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Zettelkästen?

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Re: Zettelkästen?

#11

Post by woodpanel »

I had a Zettelkasten once. I (mis-?) used this system when I was preparing for my final exams of my apprenticeship.

I had to cover a huge set of knowledge fields from which ~65% I had zero experience with, neither theoretical nor practical.

The questions that were to be expected of course wouldn't go into too much detail, but the variance of possible questions made it necessary to gain a deeper understanding instead of just memorizing words (e.g. because used vocabulary can differ/overlap from domain to domain)

I've never heard of Luhman or his system, but always thought the knowledge contained in my Zettelkasten would make a great book and that the Zettelkasten's modular organization would make it very easy to parse the knowledge into whatever form you like.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#12

Post by stewbrew »

dredmorbius wrote: post #2

For those not enlightened by the German title, "Zettelkasten", or "slip-card box", is an index-card based information capture and organisation system created by the late Geman sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

He is famous for having written his books on basis of his Zettelkasten but I doubt he invented it. It could well be he thought so himself though after having lost/omitted the external reference on that index card of his named Zettelkasten.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#16

Post by kiba »

I have an incomplete system modeled after a few ideas of zettelkasten.

150 words per card(I wrote it out on the index card and determined its approximate size), all organized into a single directory, with citations in another. All have randomly generated IDs, with title as filenames. To date, I have created about 35K words of notes across 550 cards. Only recently, did I work on linking stuff up(using the randomly generated IDs).

I even wrote a way to display ten random cards in an electron app before switching away to GTK and ruby(still working to get back to previous level of functionality). I mostly used the random display of cards to re-read and expand the cards, since I usually get more on the second read-around.

I am not quite sure how useful it is. When I was programming, I looked stuff up in my notes and mostly added to the cards that I didn't know about programming.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#17

Post by fastball »

ofrzeta wrote: post #14

It's amazing that the guy is referring to Luhmann's zettelkasten and went on to implement it and did not stumble upon an existing implementation: http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/

To be fair, the app you linked hasn't been updated since 2015 and doesn't run on my Mac (10.14).

Re: Zettelkästen?

#18

Post by inimino »

dredmorbius wrote: post #4
car wrote: post #3

Arno Schmidt is a somewhat obscure German author, known for the use of this system. He wrote a book titled "Zettel's Traum". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Schmidt https://www.zinzin.com/observations/2013/who-was-arno-schmid... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom%27s_Dream

Use of index cards by authors and researchers is pretty much legendary. From some earlier research I've done: - Carl Linneaus, who largely invented the modern index card. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616080137.h... - Numerous library cataloguers, including Melvil Dewey. - Vladimir Nabokov - Garrett Hardin (of "Tragedy of the Commons" fame). I've seen his personal collection, which was extensive. -…

Also Robert Pirsig, known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, whose second book Lila is concerned extensively with an index card scheme.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#19

Post by fastball »

Shameless plug: I'm currently building a web app[0] that attempts to digitize the notecard format in a way that makes note-taking easy and powerful. It's in its infancy, but I would like to integrate better support for some zettelkästen methodologies down the line. The "linking" in our platform isn't quite as powerful as zettelkästen for some use-cases, but we do utilize a "parent-child" method of organizing your notes hierarchically.

[0] https://supernotes.app

Re: Zettelkästen?

#20

Post by eitland »

smnrchrds wrote: post #10
eitland wrote: post #8

There is even a VS Code extension that looked promising, but I was not able to get it to work when I tried: - extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nergal-p... - repo: https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten-vscode Also I wasn't able to find a license file when I looked now. And unlike stackoverflow there isn't an implied license on GitHub, except to read and fork the repo.

package.json lists license as MIT. https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten-vscode/blob/mast...

Nice find!

Edit:

I do however suspect that this is the default when you create a new node.js project, so it might or might not be what the author wanted..?

Anyways, often the author meant it to be open source and just forgot to add a license. Here's one example I stumbled across where the author had just forgotten it: https://github.com/louisukiri/SlackClient/pull/5

A possibly more entertaining example is the project that was on the front page here a few days ago [0] where the author claimed that the project was Open Source (which it was not, it was Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause, -which even according to them Commons Clause people themselves is not Open Source[1]. This has resultet in a rather long thread in the issue tracker[2] which is simultaneously sad (because it is necessary but distracts from a promising project) and entertaining (for people who can enjoy the forum equivalent of AFV anyways).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676

[1]: https://commonsclause.com/, see FAQ, heading "Is this “Open Source”?"

[2]: https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40

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