https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

The PKM space has gotten crazy, but mostly through bad practice, lack of history, and hype. There are a few valid points I see mirrored here, but on the whole this piece is broadly off base due to a lack of proper experience, practice and study. I definitely would recommend he take a paid course to fix the issue, but delve more deeply into recommended historical practices.

This perspective is the same sort of hero worship that has too often been beaten into people (and especially students) over the centuries.

You have to be an absolute genius to be able to create work like that of Francis Bacon, Conrad Gessner, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Carl Linnaeus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Isaac Newton, Umberto Eco, Philip Melanchthon, Erasmus Darwin, Rudolphus Agricola, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Burns right?

Here's the secret: all of them kept extensive notebooks, commonplace books, or zettelkasten-like note collections. Small little pieces aggregated over time allowed them to create great things.

I suspect that if one looks at famous creators/writers throughout history they will discover that some sort of personal knowledge management system at the core of their practice.

This completely loses the fact that two different areas of work can be used fruitfully in combinatorically creative ways to expand insight and knowledge. While you can loosely forget what is in your notes, the fact that they exist and are interlinked helps you resurface and reuse them. If you're not reusing and constantly linking them, then you're failing.

I will agree that there are far too many "influencers" and "gurus" out there selling something in the note taking space. Almost none of them know what the hell they're talking about.

In watching the space and seeing the sorts of conversations and questions I see online in Twitter, Reddit, and other fora, I too often see people talking about the system(s) and not actually using the systems. Very few get to a critical mass of well written notes, which I estimate to be about 500 to 1000 before they give up. Most aren't taking good notes and are imposing far more structure on them as if they're writing wiki articles instead of taking notes. Too many things go wrong in their processes before they're giving up and moving on. This has the effect of making the enterprise appear to be a failure.

I suspect that the author of this piece is in this last group and instead of thinking about why they're failing, they're lashing out about the hype in the space. Certainly there is way too much hype, and that isn't necessarily a good thing. But there's also not nearly enough practice and that is far worse.

This sounds clever, but it belies the amount of work that can go into such systems on the font end instead of on the back end. It also sounds as if the author hasn't used such a system to even a low level of critical mass to begin discovering any serendipity or finding any insight in their links.

imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.

Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

Anecdotal evidence that not centralizing one's work is a road to failure.

Centralized note taking for easy search is key!

I had this same sense early on, but it involved a capacious memory rather than a reliance on written notes that I needed to consult.

He does build a sense of excitement and magic around the idea of taking notes here, though sadly he's covering up the amount of work that maintaining such a system entails.

The ideas behind knowledge management are largely timeless, but they are far from unchanging. They have evolved slowly over 2000+ years until we broadly threw many of them away in the early 20th century.

One only need read a few pages of Ann M. Blair's Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age to see some of the changes and shifts within the space from the 1400s on.

I might argue that you're consuming in in the wrong way and thus not able to re-use it at the correct time.

This is all too correct. Sadly the older methods for writing, note taking, thinking, and memory have fallen by the wayside, so most literate moderns don't have the tradition most of (elite educated) Western culture has had for the past 2000+ years. The long tradition of commonplace books and their related versions including waste books, florilegium, sudelbücher, scholia, glossae, notebooks, anthologies, sylvae, table books, vade mecum, memoranda books, diaries, miscellanies, pocket books, thesauruses, etc. underlines your thesis well. The Zettelkasten, exactly like almost all of these others, is simply an iteration of the commonplace book instantiated into index card form. One of the reasons that Umberto Eco's advice on writing seems so similar to the zettelkasten method is that he was a medievalist scholar who was aware of these long traditions of writing, note taking, and memory and leveraged these for himself, though likely in a slightly different manner. Would anyone suggest that he didn't have a voluminous output or an outsized impact on society and culture? If one really wants to go crazy on the idea of backlinks and the ideas of creativity and invention, perhaps they ought to brush up on their Catalan and read some Ramon Llull? He was an 11th century philosopher and polymath who spent a lot of time not only memorizing much of his personal knowledge, but who invented combinatorial creative methods for juxtaposing his volumes of information to actively create new ideas. I guarantee no backlinking system held a match to his associative methods. Now if someone wanted to mix some mysticism into the fray, then perhaps there might be a competition... Many who are now writing so positively about Zettelkasten or backlinks are doing so in much the same way that humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon did when writing about and re-popularizing commonplace books in the 1500s. The primary difference being that the chance that they leave as lasting a legacy is much smaller. Worse many of them are crediting Luhmann for the actual invention of the Zettelkasten when his is but one instantiation on a long evolution of many note taking devices over literal millennia. I'm still waiting for folks to spend more time talking about Carl Linnaeus' revolutionary invention and use of the index card. Or John Locke's system for creating a new indexing system for commonplace books. Generally we don't talk about these innovations because their users spent more of their time using their systems to get other more important things done for their legacies. In the end, the message seems clear, anyone can be incredibly productive; most of it boils down to having some sort of system of reading, thinking, note taking, and new production and sticking with it for a while. Have a system; use your system; evolve it slowly to work well for you and the way you think and work.

https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook

IFTTT.com sent out a marketing email today in which one of the five major headlines was "Automated Notebook": "Your Ideas and Inspiration in one place" with a big "Explore" button that goes to https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook

https://www.edvo.com/

Beta app for note taking/productivity.

https://heptabase.com/

A visual note-taking tool for learning complex topics. (YC W22)

... notekeeping was an art, a performance, that took place on, around, and across paper. —Matthew Daniel Eddy

I'm also reminded of this in the framing of lack of performance as students I didn't know regularly asked me in college why I didn't take notes.

Only years on now do I realize it was because they and I had been taking the wrong types of notes.

Odd that this .pdf is garbling the highlighted text...

What are the differences in the affordances of handwritten notes versus digital notes? Worth making a complete list.

Eddy, Matthew Daniel (anticipated 2022). Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo173084820.html

https://fieldnotesbrand.com/apparel/remember-it-now-tee

Field Notes, a manufacturer of notebooks, uses the credo "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now." This is an fun restatement of the idea behind the power of the Feynman technique.

Link to Ahrens' version of this idea.

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

Looks like some reasonable export to other services to get your notes out of the Boox e-reader.

https://lifehacker.com/which-epaper-tablet-is-best-for-digital-notes-1848859314

Most people born since the advent of the filing cabinet and the computer have spent a lifetime using a hierarchical folder-based mental model for their knowledge. For greater value and efficiency one needs to get away from this model and move toward linking individual ideas together in ways that they can more easily be re-used.

To accomplish this many people use an index-based method that uses topical or subject headings which can be useful. However after even a few years of utilizing a generic tag (science for example) it may become overwhelmed and generally useless in a broad search. Even switching to narrower sub-headings (physics, biology, chemistry) may show the same effect. As a result one will increasingly need to spend time and effort to maintain and work at this sort of taxonomical system.

The better option is to directly link related ideas to each other. Each atomic idea will have a much more limited set of links to other ideas which will create a much more valuable set of interlinks for later use. Limiting your links at this level will be incredibly more useful over time.

One of the biggest benefits of the physical system used by Niklas Luhmann was that each card was required to be placed next to at least one card in a branching tree of knowledge (or a whole new branch had to be created.) Though he often noted links to other atomic ideas there was at least a minimum link of one on every idea in the system.

For those who have difficulty deciding where to place a new idea within their system, it can certainly be helpful to add a few broad keywords of the type one might put into an index. This may help you in linking your individual ideas as you can do a search of one or more of your keywords to narrow down the existing ones within your collection. This may help you link your new idea to one or more of those already in your system. This method may be even more useful and helpful for those who are starting out and have fewer than 500-1000 notes in their system and have even less to link their new atomic ideas to.

For those who have graphical systems, it may be helpful to look for one or two individual "tags" in a graph structure to visually see the number of first degree notes that link to them as a means of creating links between atomic ideas.

To have a better idea of a hierarchy of value within these ideas, it may help to have some names and delineate this hierarchy of potential links. Perhaps we might borrow some well ideas from library and information science to guide us? There's a system in library science that uses a hierarchical set up using the phrases: "broader terms", "narrower terms", "related terms", and "used for" (think alias or also known as) for cataloging books and related materials.

We might try using tags or index-like links in each of these levels to become more specific, but let's append "connected atomic ideas" to the bottom of the list.

Here's an example:

• broader terms (BT): [[physics]]
• narrower terms (NT): [[mechanics]], [[dynamics]]
• related terms (RT): [[acceleration]], [[velocity]]
• used for (UF) or aliases:
• connected atomic ideas: [[force = mass * acceleration]], [[$$v^2=v_0^2​+2aΔx$$]]

Chances are that within a particular text, one's notes may connect and interrelate to each other quite easily, but it's important to also link those ideas to other ideas that are already in your pre-existing body of knowledge.

See also: Thesaurus for Graphic Materials I: Subject Terms (TGM I) https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/ic.html

Newcomers to note taking practice using tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. often see very nice and clean-cut toy examples of note collections which are impeccably linked and maintained. This may also be the case for those who publish their notes (or portions thereof) in public settings on the web. In reality, this sort of rigidness and beautifully manicured practice almost never happens. There are varying levels of messiness in actual people's notes. Beginners should be aware of this and not hold themselves to too high a standard and use this as an excuse not to practice and get their work done.

One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.

Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."

This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

Historical note taking practices can tell us many things aside from just the ways in which textual information was managed. They can also tell us about how people lived, how they thought, how they used memory and writing and how these things were understood culturally.

We do however need to be careful in how we interpret these documents historically. We need to attempt to view them exegetically and not eisegetically. We also need to be careful to look at them from a "large world" perspective and not presume that small things had large and heavy influence on things to come in the future.

This quote is worth looking up and checking its context. Particularly I'm interested to know if the purpose of summarizing the source is to check one's understanding of the ideas as is done in the Feynman technique, or if the purpose is a reminder summary of the piece itself?

Link to Ahrens mentions of this technique for checking understanding. (Did he use the phrase Feynman in his text?)

Annotations or notes are definitely the first step towards having a collection of excerpts from one's reading. Where to put them can be a useful question though. Should they be in the margins for ease of creation or should they go into a notebook. Both of these methods may require later rewriting/revision or even moving into a more convenient permanent place. The idea "don't repeat yourself" (DRY) in programming can be useful to keep in mind, but the repetition of the ideas in writing and revision can help to quicken the memory as well as potentially surface additional ideas that hadn't occurred upon the notes' original capture.

Sönke Ahrens apparently missed this bit of advice.

link to the Arthur C. Clarke quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." which appeared in his 1962 book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible”.

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

Footnote:

Sacchini (1614)—further references to “Sacchini” will be to this edition; warm thanks to Helmut Zedelmaier for sharing with me his photocopy of this edition. Further editions include: Sammieli (Saint-Mihiel, Lorraine), 1615; Ingolstadt 1616; Bordeaux 1617; Dillingen 1621; Leipzig 1711 and 1738; and Venetiis Britonum (Vannes, Brittany), 1866. It was translated into French (Sacchini [1786]) and German, Über die Lektüre, ihren Nutzen und die Vortheile sie gehörig anzuwenden, nach dem Lateini- Notes to Pages 70–72 283 schen des Sacchini teutsch bearbeitet und mit einem Anhange begleitet von Herrmann Walchner (Karlsruhe, 1832). I am grateful to Helmut Zedelmaier for the information about the German edition, which I have not seen. Sacchini’s De ratione . . . legendi was a source for Rainierio Carsughi, Ars bene scribendi (Rome, 1709), as discussed in Haskell (2003), 260. For the full range of Jesuit practices of note-taking (including notes taken under dictation) see Nelles (2007)—I am grateful to Paul Nelles for helpful conversations over the years. On Sacchini, see also Dainville (1978), 224–27.

Zedelmaier argues that scholarly methods of informa- tion management inspired bureaucratic information management; see Zedelmaier (2004), 203.

Go digging around here for links to the history of index cards, zettelkasten, and business/accounting.

Compare this with the waste book tradition in accounting.

I seem to recall a book or two like this that were on the best seller list in the 1990s and early 2000s based on a best selling Christian self help book, but with an edition that had a journal like reflection space. Other than the old word rapiaria, is there a word for this broad genre besides self-help journal?

An example might be Rhonda Byrne's book The Secret (Atria Books, 2006) which had a gratitude journal version (Atria Books, 2007, 978-1582702087).

Another example includes Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life (Zondervan, 2002) with a journal version (Zondervan, 2002, 978-0310807186).

There's also a sub-genre of diaries and journals that have these sort of preprinted quotes/reflections for each day in addition to space for one to write their own reflections.

Has anyone created a daily blogging/reflection platform that includes these sorts of things? One might repurpose the Hello Dolly WordPress plugin to create journal prompts for everyday writing and reflection.

Based on this definition of a "note", one must wonder if my public notes here on Hypothes.is are then not notes as they are tacitly circulated publicly from the first use. However they are still specifically and distinctly preparatory towards some future finished work, I just haven't yet decided which ultimate work in which they'll appear.

If Bernard of Clairvaux had secretaries take notes during his sermons for later revision and circulation, how did he compose them in the first place? Were they outlined and delivered mnemonically/orally with some extemporaneous embellishment?

Ann Blair's definition of note taking

Summary tk

Modern note taking has seen a reversion to pre-Renaissance practices in which they're much more temporary tools. Relatively few students take notes with an aim for reusing them past their immediate classroom settings or current term of study.

The revitalization of the idea of the zettelkasten in the late 2010s seems to be helping to reverse this idea. However, there aren't enough online versions of these sorts of notes which allow them to be used with other publics or even to be used and shared with other collaborators. There are some growing spaces seen in the social media note taking space like the anagora.org or the digital gardens space where this seems to have some potential to take off. There's also a small community on Hypothes.is which seems to be practicing this as well, though direct links between various collections of notes is not commonplace.

Early modern reference works, handbooks, and pedagogical practices created a sort of standardized set of subject headings amongst note takers.

A similar sort of effort could have been seen in the blogosphere of the early 2000s in which Technorati and their search functionality may have helped to standardize some of these same sorts of taxonomic issues within their product which was widely used at the time.

Blogs

Blogging is a form of public note sharing that isn't dissimilar to seventeenth-century note sharing practices in group settings.

This makes me wonder if it would be a useful product to have a highly linked note collection to sell to others in a modern context? It could be done entirely in text files for compatibility with Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. Ideally it would be done in a more commonplace way with quotes and interlinked and could be expanded upon by the purchaser.

cross reference her paper:

Blair, Ann. “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (September 2004): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1086/427303.

There is a parallel between these practices and the same sort of practices seen in social media posting, annotating, and bookmarking, however in the digital realm the user interface is so simple that one needn't put very much thought into the process and the results become almost instantaneously meaningless. Was this the case in the medieval context as well, or did the readers/compilers get more out of their practices?

https://shop.boox.com/

phy. In that sense, the reproduction of these three slips ironically resonates, if on a different scale, with the world tour of the mask of Tutankhamen. It refers, if not to the magic silence of a relic, at least to the ghostly parergonal quality of what French language calls a reliquat.

Hollier argues that Barthes' reproduced cards are not only completely divorced from their original context and use, but that they are reproduced for the sheen of reality and artistic fashion they convey to the reader. So much thought, value, and culture is lost in the worship of these items in this setting compared to their original context.

This is closely linked to the same sort of context collapse highlighted by the photo of Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders in Tim Ingold's Why Anthropology Matters. There we only appreciate the sense of antiquity, curiosity, and exoticness of an elder of a culture that is not ours. These rocks, by very direct analogy, are the index cards of the zettelkasten of an oral culture.

Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders; a picture taken by A. Irving Hallowell in 1930, between Grand Rapids and Pikangikum, Ontario, Canada. (American Philosophical Society)

Hollier, Denis. “Notes (On the Index Card).” October 112, no. Spring (2005): 35–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397642

Read: 2022-04-20 15:36

Interesting material on Barthes' use of note cards, though not in depth. Some interesting discussion on the idea of autobiography from a philosophical perspective.

The first five sections were interesting to me, the last two a bit denser and not as clear or interesting without additional context.

Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.

link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten

Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?

Bonniot quoted in Michel Leiris, La Règle du jeu (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 1658.

Stéphane Mallarmé's son in law Dr. Bonniot indicates that "Mallarmé, as we know, used to jot down his first ideas, the first outlines of his work on eighths of half-sheets of school notebook size—notes he would keep in big wooden boxes of China tea.”

Given that Mallarmé lived from 1842 to 1898, his life predated the general rise and mass manufacture of the index card, but like many of his generation and several before, he relied on self-made note tools like standard sized sheets of paper cut in eighths which he kept in somewhat standard sized boxes.

https://winnielim.org/library/collections/personal-websites-with-a-notes-section/

Winnie has some excellent examples of people's websites with notes, similar to that of https://indieweb.org/note. But it feels a bit like she's approaching it from the perspective of deeper ideas and thoughts than one might post to Twitter or other social media. It would be worthwhile looking at examples of people's practices in this space that are more akin to note taking and idea building, perhaps in the vein of creating digital gardens or the use of annotation tools like Hypothes.is?

https://www.connectedpapers.com/

https://twitter.com/ConnectedPapers

Something about the name Connected Papers reminds me of the same sort of linking name that Manfred Kuehn gave to his note taking software ConnectedText.

It really kills me to see these types of jargon and acronyms popping up in the technology space around note taking. What do these really mean? Why should the average user care? It all feels like the sort of careless marketing and buzzwords like "second brain" or "MOC" (maps of content).

https://www.thunknotes.com/

https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1517207721866452992

It took me a long time (probably more than 7-8 years of working in the industry) to get somewhat decent at capturing notes in meetings.<br><br>How can one get better at note taking? What has worked well for you? What do good note takers do particularly well?

— Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas) April 21, 2022

This question and the responses are an interesting snapshot of note taking practices, particularly for work related meetings.

I too had hoped that Ann Blair would discuss her own methods of note taking, compiling, and analysis.

Perhaps we should interview her for the details?

Some scholars study annotations as part of material culture. Are they leaving out too much by solely studying those physically left in the books about which they were made, or should we instead also be looking at other sources like commonplace books, notebooks, note cards, digital spaces like e-readers that allow annotation, social media where texts are discussed, or even digital marginalia in services like Hypothes.is or Perusall?

Some of these forms of annotation allow a digital version of cut and paste which doesn't cause damage to the original text, which should be thought of as a good thing though it may separate the annotations from the original physical object.

In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.

Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?

While the three index cards of Barthes that were reproduced in the 1977 edition of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes may have been "primarily for reality-effect value as evidence of an expanding taste for historical documents" as argued by Hollier, it does indicate the value of the collection to Barthes himself as part of an autobiographical work.

I've noticed that one of the cards is very visibly about homosexuality in a time where public discussion of the term was still largely taboo. It would be interesting to have a full translation of the three cards to verify Hollier's claim, as at least this one does indicate the public consumption of the beginning of changing attitudes on previously taboo subject matter, even for a primarily English speaking audience which may not have been able to read or understand them, but would have at least been able to guess the topic.

At least some small subset of the general public might have grown up with an index-card-based note taking practice and guessed at what their value may have been though largely at that point index card note systems were generally on their way out.

'Memory crutch' implies a physical human failing that needs assistance rather than a phrase like aide-mémoire that doesn't draw that same attention.

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

Barthes kept his system to a 'strict format' of cards which were one quarter the size of his usual sheet of writing paper, though he did adjust the size over time as paper sizes standardized within Europe. Hollier indicates that the collection had considerable 'interior mobility' and the cards were constantly reordered with use. Barthes also apparently frequently annotated and altered his notes on cards, so they were also changing with use over time.

Did he make his own cards or purchase them? The sizing of his paper with respect to his cards might indicate that he made his own as it would have been relatively easy to fold his own paper in half twice and cut it up.

Were his cards numbered or marked so as to be able to put them into some sort of standard order? There's a mention of 'interior mobility' and if this was the case were they just floating around internally or were they somehow indexed and tethered (linked) together?

The fact that they were regularly used, revise, and easily reordered means that they could definitely have been used to elicit creativity in the same manner as Raymond Llull's combinatorial art, though done externally rather than within one's own mind.

Note the idea here about how easily portable a 1,000 card index must have been or alternately how important it must have been that Barthes traveled with it.

Walter Benjamin used a zettelkasten like note taking technique.

Roland Barthes' use of index cards has been documented by the following:

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.

Hollier, D. (2005) ‘Notes (on the Index Card)’, October 112 (Spring): 35-44.

Calvet, J.-L. (1994) Roland Barthes: A Biography. Trans. S. Wykes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Includes some research on the use Roland Barthes made of index cards for note taking to create his output.

Wait, what?! Someone's written an essay on index card use by these two?!

First time I've run across the French term fichier boîte (literally 'file box') for index card boxes or files.

As someone looking into note taking practices and aware of the idea of the zettelkasten, the suspense is building for me. I'm hoping this paper will have the payoff I'm looking for: a description of Roland Barthes' note taking methods!

https://kinopio.club/

A digital card-based system for taking and collecting notes.

The linking of one zettel to another can be a lot of work, but it is also the thing which improves the creativity and serendipity of the enterprise.

To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.

Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).

Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.

There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw

There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.

All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.

Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.

Where

My annotations broadly flow into two spaces:

Obsidian

My private Obsidian-based vault is where I collect the notes and actively work on, modify, edit, and expand them if and when necessary. This is also the space where I'm broadly attempting to densely interlink them together for future use and publication in other venues. If I could, I would publish these all on the web, but I've yet to find a set up with a low enough admin tax that I can publish them inexpensively in a way I'd like them to appear (primarily with properly linked [[WikiLinks]]) while still owning them in my own space.

I've been experimenting around with using Blot.im as a solution to display them here https://notes.boffosocko.com/, but at present it's a very limited selection of my extant notes and doesn't include Webmention or other niceties I'd like to add. As it's a very alpha stage experiment I don't recommend anyone follow or use it and it may disappear altogether in the coming months.

WordPress

My main website uses WordPress. To a great extent, this is (now) primarily a back up location and the majority of the annotations are unpublished to the public, but are searchable to me on the back end.

I do, however, use it occasionally for quickly publishing and syndicating select annotations which I think others may find interesting or upon which I'm looking for comments/feedback and don't expect that the audience I'd like these from will find them natively on Hypothes.is' platform. An example of this might be a paper I was reading this weekend on Roland Barthes which discusses his reasonably well documented zettelkasten-like note taking practice. The article can be found here: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/373-604-1-PB.pdf with the annotations seen here: https://docdrop.org/pdf/The-Card-Index-as-Creativity-Ma---Wilken-Rowan-upq8g.pdf/. To tip off others in the space, I made a post on my site with a bit of a puzzle and syndicated it to Twitter. A few hours later I posted a follow up with some additional details and links to my notes on hypothesis which got some useful feedback from Matthias Melcher on the Barthes paper as well as on a related paper I mentioned by Luhmann, particularly about German translation, with which I have little facility.

Another recent illustrative example was this annotation on the Library of Congress website about Vladimir Nabokov which was picked up by my website (though unpublished/not public) but which I syndicated to Twitter primarily to be able to send a notification to Eleanor Konik who I know is interested in the idea of World Building using historical facts and uses Obsidian in her work. (The @mention in the tweet is hiding in the image of the index card so that I could save text space in the main tweet.) Several others interested in note taking and zettelkasten for writing also noticed it and "liked" it. Not being on Hypothes.is to my knowledge much less following me there, neither Eleanor nor the others would have seen it without the Tweet.

Nabokov used index cards for his research & writing. In one index card for Lolita, he creates a "weight-heigh-age table for girls of school age" to be able to specify Lolita's measurements. He also researched the Colt catalog of 1940. #WorldBuildinghttps://t.co/i16Yc7CbJ8 pic.twitter.com/JSjXV50L3M

— Chris Aldrich (@ChrisAldrich) April 10, 2022

How

Obsidian

Getting annotations from Hypothes.is to Obsidian is a short two-step process which is reasonably well automated so that I don't spend a lot of time cutting/pasting/formatting.

I start with an IFTTT recipe that takes the RSS output of Hypothes.is and creates text files directly into my Obsidian vault. The results are quite rudimentary and only include the title of the document, the permalink of the Hypothes.is post, the highlighted text, and my annotation. It doesn't include the tags as RSS doesn't have a specification for these.

Second, I've set up Hypothesidian which has a much higher fidelity dovetail with the Hypothes.is API to get all the data and even the formatting set up I'm looking for. A reasonably well laid out set of instructions with a low/no code approach for it can be found at https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225. It allows importing annotations by a variety of methods including by date and by document URL. I've also made a small modification to it so that tags on Hypothes.is are turned into [[wikilinks]] in Obsidian instead of #tags which I only use sparingly.

All the IFTTT annotations will be ported individually into a specific Obsidian folder where I'll process them. I can then quickly use Hypothesidian to import the properly laid out version (using templates) of the notes with just a few keystrokes and then focus my time on revising my notes if necessary and then linking them to the appropriate notes already in my system. Finally I'll move them into the appropriate folder based on their content—typically one of the following: zettelkasten, wiki, commonplace, dictionary, or sources (for bibliographic use). Careful watchers will notice that I often use Hypothes.is' "page notes" functionality to create a bookmark-like annotation into which I will frequently post the URL of the page and occasionally a summary of a piece, these are imported into my system and are used as source/bibliographic information. I also have some dovetailing with Zotero as a bibliographic set up which feeds into this data as well.

This version which I've cobbled together works well for me so that I'm not missing anything, but there are definitely other similar processes available out there both for Obsidian (with plugins or scripts) as well as for other platforms. If I'm not mistaken, I think Readwise (a paid solution) has a set up for note transfer and formatting.

WordPress

As there isn't an extant Micropub client for Hypothes.is I initially used RSS as a transport layer to get my notes from Hypothes.is into WordPress. The fidelity isn't great in part because RSS doesn't include any tags. To get some slightly better presentation I set up a workflow using RSS output from Hypothes.is as input into an IFTTT workflow which outputs to a webhook that stands in as a Micropub client targeting my websites Micropub server. Some of the display on my site is assisted by using the Post Kinds plugin, which I know you've been working around yourself. The details may be above some, but I've outlined most of the broad strokes of how this is done in a tutorial at https://boffosocko.com/2020/01/21/using-ifttt-to-syndicate-pesos-content-from-social-services-to-wordpress-using-micropub/. In that example, I use the service Pocket as an example, but Hypothes.is specific information could easily be swapped out on a 1-1 basis.

A custom stand-alone or even an integrated micropub client for Hypothes.is would be a fantastic project if someone wanted to dig into the details and dovetail it with the Hypothes.is API.

Why

Ideally, I'm hoping that small pieces loosely joined and IndieWeb building blocks will allow me to use the tools and have the patterns I'm looking for, without a lot of work, so that I can easily make annotations with Hypothes.is but have and share (POSSE) my content on my own site in a way that works much the way many IndieWeb sites dovetail with Twitter or Mastodon.

I'm doing some portions of it manually at present, without a lot of overhead, but it would be fun to see someone add micropub and webmention capabilities to Hypothes.is or other IndieWeb building blocks. (I suspect it won't be Hypothes.is themselves as their team is very small and they're already spread thin on multiple other mission critical projects.)

In the end, I'm using Hypothes.is as a well designed and convenient tool for quickly making notes on digital documents. All the data is flowing to one of two other locations where I'm actually making use of it. While there is some social layer there, I'm getting email notifications through the Hypothes.is settings and the data from my responses just gets rolled back into my spaces which I try to keep open and IndieWeb friendly by default. At the same time, for those who want or need it, Hypothes.is' interface is a great way of reading, searching, sorting, and interacting with my notes in public, particularly until I get something specific and user friendly up to do it on my own domain.

My first view, even before any of the potential social annotation angle, is that in annotating or taking notes, I'm simultaneously having a conversation with the author of the work and/or my own thoughts on the topic at hand. Anything beyond that for me is "gravy".

I occasionally find that if I'm writing as I go that I'll have questions and take a stab only to find that the author provides an answer a few paragraphs or pages on. I can then look back at my thought to see where I got things right, where I may have missed or where to go from there. Sometimes I'll find holes that both the author and I missed. Almost always I'm glad that I spent the time thinking about the idea critically and got to the place myself with or without the author's help. I'm not sure that most others always do this, but it's a habit I've picked up from reading mathematics texts which frequently say things like "we'll leave it to the reader to verify or fill in the gaps" or "this is left as an exercise". Most readers won't/don't do this, but my view is that it's almost always where the actual engagement and learning from the material stems.

Sometimes I may be writing out pieces to clarify them for myself and solidify my understanding while other times, I'm using the text as a prompt for my own writing. My intention most often is to add my own thoughts in a significantly well-thought out manner such that I can in the near future reuse these annotations/notes in essays or other writing. Some of this comes from broad experience of keeping a commonplace book for quite a while, and some of it has been influenced on reading about the history of note taking practices by others. One of the best summations of the overall practice I've seen thus far is Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes (Create Space, 2017), though I find there are some practical steps missing that can only be found by actually practicing his methods in a dedicated fashion for several months before one sees changes in their thought patterns, the questions they ask, and the work that stems from it all. And by work, I mean just that. The whole enterprise is a fair amount of work, though I find it quite fun and very productive over time.

In my youth, I'd read passages and come up with some brilliant ideas. I might have underlined the passage and written something like "revisit this and expand", but I found I almost never did and upon revisiting it I couldn't capture the spark of the brilliant idea I had managed to see before. Now I just take the time out to write out the entire thing then and there with the knowledge that I can then later revise it and work it into something bigger later. Doing the work right now has been one of the biggest differences in my practice, and I'm finding that projects I want to make progress on are moving forward much more rapidly than they ever did.

A photo of Roland Barthes from 1963 featured in Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship (Oxford University Press, 2020) DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0007

There appears to be in index card file behind him in the photo, which he may have used for note taking in the mode of a zettelkasten.

link to journal article notes on:

Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine 11 (2010): 7–30. https://culturemachine.net/creative-media/

In case I've not explicitly saved the idea of ars excerpendi into the notebook.

Jeremias Drexel became one of the earliest educators and reformers to recommend against the ars memoria and instead use the art of excerpting as a means external written memory.

While students apparently have ignored the instructions in the past resulting in breaches of academic integrity, teachers can prompt active learning even during exams by prompting students to write answers to questions on open book/open notes in their own words.

I love this graphic organiser created by FOSIL (Framework Of Skills for Inquiry Learning) which encourages students to write down what they have found and explain the relevance. Lots of free resources like this can be found on the FOSIL group website here https://t.co/3uhWQNOr14 pic.twitter.com/ijH98bcc5U

— Elizabeth Hutchinson FCLIP BEM (@Elizabethutch) October 27, 2021

https://fosil.org.uk/resources/

Window notes are a note taking method in which one folds a piece of paper into four squares and titles them "facts", "feelings", "questions", and "ideas" to be filled in by the note taker.

Surprised no one mentioned window notes as a strategy. You fold the paper into 4 squares entitled Facts, Feelings, Questions, and Ideas. I also like the idea of using Popplet or Evernote as a digital or collaborative note taking method as well to include drawings and videos.

— Valerie Lewis (@iamvlewis) October 7, 2018

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking/

References

Artz, B., Johnson, M., Robson, D., & Taengnoi, S. (2017). Note-taking in the digital age: Evidence from classroom random control trials. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3036455

Boyle, J. R. (2013). Strategic note-taking for inclusive middle school science classrooms. Remedial and Special Education, 34(2), 78-90. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0741932511410862

Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.12.005

Chang, W., & Ku, Y. (2014). The effects of note-taking skills instruction on elementary students’ reading. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(4), 278–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.886175

Dynarski, S. (2017). For Note Taking, Low-Tech is Often Best. Retrieved from https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/08/note-taking-low-tech-often-best

Haydon, T., Mancil, G.R.,  Kroeger, S.D., McLeskey, J., & Lin, W.J. (2011). A review of the effectiveness of guided notes for students who struggle learning academic content. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 55(4), 226-231. http://doi.org/10.1080/1045988X.2010.548415

Holland, B. (2017). Note taking editorials – groundhog day all over again. Retrieved from http://brholland.com/note-taking-editorials-groundhog-day-all-over-again/

Kiewra, K.A. (1985). Providing the instructor’s notes: an effective addition to student notetaking. Educational Psychologist, 20(1), 33-39. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2001_5

Kiewra, K.A. (2002). How classroom teachers can help students learn and teach them how to learn. Theory into Practice, 41(2), 71-80. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_3

Luo, L., Kiewra, K.A. & Samuelson, L. (2016). Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement. Instructional Science, 44(1). 45-67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9370-4

Mueller, P.A., & Oppenheimer, D.M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581

Nye, P.A., Crooks, T.J., Powley, M., & Tripp, G. (1984). Student note-taking related to university examination performance. Higher Education, 13(1), 85-97. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136532

Rahmani, M., & Sadeghi, K. (2011). Effects of note-taking training on reading comprehension and recall. The Reading Matrix, 11(2). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85a8/f016516e61de663ac9413d9bec58fa07bccd.pdf

Reynolds, S.M., & Tackie, R.N. (2016). A novel approach to skeleton-note instruction in large engineering courses: Unified and concise handouts that are fun and colorful. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, LA, June 26-29, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/64/papers/15115/view

Robin, A., Foxx, R. M., Martello, J., & Archable, C. (1977). Teaching note-taking skills to underachieving college students. The Journal of Educational Research, 71(2), 81-85. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1977.10885042

Wammes, J.D., Meade, M.E., & Fernandes, M.A. (2016). The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9). http://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1094494

Wu, J. Y., & Xie, C. (2018). Using time pressure and note-taking to prevent digital distraction behavior and enhance online search performance: Perspectives from the load theory of attention and cognitive control. Computers in Human Behavior, 88, 244-254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.008

Are there other methods of encouraging context shifts that don't include note taking (or literacy-based) solutions? What would an orality focused method look like? How might we include those methods in our practices?

Not all research shows that handwritten note taking is better than digital.

Compare and contrast the results in Dynarski,2017 and that of Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017. What does Holland, 2017 say on the matter?

Students who take notes by hand learn more than those who do so on a laptop.

Exactly how were these studies laid out? What sorts of revision and follow up were followed in each case? Was it truly an apples to apples comparison?

Students who are given well-written, instructor-prepared notes to review after taking their own notes have been shown to learn significantly more than with only using their own notes.

These notes can provide valuable additional feedback and might also be supplemented with additional texts or books. The issue may be how to encourage students to use these resources appropriately rather than relying on them as a crutch or backstop which may encourage them not to take their own notes? It's the work of making the notes and the forced context shift that are likely creating the most benefit rather than simply reviewing over what they already know.

Link this to review effects mentioned in Ahrens versus using questions and being forced to manufacture an answer.

Verbal cues can be a useful method of scaffolding for students when note taking. Examples of this behavior are statements like "this is important" or "be sure to capture this in your notes".

Susan Reynolds' paper indicates that students have positive reactions to her skeletal notes, but does her research indicate that they are measurably better?

What is the right balance of encouraging attention and participation in the process versus saving time for the students? Active work in the process is likely to be shown to work best.

Has anyone done research on actively helping students and modeling for them after a lecture experience to show them the appropriate follow up methods?

Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.

Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

Elizabeth Filips has digital versions of medical school notes online. She's drawn them (in software) by hand with color and occasional doodles in them (there's an image of Einstein's head with an E=mc^2 under it on one page) which makes them more memorable for having made them in the first place, but with the color and the pictures, they act as a memory palace.

I've found no evidence (yet) that she's using direct mnemonics or that she's been specifically trained in the method of loci or other techniques. This doesn't, however, mean that she's not tangentially using them without knowing about them explicitly.

One would suspect that this sort of evolutionary movement towards such techniques would have been how they evolved in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnFHwl2Dbr0

• System should be as frictionless as possible.
• Capture in one location. (She says as few as possible, but this is too wishy-washy: she's got a "Readwise page" and a "Links page".)
• There needs to be levels of processing.
  • Split out based on future value.
• Everything has resources. How to capture metadata and be able to cite it?

Everything needs to have a "Why"? What is the context for capturing? What is the reason? How will it be used in the future? Why was it interesting?

She also describes how she collects notes in various formats (books, online articles, Kindle, Twitter, etc.) It primarily involves using Notion along with a variety of other sub-applications including Instapaper for sharing to Notion.

Dramatically missing from this presentation is the answer to the question "why" collect all this stuff? How is she using it in the future? What is the overall value? She touches on writing the why for herself as she's taking notes, but I get the impression that she's not actively practicing what she preaches, and I suspect that many don't. This leaves me with the impression that she's collecting with no end goal, which for many may be fine.

She's got a gaping hole in the processing section which likely needs a video unto itself and which would probably go a long way toward answer the "why" question above.

In looking at her other videos, I see she's using the phrase "second brain" and words like productivity. There seems to be a high level of disconnect between those using "second brain" and the "why do this?" question other than the simple idea of "productivity" which seems to be a false trap that gets people into the mindset of being a collector for collections' sake.

Almost hilariously she's got videos with titles like: - "I'm a productivity guru and I hate it." - "Productivity YouTube is brainwashing you"

She's titled the final portion of the video "Outro" which is actually displayed on the video UI. This might be useful for production purposes but should be changed or omitted for actual consumption.

The title "How I Remember Everything I Read" is pure clickbait here. It's more aptly titled, "How I Take and Save Notes". Where's the how I use this after? or how I review over it all to actually remember it/memorize it? There's nothing here to support this end of things which is the promise given in the title.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I44oMVd4Cw

Become a Better Reader in 8 Minutes - Write down basic Impressions - Write actionable takeaways - Limit it to 10 items to create a level of selection - Create a list of favorite quotes - Bonus section: Catch all for other important tidbits. Also good for important questions.

This is useful for its brevity and actionability, but it's also glossing over so much more that could be valuable. It specifically is leaving out methods and means of actively reusing all these written notes. No mention of reviews of the material or spaced repetition.

Saw this via YouTube algorithm.

Some discussion of doing research on zettelkasten methods and workflows.

What do note taking methods and processes look like for individual people?

What questions would one ask for this sort of research in an interview setting (compared to how one would look at extant physical examples in document-based research)? #openquestions

Link this to the work of Earle Havens on commonplace books through portions of history.

For overall understanding and creating new writing output from it, the immediate focus shouldn't be about revealing new information or simple facts so much as it's about being able to place that new information into your own context. Once this has been done then the focus can shift to later being able to potentially use that new knowledge and understanding in other novel and enlightening contexts to create new insights.

https://highlighted.app/

Highlighted.app Tagline: "Capture, organize and revisit important parts of your books."

Apple iOS only

http://ratfactor.com/notes

A long explanation of how Dave Gauer takes daily notes in his life log and what he does with them. Interesting to see so many of my own practices and thoughts mirrored here.

He's using his Field Notes notebooks as waste books and transcribing the important pieces into other places as necessary.

He also indicates that he's taking brief, reminder notes (or fleeting notes) contemporaneously and then expanding upon them later as necessary.

From a social perspective, it's far less acceptable to pull your phone out and use it compared with taking out a notebook and writing a short note. One tends to end conversation and interaction whereas the second rarely ends a conversation and may sometimes create or extend one.

I've experienced this same effect myself as well.

https://maya.land/notetaking/

Maya.land talks about their methods of note taking and a nice looking TiddlyWiki set up hosted on Glitch.me.

Given the benefits of gesturing, teachers can improve their pedagogy simply by encouraging their students to move their hands while explaining things or working on problems.

Studies with elementary school children have shown that if they gesture while solving math problems led them to discover and understand new concepts and problem solving strategies.

link this with prior idea of handwriting out annotations/notes as well as drawing and sketchnoting ideas from lectures

Students reviewing over Cornell notes also be encouraged to use their hands while answering their written review questions.

Nice to see someone speaking so joyously about annotations. :) Looks like you've got a heavier analog version of the digital version of what I'm doing. I often use Kindle hightlights/annotations and then import them to Obsidian. Alternately I use Hypothes.is on online .pdf copies and then use Hypothesidian (https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225) to import all my digital notes into Obsidian. I love being able to keep the original context of the text close for either creating literature notes or expanding fleeting notes into permanent ones. When I am in a more analog mode (who doesn't love the feel of a nice fountain pen on paper?) I have a method for doing optical character recognition on my handwritten notes to save the time of typing them out again: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/20/55799844/

Genius: The Life And Science of Richard Feynman,” James Gleick, Pantheon Books, 1992 (see pg. 409).

Wouter Groeneveld here is mixing up a digital garden and a blog with social media enhancements. I personally wouldn't expect a digital garden to necessarily have features like checkins, bookmarks, etc. Ideally it would be a mix of of a zettelkasten with atomic ideas and notes and a wiki structure with somewhat longer articles and ideas strung together.

From this definition, my personal website definitely isn't a "digital garden" but a blog with a variety of social media features built in. Looking at some smaller subsets of my website, one might consider it to be a digital garden.

An additional piece of digital gardening also has to do with actually tending the garden, which I generally don't do in my website the way I do in my Obsidian vault. My vault is more like a digital garden which has many streams of data coming into it and being regularly tended.

This is another example of the broader space of these ideas being mixed together in a hodgepodge without clear definitions of what each are.

https://curatella.com/reviewing-notes-while-deep-reading/

https://anagora.org/digital-gardener-taxonomy

A long and creative list with lots of attributes people have with respect to personal knowledge management, but without any real canonical definitions.

Steven Johnson indicates that the word processor is a terrible tool for writing because it doesn't have usable affordances for building up longer pieces from one's notes or basic ideas.

He discusses his specific workflow of note taking and keeping ideas in Scrivener where he arranges them into folders and outlines which then become the source of his writing.

Different from the typical zettelkasten workflow, he's keeping his notes hierarchically organized in folders based on topic keywords and only later when creating a specific writing project making explicit links and orders between his notes to create longer pieces. It's here that his work diverges most dramatically to the zettelkasten method described by Sönke Ahrens.

https://twitter.com/asakuru_note

A twitter account of a student tweeting about note taking and their practice.

https://twitter.com/grabe/status/1493723795281956867

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

An example of a user who is (no longer) centralizing everything into one place. Also an example of a person overloading their use of note taking tool as a melting pot of data. Do they have a mental map of how to separate the pieces to get the value out of their system?

It seems like they want it to "just work" without any conception of what this looks like

Example of someone not using the system as it may have been intended. Visiting one's notes on a somewhat frequent basis should be part of one's regular practice.

If you're not doing anything with what you read, why are you reading it? Similarly, if you're not doing anything with your notes, why bother taking them?

Naturally, creating notes certainly has a valuable use for learning, but to get the most out of them revisiting and linking them has other value, based on one's need.

Missing in this article is a specific use case for why the writer is taking notes at all.

Example of someone who doesn't appreciate the work of note taking.

In the early chapters Ahrens outlines the general form and method for taking notes for a zettelkasten, though he's not overly descriptive of the method and provides no direct examples.

In the middle chapters he talks broadly about learning research and how the zettelkasten method dovetails with these methods.

He does this almost as if he's a good teacher showing the student an outline of what to do and why, but leaving it up to them to actually do the work and experimentation to come up with their own specific methods of use to best suit their purposes. This allows them to do the work themselves so that they have a better chance of following a simple, but easy set of rules, but in a way that will allow them to potentially more quickly become an expert at the practice.

“The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63) [Section 10.5]

In some sense, he's actively practicing what he preaches as a teaching device within his own book!

I think that this point may be actively missed by those readers who aren't actively engaging with and converting his ideas into their own and doing the work which he's actively suggesting.

Elaboration is thinking deeply about the meaning of what we've read, how it could inform or answer different questions, and how it can be linked or combined with other knowledge. It is one of the best-researched and most successful learning methods. While it seems to have some subtle differences, it sounds broadly similar to the Feynman technique and is related to the idea of writing questions based on one's notes in the Cornell note taking method.

The Cornell notes practice of writing questions in the empty left column as a means of testing knowledge can be an effective tool after taking notes to ensure that one has actually learned and understood the broad concepts. They can also be used for spaced repetition purposes as well.

Valuable though they may be as teaching and learning tools, they don't figure directly into the idea of permanent notes from a zettelkasten perspective.

Some of the lighter and more passive (and common) forms of reading, highlighting, underlining sentences and hoping to understand or even remember the content and contexts is far less valuable than active reading, progressive summarization, comparing and contrasting, and extracting smart or permanent notes from one's texts.

Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014 indicate that students that took lecture notes (rather than typing them on a laptop) were able to understand the content of a lecture better and that this effect extended the span of a week. It did not show a difference in the number of facts they were able to remember.

A side benefit of a growing set of notes as an academic is that one has a visible repository of knowledge and ideas as well as fascinating questions which, while they may reveal how much one doesn't know, it will make it apparent how much one does know and thereby mitigate one's feelings of imposter syndrome.

Proper note taking provides one with a permanent fount of interesting and exciting ideas to work on.

Properly framed note taking methods are themselves a hermeneutic circle for thinking and creating.

Project notes can be kept in folders either inside or outside of the zettelkasten itself, but they technically shouldn't be a permanent part of it. Perhaps it's better to think of them as a workbench or play space for ideas as they're forming into a finished piece of writing. Once the piece is done, the play space has served its purpose and can be cleaned up.

Collecting fleeting notes and not processing them into something more useful and permanent will eventually end in abject failure.

An example can be seen in the note taking of Joachim Jungius in 1657. He compiled approximately 150,000 slips (also known as scraps) with excerpts and ideas without any sort of order, arrangement, index or reference system. Following his death his students and heirs could make nothing of the massive "scrap heap". As a result, Vincent Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi (1689) specifically warns against this practice (p. 72).

(cross reference from : https://hypothes.is/a/SyenKlO2Eeys0esqwOgjUw)

Ahrens makes a useful analogy: the reason that early attempts at shipping containers failed was because their users tried to fit them into their own way of doing business instead of reorganizing their businesses to accommodate the shipping container. Similarly one needs to consider how one's note taking method fits into their work in a more integrative way. Without properly integrating it into one's workflow seamlessly the system will fail.

I wonder if there are any labs which not only have journal clubs, but have a shared note taking system or zettelkasten as well to keep as a community resource.

I'm sure there are probably a few lab wikis in existence.

Are professors keeping public note collections that they share with students or fellow researchers?

For those interested in looking at a system in English but with a slightly different form, but ostensibly similar, try W. Ross Ashby's digitized note collection: http://www.rossashby.info/

Perhaps not coincidentally, Ashby was a research colleague of Luhmann's.

Not highlighted in this context but it bears thinking about, Ahrens is looking at writing in particular while many note taking techniques (Cornell notes, SQ3R, SQ4R, etc.) and methods geared at students are specific to capturing basic facts which may need to be learned, by which I mean memorized or at least highly familiar, so that they can later be used in future analysis.

Many of these note taking concepts are geared toward basic factual acquisition, repetition, and memorization and not future generative thought or writing applications.

It's important to separate these ideas so that one can focus on one or the other. Perhaps there are contexts within which both may be valuable, but typically they're not. Within the zettelkasten context the difference between the two may be subtly seen in the conception of "literature notes" and "permanent notes".

Literature notes are progressive summarizations which one may use to strengthen and aid in understanding and later recall. These may include basic facts which one might wish to create question/answer pairs for use in spaced repetition programs.

Permanent notes have a higher level of importance, particularly for generative writing. These are the primary substance one wants to work with while the literature notes may be the "packing peanuts" or filler that can be used to provide background context to support one's more permanent notes.

Compare this with: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/22/different-types-of-notes-and-use-cases/

turns into its own project without bringing the whole much further forward. Adding another promising technique to it, then, would make things only worse.

Keeping one's notes across multiple modalities, in different locations, different apps is a massive problem portending imminent and assured failure. Regardless of the system employed (paper, digital, app), one of the most important features of any note taking system is having them all centralized in one location.

Even if the paper or book you're reading doesn't answer the particular question you're researching, you're bound to come across other novel ideas and potential questions. Don't let these go to waste, but instead note them down and save them into your note taking system. They may be useful in the future, particularly if you found them interesting or intriguing.

It turns out "waste not, want not" is applicable to ideas as well.

I can't help but also thinking "waste note, want note" as an interesting turn of expression.

An active reader is always thinking, writing, and annotating. The notes from this process can and could easily be used to facilitate writing and generating new material showing new contexts and new modes of thought.

Ahrens looks at the discrete steps of writing a paper or book in reverse order... all the way back to creating the initial notes and ideas. By framing it this way, he shows the value of note taking as a means of making the entire enterprise so much easier.

On the back of his notes, you will find not only manuscript drafts, but also old bills or drawings by his children. [footnote]

While it's possible that Luhmann may have cut some of his own paper, by the time he was creating his notes the mass manufacture of index cards of various sizes was ubiquitous enough that he should never have had to cut his own. He certainly wasn't forced to manufacture them the way Carl Linnaeus had to.

Ahrens focuses almost exclusively on Niklas Luhmann in his book How to Take Smart Notes. Sadly he misses that many others used not only the zettelkasten but other closely similar techniques including the commonplace book as a means of knowledge gathering and productivity.

There are thousands of productive researchers and writers who have broadly used many of these techniques to great advantage. In fact, it's almost hard to find famous writers or thinkers in the early Renaissance or since who did not use these systems.

Certainly Luhmann's system was one of the most refined of the group and his success is heavily underlined by his gargantuan output, but by not highlight other users of these systems, we're missing a lot more of the power of these systems.

The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.

Here in a nutshell is the thrust of the entire book to come!

Notes allow one to do small pieces of work over time, then by editing one's notes together to weave a story or create a broader thesis, one is primarily ordering and editing their prior work which isn't as difficult as staring at a blank piece of paper and wondering where to begin.

I like the framing of the idea that "Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note." as the idea of a note could potentially transcend literacy to include oral cultures as well.

qbatten annotates on Jan 11, 2022:

Why note-taking is bad. Why you shouldn't take notes. Taking notes shouldn't be the end in itself!

I'll agree that "taking notes shouldn't be the end in itself", but they've drawn the completely wrong conclusion about note taking being bad or that this flimsy argument indicates that one shouldn't take notes.

Not everyone who wields a hammer is going to be a master craftsman and it's even less likely that someone who tinkers with one for a few months or even a few years will get there without some significant help. There's no evidence here of anything but desire for methods to work. Where was the deep practice, research into these systems described?

From the start, the featured image in the original article of a crazy person's conception of a massive collection of piles of paper to represent the process is highly illustrative of so many misconceptions.

https://reallifemag.com/rank-and-file/

An interesting example of someone who fell into the trap of thinking that a particular tool or tools would magically make them smarter or help them do a particular line of work without showing any deep evidence of knowing what they were doing. The discussion here flows over a number of mixed note taking domains with no clear thrust for what they were using it pointedly for. The multiple directions and lack of experience likely doomed them to failure here.

Work out mathematically at what rate the accumulation of notes would outstrip one's ability to memorize them solely using spaced repetition of a few generations.

The unused accumulation of notes is the worst travesty. The collector's fallacy run amok.

Why did this person fail here? What was their need/use case? Was it well-defined? Were the tools suited to their purpose?

I appreciate how he puts some priority in note taking, but it does matter what your read.

Better:

It matters both what you read and how you take notes.

With blank backs, French playing cards in the late 1700s were often used as lottery tickets, marriage and death announcements, notepads, and business cards.

https://gingkowriter.com/

This looks like an interesting tool for moving from notes to an outline to a written document. Could be interesting for dovetailing with a zettelkasten.

How to move data from something like Obsidian to Ginko Writer though?