Happy to Find the Forum - Years Ago I Read About ZK - An Intro & Few ?s (Lightroom & Scrivener)
Back in my undergraduate days, circa 2013, I was struggling with notes in all my notebooks, in the margin of pages, etc. I had systems for each of them to help, but then came along my digital notes as well, and I felt rather overwhelmed. I was trying to keep notes for my thesis project, but it was too spread out. Then I found ZK. From then on I began transferring old notes into a little index card box and new notes went in as well. It was the best paper I've ever written. Alas, I didn't keep it up after that for various reasons. Chief among them was how much I traveled, and I couldn't find a good way to make it work digitally. I'm competent with a computer, but coding is beyond me. But hopefully this site will change that somewhat, as I want to reengage with some philosophical work that inspires my photography (I'm a photographer by trade), and I want to get back to writing about these ideas.
I'm gonna dig into the Getting Started tab, and see what can work best for me.
I have ADHD, so I need something that is rather flexible, and works for spontaneous note taking on-the-go. So I'll likel yneed to find some hybrid system that allows me to capture notes either physically or digitally and later store them into the ZK, and ideally I'd be able to add notes from my phone and computer.
I had the idea that it could be really cool if I could text notes from my phone and they'd get ocnverted into a node. We shall see.
Happy to hear any thoughts or tips, etc.
Also, I was wondering if anyone else is a photographer and has used a ZK methodology in, say, Adobe Lightroom or Bridge.
I also wondered if anyone has used Scrivener for their ZK.
Best,
Jared
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
I haven't used ZK techniques in Lightroom but the idea sounds interesting. I think the structures are there. Using a combination of directory structures and keywords could be interesting. I'm going to play with the idea tomorrow.
I experimented briefly with Scrivener and abandoned it for ZK for a couple of reasons, mostly no native linking between files, and lock-in concerns. That said though, I use "ZK methodology" in almost every piece of software by appending UIDs to either filenames or some other appropriate place if I want to link to them. So, for example, I have a pdf named
202001020459_Locke-Commonplace-1632.pdf, and in some text file I have"This is related to 202001020459 Locke". Then with some keyboard maestro macros (or just a search in Finder) I can see what I was talking about.(Note that this example would be better served with a bibliography citation solution like BibTex, but the same thing applies to image files, sound, whatever. This was just what I happened to be looking at).
I already file my photos by YYYYMMDD-customtext-cameraabbreviation-filmabbreviation(ifapplicable)-sequence#
And it has tags.
The way I work as a documentary photographer working with The Everyday, is to make photos intuitively and spontaneously.
I use the tagging feature for basic elements within the photo and for more conceptual elements. LR’s smart collection then accrues photos according to my instructions. So for instance I have amassed a collection of photos with the word ‘phone’, and a smaller collection within them that also has ‘screen’. Thus my project Little Screens, following on from Friedlander’s The Little Screens, already has its first wisest edit from which I can make a broad selection.
But this still only feels like a first order, maybe second order, type of engagement with my photo archive as ZK. There must be ways to make this a richer experience.
Interesting. How do you append said .txt file to the relevant file?
One of the things I did in Lightroom to make the experience a little richer was to add emotions and concepts as keywords.
@jaredkrauss I've been thinking about possibly using the Zettelkasten to create basically a super photography course because that is my background too. When I mean super, that also entails going into the psychology of art, philosophy of art, and history of it. Then also creating mini interconnected zettelkasten essays based around images. Similar to @Will book he is writing (see comments) in The Archive.
Same. It's made the exploration a lot more interesting.
Can you expand a bit more?
Actually, Scrivener has more native features for linking than most other programs -- it's really well thought out from that perspective.
You can create clickable hyperlinks and / or lists of links to the normal range of external documents (websites images, Devonthink documents etc) and to internal documents with this Scrivener project or another. Every internal link automatically creates a backlink, and [[wikilinks]] can autocomplete on existing documents and autocreate new ones. If you change the name of a document then you can update all links to it automatically.
If you use the links in the inspector (where they're called Document Bookmarks) you can see the text of linked notes at the same time as you work on the main one.
There are also features to search purely within links (Search by Format). Obviously, you can also use all the other Scrivener features, including snapshots (version control) keywords, status and labels to manage the documents, as well as create custom metadata.
The downside, as you say, is that it takes a bit of work to get the information out in a format which can be immediately used by another program (it's certainly possible, but it takes effort). If that doesn't matter, then Scrivener has quite a lot to recommend it as a ZKn vehicle: it will comfortably take thousands of individual zettels.
I don't. I just search for that UID and I find all files, text or otherwise, that refer to it. I'm not sure what the advantage of "appending" would be here.
This is very cool. I'm not using Scrivener for other reasons, but it's good to know they've added that functionality since last I played with it.
I downloaded the Sctivener free trial. The first thing I tried was to move something to Word. It was flawless. I'm going to play with it for a few days but I have high hopes that it will be an excellent writing tool. I will continue to use ZKn3 for my Zettelkasten
The trouble is, there isn't a single tool which does everything one would want -- something with combined Scrivener's linking with Tinderbox's visualisation and Devonthink's storage would get close, but even then I'm sure I'd find something missing...
It is an excellent program -- if you haven't already, then I really recommend you do the Interactive Tutorial (on the Help Menu). It only takes an hour and it's pretty much indispensable for getting the best out of the program
(BTW If you're on Windows, then I suggest you download the beta of V3, which is in Release Candidate, which catches up (with a couple of exceptions) to the features of the Mac version.)
I've been looking at the videos. Very helpful.
I use the combo The Archive (on Mac) and Editorial (on iPhone), synched over Dropbox.
If you're on Windows, you may want to take a look at Notable.