literally putting both out of their sight as well as their mind.

Compare this to the more advanced zettelkasten methods where knowledge workers file everything away out of their sight, but with the tacit idea that they'll be regularly revisiting their ideas on index cards to link other ideas to them to keep building upon them. While things may be temporarily out of mind, they're regularly recycled and linked to new ideas. Their re-emergence can cause them to be remembered, re-contextualized, and often feel like serendipity for linking to other ideas in one's collection.

The quote from this paper references Mander 1992:

It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use [12].

leads me to believe that the original paper has information which supports office workers using their physical environments as thinking and memory spaces much as indigenous peoples have for their knowledge management systems using orality and memory.

For scholars of orality, the value of the messiness in many knowledge workers' work spaces is probably not surprising. It's likely that these workers are using their local environment as oral cultures have since time immemorial. They're creating physical songlines or memory palaces in their local environment to which they're spatially attaching memories of the work they're doing, performing, or need to perform. This allows them to offload some of their memory work, storage, and retention to items in their physical space.

Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.

This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.

Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

a more refined and nuanced definition of knowledge workers than Peter Drucker's 1973 definition.

Areas of knowledge work (as determined in 1994 at least) included design, advertising, marketing, management consultancy, broadcasting, law, finance, and research.

CAUTION!

Built in assumptions which may not extrapolate.

This caveat is also a strong indication of the state-of-the-art of the level of knowledge worker research in 1994.

what he has learned in systematic education, that is, concepts, ideas and theories, rather than the man who puts to work manual skill or muscle, ” [5]. 5. Drucker, P. F. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices, Harper & Row; New York, 1973.

Influential management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker helped to popularize the concept of the "knowledge worker" by way of his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (Harper & Row, 1973).

Who/where is the origin of the neologism/idea of "knowledge worker"?

Humans make sense of information in different ways and as a result respond to it and their environments in diverse manners, a fact from which companies can derive direct value.

This idea is becoming more commonplace now, but here it is in print in 1994. Are there earlier versions of this in the literature?

Kidd, Alison. “The Marks Are on the Knowledge Worker.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 186–91. CHI ’94. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 1994. https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191740.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/07/07/the-fallout-continues-us-news-pulls-columbia-university-from-its-2022-rankings/

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/29/twitter-collabs-feature-could-make-it-possible-for-users-to-co-author-tweets-with-brands/

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-07-08.html

Realizing that my prior separate advice wasn't as actionable or specific, I thought I'd take another crack at your question.

Some seem to miss the older techniques and names for this sort of practice and get too wound up in words like categories, tags, #hashtags, [[wikilinks]], or other related taxonomies and ontologies. Some become confounded about how to implement these into digital systems. Simplify things and index your ideas/notes the way one would have indexed books in a library card catalog, generally using subject, author and title.

Since you're using an approach more grounded in the commonplace book tradition rather than a zettelkasten one, put an easy identifier on your note (this can be a unique title or number) and then cross reference it with any related subject headings or topical category words you find useful.

Here's a concrete example, hopefully in reasonable detail that one can easily follow. Let's say you have a quote you want to save:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

In a paper system you might give this card the identification number #237. (This is analogous to the Dewey Decimal number that might be put on a book to find it on the shelves.) You want to be able to find this quote in the future using the topical words "power", "information", "connections", and "quotes" for example. (Which topical headings you choose and why can be up to you, the goal is to make it easier to dig up for potential reuse in future contexts). So create a separate paper index with alphabetical headings (A-Z) and then write cards for your topical headings. Your card with "power" at the top will have the number #237 on it to indicate that that card is related to the word power. You'll ultimately have other cards that relate and can easily find everything related to "power" within your system by using this subject index.

You might also want to file that quote under two other "topics" which will make it easy to find: primarily the author of the quote "Umberto Eco" and the title of the source Foucault's Pendulum. You can add these to your index the same way you did "power", "information", etc., but it may be easier or more logical to keep a bibliographic index separately for footnoting your material, so you might want a separate bibliographic index for authors and sources. If you do this, then create a card with Umberto Eco at the top and then put the number #237 on it. Later you'll add other numbers for other related ideas to Eco. You can then keep your card "Eco, Umberto" alphabetized with all the other authors you cite. You'll effect a similar process with the title.

With this done, you now have a system in which you don't have to categorize a single idea in a single place. Regardless of what project or thing you're working on, you can find lots of related notes. If you're juggling multiple projects you can have an index file or document outline for these as well. So your book project on the History of Information could have a rough outline of the book on which you've got the number #237 in the chapter or place where you might use the quote.

Hopefully this will be even more flexible than Holiday's system because that was broadly project based. In practice, if you're keeping notes over a lifetime, you're unlikely to be interested in dramatically different areas the way Ryan Holiday or Robert Greene were for disparate book projects, but will find more overlapping areas. Having a more flexible system that will allow you to reuse your notes for multiple settings or projects will be highly valuable.

For those who are using digital systems, ask yourself: "what functions and features allow you to do these analog patterns most easily?" If you're using something like Obsidian which has #tagging functionality that automatically creates an index of all your tags, then leverage that and remove some of the manual process. The goal is to make sure the digital system is creating the structure to allow you to easily find and use your notes when you need them. If your note taking system doesn't have custom functionalities for any of these things, then you'll need to do more portions of them manually.

If these are the types of things that are interesting, you might also try a shared bibliography that a handful of readers/researchers share and contribute to: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought

I've spend a lot of time in the education, pedagogy, and instructional design spaces in the past decade. I can guarantee you that he hasn't solved the problem. People have been talking about education reform for centuries and it's still no where close to being solved. If anything perhaps it's even gotten worse, particularly in Western culture.

If this is your area, I'd recommend taking a look at some of Andy Matuschak's work on mnemonic medium and Lynne Kelly's work on orality and memory which take some non-standard approaches to some of these wholly unsolved questions. Annie Murphy Paul's recent book The Extended Mind will also outline some fun recent work and potentially show you gaping holes in the thought enterprise.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vu9ct9/folks_i_need_some_advice/

https://web.hypothes.is/blog/back-to-school-with-annotation-10-ways-to-annotate-with-students/

circle back to this...

Jeremy Dean indicates that marginal notes are often "the basis for [...] points made in a final paper", but I wonder how frequently this is the case in the computer era? I rarely see or hear of educators encouraging the reuse of marginalia or even notes in academic settings, even within the framing of Hypothes.is which is an ideal tool for such a practice.

It's been my experience that while notes are in margins, they tend to sit there lonely and unused. Few are actually creating content based on them. When this is the case, memory of the idea or issue at hand is necessary so that it may be looked up and transcribed back into a bigger piece. When it does happen it's also far more likely to be academic writers or researchers who are concertedly building up particular areas. It's much less likely to be high school or undergraduate college students who should have picked up the practice earlier in junior high school or even elementary school so that their school research years are easier.

A potential resurgence of this broader practice may be coming back into vogue with the slew of new note taking apps that have been popping up and the idea of the zettelkasten coming back into a broader consciousness.

https://campustechnology.com/Articles/2022/05/12/14-Equity-Considerations-for-Ed-Tech.aspx?Page=1

Designing pedagogical experience (PX) encompasses both the learning experience (LX) of the students as well as the teaching experience (TX) of the instructor.

Educational technology should take both parts of the overall experience into account. Too many focus on one side or the other: the ease of use for the teacher at the expense of the student or the ease of use for the student at the expense of the teacher. Balancing the two can be difficult, but designers should be watching both.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/a-better-ranking-algorithm/

Putting upvoting at the bottom of a post is a better indicator of quality than at the top where it's less likely to have been read and more of a knee-jerk reactions, particularly for the punch-the-monkey crowd.

Similar to how I use read, listen, and watch posts.

On platforms where the content takes roughly the same amount of time to consume, one can factor in the number of views versus upvotes as a quality indicator. One needs to be more careful with longer form content though as length will tend to decrease readership and clicks and potentially push people to "bookmark" to read later. How to account for these?

What are the list of variables in this overall problem?

Introducing some randomness for new unranked articles is an interesting and likely useful tactic.

short outline of the Hacker News algorithm.

Network effects can describe a broad variety of phenomenon. Is Katamari ball a better descriptor of this specific phenomenon?

How does one prioritize the richer quality Lindy library material that may be even more beneficial than things which are simply new?

When thinking about algorithmic feeds, one probably ought to not include simple likes/favorites/bookmarks as they're such low hanging fruit. Better indicators are interactions which take time, effort, work to post.

Using various forms of webmention as indicators could be interesting as one can parse responses and make an actual comment worth more than a dozen "likes", for example.

Curating people (who respond) as well as curating the responses themselves could be useful.

Time windowing curation of people and curators could be a useful metric.

Attempting to be "democratic" in these processes may often lead to the Harry and Mary Beercan effect and gaming issues seen in spaces like Digg or Twitter and have dramatic consequences for the broader readership and community. Democracy in these spaces is more likely to get you cat videos and vitriol with a soupçon of listicles and clickbait.

https://boingboing.net/2018/03/12/the-vim-clutch-a-footpeda.html

https://warmedal.se/~bjorn/posts/2022-07-02-providing-meaningful-search-results-without-own-index.html

https://www.typography.com/blog/house-of-flying-reference-marks

the guard that separates the hilt of a knife or dagger from its blade ::: quillon

the notch where the blade of a knife meets the quillon ::: choil

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vtekz2/there_is_a_zettel_maximum_capacity_and_thats_not/

I wonder if Scott P. Scheper has done any videos on his writing/composing process for getting material out of his card file for creating his book for which I've seen portions of a few chapters floating around. I've loosely followed his YouTube channel and his r/antinet community on Reddit, but I haven't seen this portion of his process in any detail.

This (export) part also seems like one of the more intense, manual, and heaving lifting pieces of the process. I've yet to see any digital tools which automate or make this portion of the work easier.

Perhaps a graph view of connected nodes with titles in which one can highlight nodes as a selection method and then export them in some process to a space where they might be potentially reordered or shuffled into a linear order for further editing and ultimately publishing, might be useful? Even saying this takes forever much less doing it easily with an inspiring user interface..

Link to: https://hyp.is/9PV1jP5OEeyPumNKyckR1A/danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper

Syndication links: - https://danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper/comment/7610486

This is one of the biggest problems with any of the systems digital or analog. The workflows for this are all generally not great.

I'm actually trying some advice from Konrad Gessner from the 1500s today. I've printed out some of my digital notes about Tiago Forte's new book to arrange and organize them in an attempt to reuse all my writing and thinking about it into a review of the book. It'll probably take a bit as I've left them for a week or two, but I'm curious to see what the manual process looks like here in an effort to help make the digital portion potentially easier.

These always read as hyperbole to me, but it's difficult to explain the surprise and serendipity of re-finding things in one's notes on a regular basis. It's akin to the sort of cognitive dissonance that religious people have when encountering the levels of complexity formed by living systems through evolution. Not having better words for describing the experience, they may resort to descriptions of magic or religion to frame their experiences.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper

https://youneedawiki.com/

Looks like a service that takes a Google Docs folder and turns it into a wiki. Clever!

https://www.lockelord.com/professionals/a/armstrong-james-e

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/03/90-of-everything-is-crap-a-source-of-imposter-syndrome/

The cumulative effect of one's perception of Sturgeon's law may be a driving force underlying imposter syndrome.

While one see's the entirety of their own creation process and realizes that only a small fraction of it is truly useful, it's much harder seeing only the finished product of others. The impression one is left with by availability heuristic is that there are thousands of geniuses in the world with excellent, refined products or ideas while one's own contribution is miniscule in comparison.

Contrast this with Matt Ridley's broad perspective in The Rational Optimist which shows the power of cumulative breeding and evolution of ideas. One person can make their own stone hand axe, but no one person can make their own toaster oven or computer mouse alone.

Link to: - lone genius myth (eg. Einstein's special relativity did not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, there was a long train of work and thought which we don't see the context of)

Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.

Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.

How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?

The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?

Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.

Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.

Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.

How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?

How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.

https://nota.md/

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/tech-etymology-tv-clicker/236965/

https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

https://app.kittl.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/kv7wtq/ecos_zk_notes/

Look into Henry La Fontaine, Mundaneum, Ranganathan's faceted classification system.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification

What was Carl Sagan's system?

Is this the same thing as the arca studiorum? I suspect it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s4xx_muNcs

Don't recommend unless you have 100 hours to follow up on everything here that goes beyond the surface.

Be aware that this is a gateway for what I'm sure is a relatively sophisticated sales funnel.

Motivational and a great start, but I wonder how many followed up on these techniques and methods, internalized them and used them every day? I've not read his book, but I suspect it's got the usual mnemonic methods that go back millennia. And yet, these things are still not commonplace. People just don't seem to want to put in the work.

As a result, they become a sales tool with a get rich quick (get smart quick) hook/scheme. Great for Kwik's pocketbook, but what about actual outcomes for the hundreds who attended or the 34.6k people who've watched this video so far?

These methods need to be instilled in youth as it's rare for adults to bother.

Acronyms for remembering things are alright, but not incredibly effective as most people will have issues remembering the acronym itself much less what the letters stand for.

There seems to be an over-fondness for acronyms for people selling systems like this. (See also Tiago Forte as another example.)

Marshall, in looking at your cards, I'm curious how easy/hard you feel it is to remember longer portions of full quotes like your H.L. Menken example using only spaced repetition? I usually find it far more taxing and not as long lasting as using other more classical mnemonic methods (method of loci/songlines).

Piotr Wozniak has some material on creating/designing more concrete cards for spaced repetition that I've found generally helpful. I know that Andy Matuschak and Soren Bjornstad have some ideas, experience, and research in the space but I've yet to see more deep research on the effectiveness of these more specific practices at scale or beyond the anecdotal.

https://marshallk.com/7-steps-i-take-to-get-value-from-what-i-read-notes-on-note-taking-review

https://marshallk.com/7-steps-i-take-to-get-value-from-what-i-read-notes-on-note-taking-review

Spending just a few minutes writing about an idea in one's flash card review can be a useful way to better integrate that idea into one's field of thought. Bringing it out and expressing it more fully, linking it to other thoughts, and shifting the modality from reading into writing can be powerful methods for ensconcing it into one's memory as well as mentally owning it and even potentially extending it.

Example of someone in the wild using their body as a locus for attaching memories temporarily so that they can recall ideas for making note of later.

Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind lays out an idea he call's "Symphonic Thinking" which is a practice of finding connections between unrelated ideas. He suggests that this practice is an important key to the future of work.

Link this to other incarnations of this pattern in history: - Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts - Niklas Luhmann - linked zettelkasten - Marshall Kirkpatrick - triangle thinking - Dan Pink - symphonic thinking - etc...

Dan Pink A Whole New Mind #books/wanttoread

What specifically?

Noam Chomsky felt that there was a tendency for people to confuse the ideas of deep structure with the ideas of either generative grammar or universal grammar. He also thought that professional linguists confused what he called "the creative aspect of language use" with the recursive property of generative grammars.

https://personalknowledgegraphs.com/#/page/Personal%20Knowledge%20Graphs

reply to: https://ariadne.space/2022/07/01/a-silo-can-never-provide-digital-autonomy-to-its-users/

Matt Ridley indicates in The Rational Optimist that markets for goods and services "work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation" while assets markets are nearly doomed to failure and require close and careful regulation.

If we view the social media landscape from this perspective, an IndieWeb world in which people are purchasing services like easy import/export of their data; the ability to move their domain name and URL permalinks from one web host to another; and CMS (content management system) services/platforms/functionalities, represents the successful market mode for our personal data and online identities. Here competition for these sorts of services will not only improve the landscape, but generally increased competition will tend to drive the costs to consumers down. The internet landscape is developed and sophisticated enough and broadly based on shared standards that this mode of service market should easily be able to not only thrive, but innovate.

At the other end of the spectrum, if our data are viewed as assets in an asset market between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al., it is easy to see that the market has already failed so miserably that one cannot even easily move ones' assets from one silo to another. Social media services don't compete to export or import data because the goal is to trap you and your data and attention there, otherwise they lose. The market corporate social media is really operating in is one for eyeballs and attention to sell advertising, so one will notice a very health, thriving, and innovating market for advertisers. Social media users will easily notice that there is absolutely no regulation in the service portion of the space at all. This only allows the system to continue failing to provide improved or even innovative service to people on their "service". The only real competition in the corporate silo social media space is for eyeballs and participation because the people and their attention are the real product.

As a result, new players whose goal is to improve the health of the social media space, like the recent entrant Cohost, are far better off creating a standards based service that allows users to register their own domain names and provide a content management service that has easy import and export of their data. This will play into the services market mode which improves outcomes for people. Aligning in any other competition mode that silos off these functions will force them into competition with the existing corporate social services and we already know where those roads lead.

Those looking for ethical and healthy models of this sort of social media service might look at Manton Reece's micro.blog platform which provides a wide variety of these sorts of data services including data export and taking your domain name with you. If you're unhappy with his service, then it's relatively easy to export your data and move it to another host using WordPress or some other CMS. On the flip side, if you're unhappy with your host and CMS, then it's also easy to move over to micro.blog and continue along just as you had before. Best of all, micro.blog is offering lots of the newest and most innovative web standards including webmention notificatons which enable website-to-website conversations, micropub, and even portions of microsub not to mention some great customer service.

I like to analogize the internet and social media to competition in the telecom/cellular phone space In America, you have a phone number (domain name) and can then have your choice of service provider (hosting), and a choice of telephone (CMS). Somehow instead of adopting a social media common carrier model, we have trapped ourselves inside of a model that doesn't provide the users any sort of real service or options. It's easy to imagine what it would be like to need your own AT&T account to talk to family on AT&T and a separate T-Mobile account to talk to your friends on T-Mobile because that's exactly what you're doing with social media despite the fact that you're all still using the same internet. Part of the draw was that services like Facebook appeared to be "free" and it's only years later that we're seeing the all too real costs emerge.

This sort of competition and service provision also goes down to subsidiary layers of the ecosystem. Take for example the idea of writing interface and text editing. There are (paid) services like iA Writer, Ulysses, and Typora which people use to compose their writing. Many people use these specifically for writing blog posts. Companies can charge for these products because of their beauty, simplicity, and excellent user interfaces. Some of them either do or could support the micropub and IndieAuth web standards which allow their users the ability to log into their websites and directly post their saved content from the editor directly to their website. Sure there are also a dozen or so other free micropub clients that also allow this, but why not have and allow competition for beauty and ease of use? Let's say you like WordPress enough, but aren't a fan of the Gutenberg editor. Should you need to change to Drupal or some unfamiliar static site generator to exchange a better composing experience for a dramatically different and unfamiliar back end experience? No, you could simply change your editor client and continue on without missing a beat. Of course the opposite also applies—WordPress could split out Gutenberg as a standalone (possibly paid) micropub client and users could then easily use it to post to Drupal, micro.blog, or other CMSs that support the micropub spec, and many already do.

Social media should be a service to and for people all the way down to its core. The more companies there are that provide these sorts of services means more competition which will also tend to lure people away from silos where they're trapped for lack of options. Further, if your friends are on services that interoperate and can cross communicate with standards like Webmention from site to site, you no longer need to be on Facebook because "that's where your friends and family all are."

I have no doubt that we can all get to a healthier place online, but it's going to take companies and startups like Cohost to make better choices in how they frame their business models. Co-ops and non-profits can help here too. I can easily see a co-op adding webmention to their Mastodon site to allow users to see and moderate their own interactions instead of forcing local or global timelines on their constituencies. Perhaps Garon didn't think Webmention was a fit for Mastodon, but this doesn't mean that others couldn't support it. I personally think that Darius Kazemi's Hometown fork of Mastodon which allows "local only" posting a fabulous little innovation while still allowing interaction with a wider readership, including me who reads him in a microsub enabled social reader. Perhaps someone forks Mastodon to use as a social feed reader, but builds in micropub so that instead of posting the reply to a Mastodon account, it's posted to one's IndieWeb capable website which sends a webmention notification to the original post? Opening up competition this way makes lots of new avenues for every day social tools.

Continuing the same old siloing of our data and online connections is not the way forward. We'll see who stands by their ethics and morals by serving people's interests and not the advertising industry.

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/HVN2uPsDEeye0HtWv8bS1w

Dear god I really hate when publishers do their references/notes like this. Sitting here at the end, unlinked to the actual text. There's a special place in hell for editors that do this in the digital age.

Time is a useful and relatively equal "currency" that can be used across time for comparison.

One might wish to add corrections for increasing health and lifespans however as this means more lived time for the average person.

The Flynn effect was initially discounted as either an issue with changes in tests or longer school days or improved education.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Link to the same idea in The Extended Mind: https://hyp.is/-84MoBWKEeyBfg9kUEdv2w/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/brain-mind-cognition.html

Matt Ridley cites a lot of statistics in The Rational Optimist to indicate that inequality has been declining worldwide, though he doesn't do it as convincingly or as well cited as Thomas Piketty does in A Brief History of Equality.

Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.

Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.

Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/

https://slate.com/culture/2022/06/book-titles-eleanor-oliphant-women-fiction.html

This article has a nice number of examples of the naming convention: "Protagonist Does a Thing"

I am a bit shocked to see Hypothes.is indicates that there are 31 (private) annotations on this particular page. What is going on here?!

https://tinysubversions.com/spring-83/rrffcc-dfk-1.txt

Some interesting points from someone with experience on several fronts.

I love that he's published his response in plain text this way!!

I thought of the same aesthetic as well, in part because it wasn't as "busy" as the comic book page aesthetic.

https://context.center/

https://context.center/topics/indie-search/

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/

I've been thinking about this sort of thing off and on myself.

I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I'd love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton's idea of reading based on social distance.

I'm struck by the seemingly related idea of @peterhagen's LindyLearn platform and annotations: https://annotations.lindylearn.io/new/ which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring '83 provide some of this?

I'm also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver's /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the "board" of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring '83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers' frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain "sense of quiet" into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.

The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one's high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!

Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring '83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don't already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties?

It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn't worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?

It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its "Cambrian explosion"?

I've been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random "Markov monkey" change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?

This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?

For more on these related ideas, see: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22spring+%2783%22

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2022/roe-opinion-annotated/

An interesting example of visual user interface of highlights and marginalia on a news site to help tell and report on a story.

A potential word to describe some of my theory for evolution, DNA, and complexity

Used often in business to describe increasing momentum

https://wiki.nikiv.dev/other/wiki-workflow

https://wiki.nikiv.dev/web/search-engines

What a fantastic list of search engines and search related tools.