81–90 of 309 posts
Should this implicate that Luhmann invented Noteboxes? Because this is absolute not the case. There are many famous Zettelkaesten from famous people. The most famous might be the Mundaneum, a kind of wikipedia in noteboxes, from around 1900.
What Luhmann did was adding basic hypertext-principles to a common note-taking-tool.
> Zettelkasten is German for “slip-box”. It originates from German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Should this implicate that Luhmann invented Noteboxes? Because this is absolute not the case. There are many famous Zettelkaesten from famous people. The most famous might be the Mundaneum, a kind of wikipedia in noteboxes, from around 1900. What Luhmann did was adding basic hypertext-principles to a common note-taking-tool…
That word isn't in general use in German, and it's certainly not in general use in English. So I don't see any confusion.
As far as I can tell, both in studies and in personal experience, the fiddly details of your note-taking schemes don't matter. The only thing that matters is attempting to integrate the information into a cohesive whole, which takes intentional thought.
With linear notes, there's a failure mode where links that should be made aren't; you can even walk around believing outright contradictions without noticing. But with a web, there's an equally bad failure mode where your knowledge gets diffuse and unstructured (instead of "X causes Y if Z", you get "X, Y, and Z are related. But... was Z the thing that caused X? Wait, but then what was Y for?").
Both of these reflect a failure to aggregate and chunk the information into hard tools, but no productivity system can magically fix that; it always takes time.
When I want to find things, I use the search. If I was diligent about my taxonomy, then it's effective.
Is there anything else to this system that I'm missing?
Are Zettelkasten the latest Hipster fad? A fortnight or so ago, I saw a link on HN mentioning 'Zettelkasten' and had to look up the word, because I'd never heard it before. Since then, there must have been a Zettelkasten reference at least every other day.
It's important to keep in mind that Zettelkasten's creator was an academic in the humanities. When I tried this system, I found it really shone when my goal was literature review -- i.e. to weave together arguments from disparate sources and articles, particularly when there was no quantitative or numeric way to do that weaving (e.g. in a table). I think that more technical and quantitative subjects do not benefit as…
Recently I started with the Zettelkasten approach (120 notes now), so not much experience yet. I did not use something like this for my phd thesis. Thinking back, I don't think it would have helped significantly because computer science works differently than the humanities.
What works very well is to use Zettelkasten as the next step after taking notes from reading book, blog posts, and articles to collect your personal insights. Probably also from movies, podcasts, whatever.
I believe Zettelkasten will help me with writing for my own blog and when I'm collecting information for personal projects. In both cases, I have lots of ideas which are not fully formed yet to be published or implemented. With a job and a family there is little time to pursue it, so I have to work in little steps. Externalizing this ideas is essential and a very-hyperlinked style like Zettelkasten seems to fit well.
For learning little facts about programming languages, spaced repetition is probably more suitable.
Are Zettelkasten the latest Hipster fad? A fortnight or so ago, I saw a link on HN mentioning 'Zettelkasten' and had to look up the word, because I'd never heard it before. Since then, there must have been a Zettelkasten reference at least every other day.
It's important to keep in mind that Zettelkasten's creator was an academic in the humanities. When I tried this system, I found it really shone when my goal was literature review -- i.e. to weave together arguments from disparate sources and articles, particularly when there was no quantitative or numeric way to do that weaving (e.g. in a table). I think that more technical and quantitative subjects do not benefit as…
I disagree. The general idea that human mind stores information as a connected knowledge graph is still valid for technical subjects. Sure, for simpler examples like if statements, you may not gain much. But, even for loops have differences across languages. JS uses for..of for iterating while Python and Swift use for..in Also, there are different approaches in each language for getting the index and value while iter…
I searched for hours for a viable Zettelkasten method: org-mode, vim-org, TiddlyWiki, Roam, Notion, Joplin, Notable, Obsidian, Zettlr. All of them were too complex, and not lightweight, cross-compatible, private/secure, or futureproof enough. I decided to settle on the default MacOS editor using a mix of .txt/.rtf files, with extensive folder organization and the built-in tagging system. I plan on consolidating journ…
It deals in text files and folders structured the way you describe. Cross platform and simple with some powerful plugins.
It has integrated tagging, journal, to-dos.
I have tried vim-wiki but keep coming back to Zim every time.