reply to u/ArousedByApostasy at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g8diq4/any_books_about_how_someone_used_zettelkasten_to/

If you're suffering from the delusion (and many do) that Zettelkasten is only about Luhmann and his own writing and 4-5 recent books on the topic, you're only lacking creativity and some research skills. Seemingly Luhmann has lots of good PR, particularly since 2013, but this doesn't mitigate the fact that huge swaths of the late 1800s to the late 1900s are chock-a-block full of books produced by these methods. Loads of examples exist under other names prior to that including florilegia, commonplace books, the card system, card indexes, etc.

Your proximal issue is that the scaffolding used to write all these books is generally invisible because authors rarely, if ever, talk about their methods and as a result, they're hard to "see". This doesn't mean that they don't exist.

I've got a list of about 50+ books about the topic of zettelkasten or incredibly closely related methods dating back to 1548 if you want to peruse some: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/collections/V9RPUCXJ/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

There are a variety of examples of people's note collections that you can see in various media and compare to their published output. I've collected several dozens of examples, many of which you can find here: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

Interesting examples to get you started:

• Vladimir Nabokov's estate published copies of his index cards for the novel The Original of Laura which you can purchase and read in its index card format. You can find a copy of his index card diary as Insomniac Dreams from Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691196909/insomniac-dreams
• S.D. Goitein - researchers on the Cairo Geniza still use his note collection to produce new scholarship; though he had 1/3 the number of note cards compared to Luhmann, his academic writing output was 3 times larger. If you dig around you can find a .pdf copy of his collection of almost 30,000 notes and compare it to his written work.
• There's a digitized collection of W. Ross Ashby's notes (in notebook and index card format) which you can use to cross reference his written books and articles. https://ashby.info/
• Wittgenstein had a well-known note collection which underpinned his works (as well as posthumous works). See: Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel. Edited by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. Translated by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. Second California Paperback Printing. 1967. Reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007.
• Roland Barthes had a significant collection from which he both taught and wrote; His notes following his mother's death can be read in the book Morning Diary which were published as index card-based notes.
• The Marbach exhibition in 2013 explored six well-known zettelkasten (including Luhmann's): Gfrereis, Heike, and Ellen Strittmatter. Zettelkästen: Maschinen der Phantasie. 1st edition. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillerges, 2013. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Heike-Gfrereis/dp/3937384855/.
• Philosopher John Locke wrote a famous treatise on indexing commonplace books which underlay his own commonplacing and writing work: Locke, John, 1632-1704. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. 1685. Reprint, London, 1706. https://archive.org/details/gu_newmethodmaki00lock/mode/2up.
• Historian Jacques Barzun, a professor, dean and later provost at Columbia, not only wrote dozens of scholarly books, articles, and essays out of his own note collection, but also wrote a book about some of the process in a book which has over half a dozen editions: Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse. In his private life, he also kept a separate shared zettelkasten documenting the detective fiction which he read and was a fan. From this he produced A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres (with Wendell Hertig Taylor). 1971. Revised edition, Harper & Row, 1989: ISBN 0-06-015796-8.
• Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon all wrote treatises which included a variation of the note taking methods which were widely taught in the late 1500s at universities and other schools.
• The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale has a digitized version of his note collection called the Miscellanies that you can use to cross reference his written works.
• A recent example I've come across but haven't mentioned to others until now is that of Barrett Wendell, a professor at Harvard in the late 1800s, taught composition using a zettelkasten or card system method.
• Director David Lynch used a card index method for writing and directing his movies based on the method taught to him by Frank Daniel, a dean at the American Film Institute.
• Mortimer J. Adler et al. created a massive group zettelkasten of western literature from which they wrote volumes 2 and 3 (aka The Syntopicon) of the Great Books of the Western World. See: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2623/mortimer-j-adlers-syntopicon-a-topically-arranged-collaborative-slipbox
• Before he died, historian Victor Margolin made a YouTube video of how he wrote the massive two volume World History of Design which included a zettelkasten workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI
• Martin Luther King, Jr. kept a zettelkasten which is still extant and might allow you to reference his notes to his written words.
• The Brothers Grimm used a zettelkasten method (though theirs was slips nailed to a wall) to create The Deutsches Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary that preceeded the Oxford Dictionary). The DWB was begun in 1838 by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm who worked on it through the letter F prior to their deaths. The dictionary project was ended in 1961 after 123 years of work which resulted in 16 volumes. A further 17th source volume was released in 1971.
• Here's an interesting video of Ryan Holliday's method condensed over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk
• Because Halloween is around the corner, I'll even give you a published example of death by zettelkasten described by Nobel Prize winner Anatole France in one of his books: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/24/death-by-zettelkasten/

If you dig in a bit you can find and see the processes of others like Anne Lamott, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bob Hope, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Kate Grenville, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Phyllis Diller, Carl Linnaeus, Beatrice Webb, Isaac Newton, Harold Innis, Joan Rivers, Umberto Eco, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Raymond, Llull, George Carlin, and Eminem who all did variations of this for themselves for a variety of output types.

These barely scratch the surface of even Western intellectual history much less other cultures which have broadly similar methods (including oral cultures). If you do a bit of research into any major intellectual, you're likely to uncover a similar underlying method of work.

While there are some who lionize Luhmann, he didn't invent or even perfect these methods, but is just a drop of water in a vast sea of intellectual history.

And how did I write this short essay response? How do I have all these examples to hand? I had your same question years ago and read and researched my way into an answer. I have both paper and digital zettelkasten from which to query and write. I don't count my individual paper slips of which there are over 15,000 now, but my digital repository is easily over 20,000 (though only 19K+ are public).

I hope you manage to figure out some version of the system for yourself and manage to create something interesting and unique out of it. It's not a fluke and it's not "just a method for writing material about zettelkasten itself".

Theatres of Memory (1994) sounds like it's taking lots of examples from a zettelkasten and tying them together.

It's also interesting to note that he published several books posthumously. Was this accomplished in part due to his zettelkasten notes the way others like Ludwig Wittgenstein?

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook E, #46, 1775–1776

In this single paragraph quote Lichtenberg, using the model of Italian bookkeepers of the 18th century, broadly outlines almost all of the note taking technique suggested by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes. He's got writing down and keeping fleeting notes as well as literature notes. (Keeping academic references would have been commonplace by this time.) He follows up with rewriting and expanding on the original note to create additional "explanations" and even "connections" (links) to create what Ahrens describes as permanent notes or which some would call evergreen notes.

Lichtenberg's version calls for the permanent notes to be "separated and ordered" and while he may have kept them in book format himself, it's easy to see from Konrad Gessner's suggestion at the use of slips centuries before, that one could easily put their permanent notes on index cards ("separated") and then number and index or categorize them ("ordered"). The only serious missing piece of Luhmann's version of a zettelkasten then are the ideas of placing related ideas nearby each other, though the idea of creating connections between notes is immediately adjacent to this, and his numbering system, which was broadly based on the popularity of Melvil Dewey's decimal system.

It may bear noticing that John Locke's indexing system for commonplace books was suggested, originally in French in 1685, and later in English in 1706. Given it's popularity, it's not unlikely that Lichtenberg would have been aware of it.

Given Lichtenberg's very popular waste books were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Reference: Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.) It would not be hard to imagine that Niklas Luhmann would have also been aware of them.

Open questions: <br /> - did Lichtenberg number the entries in his own waste books? This would be early evidence toward the practice of numbering notes for future reference. Based on this text, it's obvious that the editor numbered the translated notes for this edition, were they Lichtenberg's numbering? - Is there evidence that Lichtenberg knew of Locke's indexing system? Did his waste books have an index?

reply to u/muhlfriedl by way of reply to u/chounosumuheya at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13s6dsg/comment/jlpt8ai/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Examples of zettelkasten users

S.D. Goitein, Beatrice Webb, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Harold Innis, Victor Margolin, Eminem, Aby Warburg, Antonin Sertillanges, Jacques Barzun, C. Wright Mills, Gotthard Deutsch, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Vladimir Nabokov, Gerald Weinberg, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Hans Blumenberg, Keith Thomas, Arno Schmidt, Mario Bunge, Sönke Ahrens, Dan Allosso for a few more. If you go with those who used commonplace books and waste books, which are notebook-based instead of index card-based, there are thousands upon thousands more.

Historically the easier question might be: what creators didn't use one of these systems and was successful?!? The broad outlines of these methods go back much, much farther than Niklas Luhmann. These patterns are not new...

Personally, I've used my own slip box to write large portions of the articles on my website. I also queried it to compile this reply.

via: Georg Henrik von Wright, “The Wittgenstein Papers,” The Philosophical Review 78:4 (1969), 483–563, here: 487.

von Wright seems to indicate that Wittgenstein created typescripts which he cut up into zettel and then was able to rearrange them into final forms.

does my zettelkasten make writing... harder?

Worried about self-plagiarizing in the future? Others like Hans Blumenberg have struck through used cards with red pencil. This could also be done with metadata or other searchable means in the digital realm as well. (See: https://hypothes.is/a/mT8Twk2cEe2bvj8lq2Lgpw)

General problems she faces: 1. Notetaking vs. writing voice (shifting between one and another and not just copy/pasting) 2. discovery during writing (put new ideas into ZK as you go or just keep writing on the page when the muse strikes) 3. Linearity of output: books are linear and ZK is not

Using transclusion may help in the initial draft/zero draft?<br /> ie: ![[example]] (This was mentioned in the comments as well.)

directional vs. indirectional notes - see Sascha Fast's article

Borrowing from the telecom/cable industry, one might call this the zettelkasten "last mile problem". I've also referred to it in the past as the zettelkasten output problem. (See also the description and comments at https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/ as well as some of the examples linked at https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/)

Many journal articles that review books (written in English) in the last half of the 20th century which include the word zettelkasten have a negative connotation with respect to ZK and frequently mention the problem that researchers/book writers have of "tipping out their ZKs" without the outlining and argument building/editing work to make their texts more comprehensible or understandable.

Ward Cunningham has spoken in the past about the idea of a Markov Monkey who can traverse one's atomic notes in a variety of paths (like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but the monkey knows all the potential paths). The thesis in some sense is the author choosing a potential "best" path (a form of "travelling salesperson problem), for a specific audience, who presumably may have some context of the general area.

Many mention Sonke Ahrens' book, but fail to notice Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) and Gerald Weinberg's "The Fieldstone Method (Dorset House, 2005) which touch a bit on these composition problems.

I'm not exactly sure of the particulars and perhaps there isn't enough historical data to prove one direction or another, but Wittgenstein left behind a zettelkasten which his intellectual heirs published as a book. In it they posit (in the introduction) that rather than it being a notetaking store which he used to compose longer works, that the seeming similarities between the ideas in his zettelkasten and some of his typescripts were the result of him taking his typescripts and cutting them up to put into his zettelkasten. It may be difficult to know which direction was which, but my working hypothesis is that the only way it could have been ideas from typescripts into his zettelkasten would have been if he was a "pantser", to use your terminology, and he was chopping up ideas from his discovery writing to place into contexts within his zettelkasten for later use. Perhaps access to the original physical materials may be helpful in determining which way he was moving. Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/BptoKsRPEe2zuW8MRUY1hw

Some helpful examples: - academia : Victor Margolin - fiction/screenwriting: - Dustin Lance Black - Vladimir Nabokov - others...

Llewelyn, J. E. “Zettel. By Ludwig Wittgenstein. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1967. Pp. v + ve + 124 + 124e. Price 37s 6d).” The Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 71 (April 1968): 176. https://doi.org/10.2307/2217524.

reply to u/dotphrasealpha at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11z08fq/what_type_of_note_did_niklas_luhmann_average_6/

The true insight you're looking for here is: Forget the numbers and just aim for quality followed very closely by consistency!

Of course most will ignore my insight and experience and be more interested in the numbers, so let's query a the 30+ notes I've got on this topic in my own zettelkasten to answer the distal question.

Over the 45 years from 1952 to 1997 Luhmann produced approximately 90,000 slips which averages out to:

• 45 years * 365 days/year = 16,425 days
• 90,000 slips / 16,425 days = 5.47 slips per day

In a video, Ahrens indicates that Luhmann didn't make notes on weekends, and if true, this would revise the count to 7.69 slips per day.

260 working days a year (on average, not accounting for leap years or potential governmental holidays)

• 45 years x 260 work days/year = 11,700 days
• 90,000 slips / 11,700 days = 7.69 slips per day

Compare these closer numbers to Ahrens' stated and often quoted 6 notes per day in How to Take Smart Notes.

I've counted from the start of '52 through all of '97 to get 45 years, but the true amount of time was a bit shorter than this in reality, so the number of days should be slightly smaller.

Keep in mind that Luhmann worked at this roughly full time for decades, so don't try to measure yourself against him. (He also published in a different era and broadly without the hurdle of peer review.) Again: Aim for quality over quantity! If it helps, S.D. Goitein created a zettelkasten of 27,000 notes which he used to publish almost a third more papers and books than Luhmann. Wittgenstein left far fewer notes and only published one book during his lifetime, but published a lot posthumously and was massively influential. Similarly Roland Barthes had only about 12,500 slips and loads of influential work.

I keep notes on various historical practitioners' notes/day output over several decades using these sorts of practices. Most are in the 1-2 notes per day range. A sampling of them can be found here: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/#Notes%20per%20day.

Anecdotally, I've found that most of the more serious people here and on the zettelkasten.de forum are in the 4-10 slips per week range.

<whisper>quality...</whisper>

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel. Edited by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright,. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Second California Paperback Printing. 1967. Reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007.

annotation target: urn:x-pdf:15f4a1e48274f28b55eb6f8411c1ff1c

This brings up the question of how Ludwig Wittgenstein arranged his own zettelkasten...

Peter Geach made an arrangement of Wittgenstein's zettels which was broadly kept in the edited and published version Zettel (1967). Apparently fragments on the same topic were clipped together indicating that Wittgenstein's method was most likely by topical headings. However there were also a large number of slips "lying loose in the box." Perhaps these were notes which he had yet to file or which some intervening archivist may have re-arranged?

In any case, Geach otherwise arranged all the materials as best as he could according to subject matter. As a result the printed book version isn't necessarily the arrangement that Wittgenstein would have made, but the editors of the book felt that at least Geach's arrangement made it an "instructive and readable compilation".

This source doesn't indicate the use of alphabetical dividers or other tabbed divisions.

Some of the manuscript notes in Wittgenstein's zettelkasten were "apparently written to add to the remarks on a particular matter preserved in the box".ᔥ So much like Niklas Luhmann's wooden conversation partner, Wittgenstein was not only having conversations with the texts he was reading, he was creating a conversation between himself and his pre-existing notes thus extending his lines of thought within his zettelkasten.

In 1967, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright published a collection of notes from Ludwig Wittgenstein's zettelkasten which they aptly titled Zettel.

Perhaps apropos from Wittgenstein's own zettelkasten? 🐎

1. ''Putting the cart before the horse" may be said of an explanation like the following: we tend someone else because by analogy with our own case we believe that he is experiencing pain too.—Instead of saying: Get to know a new aspect from this special chapter of human behaviour—from this use of language. (p96)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel. Edited by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright,. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Second California Paperback Printing. 1967. Reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVHhwyx-Cg

An overly complex method of commonplacing, though oddly with absolutely no mention of indexing of any sort.

reply: <br /> If academia doesn't work out, then perhaps you could shill for "Big Notebook"? Seriously though, this is a pretty heavy/complex method of commonplacing. Do you index any/all of it somehow so you can find the pieces you know you've worked through in the past? A card index perhaps? John Locke's commonplacing method? I do something similar, but use slips or index cards the way Wittgenstein or Walter Benjamin did.... Perhaps one day I'll go more visual like https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/ ?

https://www.amazon.com/Private-Notebooks-1914-1916-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/1324090804

Notes or diaries or a mixture of both?

I've got a few slips/references to Wittgenstein's practice available here: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=Wittgenstein

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

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.

The compositional approaches mentioned here are those of Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin.

What was Burrough's cut-up-fold-in technique?

Ludwig Wittgenstein had a box, which he apparently called his 'Zettel' in which he kept over 700 text fragments or scraps and other loose pages.

Double check this reference for a translation error from German as Zettel is the 'slip' and kasten is the 'box', 'crate', or 'container'.

Wittgenstein worked with typescripts which he would often cut up into fragments so that he could reorder them for his particular needs. He had an unpublished work titled The Big Typescript of 768 pages which he created in this manner.

Link this to: - Kevin Marks' media fragments and fragmentions work - blackout poetry - mid 1900s newspaper publishing workflows

Peter Krapp created a list of thinkers including Locke, Leibniz, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Barthes, Michel Leiris, Georges Perec, and Lévi-Strauss who used index cards in his essay Hypertext Avant La Lettre on the precursors of hypertext.

see also: Krapp, P. (2006) ‘Hypertext Avant La Lettre’, in W. H. K. Chun & T. Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Theory: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge: 359-373.

Notice that Krapp was the translator of Paper Machines About Cards & Catalogs, 1548 – 1929 (MIT Press, 2011) by Marcus Krajewski. Which was writing about hypertext and index cards first? Or did they simply influence each other?

apparently a quote from Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money by David Sawyer FCIPR.

Notes about users of index card based commonplace books.

It would almost have to be the case that with his method and notebooks being so well known that they influenced Niklas Luhmann's idea of a zettelkasten.

I added this section.