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Luhmann's Zettelkasten

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Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten

#51

Post by loudandskittish »

darkpicnic wrote: post #5

Zettelkasten has to be the least explained concept I've discovered online. Sure, they'll explain the _technique_ of it, but I've almost never seen any solid examples of it in _use_. I was so excited when I first heard of it, but I'm a person that learns by seeing examples and I couldn't find any good ones anywhere. Does anyone have any good examples they've seen?

Here's an article by someone using a similar system where I think how it's actually used in practice is described pretty well: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-bo...

Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten

#52

Post by kiwicopple »

lethologica wrote: post #49

I've tried to keep a Zettleksaten several times now with no real luck. My most recent try was using TiddlyWiki, with each Tiddler being an entry, usually containing a single piece of information. Perhaps it's the way TiddlyWiki is laid out, but I didn't particularly find the filing system to be of any real benefit to me. After my 30 day experiment I had nearly 1,000 Tiddlers and the majority were interlinked. When I…

I used Trello with relatively good results. The process was:

1. Create a board with a single “Dump” column

2. Create cards in the Dump column (or “share” to the column whenever I read something online)

3. Every week, categorise the card into new columns. Each column was a broad category like “Philosophy” and “Startup ideas”

4. When the board became unwieldy, with too many columns, I created a new board (Philosophy) and split the categories/columns again (Stoicism and Nihilism)

The act of reorganising the board was super useful for remembering everything, a bit like spaced repitition

Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten

#53

Post by darkpicnic »

no_identd wrote: post #46
darkpicnic wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

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 the…

Tinderbox was something I paid for (and wanted to love) but it was just too bloated and buggy. The creator's stance on "artisan software" is intriguing, but frankly the software doesn't put him in a good light. I'm willing to pay good money for good software, but $180 for software that feels like it's an open source alpha project is annoying, especially software that is meant to contain massive amounts of connected data.

Thanks for the links! I'll check the rest out.

Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten

#55

Post by no_identd »

tunesmith wrote: post #50

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 c…

Luhmann just intuitively came up with the same addressing concept as represented by a Xanadu Tumbler, essentially it relies on (implicitly) transfinite numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_%28Project_Xanadu%29

Only, he realized that using letters for every other number makes the dot number dot sequence as a separating character redundant, thereby shortening the address length tremendously, and he didn't need versioning in the way the Xanadu devs thought it would need.

Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten

#56

Post by no_identd »

jdkee wrote: post #54

Robert Pirsig alludes to his use of this technique in his novel, Lila, but never names it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila:_An_Inquiry_into_Morals

I'd speculate he might have picked it up from Umberto Eco's Come si fa una tesi di laurea (1977 - English translation: How to Write a Thesis, 2015)

Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten

#57

Post by kmill »

lkrubner wrote: post #41

Prior art against Google’s Page Rank: “ By connecting lose dots of information you create interconnected clusters of knowledge which emphasize the importance of an information based on the number of connections”

Though PageRank has the innovation of weighting the connections based on how important the information is.

(Just for fun, here's one linear-algebra-free way to understand classic PageRank: imagine starting from a random page on the internet and then randomly clicking links. If you continue clicking for long enough, then the probability that you end up on any given page is, more or less, its PageRank. If your access patterns with Zettelkasten are random-ish and you keep track of how many times you look at each card, then these counts are a crude approximation of the PageRank of your cards.)

Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten

#59

Post by zerof1l »

Great article. However, I don't like the idea of using online platform for this. Maybe if it was offline app I would try it. I haven't found a perfect app for this. So far, just simple text file worked the best. Effortless, easily searchable, open in any app. I'm considering upgrading to using very plain HTML files (so that I could embed media) and folders. IMO that's all you need.

Re: Luhmann's Zettelkasten

#60

Post by sveng »

loudandskittish wrote: post #51
darkpicnic wrote: post #5

Zettelkasten has to be the least explained concept I've discovered online. Sure, they'll explain the _technique_ of it, but I've almost never seen any solid examples of it in _use_. I was so excited when I first heard of it, but I'm a person that learns by seeing examples and I couldn't find any good ones anywhere. Does anyone have any good examples they've seen?

Here's an article by someone using a similar system where I think how it's actually used in practice is described pretty well: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-bo...

That is interesting; here’s another from Ryan Holiday that goes deeper:

https://forge.medium.com/the-incredible-creative-power-of-th...

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