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Zettelkästen?

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Re: Zettelkästen?

#71

Post by emmanueloga_ »

cbau wrote: post #66
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool recap. From your article: > Is there a general interchange format for these systems? I don't understand why none of these people is using RDF. Seems like a perfect technology for a memex.

I've never heard of it! I will check it out. Have you seen it used successfully?

RDF is the technology behind schema.org, so that would be a good success story. There are quite a bunch of companies working around RDF based technologies, like TopQuadrant, StarDog, Ontotext, and more. But if you want to start playing with it, I recommend you start with Jena/Fuseki [1], it is super easy to run.

Example: say your database contains a note about "doves", and another one about, say, "seagulls". Later, you can search for things you have written about birds, and the query would find both your notes about doves and seagulls (something that you wouldn't be able to do with a fulltext search). There's a whole world of things you can do with inference, so using RDF is a no brainer when it comes to finding relationships between things. It also makes it trivial to import knowledge annotated by other ppl.

If you are interested, here are some other resources I found useful to get started:

* http://www.learningsparql.com/

A great book about SPARQL, a query language for RDF data.

* http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596153823.do

"Programming the Semantic Web"

This is book is old but Chapter 2 and 3 are a good intro on "machine-readable meaning" and Inference. The author also has another cool book on "collective intelligence" I still haven't worked through yet :-)

* http://www.bobdc.com/blog/reification-is-a-red-herring/

How to model "property graphs" with RDF. You'll stumble upon this question at some point :-)

[1]: https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/fuseki-run.htm...

Re: Zettelkästen?

#72

Post by justsubmit »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #39
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…

Cool recap. From your article: > Is there a general interchange format for these systems? I don't understand why none of these people is using RDF. Seems like a perfect technology for a memex.

Because RDF looks like this:

    
    
      
        Eric Miller
      
      
        
      
      
        Dr.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#73

Post by kristiandupont »

z3t4 wrote: post #68
kristiandupont wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. I've used it for side-project code a couple of times and it's absolutely wonderful. The ability to group code semantically at unit-level, cross-language is extremely powerful. Go to definition and the like in other editors work to some extent but very often, abstractions hide the actual link between code parts and you have to rely on your (brain-)memory or a debugger to figure out what the graph looks like. Sa…

I tried it, but when viewing in "browser" mode, the entire file is the only item. What am I missing ?

It doesn't automatically fold anything, you do that by selecting some text and folding it. That inserts two comments in your code with tags indicating the start and end of the fold.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#74

Post by cardiffspaceman »

Cladode wrote: post #60
submeta wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Did you try tags? If you have I'm interested in what you might have to say about them.

I liked Gmail originally because it used tabs. I have seldom had an email that was permanently tagged with more than one tag, but I have imagined having files in a filesystem with multiple tags. Bloggers commonly use tags but I don't know if they're successful.

On a filesystem where tags were not native, you could implement tags as subdirectories, using symlinks to achieve that the same file had multiple paths giraffes/history.html and history/giraffes.html.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#75

Post by Cladode »

cardiffspaceman wrote: post #74
Cladode wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Did you try tags? If you have I'm interested in what you might have to say about them. I liked Gmail originally because it used tabs. I have seldom had an email that was permanently tagged with more than one tag, but I have imagined having files in a filesystem with multiple tags. Bloggers commonly use tags but I don't know if they're successful. On a filesystem where tags were not native, you could implement tags as…

   Did you try tags?
No. I found that many of my early ideas on how to structure my notes didn't scale, made evolution of my system more difficult. So later I tried not to impose addition structure. Tagging enforces a structure, and how I classify ideas changes over time. What do tags give that grepping words doesn't?

Re: Zettelkästen?

#76

Post by submeta »

apostacy wrote: post #67
kristiandupont wrote: post #42

I must, as I always do, bring up my favorite editor Code Browser which works for this to some degree: http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/ I've been using it for some 15 years and I don't think I will ever leave it. I do wish that other editors (vscode in particular) would adopt its folding style or at least enable it. Doesn't seem promising though ( https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/17904 )

I'd like to let people know about Sublime Zettelkasten[1], which is this really useful module for Sublime that automates searching, linking, and lots of other stuff. There's also a standalone version that is attempting to have the same functionality[2]. [1]: https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk [2]: https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk

Excellent! Only a few days ago I started using SublimeText for writing (markdown) and managing my folder- and file-based personal wiki. This plugin will propably be very useful.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#77

Post by submeta »

slightwinder wrote: post #52
MrGilbert wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

The problem with digital handwritten notes is: They are more problematic than all the proprietary databases and file formats that we have. Personally I started using the iPadPro with the Apple pencil last christmas. Generated tons of notes with an app called Notability. Soon I realized that my notes are trapped in their proprietary format. Sure, I can export to PDF, but that’s not their database format.

I have seen many good and useful apps come and go. After these apps become abandonware[^1] we have tons of data created in those proprietary data formats, trapped in them.

[^1] off the top of my head: WordPerfect, MS Word pre 2000, AskSam (fulltext database), Netmanage‘s ECCOPro (a PIM), NoteMap (an outliner), MindJet‘s MindManager, MS Access pre 2000. - Tons of data that I created in those apps waiting to be migrated.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#78

Post by flarg »

submeta wrote: post #77
slightwinder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

The problem with digital handwritten notes is: They are more problematic than all the proprietary databases and file formats that we have. Personally I started using the iPadPro with the Apple pencil last christmas. Generated tons of notes with an app called Notability. Soon I realized that my notes are trapped in their proprietary format. Sure, I can export to PDF, but that’s not their database format. I have seen m…

Mind manager is still available

Re: Zettelkästen?

#79

Post by fastball »

Philipp0205 wrote: post #70
fastball wrote: post #19

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 not…

I get an error visiting the page :( It it only me?

Yeah, sorry about that. I am "moving fast and breaking things" at the moment as I'm hoping to do a proper launch next week and want to make sure everything is stress-tested and scalable before then. My fiddling with load balancers, etc. is causing things to break periodically.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#80

Post by fho »

floren wrote: post #58

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 aut…

I kind of got inspired by the original article ... and your post (which was in the top spot when I first looked at the entry). I set out to build my own digital version of the Zettelkasten system.

But the more I think about it ... there is not a lot that there is to implement that basic command line tools don't handle.

---

Basically every editor (camp vim here) has support for markdown syntax highlighting, giving you a simple way to compose notes.

Fulltext search is handled by grep (ripgrep for me), fuzzy file search (fzf) probably comes in handy too.

If you need pretty printed notes you can use pandoc to convert multiple zettel files into one document of basically any format.

Graphs can be created with graphviz/dot.

---

There is little there is to improve on. From my (zettelkasten) notes:

* Something that assembles multiple notes into one temporary, editable document. Changes are commited into their respective zettel files once you close the editor.

* Some scripts that provide easy to access reports. E.g. based on recent activity, topic or based of a single zettel and it's neighbors.

---

All of the above are more or less trivial to implement. So ... any one up to propose something more challenging that is actually useful?

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