Zettelkasten Forum


Hello and THANK YOU

David here. I am a church pastor from New Mexico.

I have spent the last 2 weeks completely obsessed with the concept of a Zettelkasten and how it applies to my work in bible study and preaching. I've read most of the past blog posts and watched all the youtube videos. Both are excellent.

I have spent a fair amount of time converting my plain text note archive previously kept in DevonThink (comprised of points, illustrations, stories, and quotes) into the Zettelkasten format. I am LOVING direct links.

Just wanted to express my gratitude to Christian and Sasha for all their hard work. I am incredibly grateful for all the time you've put into this project and I look forward to being a part of the community.

Comments

  • Hi David, I'm interested in your approach to quotes. It looks like each quote is a new entry, with a #quote tag. I would guess you could then search for the specific author, and get a list of their quotes.

    Is that right? Have you tried other approaches?

    Right now, I'm collecting all quotes from a given author into one note—and have been wondering about the pros and cons of this system.

    What about others? How do you all approach it?

    Thanks!

  • @micahredding said:
    It looks like each quote is a new entry, with a #quote tag. I would guess you could then search for the specific author, and get a list of their quotes.

    Is that right? Have you tried other approaches?

    Hi Micah,
    Yes one quote per note. Years ago, I had longer notes with lots of quotes in them, but I have since moved everything to one quote per note. It's more flexible and I believe it adheres to the One Thought Per Note method. The advantage the this is I can tag and/or link to a specific quote that pertains to a topic, but if it was just one of many quotes in a larger note, I could only link to the whole collection which would be less valuable.

    It's easy enough to tag the quotes by author and then searching (or clicking in 'The Archive' app) would give you all quotes by a particular author. Additionally, if you like visually having them all in one note, you could make a an 'Overview' note contains links to all notes by a particular author (or topic). That's the nice thing about keeping them separate, you can group them lots of different ways, versus if the quotes are already together in one note, you're locked in to the one way you've already grouped them. This post has a pretty good description of a structure note.

    Hope that helps!

  • Welcome to the forum, David! Great to hear you like the approach & app :)

    @micahredding I'd probably collect quotes into 1 per note, too. That adheres to the Principle of Atomicity.

    But what's an "atom"? You could argue that "Collection of Quotes on serving God as social signalling" has well-defined boundaries, too, and may consist of multiple notes. It depends on what you want to do with them: if you want a collection of quotes to paste into emails and chats, a long note might be useful. If you want to link to quotes, reference them from other places with a well-defined address, (and you almost always want to enable this use case,) then create 1 note per quote and add an index note "Collection of Quotes on ..." that links to all the relevant ones. Which you now can reuse in multiple collections. A mere "collection of quotes" note makes most sense when you add order and additional information, like comments, to the index. Or else you could've just used more specific tags to lump notes together into a cluster.

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

  • Hi David,

    welcome to the community.

    Do you have a structure note that follows the structure of the bible? I suspect when set it up once it would be helpful to track the hyperlinked nature of the biblical stories.

    I am a Zettler

  • @Sascha said:
    Do you have a structure note that follows the structure of the bible? I suspect when set it up once it would be helpful to track the hyperlinked nature of the biblical stories.

    I don't have that YET, but I intend to eventually get to that level.

    I am, however, getting glimpses of how it could function and it would truly be AWESOME. Here's an Overview note I've created outlining the story of Jonah. I intend to slowly build these story (or bible section) overview notes as I study. The Zettelkasten system really is amazingly well thought out.

  • Looks very cool. :smile:

    You are right. Bottom Up works really good.

    I am a Zettler

Sign In or Register to comment.