How to expand on ideas?
Usually when I take notes on books either I note down a concept or a claim. When it's a concept I don't experience an issue. The problem is I cannot find something to write about claims since they look self-sustained.
Asking questions seem like a good solution. But the answers belong to another note. Still nothing to write in my atomic notes.
I only group ideas and write meta notes which create a structure between ideas.
Can you offer insights on the ways you use?
Selen. Psychology freak.
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
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When you find a claim, you can ask yourself, for example (absolutely not exhaustive list):
Every question can bring you to a thinking path starting from your initial claim and ending to... who knows :-)
Regarding the original claim, you can even just express it as you have interpreted it. Its role can be simply the spark for other ideas, if you really can't add anything else, that's fine too
Zettelkasten should not become wikipedia clone (exhaustive information), but personal system (only interesting information). It means you should add there only notes/claims which are personally relevant for your purposes/research goals/publication goals etc.
(That is by the way why e.g. IMO Zettelkasten system is not best for normal "excerpts when learning from textbook" or "study notes" as the goals of study notes should be for you to memorise/deeply understand the topic and repeat the main points, not to brainstorm/build on it with your new notes and thoughts much).
If you have these personal/research goals, you should always know whether some claim from the book is interesting for you or not. If it is, you copy/re-word it, plus you add your own points, questions, disagreements, links - because it is interesting = you already have some other ideas connecting with the topic of the claim, or your positions, or your attitudes towards the claim etc. If it is not interesting/important, you do not excerpt it (because this is not your study note from the school textbook, from which you have to memorise everything).
But sometimes, some claims from the books can be interesting just as self-contained ideas. You do not have to put anything more to them. They are just interesting for you now (you do not have to write down that it is interesting as this is implicitly obvious). So I just write down this claim (with citations) and I am sure to format it in specific way, so that I always know what is claim of other authors and what is my idea (so as to avoid plagiarism). And sometimes later I can add anything new, my own addition or new link to them. But I do not force myself to do it now.
Have you come across Joel Chan's work on discourse graphs/questions-claims-evidence? He's done a lot of work on how to productivity develop knowledge with research oriented notes that deal with things like this.
I spent some time looking to his work and saw that the solution is using questions as entry points and navigational entities. Thank you.
Selen. Psychology freak.
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
Is there a way to distinguish between copy/reword and adding your own opinions when excerpting?
As I read sources and write notes, I feel the need to distinguish between others' ideas and my own.
It's especially important to distinguish between someone else's sentences and my own.
I used to read sources and rephrase them in my own words, but I realized that when I looked at old notes, I couldn't tell what the original text was like or what the author said.
I like to keep my notes as concise as possible. So, in the early days of my Zettelkasten journey, I read the original text and extracted only the ideas from it. There were no direct quotes.
However, as the number of notes increased, it became difficult to distinguish between my own ideas and those of others. In particular, I couldn't tell if a sentence was my own, someone else's, or a modified version of someone else's. I believe this increases the risk of plagiarism.
I used "" when excerpting sentences directly. However, excerpting sentences directly makes notes messy. Especially in books where ideas are scattered, sentences often refer to only fragments of ideas. Extracting all of them has too little cost-benefit. My goal is to explore and develop ideas, and I've found that the more direct quotes I use, the more expensive it is to achieve my goal.
However, I've found that removing unnecessary sentences and rewording them makes it difficult to distinguish between ideas when I include my own thoughts in the paragraph.
So, I used to use phrases like "according to" or "in my opinion," but these tend to lengthen notes and reduce readability.
Now, I use "according to" and "in my opinion," and for excerpts, I use citekeys after sentences. However, this requires too much additional work, making it difficult to focus solely on ideas. I've had to do too much additional work just to accomplish my primary task of exploring ideas.
Do you have a solution to this?