Luhmann's Zettelkasten

Everything I’ve read on Zettelkasten has been the equivalent of trying to learn to program by reading a reference book. Sure, I could technically learn Python by reading an exhaustive list of methods, classes and operators, or I could pickup a book which explains key concepts through an example project and examines the syntax through a specific context.

I learn best by example, personally, and I’ve never seen good examples on this topic myself.

Could be, i know some girls that keep drawrs tho, but it may very well be a case of over applying spaced rep.

I think the point most guides overlook consists of the internal semantics of using a Zettelkasten, Luhmann essentially used it to create a paragraph (Zettel) & subchapter (Zettel Sequence, but note they of course sometimes he'd not manage to fit an entire paragraph on one Zettel due to margin limitations) branching & branchable, recursively self-referential choose your own adventure hypertextbook, from which he'd then generate regular textbooks. Hence why he said that his books basically wrote themselves — to write a book, he'd 'just' enter the Zettelkasten, and copy out everything he'd already written there on the topic, picking between branches & branchings as he went back, forth & side-to-side within it. Hence why if one looks close, one can find Luhmann seemingly self-plagiarising paragraphs from books he'd previously written. I suspect a similar mechanic sits behind the (in this sense very ignorant) accusations of self-plagiarism against Slavoj Zizek.

As such, one might wish to instead consider using Hypertext Fiction tools for creating a Zettelkasten, such these two (proprietary software, Mac OS X only, unfortunately):

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/

Note that there exists an EXTREMELY useful plugin for Tinderbox which implements Stretchtext:

https://natematias.com/stretchtext/

Now gimme a combination of what roamresearch.com does with the above, but using the data structure of Hode:

https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode

But with support for zzstructure like hyperthogonality:

https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/i...

And secretly use the patching patches feature of pijul.org in the background so version control actually becomes sanely doable, throw in elastic tab stop support, and maybe an entire kitchensink in which someone let a mixture of ChrysaLisp, SmallTalk, Hazel, Scala 3, /r/nosyntax, Inferno, RINA, GNUnet, & every single proof assistant and theorem prover sit for a tad bit long, and then MAYBE we can stop living in the dark ages of computing.

(Yes I'm bitter)

P.S.: Identity Transclusion ≠ Instance Transclusion

P.P.S.: Birth & Death of Javascript, anyone?

I would like to understand why you think that, could you explain a bit why it cant be replicated?

It's unclear whether being able to insert a new identifier within an existing list of identifiers is a feature. That might just be a byproduct of needing to put the new card into a related area.

The Zettelkasten.de software appears to be pushing concepts that would have been impossible in Luhmann's system.

Ultimately it seems that all these information systems are just different implementations of nodes, edges, and containers.

Node: Do you want it to support formatted text and/or media? Do you want to be able to visually explore this node's edge relationships to other nodes? (Software often chooses one or the other; both would be nice.)

Edge: Do you want directed edges? Do you want to support Graphs and not just Trees? Do you want your edges to have configurable meaning beyond "this relates to that"?

Containers: Do you want to be able to collect multiple nodes together? Do you want a node to optionally be a container, meaning do you want to allow an edge to link a node to a container? Do you want to support non-hierarchical (Venn) containers, aka tags?

Outliners, Todo list software are almost always directed trees instead of directed graphs. Even with mindmapping / bubble graph software - it's weird how many of them are just undirected trees instead of undirected graphs. Even orgmode is at best a directed tree with tags - it's not a DAG unless you use something like org-brain, which has its own limitations. Wikis usually don't have the visual exploration tools - imagine being able to zoom out of a wiki and just draw edges and containers to put the nodes (articles) in.

Zettelkasten supported (somewhat) formatted text. Not really able to visually explore edge relationships without taking stuff apart. Undirected graph, generic edge meaning. Links probably often one-way and not self-healing (removing a card wouldn't remove links of all linking cards). Supported heirarchical containers, and a card could conceptually link to a container by having "2" link to "2a" which might include 2a1, 2a2, 2a3, etc. Supported tags, sort of, although there wasn't a way to search for all cards that had a particular tag.

Ultimately you find that different thinking styles require different combinations of these concepts, so there isn't a one-size-fits-all, and there isn't "one system" that works like how the brain does, at least not until we have a system that allows us to easily mix these concepts together into a custom implementation.