@ctietze OULIPO were (and still are in some places) a fun group who employed a slew of process-oriented techniques and restrictions on their writing, which had the effect of shaking up where and how meaning was made. For me, OULIPO and zk sync up in their playing with and enhancement of "emergence" or finding unexpected connections. I focused my Masters in writing on the "defamiliarization" writers (OULIPO, Dada, Russian Formalists, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing, et al), and the zk continues to feel like an odd, totally unintentional extension of much of that.
@taurusnoises, I've had similar experiences with some of my notes, especially for philosophical or literary concepts. Here's an example: I have a growing cluster of notes for my study of Aikido, including quotes from the founder (who, in samurai tradition, also wrote poetry). So periodically I find myself tempted to link a Zettel quoting something he said to a Zettel on Imagist poetry. The connection sometimes produces a flash of new insight or reveals an unusual pattern.
@Sociopoetic, I really hope you do link those notes! The ability to do that, linking ideas across seemingly disparate disciplines and thought-worlds, is what I love most about ZK.
If writing isn't the likely outcome, don't go ... This is the writer's life, which I understand as instrumental, uncompromising and predatory.
I'm reminded of Deleuze's distinction between writing-as-neurosis and writing-as-health. Excessive instrumentalism would push one into the former category. Writing "to become something other than a writer" (Deleuze) would push one into the latter category. Never doing something because writing isn't the likely outcome of it is writing-as-neurosis. Writing about something because it allows one do do more beyond writing, and thereby become something other than a writer, is writing-as-health. (At least that's my interpretation of Deleuze in the present context.)
"Moreover, the writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is a set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health ... If we consider these criteria, we can see that, among all those who make books with a literary intent, even among the mad, there are very few who can call themselves writers." – Gilles Deleuze (1997) [French original 1993]. "Literature and life". Critical Inquiry, 23(2), 225–230.
"Moreover, the writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is a set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health ... If we consider these criteria, we can see that, among all those who make books with a literary intent, even among the mad, there are very few who can call themselves writers." – Gilles Deleuze (1997) [French original 1993]. "Literature and life". Critical Inquiry, 23(2), 225–230.
Deleuze's remarks remind me of my childhood. When I was a little boy, my parents took me with them into the city to writers' workshops and play and poetry readings, where I met drunken, chain-smoking poets and my mother's actor friends. I became jaded at an early age and have avoided writers' workshops ever since.
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 new around here and have been wanting to create a Zettelkasten system for a while.
Before reading this article, I had a completely wrong conception of literature notes (if I understood the article correctly).
I considered literature notes as those notes you take when you process, in your own words, a piece of information that you have taken from the source you are consulting and that is relevant to you for some reason.
Permanent notes I considered to be the real soul of the system: notes that are of your own creation, that do not come directly from an external source (although they may well be inspired by one), but rather from within yourself, in the form of ideas, reflections, arguments etc on a given topic.
With this perception in mind, I considered that both literature notes and permanent notes should remain inside my, let's call it, slip-box (in this case, inside Obsidian).
This interpretation is the reason why, when reading the article and the comments, I felt very confused, because every time @ZettelDistraction and other users in the comentary section referred to literature notes, I kept thinking about my own interpretation of them.
And when @ZettelDistraction talked about the literature notes and the rest of the permanent notes (Zettels) having to stay separated in different environments (say Zotero for literature notes and Obsidian for the Zettels)... my head just exploded, because I didn't see clear to have this separated in two different places when I could benefit from building connections in Obsdian with both of them.
I had to read some passages several times (besides English is not my mother language) until I understood this dissociation that existed: what I had in mind was not the same as what ZettelDistraction was referring to. In other words, and as I started this comment, I had a wrong and different conception of literature notes than what ZettelDistraction was explaining. Or at least that is the conclusion I have come to, and I may have been correct from the beginning and simply the way these notes are treated is different from how I had in mind, which would open for me a new topic of discussion.
So, assuming I understood correctly and that the reflection I have made here is correct and I was wrong before, I reread these passages with another perspective and I think I started to understand everything.
So, having said that, what I now understand by literature notes is not what I wrote at the beginning, but a note, if you can call it that, that contains a citation. And I understand citation to mean bibliographic information from the source you are consuming at the time. Nothing more and nothing less. It does not contain information on the subject that said source is discussing.
Now, I don't know if this interpretation is correct or not.
If it is correct, then I understand that what I used to call literature notes are simply....notes. Permanent notes that would fall under what you call Zettels.
Then we would have literature permanent notes (citations, which would go in a reference manager, for example Zotero) and non-literature permanent notes (Zettels, which would go in the slip-box, for example inside Obsidian).
To conclude, that in the end I have left a much longer commentary than I had planned at the beginning, I would like to expose the above with an example (since in my opinion, with examples everything is better understood).
Let's say I am reading a book about the Spanish Civil War. Let's see if I have understood something:
Possible permanent literature notes:
The book itself would be a literature note, since it is my citation reference. Let's imagine that this book makes a claim based on an outside source, say another book dealing with the subject. Here I could create a second literature note, since I would like to consult that source later.
I will keep these notes in Zotero.
Possible non-literature permanent notes:
Let's say I read a passage in the book, and to me it is relevant information. I process that information by creating a Zettel note stating the information in my own words, and I save this note in Obsidian.
Now let's imagine that reading about this topic gives me a reflection related to a current event in Spain, which I want to put in a note. Then I will create another Zettel note with this reflection and I will save it also in Obsidian (here I am not sure if in the same directory or not). If there is a connection with the previously created note (or with others that I already have in the slip-box), it will be done.
Am I understanding something or am I completely lost? I would appreciate it if you could help me to solve these doubts.
@carlospj Now I would say that "literature note" is a citation or source note, with or without annotations. Perhaps its time to revise the article.
It would have been most useful for Ahrens to describe a common workflow that could be adapted to various needs. Often people don't have a workflow, so they might as well use the one that Ahrens might have suggested, if only his terms were clear and bore some relation to practice.
I'll take a stab at this.
Ahrens wants you to read with pen and paper in hand. At this stage you are creating a citation for the source, possibly with annotations. These are what Ahrens calls "fleeting notes."
The sources cited in these notes go into a reference manager.
Some, all or none of the annotations written with these notes are stored with their citation in the reference manager.
Some all or none of the annotations are reworked into Zettels that cite the source
And then one repeats. I have omitted the question of standard Zettel formats, linking Zettels, IDs, etc. That's an addendum to 4.
Question: what happened to literature notes? With this process, whatever ended up in the reference manager is the "literature note." The notion of "literature note" is not operational, unless your reference manager is a library card index, which is what Luhmann used in addition to a slip box. In that case, a literature note is an index card. The closest analogy in Zotero would be a citation, together with whatever information the citation contained. Even there the analogy is strained, since citations in Zotero can have notes and attachments such as PDF files. The features that digital reference managers make possible would be impractical or inconceivable with index cards. I'm not convinced that retaining the notion of "literature note" is so useful.
Post edited by ZettelDistraction on
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.
Hi, during these first weeks in this world I've read a lot of articles and discussions about Zettelkasten definitions and... more I read more I feel confused :-)
Actually, anyway, I don't care very much how my notes are defined, I think that I've learned a good grasp of the principles of the method, and, in the end, I think this is the most important thing.
I don't know if my workflow is a Zettelkasten or not, if my literature note is the Luhman or Ahrens or John Doe literature note, but my set of notes and how I obtain some of them from the others work from me :-)
At the moment, briefly, if I read this forum topic, for example, I make:
a "source note" containing most of, if not all, the conten of this discussion.-
processing this source note, maybe (not always) I create a literature note containing relevant quotes, some of my annotations, ad finally a rewriting in my words of most important points of the article, viewed from the point of view of the authors
when I process the literature note, I create (or update if they already exists) my "zettel notes" that I divide in fact notes, concept notes, principle notes, idea notes. The content of these notes is written according to my point of view, how I have internalized the knowledge contained in the literature notes.
For me the main difference between literature notes and zettels is the point of view. Literature are reference that point to "other" knowledge, zettels are "my knowledge"
Thank you, @andang76. You've helped me clarify my thinking around this subject.
Why not skip the "literature" note and jump right from the source notes and highlights directly to the zettel?
Take notes and clip relevant quotes, follow references, and capture anything that sparks interest. Refactor that into autonomous atomic notes. The original note is primarily other people's POV. When refactored, each note fills with the personal POV and, significantly, the supporting references from the initial go around. Each zettel consumes part of the original until none is left; then, I know I'm done.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. 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 said:
Thank you, @andang76. You've helped me clarify my thinking around this subject.
Why not skip the "literature" note and jump right from the source notes and highlights directly to the zettel?
Take notes and clip relevant quotes, follow references, and capture anything that sparks interest. Refactor that into autonomous atomic notes. The original note is primarily other people's POV. When refactored, each note fills with the personal POV and, significantly, the supporting references from the initial go around. Each zettel consumes part of the original until none is left; then, I know I'm done.
Yes, I follow the approach you suggested when I meet a short or simple content, indeed.
I think that literature notes (my version of literature note, at least), using a source note, are relevant if the content I process requires intermediate steps, because of its size, its complexity or its' importants. In general, if it requires a long time to be processed.
Thank you so much for this healthy discussion everyone! I myself was confused about the different components of the Zettelkasten after reading Ahrens book. Now it's crystal clear for me.
Comments
Oulipo -- Never heard of that before, but it seems to be meme-material for you all.
Is there something besides employing techniques (and restrictions) to practice you have in mind?
@Sociopoetic's "poetry challenge" quip hints at that, but I'm not sure I really follow what gets you so excited
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@ctietze OULIPO were (and still are in some places) a fun group who employed a slew of process-oriented techniques and restrictions on their writing, which had the effect of shaking up where and how meaning was made. For me, OULIPO and zk sync up in their playing with and enhancement of "emergence" or finding unexpected connections. I focused my Masters in writing on the "defamiliarization" writers (OULIPO, Dada, Russian Formalists, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing, et al), and the zk continues to feel like an odd, totally unintentional extension of much of that.
@taurusnoises, I've had similar experiences with some of my notes, especially for philosophical or literary concepts. Here's an example: I have a growing cluster of notes for my study of Aikido, including quotes from the founder (who, in samurai tradition, also wrote poetry). So periodically I find myself tempted to link a Zettel quoting something he said to a Zettel on Imagist poetry. The connection sometimes produces a flash of new insight or reveals an unusual pattern.
@Sociopoetic, I really hope you do link those notes! The ability to do that, linking ideas across seemingly disparate disciplines and thought-worlds, is what I love most about ZK.
@Sociopoetic I personally would also be intrigued to see an example shared some day
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@ZettelDistraction said:
I'm reminded of Deleuze's distinction between writing-as-neurosis and writing-as-health. Excessive instrumentalism would push one into the former category. Writing "to become something other than a writer" (Deleuze) would push one into the latter category. Never doing something because writing isn't the likely outcome of it is writing-as-neurosis. Writing about something because it allows one do do more beyond writing, and thereby become something other than a writer, is writing-as-health. (At least that's my interpretation of Deleuze in the present context.)
"Moreover, the writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is a set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health ... If we consider these criteria, we can see that, among all those who make books with a literary intent, even among the mad, there are very few who can call themselves writers." – Gilles Deleuze (1997) [French original 1993]. "Literature and life". Critical Inquiry, 23(2), 225–230.
Thanks for your comments. An edited version is available at https://zettelkasten.de/posts/concepts-sohnke-ahrens-explained/ I should have mentioned that Zettels are written in the writer's own words. This is important in Ahrens.
Deleuze's remarks remind me of my childhood. When I was a little boy, my parents took me with them into the city to writers' workshops and play and poetry readings, where I met drunken, chain-smoking poets and my mother's actor friends. I became jaded at an early age and have avoided writers' workshops ever since.
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.
Hello everyone,
I'm new around here and have been wanting to create a Zettelkasten system for a while.
Before reading this article, I had a completely wrong conception of literature notes (if I understood the article correctly).
I considered literature notes as those notes you take when you process, in your own words, a piece of information that you have taken from the source you are consulting and that is relevant to you for some reason.
Permanent notes I considered to be the real soul of the system: notes that are of your own creation, that do not come directly from an external source (although they may well be inspired by one), but rather from within yourself, in the form of ideas, reflections, arguments etc on a given topic.
With this perception in mind, I considered that both literature notes and permanent notes should remain inside my, let's call it, slip-box (in this case, inside Obsidian).
This interpretation is the reason why, when reading the article and the comments, I felt very confused, because every time @ZettelDistraction and other users in the comentary section referred to literature notes, I kept thinking about my own interpretation of them.
And when @ZettelDistraction talked about the literature notes and the rest of the permanent notes (Zettels) having to stay separated in different environments (say Zotero for literature notes and Obsidian for the Zettels)... my head just exploded, because I didn't see clear to have this separated in two different places when I could benefit from building connections in Obsdian with both of them.
I had to read some passages several times (besides English is not my mother language) until I understood this dissociation that existed: what I had in mind was not the same as what ZettelDistraction was referring to. In other words, and as I started this comment, I had a wrong and different conception of literature notes than what ZettelDistraction was explaining. Or at least that is the conclusion I have come to, and I may have been correct from the beginning and simply the way these notes are treated is different from how I had in mind, which would open for me a new topic of discussion.
So, assuming I understood correctly and that the reflection I have made here is correct and I was wrong before, I reread these passages with another perspective and I think I started to understand everything.
So, having said that, what I now understand by literature notes is not what I wrote at the beginning, but a note, if you can call it that, that contains a citation. And I understand citation to mean bibliographic information from the source you are consuming at the time. Nothing more and nothing less. It does not contain information on the subject that said source is discussing.
Now, I don't know if this interpretation is correct or not.
If it is correct, then I understand that what I used to call literature notes are simply....notes. Permanent notes that would fall under what you call Zettels.
Then we would have literature permanent notes (citations, which would go in a reference manager, for example Zotero) and non-literature permanent notes (Zettels, which would go in the slip-box, for example inside Obsidian).
To conclude, that in the end I have left a much longer commentary than I had planned at the beginning, I would like to expose the above with an example (since in my opinion, with examples everything is better understood).
Let's say I am reading a book about the Spanish Civil War. Let's see if I have understood something:
Possible permanent literature notes:
The book itself would be a literature note, since it is my citation reference. Let's imagine that this book makes a claim based on an outside source, say another book dealing with the subject. Here I could create a second literature note, since I would like to consult that source later.
I will keep these notes in Zotero.
Possible non-literature permanent notes:
Let's say I read a passage in the book, and to me it is relevant information. I process that information by creating a Zettel note stating the information in my own words, and I save this note in Obsidian.
Now let's imagine that reading about this topic gives me a reflection related to a current event in Spain, which I want to put in a note. Then I will create another Zettel note with this reflection and I will save it also in Obsidian (here I am not sure if in the same directory or not). If there is a connection with the previously created note (or with others that I already have in the slip-box), it will be done.
Am I understanding something or am I completely lost? I would appreciate it if you could help me to solve these doubts.
@carlospj Now I would say that "literature note" is a citation or source note, with or without annotations. Perhaps its time to revise the article.
It would have been most useful for Ahrens to describe a common workflow that could be adapted to various needs. Often people don't have a workflow, so they might as well use the one that Ahrens might have suggested, if only his terms were clear and bore some relation to practice.
I'll take a stab at this.
And then one repeats. I have omitted the question of standard Zettel formats, linking Zettels, IDs, etc. That's an addendum to 4.
Question: what happened to literature notes? With this process, whatever ended up in the reference manager is the "literature note." The notion of "literature note" is not operational, unless your reference manager is a library card index, which is what Luhmann used in addition to a slip box. In that case, a literature note is an index card. The closest analogy in Zotero would be a citation, together with whatever information the citation contained. Even there the analogy is strained, since citations in Zotero can have notes and attachments such as PDF files. The features that digital reference managers make possible would be impractical or inconceivable with index cards. I'm not convinced that retaining the notion of "literature note" is so useful.
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.
Hi, during these first weeks in this world I've read a lot of articles and discussions about Zettelkasten definitions and... more I read more I feel confused :-)
Actually, anyway, I don't care very much how my notes are defined, I think that I've learned a good grasp of the principles of the method, and, in the end, I think this is the most important thing.
I don't know if my workflow is a Zettelkasten or not, if my literature note is the Luhman or Ahrens or John Doe literature note, but my set of notes and how I obtain some of them from the others work from me :-)
At the moment, briefly, if I read this forum topic, for example, I make:
For me the main difference between literature notes and zettels is the point of view. Literature are reference that point to "other" knowledge, zettels are "my knowledge"
Thank you, @andang76. You've helped me clarify my thinking around this subject.
Why not skip the "literature" note and jump right from the source notes and highlights directly to the zettel?
Take notes and clip relevant quotes, follow references, and capture anything that sparks interest. Refactor that into autonomous atomic notes. The original note is primarily other people's POV. When refactored, each note fills with the personal POV and, significantly, the supporting references from the initial go around. Each zettel consumes part of the original until none is left; then, I know I'm done.
We've been discussing this on a current thread.
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2450/zettel-feedback-range-david-epstein-overview
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. 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
Yes, I follow the approach you suggested when I meet a short or simple content, indeed.
I think that literature notes (my version of literature note, at least), using a source note, are relevant if the content I process requires intermediate steps, because of its size, its complexity or its' importants. In general, if it requires a long time to be processed.
Thank you so much for this healthy discussion everyone! I myself was confused about the different components of the Zettelkasten after reading Ahrens book. Now it's crystal clear for me.