Zettelkasten Forum


Discourse graph and Zettelkasten

It would be nice to see how to combine the Zettelkasten with the QCE/discourse graph by Joel Chan [1]

There might be an interesting mapping exercise between reference/source notes, literature notes, zettels or atomic notes and cluster/hub notes and

Does someone have some experience doing or working using both?

[1] J. Chan, “Discourse Graphs for Augmented Knowledge Synthesis: What and Why,” Aug. 2021.

David Delgado Vendrell
www.daviddelgado.cat

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Comments

  • @daviddelven: Based on past discussions in this forum and elsewhere, it's clear to me that many people use semantic schemas for knowledge representation, like the one that you mentioned above, in their note systems. For example, in a prior discussion on note typology I said:

    There are many relevant ontologies that one could use to organize one's note system. The venerable IBIS and the more recent AIF are two that have inspired the organization of my own note system.

    I think the answer to the question "should we agree on a common language" is: No, if we are not working together on a common project, then we do not need to agree on a common ontology any more than we need to agree on a common markup language.

    IBIS or issue mapping, which I mentioned in that discussion, has been around since the early 1970s and greatly influenced how I think about my note system. It's similar to what Joel Chan wrote about in the recent paper that you cited. I mentioned in a prior discussion on question notes how I combined ideas from IBIS and from The Craft of Research to create a semantic schema that's not too different from what Chan proposed. Chan doesn't mention IBIS, but it is mentioned by some of the texts that Chan cites, such as D. Scott McCrickard's Making Claims: The Claim as a Knowledge Design, Capture, and Sharing Tool in HCI (2012). Many scholars have been working on similar ideas for decades.

  • @Andy Thanks for bringing me up all these previous discussions. Very valuable.
    I'll have to process them meticulously.

    I wonder why we call them "question, claim or evidence" notes as they are atomic, or if we should refer to the Note type that hosts them (i.e. Literature note or Atomic note/Zettel?).

    There might be different types of them depending on the ownership (author's question or your own question?; third-party claims or your claim?; other's evidence or your evidence?). Depending on which type, you could place those "notes" within different main type notes.

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • @daviddelven said:

    I wonder why we call them "question, claim or evidence" notes as they are atomic, or if we should refer to the Note type that hosts them (i.e. Literature note or Atomic note/Zettel?).

    You will have to answer that question for yourself in your own system; I don't use the terms "literature note" or "atomic note" so your question does not make sense in terms of my note system.

    There might be different types of them depending on the ownership (author's question or your own question?; third-party claims or your claim?; other's evidence or your evidence?). Depending on which type, you could place those "notes" within different main type notes.

    I tend to think in terms of dialogue mapping (group facilitation technique based on IBIS), which does not attribute the elements to different authors/owners; everything is collectively owned, and the whole issue map is a collective project. Ontologically that is how I think about it: we are all in this thinking business together. But I also need to cite my sources, which I do within each note. But I do not indicate, as an attribute of the note, that it is mine or someone else's: the note ontology is completely communistic in that respect.

  • @daviddelven: After some further online research about Joel Chan, I discovered that a web page he wrote (on the Scaling Synthesis website) has the title: People naturally try to enact typed distinctions in their notes. I would say that statement is also a good empirical generalization of some of the discussions in this forum!

  • @Andy Indeed! Especially I always liked Maggie Appleton's way of elaborating her discourse, as well.

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • Joel Chan's 2021 paper cited above also mentions at one point that "there is a subculture of academic researchers who repurpose qualitative data analysis tools like NVivo and Atlas.ti to do literature reviews". At the end of the paper Chan also mentions the kind of hypertextual personal knowledge base software that everyone in this forum knows.

    What Chan doesn't mention is that people are also repurposing such personal knowledge base software to do qualitative data analysis! I mentioned in a prior discussion on tagging individual sentences that Ryan J. A. Murphy described how to create "an integrated qualitative analysis environment with Obsidian", and others in this discussion forum have described similar projects. Various tools such as qualitative data analysis software, argument mapping software, and hypertextual personal knowledge base software, are converging into a single integrated environment for what Chan calls "knowledge synthesis".

  • edited February 2023

    One way to distinguish Zettelkasten methods is by how they define notes and how they define the links between notes.

    A minority of Zettelkasten users seek to formulate clear, rigorous inferences when they link notes. They use 'inference-dominant' Zettelkasten methods.

    Those who use inference-nondominant Zettelkasten methods--a majority of Zettelkasten users--link notes without putting much effort into distinguishing variations in link quality.

    Inference-dominant methods are best for users who need to produce communications that will be subject to critical scrutiny by others. Such communications include analyses of any type and are often needed by academics, lawyers, consultants, and leaders in all fields.

    Inference-nondominant methods are best for users who seek to produce lots of content. If you want to publish three posts to your blog each day, you would be a good candidate for these methods.

    Just as we used link quality to distnguish inference-dominant methods from inference-nondominant methods, so too we can distinguish different kinds of inference-dominant methods.

    In this thread, the more well-known methods mentioned were Joel Chan's QCE Method and The Craft of Research's method, which leans heavily on the Toulmin Model of Argument.

    Joel Chan's QCE method is demonstrated in simplified form, in a Zettelkasten, in this video. The fundamental types of notes are questions, claims, and evidence, and the fundamental types of links are relations of support, opposition, or is-answered-by.

    The Craft of Research's method has evidence, claims, warrants and reasons which are linked by relations of support and opposition.

    Joel Chan gives a more complex example on this web page.

    Joel Chan's method was constructed to promote collective sense-making and is better suited to that task than the Craft of Research method which was constructed for individual researchers.

    Even the authors of the Craft of Research method acknowledge that their procedure can bewilder the most diligent practitioner:

    If all this seems complicated, know that you are in good company: the relationship of warrants to claims and reasons has vexed logicians since at least the time of Aristotle. (164)

    Just as Joel Chan's question, claim, evidence method has more rigor than inference-nondominant methods have, so we can choose a method that fills some of the gaps left by Joel Chan.

    Specifically, we can insist that all unstated premises and assumptions be made explicit. When producing communications for others, stating every premise and assumption easily becomes tedious and pedantic. But for the rigorous knowledge worker, such an exercise has great value. It forces the user to test every inference, simulating the test that opponents will certainly perform.

    For example, Joel Chan lays out, in graphical form, an argument about the efficacy of banning bad actors in online forums here.

    The argument map intentionally leaves out a number of claims. By inserting the missing claims, one can get a stronger grasp of the argument, home in on its weakest points, and gain greater understanding of premises' relations of dependency. This more rigorous analysis does not require significantly greater effort and yields outsized benefits in the form of deeper insight.

    A more rigorous map of Joel Chan's argument can be seen here.

    The principles underlying this more rigorous method are explained in this video.

    Post edited by Nido on
  • @Nido: Thanks for all that! What you call the inference-dominant/nondominant distinction is what I might call the degree to which users have formalized a schema of link types (including, but not necessarily limited to, the types of inference traditionally studied in logic and argumentation), which also would be related to node/note types and their level of granularity.

    @Nido said:

    Joel Chan's method was constructed to promote collective sense-making and is better suited to that task than the Craft of Research method which was constructed for individual researchers.

    IBIS and dialogue mapping were also invented for collective sensemaking. I'm surprised that Chan does not seem to mention IBIS directly since his schema reinvents IBIS, more or less, 50 years later.

    I wouldn't say that Joel Chan's schema is more well known than IBIS or the Toulmin model. The latter two have been around for decades and are frequently mentioned in the argumentation theory literature (for example, both are mentioned in the Handbook of Argumentation Theory by Frans van Eemeren and colleagues (2014), along with many other concepts and systems), but I have never seen Chan's schema mentioned in the literature.

    Specifically, we can insist that all unstated premises and assumptions be made explicit. When producing communications for others, stating every premise and assumption easily becomes tedious and pedantic. But for the rigorous knowledge worker, such an exercise has great value. It forces the user to test every inference, simulating the test that opponents will certainly perform.

    Yes, this is an important principle and is now a standard instruction in argument mapping. (I'm reminded of Robert Ennis's 1982 article "Identifying implicit assumptions", Synthese, 51(1), 61–86.) The study and practice of such argument analysis techniques can greatly improve the rigor and systematicity of one's thinking, both in private and when writing for the public. The uncovering of implicit assumptions also tends to happen naturally in groups of people when using dialogue mapping.

    In IBIS, there another important kind of implicit element that is analogous to implicit assumptions: implicit questions. Jeff Conklin said that what people often do is "the answer reflex": stating positions (i.e. claims, answers) without making explicit the question(s) behind the positions. IBIS puts the identification of questions into a central role (Chan's QCE schema could do this too). This is important because just like people often fail to identify implicit assumptions, they can also fail to identify questions.

    Types of questions that Jeff Conklin listed in Dialogue Mapping are: deontic questions (e.g. What should we do?), instrumental questions (e.g. How should we do it?), criterial questions (e.g. What are the criteria?), meaning or conceptual questions (e.g., What does X mean?), factual questions (e.g. What is X? or Is X true?), background questions (e.g. What is the background to this project?), and stakeholder questions (e.g. Who are the stakeholders of this project?). There are probably other important types of questions too.

  • @Andy You have given me a lot of fascinating resources to investigate further. Thanks.

    I won't be saying anything that is new to you, but here are some of my thoughts on the issues you've raised.

    1. Digital argument mapping tools encourage some degree of formalization and, thus, rigor, on the user's thinking. But they tend to keep the arguments of different texts in distinct files.
    2. Digital Zettelkasten tools encourage linking across texts and across disciplines but are agnostic with respect to rigor.

    I do not want to formally analyze everything I read. Only the good stuff. But I always want to have the option of adding rigor as my thinking evolves.

    So, the solution is to have the option, when desired, to use argument mapping methods in the Zettelkasten tool.

  • @Nido: Agreed. If people were to think, after reading what I've said, that my whole note system is a crystalline castle of immaculate reasoning, they would be wrong. As Luhmann said of his Zettelkasten, "The entirety of these notes can only be described as a disorder", and it's no different for me, but there are floating islands of order in the disorder.

  • Thus, @Nido and @Andy , using a Digital Zettelkasten tool when creating those "islands of order", where do you deploy the argument-oriented action within the ZK framework: discovery phase or development one?

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • @daviddelven: I know from reading this forum that there are many answers to that question, since different people have their different methods. I am interested to hear what @Nido or others have to say.

    For me, it depends on the purpose of particular notes. For example, some of my notes are for personal development: for those notes, I do all the argument structuring within the note system (or ZK or personal knowledge base or whatever you want to call it) because there is no external product other than my way of life. Other notes are for projects, such as writing projects: those notes are tagged with the project name and are structured as arguments to some degree, but are not completely structured because I do the final writing or production of the project not in the note system, but instead elsewhere—usually in Scrivener for writing projects—and that is where the final organization happens. After I finish the project, I try to transfer some of what was developed in Scrivener back into the note system, but I don't put an extreme amount of effort into it.

  • @Andy That's a very explicit and interesting workflow. Once we jump into the practical ground level, where tools and their architectures appear, it's quite fun.

    @Andy said:

    For me, it depends on the purpose of particular notes. For example, some of my notes are for personal development. For those notes, I do all the argument structuring within the note system (or ZK or personal knowledge base or whatever you want to call it) because there is no external product other than my way of life. Other notes are for projects, such as writing projects: those notes are tagged with the project name and are structured as arguments to some degree, but are not completely structured because I do the final writing or production of the project not in the note system, but instead elsewhere—usually in Scrivener for writing projects—and that is where the final organization happens. After I finish the project, I try to transfer some of what was developed in Scrivener back into the note system, but I don't put an extreme amount of effort into it.

    I'm also especially interested in the "lessons learned" from projects. Like many of you, I combine personal and professional development, producing outcomes from both. Producing them forces you to go through an additional layer of arguments that might become valuable for further discoveries and development.

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • @daviddelven said:

    I'm also especially interested in the "lessons learned" from projects. Like many of you, I combine personal and professional development, producing outcomes from both. Producing them forces you to go through an additional layer of arguments that might become valuable for further discoveries and development.

    Yes, absolutely! I like the way you said that. Stated more abstractly, some related concepts are action research, learning cycle, and reflective practice. Those are all names for the overall continuous development process within which argument technology is used.

    Also, often it is not easy to separate a discovery phase from a development phase, a point that was made by Horst Rittel, one of the inventors of IBIS:

    The designer's reasoning is much more disorderly, disorderly not due to intellectual sloppiness, but rather to the nature of design problems. There is no clear separation of the activities of problem definition, synthesis, and evaluation. All of these occur all the time. A design problem keeps changing while it is treated, because the understanding of what ought to be accomplished, and how it might be accomplished is continually shifting. Learning what the problem is IS the problem. Whatever he learns about the problem, becomes a feature of its resolution. From the beginning, the designer has an idea of the 'whole' resolution of his problem which changes with increasing understanding of the problem, and the image of its resolution develops from blurry to sharp and back again, frequently being revised, altered, detailed and modified.

    — Horst W. J. Rittel (1987/1988). "The reasoning of designers". Arbeitspapier A-88-4. Institut für Grundlagen der Planung, Universität Stuttgart.

  • Also, often it is not easy to separate a discovery phase from a development phase, a point that was made by Horst Rittel, one of the inventors of IBIS:

    The designer's reasoning is much more disorderly, disorderly not due to intellectual sloppiness, but rather to the nature of design problems. There is no clear separation of the activities of problem definition, synthesis, and evaluation. All of these occur all the time. A design problem keeps changing while it is treated, because the understanding of what ought to be accomplished, and how it might be accomplished is continually shifting. Learning what the problem is IS the problem. Whatever he learns about the problem, becomes a feature of its resolution. From the beginning, the designer has an idea of the 'whole' resolution of his problem which changes with increasing understanding of the problem, and the image of its resolution develops from blurry to sharp and back again, frequently being revised, altered, detailed and modified.

    — Horst W. J. Rittel (1987/1988). "The reasoning of designers". Arbeitspapier A-88-4. Institut für Grundlagen der Planung, Universität Stuttgart.

    I love this reference, as a common branch paradigm to many different design-related domains.

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • Since @Andy recently lamented that nobody is paying attention to this topic, I'd like to ask practitioners to share an example :)

    For context, I have notes on IBIS since a recent mention in this discussion. I believe that my deliberations about "Zettel refactoring" aligns with this, but I haven't applied IBIS in a strict sense to a topic because I didn't see the point. If someone could illuminate this, that'd be great!

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • edited June 22

    @ctietze said:

    I haven't applied IBIS in a strict sense to a topic because I didn't see the point.

    I'll have to see if I can find a good example that I'm willing to share. What's the point? A general point or principle that I learned specifically from the IBIS ontology is that I can and should make questions (what IBIS calls issues) more central to my thinking, instead of my usual pattern of thinking only in terms of answers/positions and the reasons for or against them. (Jeff Conklin, in an introduction to IBIS, calls the latter pattern "the Answer Reflex": "A well-functioning Answer Reflex assures that no one asks, 'What is the question here?'") As you could guess from my forum posts, I still often struggle with this: my Answer Reflex is still strong in an unstructured writing environment. Typical approaches to argument diagramming seem to reinforce the Answer Reflex, and IBIS showed me an alternative with rules that force more emphasis on questions. This is one example of how a schema or ontology can help one pay attention to patterns of thinking that one would otherwise tend not to use when faced with a blank page or unstructured text field.

    EDIT: @ctietze said that in another discussion I "recently lamented that nobody is paying attention to this topic", but in my first comment above in this discussion I contradicted myself the year before by saying "it's clear to me that many people use semantic schemas for knowledge representation". The truth is that I have no idea how many people use some kind of discourse schema in their notes, but it may be that many people use something very simple without even having a name for it (Joel Chan: "People naturally try to enact typed distinctions in their notes") while a smaller number of power users use something more complex with knowledge of the formal foundations (Dorian Taylor: "A side effect of spending too much time working with the Semantic Web proper is analytic philosophy").

    Post edited by Andy on
  • @ctietze said:

    I'd like to ask practitioners to share an example :)

    I remembered an example from the blog of a software engineer that I found some years ago that may be helpful: in this first post he describes IBIS in his own words, and in this second post he shows how he applies it in the kind of note-taking process that everyone here is familiar with.

  • My initial response was to agree with @ctietze with a resounding yes. My ideas and practice about zettel refactoring align with what I've gathered from @Andy's posts. But like in the past, @Andy sent me off looking at all the links to his arguments. After a couple of hours, I came up for air to find I had a greater appreciation for IBIS.

    Dialogue mapping and argument mapping, the core activities of IBIS, have, until now, been subconsciously and haphazardly integrated into my note-taking. Being aware of them and formally incorporating them into my thought process while zettelkasting is something worth developing. They can be applied to zettelkasting through the lens of mapping my dialogue/arguments with ideas. I choose to express my dialogue/arguments through my writing. This workflow, with its strengths of structured argumentation and formal representation, doesn't apply to every idea but can be formally used in more ideas than we think.

    Thank you, @Andy, for the links to Knowledge Synthesis: A Conceptual Model and Practical Guide and The IBIS Field Guide: Exploring Complexity. I'm spending the day immersed in deep thought, processing these ideas.

    Will Simpson
    My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • @Will, thanks, that resonates with me. Also check out that second link in my previous comment, where refactoring is explicitly and prominently discussed:

    I remembered an example from the blog of a software engineer that I found some years ago that may be helpful: in this first post he describes IBIS in his own words, and in this second post he shows how he applies it in the kind of note-taking process that everyone here is familiar with.

  • edited June 23

    It's fun, when I first met "discourse graph" in this forum, I... snubbed all :)
    This happened because in my language the word "discourse", translated "discorso", doesn't map to what I find interesting, instead, how to to create a network of claims.
    So, not having addressed the topic here (also because I didn't yet have enough knowledge to address it), I built my own claim network model, reinventing the wheel... no problem, it was a good exercise.

    I've collected these three days a bunch of sources, I had the time to read only the main paper, "Discourse Graphs for Augmented Knowledge Synthesis". Next day I'll try to read the others, and the posts in this topic.

    According to that paper and my own practices with my own "model", I think that the answer to the question depends on how powerful, formal and sophisticated we want to make our discourse graph model into Zettelkasten.

    My thought, having a pretty basic discourse graph model into Zettelkasten is... very easy :-)

    Try to say why.

    I've found important similarities between Zettelkasten and Discourse Graph.

    Discourse Graph is a network of claims, in the end, as Zettelkasten is a network of ideas. You can start from the idea of replace zettel notes with claims notes and... that's it.

    Further, Reading the paper of Joel Chan, I was surprised to find again what I've found learning Zettelkasten:

    • in discourse graph we need to lower the granularity of entites not at document level but at claim level, so they are combined better an can be reused. It's nothing else try to make atomic zettels.
    • in discourse graph we need do extract claims from sources and make them decontextualized. So we do for our zettels.
    • for the third properties, linking, I've already said. It's a network of linked claims.

    So, we have atomic, decontextualized, linked claims ===> they are zettels!

    At this point, I can build a discourse graph as I build the rest of Zettelkasten .
    And infact I have been building this stuff for months, even without having the right name for them... built like the zettelkasten, claims as zettels and their network as an idea network. The same dynamics.

    At a practical level, I think that we need only to reframe our zettelkasten toolset to treat "claim zettels" instead of "idea zettels".

    In my case, in a very synthetic description, I've done these basing things:

    • I've included a "claim note" subtype of note in my zettelkasten, and for me it is a zettel
    • I've created a template for that kind of note
    • I create claim notes with the same processes that I use to create idea Zettel from external sources and my reflections
    • Every claim note, in my basic model, has this structure:
      1) the claim is represented in the title
      2) the body of the note has a "support" section, and a "adverse" section, that will contains the arguments and examples pro and against the claim, as content and/or as link to other notes (and claims)
      3) there is an "opinion" section, when I can write my points about the claim, if there are
      4) there is a final section, I could call it "takeaway" in english I think, that contains my conclusion, for what and where I can use what I've written, the consequences, and so on. Even consequences often are link to notes, for example a note that describe how I use the mean of the claim in a specific context.

    • having a claim, how I build the network that models an answer to a question, for example? The same process that I use for idea in Zettelkasten. I compose atomic notes in structures into other notes. I can "answer to a question" creating a question note and building into it the network, as when I write a composition of zettels for having a story. It is typically a bullet tree list in which I put links to claims and other notes. Just as I'd write a "train of thought", a construction that I've described many other times here.
      Yes, in almost all my cases a discourse graph is a bunch of bullets that form a tree of claims (and ideas and other kind of notes if suitable) into a container note. I could use structure notes, folgezettel, or other form of composition provided by my system. Any model that allow me to compose a bunch of notes together.

    This is what I've done until yesterday, and I've called, today, "Dumb Claim Network Model", so I can differentiate it from the "real" Discourse Graph :-) .
    It is enough for my use cases (pretty basic, not too formal, not too... scientific). These hours I'm reading further about seeing if I can improve further.
    I'm sure that I will find interesting things in your ideas, I've just found a shared name for the model (it's important having a name...) and useful insights taken from the first read, the Joel Chan paper.

    Post edited by andang76 on
  • @andang76, I see you've been "swallowed in the same hurricane" as me. I share your exuberance, but seeing it in writing tames mine a little. The application of the note-as-claim model lives on a spectrum. Some ideas are amenable to sharing their claims, and some couldn't care less. Here are a couple of examples where the claim/observation paradigm doesn't work.
    1. Coding notes
    2. Notes on the beautiful language in poetry
    3. Notes on people or applications
    4. Class notes
    5. Structure notes

    There must be others. Some of the books I've read don't make claims, at least factual claims. Looking at my note list I am surprised how few examples I could come up with. I sense this paradigm will increasingly infiltrate my workflow.

    Will Simpson
    My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • @Andy said:
    @Will, thanks, that resonates with me. Also check out that second link in my previous comment, where refactoring is explicitly and prominently discussed:

    I remembered an example from the blog of a software engineer that I found some years ago that may be helpful: in this first post he describes IBIS in his own words, and in this second post he shows how he applies it in the kind of note-taking process that everyone here is familiar with.

    What do you think Chris means by "Hidden Questions" in his post? His example doesn't resonate with me.

    Will Simpson
    My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • edited June 24

    @Will said:
    @andang76, I see you've been "swallowed in the same hurricane" as me. I share your exuberance, but seeing it in writing tames mine a little. The application of the note-as-claim model lives on a spectrum. Some ideas are amenable to sharing their claims, and some couldn't care less. Here are a couple of examples where the claim/observation paradigm doesn't work.
    1. Coding notes
    2. Notes on the beautiful language in poetry
    3. Notes on people or applications
    4. Class notes
    5. Structure notes

    There must be others. Some of the books I've read don't make claims, at least factual claims. Looking at my note list I am surprised how few examples I could come up with. I sense this paradigm will increasingly infiltrate my workflow.

    Oh, although perhaps not always appropriate, in my system I give to the term claim a broad mean (and I don't even use the term claim, I use the term "principle", it's the first word I adopted along time and beause I want to keep my system simple, I prefer use a single word, principle even if it is not always correct. I don't want a system with dozens of types and terms).

    Just for example, even a note that has title "I can use Zettelkasten for making Discourse Graphs" is built with the same process. As a claim (a principle, actually).
    The only thing, I don't call the sections into that note "support" and "counterargument", but I feel more appropriate having "benefits" and "limitations and drawbacks". Positive and negative side, in general.
    Sometimes they aren't even so structured, positive and negative arguments are mixed together. Only recently I've found useful having distinct sections.

    Do you want an example of a coding note that I'd write as a claim?

    "Avoid complex if statements in your code" is its title
    Then I write why you would follow this advice into the positive arguments of the note.

    Regarding beautiful language, two days ago I've written a couple of claim notes about the concept of metaphor. The positive arguments in that case are some examples of metaphor used to explain a thing in an effective way.
    I don't know if it is corret to call this stuff "claim", but it works so I don't care :smile:

  • @andang76 said:
    Oh, although perhaps not always appropriate, in my system, I give the term claim a broad meaning (and I don't even use the term claim; I use the term "principle." It's the first word I adopted a long time ago, and because I want to keep my system simple, I prefer to use a single word, principle, even if it is not always correct. I don't want a system with dozens of types and terms).
    ... The only thing, I don't call the sections into that note "support" and "counterargument", but I feel more appropriate having "benefits" and "limitations and drawbacks". Positive and negative sides, in general.

    It's great, not getting hung up on terms. I like the idea of capturing an idea's principle and then looking for its benefits, limitations, and drawbacks. Phrasing the workflow this way feels inviting and less academic. This is how IBIS can be synthesized into a note-making workflow.

    Sometimes they aren't even so structured, positive and negative arguments are mixed together. Only recently, I've found it useful to have distinct sections.

    I want to think of two contrary ideas simultaneously. This describes my evolution toward a more disciplined zettelnaut. Also, life in zettelkasten is more like a dance than a factory.

    I don't know if it is correct to call this stuff "claim," but it works, so I don't care :smile:

    :smiley:

    Will Simpson
    My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • edited June 25

    @Will said:

    Here are a couple of examples where the claim/observation paradigm doesn't work. [...] Some of the books I've read don't make claims, at least factual claims. Looking at my note list I am surprised how few examples I could come up with.

    This observation seems to be related to a point I tried to make recently in a different discussion about modes of discourse such as description, narration, and argumentation. The original poster in the other discussion described how (in my interpretation) they tended to write in an intuitive way that mixed different modes of discourse but was oriented especially toward narrative. That is not necessarily bad, but because they wanted to break down the writing into more atomic units, I suggested that the concept of modes of discourse could help them analyze that mixed writing into different modes.

    The relevance of modes of discourse here is that schemas such as IBIS and QCE are sometimes called structured argumentation (and what may be the most well-known form of structured argumentation is simply called argument diagramming or argument mapping), and that name indicates that these schemas are for the argumentative mode of discourse. One would need to expand such schemas with further note types to accommodate other modes of discourse such as description, narration, classification, or else not use a discourse schema at all for non-argumentative modes.

    You mentioned structure notes, which are definitely their own note type distinct from what we could call the "atomic" note types in IBIS. In the most well-known IBIS-specific app, called Compendium, there are types of node called list view and map view, which are directly analogous to structure notes, as we who use text files call them.

    What do you think Chris means by "Hidden Questions" in his post? His example doesn't resonate with me.

    In the "Hidden Questions" section, I think Chris was talking about background knowledge: How much background knowledge that's not in the text do you need to add to your notes to make them intelligible to you and coherent in general? In practice, using IBIS's rules you would need to add additional questions as part of the process of adding that background knowledge to the graph; you couldn't just dump it in as a bunch of claims. (Well, you could brain-dump a bunch of claims as a first step, but you would need to refactor with questions.) Some of those questions could represent real problems and some them could be more rhetorical for the purpose of conforming to IBIS rules; in both cases, you would be adding questions (and notes of other types) that aren't explicitly in the text.

    EDIT, June 23: I'm not completely happy with that last paragraph (I can think of other ways of talking about it), but it's the best I can give you at the moment.

    EDIT 2, June 25: A restatement: I can think of two related topics that could be summarized under the heading of "Hidden Questions" in IBIS, and Chris didn't differentiate them as he should have done in his post:

    1. When representing any discourse in IBIS notation, you will usually rephrase some information in question-form that was not stated in question-form in the original discourse, when you recognize that the information corresponds to a certain type of question (see, e.g., Jeff Conklin's list of types of question). This is one type of "hidden question".
    2. When adding background knowledge or implict assumptions that were not in the original discourse to the IBIS graph, some of it will be stated in question-form in IBIS notation. This is another type of "hidden question".
    Post edited by Andy on
  • edited June 26

    @Andy said:
    @ctietze said:

    I haven't applied IBIS in a strict sense to a topic because I didn't see the point.

    I'll have to see if I can find a good example that I'm willing to share. What's the point? A general point or principle that I learned specifically from the IBIS ontology is that I can and should make questions (what IBIS calls issues) more central to my thinking, instead of my usual pattern of thinking only in terms of answers/positions and the reasons for or against them. (Jeff Conklin, in an introduction to IBIS, calls the latter pattern "the Answer Reflex": "A well-functioning Answer Reflex assures that no one asks, 'What is the question here?'") As you could guess from my forum posts, I still often struggle with this: my Answer Reflex is still strong in an unstructured writing environment. Typical approaches to argument diagramming seem to reinforce the Answer Reflex, and IBIS showed me an alternative with rules that force more emphasis on questions. This is one example of how a schema or ontology can help one pay attention to patterns of thinking that one would otherwise tend not to use when faced with a blank page or unstructured text field.

    I still have to read Conklin paper your have provided, but I think understand your main point about IBIS. Your post helps me to notice it.
    I believe that it works on you as some constructions that I adopt in my notes (in some of my note templates, above all) work on me. They essentially form "holes" that we then invited to fill, through thought. For you the gap to be filled is the question for which to find answers, for me it is the hole left in a template.
    Compass model works in the same way, probably, it is another model that pushes thinking in different directions and you follow it in a dynamic way, rather than staying on a read with a static attitude.
    The key is the created instability that forces the mind to move searching a new stability.

    I adopt a very less formal method than IBS, but having in general a structure that directs the way of thinking is a powerful thing.

  • edited June 26

    I've read almost all the topic, and I've developed many ideas about Discourse Graph and not only that. It has been a fruitful journey

    I need to partial revisit what I've written a couple of days ago, need to be contextualized.
    Making Discourse Graph as a Zettelkasten is simple if you use it for yourself.
    If you need to build a shared system (ad sharing is one of the core principles of Discourse Graph, I've learned later), the sharing create issues to manage.
    I've developed my own theory about a "shared zettelkasten", that presents similar aspects to what I've developed in another topic: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2901/where-do-you-do-the-contextual-thinking-for-a-project#latest

    When we need to share the "internals" of our Zettelaksten, rather than the output artifacts, emerge the questions that @daviddelven posed at start.
    They are real, where to place our notes and how to write them are issues to be managed, and it is not straightforwand and general.
    Some good heuristics are already written.
    There is need of a common ontology, surely, and it is not enough. There's need the right strategy that enables our to accept content from other and transfer content to others in a transparent way. It is not a simple problem.
    I think that in this problems a good hand is learning something about enterprise KMS and Semantic web.

    Back to the specific model of Discourse Graph, rather than the formalism itself, two things hit me.
    About the first is what I've already written quoting Andy in previous message. It's the underlyining principle of Discourse Graph, IBIS and others that works, rather than the particular implementation.

    The second, I've found in Discourse Graph something similar that I've found in the philosophy of Digital Garden Spaces (I suggest https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/, it was a revealing read).
    The principle of "garage open". The idea of learning, moving and sharing knowledge with others not sharing documents, articles, finished products, but the "internals" of our knowledge labs.
    With discourse graph is the same thing, I don't share with you something to read, but something you can directly use in your own internal process.
    Even in this case, It's something similar to the "old" dream of semantic web, that in small places we can see realized.

    Both models convey the fact that I do not take advantage of knowledge they provide by consuming products, but by directly traveling through the space that implements knowledge.

    I wouldn't have been able to bring Discourse Graph and Digital Garden Space close together.
    It is the power of Zettelkasten, allowed me to isolate and develop a common aspect of them, make it become an approach point. If I had studied the two themes in a classical way I would never have succeeded.

    Post edited by andang76 on
  • edited June 26

    Just another thing, I think that the "ossification effect" explained by Chan in https://oasislab.pubpub.org/pub/54t0y9mk/release/3 is a relevant issue that even people that don't do Discourse Graph, IBIS or similar processes can consider a takeaway for their own Zettelkasten.
    I think that it still apply in general Zettlkasten context, so its countermeasure.

    I've imported this idea in my personal Zettelkasten bag

  • @andang76, I, too, am processing Knowledge synthesis: A conceptual model and practical guide into my zettelkasten. This idea has applications in many life domains.

    I'm confused by what seems like a language barrier in the first part of your quote.

    But we've been struck by the same bolt of inspiration. I love how you've framed directly traveling through the space of an idea that implements knowledge.

    Your quote posted on the forum:

    Both models convey the fact that I do not take advantage of knowledge they provide by consuming products but by directly traveling through the space that implements knowledge.

    I feel my position is less poetic, but in the same vein.

    My position recorded in my note, The Creative Process of Synthesizing Ideas:

    I apply what I read on the forums and in books to my workflow and system development based not on their precise recommendations and the ethereal nuances that I get from the reading.

    Will Simpson
    My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

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