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Zettelkästen?

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Re: Zettelkästen?

#41

Post by bryankam »

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…

Agreed! That's why I went for markdown in implementing it for myself.

Handwriting definitely helps, but a lot of it in this system is done during reading (or just general life), which Ahrens calls "literature notes". Ahrens has a theory that handwriting forces paraphrasing, which he views as important to learning. Anyway, I handwrite all that, then there's a later stage of integrating the relevant info into the system.

For me, searchability and accessibility, plus backup (I write a ton on paper already and I'm a bit worried about losing notebooks) makes it worth the digital step.

Also, I suspect from initial usage that the Zettelkasten is what Krakauer calls a "complementary cognitive artifact": https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2016/09/comp...

I.e., it makes you better at what you're trying to do even in the absence of the tool. To me, the main benefit of the system is that it encourages relational thinking.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#42

Post by kristiandupont »

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)

Re: Zettelkästen?

#43

Post by bryankam »

inimino wrote: post #18
dredmorbius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. -…

Also Robert Pirsig, known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, whose second book Lila is concerned extensively with an index card scheme.

That's great to know. I loved Zen when I was younger, thanks for mentioning Lilo.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#44

Post by bryankam »

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.

Thanks for mentioning this! I'm going to try it out today.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#45

Post by bryankam »

ofrzeta wrote: post #14

It's amazing that the guy is referring to Luhmann's zettelkasten and went on to implement it and did not stumble upon an existing implementation: http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/

Thanks for mentioning this! I did have a look at that software but couldn't get it to run on my Linux machine. To be fair, I didn't try very hard.

I also figured, since what I started was just a lightweight tree of plaintext markdown files, that it would be easy to integrate into another comparable system later on.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#46

Post by mpweiher »

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 )

Wow, that's a nice mapping of the Smalltalk code browser onto a regular text-based PL.

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/673

Re: Zettelkästen?

#47

Post by kristiandupont »

mpweiher wrote: post #46
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 )

Wow, that's a nice mapping of the Smalltalk code browser onto a regular text-based PL. http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/673

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.

Sadly, I have not been able to convince anyone to use it in a team setting and on top of that, it is a very primitive code editor. There is some syntax highlighting and that's basically it. No VIM bindings and no IDE-like features. So I now use it as my org-mode text editor, with the occasional link to code or config files here and there, which works well.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#48

Post by akavel »

_def wrote: post #36
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.

Wow that looks really neat! Too bad that there seems to be no Webclient, although it seems to be a Webapp (based on Electron) ... Last weekend I hacked a tiny WYSIWG flat-file HTML wiki for documenting a small hobby project with a non-coder friend, but now Zettlr looks like all I ever wished for, for that purpose. Except I would've to bug my buddy to install the Zettlr applciation as well.

As I hinted to in the comment, if you just want a WYSIWYG Markdown editor, and you're not particularly interested in the Zettelkasten aspect, take a look at https://marktext.app too, to compare which one you prefer. In my personal opinion, Marktext seems in particular more robust.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#49

Post by dgb23 »

This way of organizing information instantly reminds me of graph databases, and how natural it feels to model and query with them.

In the back of my head I have this nagging thought that graph databases are a strict upgrade from traditional relational (SQL) in many if not most cases.

I have nothing to back this up. It really is just a feeling. It simply feels more fun and productive.

Re: Zettelkästen?

#50

Post by ttepasse »

ralfd wrote: post #28

Here is a picture of German author Arno Schmidt with his "Note box": https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140... Btw: He is regarded as an important author who is famously not read, as his magnus opus is even difficult to hold with a weight of 13 pounds: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seasons-biggest-novel-has-1... And Niklas Luhmann himself explaining his Zettelkasten (the archive with 50000 no…

Fun fact aside: Arno Schmidt's grandnephew is Dave Winer. We know Winer today more as the chief populariser of RSS but his life's idea is more in Outlining, organising your thoughts in nested lists and, since he's a programmer, coding in and on outline structures.

If I remember correctly from his blog Winer and Schmidt never had much contact, language barrier and such, so it's more of a coincidence.

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