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Zettelkästen?

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Re: Zettelkästen?

#51

Post by charliepark »

cbau wrote: post #30

I actually was just at a small meetup for people in the SF Bay Area who are building memex's. The Zettelkasten was a common theme in several of the projects people were working on. Here are my notes from the event for anyone interested: http://ceasarbautista.com/posts/memex_meetup_2.html There are a couple projects that came up that were loosely based on the Zettelkasten: - IdeaFlow by Jacob Cole - Roam Research by C…

Thank you for blogging your notes on it!

Seems like an interesting meetup. How did you find out about it?

Re: Zettelkästen?

#52

Post by slightwinder »

MrGilbert wrote: post #37
jonathanstrange wrote: post #33

My father used to have a gigantic collection of index cards when he worked as a professor at a high school for librarians. We're talking about 100,000 cards or more. When he had to give a seminar session about topic X, he just selected a bunch of cards from his well-ordered, beautiful wooden storage boxes, fastened them with a rubber band, and took them for work. They contained references, small summaries, newspaper…

I think going plaintext might be the best way here. I wonder, though... I think writing something by hand gives a different feel for it. I don't know how to explain it. It's like your mind works better if you write by hand. So maybe an app, used with a stylus on a tablet or large-ish phone might be the best combination? It should then create folders and textfiles, and just store the text there. Which would require OC…

Handwriting is freeform, while digital gives constraints. With keyboard you can't arrange text and draw stuff as simple as with a pen on paper, most applications don't even support it at all.

Stylus is indeed big step in this direction, but still is a tick off. Also with a tablet you tend to suffer from "modern technology"-syndrom, meaning you wanna utilize all the good features now that you have it at your stylus tip. But they tend to make thinks complicate aagin.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#53

Post by qnsi »

cbau wrote: post #30

I actually was just at a small meetup for people in the SF Bay Area who are building memex's. The Zettelkasten was a common theme in several of the projects people were working on. Here are my notes from the event for anyone interested: http://ceasarbautista.com/posts/memex_meetup_2.html There are a couple projects that came up that were loosely based on the Zettelkasten: - IdeaFlow by Jacob Cole - Roam Research by C…

Fuck my life... all this interesting meetups happening in SF. Progress meetup / memex meetup ;_; pls accept me as a refugee from EU

Re: Zettelkästen?

#54

Post by drtse4 »

The people from the blog he links (that I'm in the process of reading) wrote an application for macOS that reminds me of notational velocity in spirit but that has been made specifically for Zettelkasten and should be able to handle even huge amounts of notes (stored in plain text, the best format in my opinion, portable and all that): https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

Re: Zettelkästen?

#55

Post by cos2pi »

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. -…

Umberto Eco as well, who wrote a book on the topic: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis

Re: Zettelkästen?

#56

Post by bracobama »

I am kinda surprised no one has mentioned Tinderbox by eastgate systems! (1)

Beck Tench (2) has a brilliant youtube series (3) about how she uses tinderbox with the zettlekasten method to create associations between various notes. She also links these notes to her devonthink db so that when she is searching for something there it will also pull up her relevant notes.

I myself have been using her method in writing my masters thesis and I think, because I am a visual learner, the ability to visualise theories through a mind-map style interface has really helped my retention and understanding of them.

Anyway, try it out!

(1): http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ (2): https://www.becktench.com/workflow#reading (3): https://www.becktench.com/blog/2018/11/12/using-zettelkasten...

Re: Zettelkästen?

#57

Post by sotsoguk »

akavel wrote: post #26

There's an open-source WYSIWYG Markdown editor named Zettlr, the author of which is very fond of the Zettelkasten method and seems to provide some features meant to help with it: https://www.zettlr.com/ I don't know much about Zettelkasten, but I used this app as a Markdown editor of choice for some time until I discovered Marktext.

Thx. This one really looks very nice and polished. It can even export to reveal.js

Re: Zettelkästen?

#58

Post by floren »

I wrote a small Go program to manage a Zettelkasten-like set of notes. I use it to keep notes for work and for personal diary-keeping.

The goal was to have the least friction possible for taking notes, figuring that's the only way I'd actually do it. I say 'zk t' to print out the tree of all my notes, then 'zk e 23' to edit note #23. I can set my "current" note by running 'zk 5', then when I next run 'zk e' it'll automatically open up note #5. There's a hierarchy, so I can make note #1 titled "work", then create notes under that for different work topics. I can also link and unlink notes from different points in the hierarchy, so the same note can appear in multiple places.

The code is at https://github.com/floren/zk if anyone would like to play with it. Caveat: I bashed out just enough to make it useful, then stopped fooling with it and started working. The code has too much manual file-bashing and struct-bashing. I've also been meaning to add the ability to associate files with a given note (so I take notes on a paper and attach the PDF, etc.) for at least two years but haven't done it yet.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#59

Post by submeta »

Cladode wrote: post #40
jonathanstrange wrote: post #33

My father used to have a gigantic collection of index cards when he worked as a professor at a high school for librarians. We're talking about 100,000 cards or more. When he had to give a seminar session about topic X, he just selected a bunch of cards from his well-ordered, beautiful wooden storage boxes, fastened them with a rubber band, and took them for work. They contained references, small summaries, newspaper…

I've been using a system like that successfully as an academic (for some interpretation of successful). Started when I was a PhD student 25 years ago, and have been maintaining it ever since. I was inspired by Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten, whom I read voraciously as a teenager. I started as an undergraduate with hand-written index cards, but the obvious advantages of electronic files (fast search, cut/paste, easy ba…

Since you keep your notes in files, what naming convention do you apply?

I am in the process of moving away from proprietary note taking tools like AskSam (more than 15 years ago on a Windows machine), Evernote, Bear Writer and some more). Got a long list of legacy systems that I want to migrate to markdown / file based system.

I keep date stamping files like so: `yyyy-mm-dd_topic-subtopic-subsub`

Re: Zettelkästen?

#60

Post by Cladode »

submeta wrote: post #59
Cladode wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using a system like that successfully as an academic (for some interpretation of successful). Started when I was a PhD student 25 years ago, and have been maintaining it ever since. I was inspired by Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten, whom I read voraciously as a teenager. I started as an undergraduate with hand-written index cards, but the obvious advantages of electronic files (fast search, cut/paste, easy ba…

Since you keep your notes in files, what naming convention do you apply? I am in the process of moving away from proprietary note taking tools like AskSam (more than 15 years ago on a Windows machine), Evernote, Bear Writer and some more). Got a long list of legacy systems that I want to migrate to markdown / file based system. I keep date stamping files like so: `yyyy-mm-dd_topic-subtopic-subsub`

That's a good question. I tried a variety of options, but it stabilised on something that could be termed "micro-summary of context as file name". Example:

   - giraffes.html
   - giraffes_in_history.html
   - natural_predators_of_giraffes.html
   - grade_inflation.html
   - graffiti.html
   - genghis_khan.html       
   - grassroots_lobbying.html
Since all my Zettel are version controlled anyway, I don't see the point of tracking dates/times in filenames (or the file itself). I've now got so many Zettel that I can no longer recall even descriptive names like the above anyway: is the Zettel called giraffes_in_history.html or history_of_giraffes.html ...? So in practise, nowadays, when I look for related Zettel I always use grep with words I expect to be in the relevant Zettel. Example:

   grep -i giraffe *.html
It works really well.

What I do recommend is writing a little tool that produces filenames in a consistent way. (E.g. stripping out 'weird' characters, removing capitalisation etc.) I found that the more uniform filenames, file structure etc, the easier searching remains. Moreover, writing tools that mine / transform Zettel is also easier when the setup is uniform.

I also tried adding structures by subdirectories

   - computer_science
   - economics
   - biology
etc, but that didn't scale, since everything is connected to everything else. Knowledge is not tree- or DAG-structured. Flat file structure + hyperlinks works for me.
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