The reason you want to make note sequences instead of creating just an ever growing wiki entry for each topic is because it lowers the barrier for entry of information and keeps you from wasting time on constant reformulation.
Imagine your notes looks like a wikipedia page for a topic such as knowledge. Every time you come across new information on the topic you have to figure out some way to integrate it into the existing page, which means you’d waste a lot of time on revising pages.
Instead, you can just connect the information to the end of the chain, while keeping it as its own note. This way you can be constantly be adding new information to your zettelkasten without worrying about how it exactly fits. It lowers the barrier to help encourage you to add new information, especially when you don’t know what information will be relevant when you go to decide to write on a topic.
In the book How Music Works, author David Byrne discusses how much of music throughout history was intensely shaped by the environment it existed in. This is in contrast to how people often perceive music as being spontaneously generated from the musician’s inner soul. Simply put, the reason medieval church music sounds the way it does, is due to the fact that other types of popular music sound like crap in a big cathedral. No one wants to hear crappy music.
This can be related to my discussion on how note taking has evolved over the years based on the mediums. Something I haven’t though about enough, which the above book made me realize, is how the different mediums of information management have shaped the ways we take notes. It is part of the storage process.
When you take notes in a more atomic, decontextualized, and individual manner, does that change how you think? Do you start automatically thinking in such a way as you are reading and writing?
The ideal note format for me would be strict Time IDs (e.g. 202008031140) for filenames accompanied by an optional title at the top of each note. Then a computer would display each file as Filename + Title. This note would look like:
filename: 202008031140.md
title: # Ideal Note Format
Shows up in the File Explorer and Note search as: “202008031140 Ideal Note Format” or “Ideal Note Format”
Maybe this format can be supported in a plug in based Obsidian? In a future plug in based Obsidian, I would also like the option to spontaneously generate Time IDs within a document for the purpose block/sentence level linking.
Current Issue
The problem with the current format of “ID + Title” (e.g. 202008031140 Ideal Note Format) is that not every note needs to have a title because it may only be a sentence long. For example, Niklas Luhmann had a note that read “7.6e On the history of the concept of economic. Value cf. Literature at 7.15, Böhm-Bawerk, loc. Cit., P. 991f., 993ff.”. Because of this sometimes it makes more sense not to give it an official title but instead just a way to identify it in the future if needed. You can do this with either a time ID (e.g. 202008031140) or Luhmann ID (e.g. 7.6e).
If you can automatically generate a time ID, then you can put it anywhere in a note to represent a piece of information as small as a sentence.
As you think about creating software (Obsidian) and designing systems (Zettelkasten) it is important to keep in mind what problems you are trying to solve. It helps keep you focused and gives you an anchor to connect new thinking too.
What are the major problems people face with note taking?
I saw this nice post on the zettelkasten De forum about one persons struggles with traditional methods.
I’ve had a problem in the past thinking too much instead of putting things into action
get stuck on deciding on categories and where to file certain things
As for my notes, it was the retrieval process that was most difficult. I’ve often had trouble with tags, because I would have multiple versions of the same tag, but with slight variations in phrasing, spelling, hyphens, etc
the one thing that tripped me up was the lack of flexibility involved with systems such as the GTD. So I would have questions that I would tack on, or further ideas for exploration after having written a ZT, but nowhere central to find these questions again
Luhmann’s Note Taking Problem
Why Luhmann started engaging with Card Indexing
before he had any institutional affiliation with academia, he was already conscious of the fact that the notes he took from his readings at the time, would not be collected for a limited publication project but for a far more extensive endeavor, eventually for a lifelong project. The shortcomings of the common methods of organizing notes by collecting them in folders motivated him early on to start a card-based filing system.
“The shortcomings of the common methods of organizing notes by collecting them in folders” - I’ve heard of people working with folders before such as the Noguchi Filing System and Shane Parish of Farnam Street Blog (may be wrong, can’t find exact source for this). I’ve never used a folders system, so I’m curious what is the shortcomings with it? My hunch would be people get caught up in categorizing and deciding what folder to use.
Adopting the Emerging Practice of Card Indexing
In organizing his research in this way, Luhmann adopted a system of organizing knowledge that had emerged in the wake of early modern scholarship along with the rapidly growing number of available publications since the Sixteenth century and the practice of excerpting that followed: card indexing.
Perfecting Card Indexing
He went on to develop the potential for systematic knowledge production inherent in this filing technique to perfection by devising a very specific system of organization and referencing which seems to be an analogical pre-adaptive advance of the modern form of digital database. Luhmann’s card index allows the production of new and often unexpected knowledge by relating concepts and thoughts that do not have much in common at first sight
The problem of categorization is a confusing one to me because I feel like you are going to run into the same problem no matter what. The zettelkasten supposedly gets around this by having you start an arbitrary branch or brand new number at the end when you can’t find a place to put your new note. Where I get confused is that this just seems like the same process as starting a new category if your new note doesn’t fall into the existing categories?
The true problem in my mind is that of a failure in the retrieval process, such that you end up creating essentially near duplicate tags or categories.
One way to better understand and think about the purpose of a zettelkasten is to compare it to an explorer.
You are an explorer who has reached a new and magical world! The first thing you do is set up “the index”. The index is your original port city, the biggest hub where information is located and a place to branch off from. You aren’t just any explorer though, you also happen to be a cartographer.
Setting up outposts for further exploration
Refining the Existing Maps
Exploration is the act of searching for the purpose of discovery of information or resources.
Often early cartographers will have made a low resolution map of a new area. Where you are pretty much familiar with all the parts but are unsure how they are connected. When exploring the west, part of your journey will be on paths created by past explorers. Even though these routes aren’t novel, you can still add them to your map. In the zettelkasten, this would be established knowledge that you just haven’t learned yet. As you explore, you might find faster routes between two places then the previously established route. In the zettelkasten, this would be finding a connection between two concepts that people haven’t considered.
At some point you will be charting lands people haven’t discovered or mapped out in a rudimentary way. In the zettelkasten, the equivalent would be your own novel theories or academic research you are part of.
Setting up outputs for further exploration in your new world would be laying out all the different parts of a concept that you know about. Then as you read more books on the subject, you add more parts/dimensions to it. An example of this is when you first start learning about a field of science. You start out with the definition of the field, then start mapping out all the different sub-fields.
Simile - a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid
Metaphor - a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
Example - a thing characteristic of its kind or illustrating a general rule.
Luhmann and his prolific writings - “Luhmann published a bewildering wealth of articles and books year after year and at the time of his death, his list of publications comprised more than 500 titles on diverse topics, mostly part of his central research interest: a theory of society” Source - Johannes F.K. Schmidt Paper
221 - Communication is the act of conveying meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic rules. - Wikipedia
Communication is an important skill to develop in life because it is necessary for cooperation. Whether that be working with others to implement a solution you generated or communicating your contribution to our collective understanding of the universe.
Visual Communication
Written Word (Blog Posts, Wiki, Books, etc)
Pictures (Photographs, Paintings, Movies, etc) - tell a story through strict visual art to communicate an experience
Combination (Comics, Graphic Novels, etc) - my favorite example of this would be the work of larry gonick
Body Language (e.g. pointing, shrugs, facial expressions, etc)
In the first case, it is simply tracking where you come across information without the intention to track every existence of it. In a sense, this is what the zettelkasten is about, saving interesting information that may not have immediate use.
You can think of the zettelkasten as an idea tracker. So for a graduate student, I think of three realms of knowledge that these ideas exist in. The zettelkasten is about tracking the knowledge existing in all three realms. First Realm + Second Realm = Third Ream.
The first realm is established knowledge. This means reading the works of your professors and their colleagues, laying out a map of what the established knowledge on a subject matter looks like.
The second realm is new information. Because creativity comes about from the interaction of your old knowledge with new knowledge, it is important to be taking notes on the new knowledge you purposely expose yourself to.
The third realm is your creative output. Creative Knowledge is the byproduct of mixing the former to realms. It is an important to track this information because it can help keep from retreading areas you’ve already explored. You can make more informed exploratory decisions by knowing where the dead ends have been.
Because our memory systems aren’t designed for the long term tracking of such information, it helps to have an external system that can track all the knowledge/information you are working with. This is why we have books. Books are a form of externalized memory. Zettelkasten is just another way of organizing and engaging with your externalized memory. It is also a way of more easily integrating others externalized memory (books written by others) into your own thinking (zettelkasten).
225 - Note Sequence vs. Latticework for Creative Output
Placeholder Text - write about how the magic of a zettelkasten comes not just from creating note sequences but the interaction between note sequences and how they contribute to each other. See multiple storage and abstracted concepts. This is important to keep in mind with the pizza note sequence because it is just one note sequence. So you won’t see the true utility (link) of the zettelkasten. But it is still useful example to have.
One of the core issues with sharing information over the internet in the form of a blog post, wiki, or zettelkasten, is that of the users prior knowledge. This issue becomes heightened when the user doesn’t necessarily want to take the time to fill in their prior knowledge gaps. Users will be more likely to engage with the material if you make the acquisition of the prior knowledge as easy as possible. This is why clear, concise and structured writing is so important.
Structured content allows the reader to more easily structure build a mental model on which to hang new information as they come across it while reading.
Surprising connections can be ones that people have previously discounted but end up being right or ones that haven’t been thought of. That could mean connecting two concepts that people didn’t realize were connected. The more informative, the better.
Think of your zettelkasten as a giant box of legos, with each individual lego being a piece of information (concept, commentary, reference, etc) in the form of a note. As you collect more and more legos you organize them (zettelkasten workflow) in such a way that when you want to go build something you are able to get all the pieces you need.
You can then take these legos (information building blocks) and organize them into different structures to create a bunch of different things. What you end up making are made up of all the same thing (information) but are different depending on how you structure them. These different structures are blog posts, books, presentations, and wikis.
You collect and organize the legos until you have enough to build a structure. In the same way you collect and organize information in the zettelkasten until you have enough notes to use for a wiki entry, blog post, or book. In this situation, the difference between a wiki and zettelkasten is that you might not use all the information on a topic for the wiki entry that you have in your zettelkasten. Zettelkasten is your loose collection of information, sometimes it includes incorrect information that you later correct in your research process.
I think how successful a zettelkasten user is depends on the person and how they communicate with their zettelkasten. Luhmann published prolifically with his zettelkasten. His output was a byproduct of the interaction between what he put in the zettelkasten, his default brain, and how the two communicated with each other.
Just because you create a zettelkasten, doesn’t mean you’ll somehow create great work. It is just a tool. Some people suck at using tools and others create amazing masterpieces with them.
In the same sense, you can think of your brain as an information processing program and the zettelkasten as a plugin. Plugins don’t guarantee success, but powerful ones can act as a great multiplier in the knowledge work you do.
mediocre general skills (e.g. average guitar player, which there are a million of)
mastering specialized skills that are undesirable (e.g. masters in obscure literature, see Note)
Note: I often still think a lot of the masters in obscure literature are still valuable, its just harder for the average person to find a job with that skillset. But if you are productively contributing to our global knowledge base, then that is good. Same goes with Philosophy degrees, there is so much bullshit literature produced by PhD students, but if done right, the philosophy degree will give you a great thinking tool set.