Is Anyone Using Whiteboarding with their Zettelkasten?
Hi everyone. I've mentioned a few times how an important purpose of my ZK is to help me write a personal/family history. This has been an ongoing project in my ZK for 3-4 years. The process so far has been:
- Simply writing zettels on random topics of interest to me or based on memories that pop into my head randomly (or prompted by a conversation with a friend). That continued for about three years without me doing much to integrate the information. I was content to build my database, which had grown to about 400 zettels.
- This year, I got a kick in the pants from a daughter who knew what I was doing and gave me a Christmas present in the form of a service called Storyworth. Since then, I have been writing longer, more coherent stories. Every week, I get a question, and I respond with typically a 1000-2000 word post. Writing these stories is intense, as is keeping it up week after week. It usually takes me 4 to 6 hours to get a first draft and then several rounds of editing to get to the point that it feels right. In writing these stories, I rely heavily on my ZK, which, unsurprisingly, is full of relevant material to draw on.
- The intent is that after a year, one has 52 stories that can be combined into a personal history book. The questions you receive each week also seem random, but after a while, you realize they are designed to cover different periods of your life and various topics (both the "giver" and the "receiver" can change some of the questions, if they want).
- I discovered this week the power of posting a set of related zettels on a whiteboard while writing the weekly story. This will come as no surprise to @Edmund and others who like to see the contents of their ZK visually. However, to me, it was an eye-opener. I could quickly refer to all related zettels while combining different ideas and see connections between them that I hadn't recognized before.
I have experimented with mind mapping to establish connections between zettels before, with limited success. Whiteboarding the zettels was a much more powerful way of finding connections. I'm just starting to explore other ways that whiteboarding might improve my ZK. For example, if I whiteboard some zettels (say, based on a common tag or searching for a particular word or set of words), I could start physically drawing in the connections. This is like mind mapping on steroids. It's just an idea; I have yet to experiment with it.
So... this is a long-winded way of getting to my question. Has anyone else experimented with whiteboarding to build or improve their ZK? I would be happy to hear about any experiences or ideas you have.
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
What do you mean by whiteboarding? Is this clicking on a Zettel on your computer and dragging it off of the desktop through space and onto to a nearby physical whiteboard? I hope that's what it means. Or does this mean importing notes into a whiteboard application? Is there one you recommend?
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
I have the same questions as @ZettelDistraction. So I don't know if this is off topic: I recall that @GeoEng51 was a Scrivener (writing app) user, and so he is probably familiar with the corkboard view in Scrivener, which is modeled after the real-life boards that writers often use to arrange their index cards. The makers of Scrivener also make Scapple, a rather whiteboard-like infinite-canvas app that was previously discussed here. There are other infinite-canvas apps. I've used both Scrivener and Scapple.
A physical table, by the way, is just a horizontal board with legs. And that reminds me of a past discussion in which @Sascha said that Luhmann "could just put all the relevant notes on a table", and someone else asked, "Does anyone know if there is an efficient way to put all the relevant notes on the table in Obsidian?", and Sascha responded: "Any note can be a table for anything." I've never had much desire for a whiteboard because, in some sense, any digital note (with infinite scrolling or infinite canvas) can be a whiteboard for anything.
LogSeq has implemented the concept of whiteboards. You may want to have a look, and see if it might meet your needs.
@ZettelDistraction @Andy Yes, I forgot to mention. @jregan is correct; I did this in Logseq, which has an integrated whiteboard app. I could have done something similar in Scrivener but it's simpler in Logseq and that is where I'm keeping my Zettelkasten now.
I am ashamed to say that I haven't gotten the hang of logseq. I could be well on my way to irreversible cognitive decline.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Recommended online whiteboard: OrgPad, more freedom!
https://orgpad.info/o/DuY8VwD9JLuZcf5DvD9g4P
Logseq, which I've never used, was not what came to mind when I saw "whiteboarding" in this discussion title. But now I see that "Whiteboard" is the name of the infinite canvas feature in Logseq, analogous to the "Canvas" feature in Obsidian.
@GeoEng51, you may want to better specify the range of experiences you are looking for. Do you only want to talk about Logseq Whiteboards, or are you interested in any use of infinite canvases together with a Zettelkasten? It's not clear whether "whiteboarding" should be taken here as a generic term (i.e., as I said, "in some sense, any digital note (with infinite scrolling or infinite canvas) can be a whiteboard for anything") or as referring to the use of Logseq Whiteboards.
How much do you want to see from the content on the whiteboard?
I am a Zettler
Yes, whiteboarding, which means to use an infinite canvas for ideas, is an eye-opener. And it could be the part of a Zettelkasten that makes a difference.
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
A textual and a visual example from my Zettelkasten. Do you see a difference?
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
If the more general term is "infinite canvas," then that is what I had in mind. I've used Miro extensively at work. It is an infinite canvas with many tools and ways of adding and interacting with information. When I started using Logseq, I saw that it had a similar capability that it calls "Whiteboards," which is quite capable, although not as feature-rich as Miro.
I'd like to see how people use a whiteboard or infinite canvas to interact with and improve the connections in their Zettelkasten. I started by adding related zettels to a whiteboard to see them all at once and combine ideas from each as I wrote a longer story. But then I realized I could actually draw connections between one point in one zettel to another point in another zettel. Seeing the connections visually provided an alternate way of identifying them, as opposed to making the connections in my own brain (if that makes any sense).
I'll attempt to add some images showing what I mean later today.
@Edmund said:
But I don't think all of that is what @GeoEng51 is calling "whiteboarding". I don't think he is referring to an automated graph view of a note system. The more general topic of the use of graphics in note systems has been covered in many previous discussions.
I would add that there is nothing new about viewing and editing a note system as a graph view, which has been a software feature since the 1980s in, e.g., gIBIS (which later became Compendium).
@Andy is correct in that I was not looking for a tool to "graph" the connections in my ZK. I can do that already with other software, including the built-in graph view in Logseq.
I am thinking at a simpler level. Last week, my Storyworth topic was "What is a good way to think about death". So, I created a whiteboard in Logseq called "Thinking about death" and pulled in a few relevant zettels: a portion of a talk I gave at my Dad's memorial service (15 years ago; since imported into my ZK), some comments on death from a Stoic philosophy perspective, and some memories I had captured about my Grandfather, (I'll insert an image of the resulting whiteboard below).
To start, I was working on the Storyworth post (the left-most column / zettel on the whiteboard). The other zettels were all visible (I have a wide screen), and I could refer to them as I wrote. That fit my needs at the time, as I was able to bring a lot of material into the Storyworth post with little effort. And as I said, I was using the whiteboard in a very simple manner.
Afterwards, with visions of @Edmund 's beautiful sketches/figures and of mind-maps that I had created in Miro all dancing in my brain, I thought: "Can I extend the idea of placing entire zettels on a whiteboard? Could I visually see and create connections between different ideas in separate zettels?" I could think of some ways of doing this. It would require the entire text of each zettel to be visible and freedom to move around the whiteboard and read. When I saw a connection between one idea on one zettel and another idea on another, I could draw a line between the two and later make the link in Logseq.
This thinking is still really simplistic, but the visual aspect of perceiving and creating connections was really appealing. What else might be done?
This is why I started this thread, to see if anyone on the forum had a bigger vision or better idea of what could be accomplished by placing the full text of zettels on a whiteboard.
By the way, you will notice that some of my zettels are short (100 to 200 words). These are the one most people would recognize as being "atomic". Others are a bit longer (500 words plus or minus). In my mind, these are still "atomic" in that they capture one memory or event, although they may well have more than one idea. Then the Storyworth posts, which are also written as zettels, can be 1000-2000 words long. They clearly are not "atomic" by any stretch of the imagination. Still, I've elected to capture them in my Zettelkasten as a single note. This is less of an issue in Logseq, because I can create connections between any bullet point (paragraph) in any note and any other bullet point in the entire database.
You might also note from the image below that one can expand and collapse each zettel on the whiteboard, which offers additional flexibility in moving them around and creating different structures.
Write what you know, as the rule says (in this case, the rule has to be broken). Interesting notes, by the way. I'm going to try this technique--thank you.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
I'm happy to hear it strikes a chord for you. I'm still at an early stage of exploring what I can do with this approach.
@GeoEng51 In case you missed the question.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha Sorry, I thought the question was rhetorical, to some extent.
I'm interested in seeing all of the note contents on the whiteboard, although it is possible in Logseq to partially or fully collapse the notes to show just what is of interest. I imagine some way of seeing relationships between notes because they are partially or fully visible, moving them around, drawing connections between different points, etc. I have yet to fully explore this. One needs a lot of screen space to make this workable, such as a large TV screen or a surround of monitors.
We used to do something similar in the "old days", writing notes on different sheets of paper and then pinning them onto a wall, moving them around, etc.
Is that what you were asking?
Yes.
I was asking because I was interested in the particular combination of bigger picture view and details.
One of the major benefits of bigger picture views is that they externally remove details and therefore reduce cognitive load. By "externally" I mean, that something else does what otherwise would be a task for your mind.
Obsidian Canvas does a great job for that:
This is a schema of a particular training dashboard:
While this is zoomed out:
So, if you want to combine both, the micro and the macro, you want to mitigate the cognitive load imposed by this combination. (from the brains standpoint it is particular straining because it necessitates the switching between two modes guided by both hemispheres)
So, there are some techniques to mitigate this problem:
I use certain model types to incrementally build visual representations of bigger chunks of my work like this:
This is a two-dimensional model for various activities. As you can see, there are no full notes in this model because I'd see this as a distraction. The relationship of structure and atomic notes is guided by the above principle of separating bigger picture views from the details externally to reduce cognitive load.
The idea is the same: Incrementally create a visual representation of the relationships of vast number of notes.
BUT....
If you want to just raw power through, my recommendation would be to make room on a wall and either go analog by printing out the stories and pinning them to the wall, or use a beamer and then use the canvas feature (which is similar in Logseq?)
The major risk that I see is that you will train your brain on the particular medium. It will create a mental map guided by the material you use. The brain doesn't abstract from the medium like normally think that it does.
To give you an example: You can learn numbers both with your fingers and a tablet. But if you learned with your fingers, the brain's representations of numbers are far richer and reach deep into the motor cortex, while the tablet stimulates the motor cortex much less. In the beginning, it will not show but later on, the tablet learners will have major disadvantages with the strange side effect that numbers and math will feel much different.
So, the connections that you make on the different medium aren't just connections of ideas, story plot points, but they will be of the substance that you used to draw those connections.
So, having typed out my thoughts, I'd use many different ways, especially physical ones, to represent the collection of stories. I'd even create wooden boards for each story and place them in the garden, seeing if I can tease something out of it and then always come back to the Zettelkasten and write about the learnings here.
As an engineer, you have plenty of tools to go back to first principles for the task at hand. If you, for example, want to stimulate your brain to form connections, you need to find ways to disrupt set paths.
If you don't want to have it all but just zoom in into a couple of notes, bringing back what you learned into your ZK, I wouldn't sweat it. Just try out everything that you can think of and then evaluate.
PS: Got a little bit into the groove, so my post is not super structured.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha
Thanks for all the good ideas!
Logseq can zoom in or out similarly to what you showed for Obsidian Canvas. This works as long as some of your labels are in larger text sizes so they still appear in the zoomed-out version. I could accomplish that by using Markdown titles of different sizes in my zettels.
The outliner in Logseq is very similar to Bike. So, if I imported some zettels into a whiteboard, I could see everything when viewing at a standard size and then selectively collapse parts of the zettels when zooming out. I'll have to experiment with that. You don't lose too much information because, if you've done your outlining properly, the child bullet points just provide more detail to the parent, which is still visible.
The entire zettel in a Logseq whiteboard can be collapsed to just the file name/title, which could be used to create a mind map of items in your Zettelkasten. However, I wanted to avoid just seeing links between zettels and instead see links between specific parts of different zettels.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, I would "power through" by placing notes on Flipboard-size sheets of paper and then pasting or pinning them to all the walls in a large boardroom. It was amazing what you could accomplish by walking around, looking at different notes, and then extracting and combining ideas for a report or commentary. You didn't have the same "resolution" problem that occurs with a computer screen - you just walked closer to or farther away from your Flipboard sheets. I have yet to find the digital whiteboard equivalent, either in Logseq or Miro, because there is always a limitation to the screen space.
I understand and like your example, and will explore it further.
This is an important point - similar to the one that Marshall McLuhan made back when I was a tadpole: "The medium is the message" ("Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man", 1964). I recall hearing the catchphrase back then but didn't understand it for many years.
Yes! I definitely want to disrupt set paths and find new ways of seeing (and thus creating) connections. The larger our ZK gets, the more important this is. Right now, I rely heavily on thoroughly tagging zettels and regularly reviewing them for possible connections. However, I fear the latter is primarily serendipitous. We can do more than simply reading through zettels and trying to remember where else we have material that is related in some way. I'm hoping this whiteboarding technique will provide a more visual way of discovering those connections, and not just the logical or obvious ones, but also the more subtle ones.