What are your zettelkasting plans for 21 August - 27 August 2022?
Starting this week's discussion space...
My Zettelkasten plans for this week include:
- Reviewing my ZK on Heuristic Inquiry (research methodology) in preparation for my consultation appointment with a HI expert.
- Crafting a few ZK from my readings on management, spirituality, and religion. I'm writing a position paper for a conference and it's due this Thursday. I will be revisiting my existing ZK to write the paper, and will want to freshen up my perspective with some new articles (hence the new ZK - anything I read gets a ZK).
- Revisit my ZK on agency to see if there's a blog post or LinkedIn article calling me for this week. I'm trying to get more in the habit of sharing on LinkedIn to position myself as an emerging expert in my research space.
Otherwise, I'm getting ready for my university's residential conference and the start of the fall semester!
How about you? What are your ZK plans for this week?
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
I'm hoping to really get in gear and get started with ZK. I looked at the method last year, dismissed it, almost recreated it by accident, and have returned this year. I'm working on a nonfiction book about a failed marijuana smuggling operation and a b-movie it inspired, so there are a lot of biographies, events, undercurrents, etc.
It just seems that the ZK method is very clunky when it comes to history work. My own proto-ZK-thing is sorted alphabetically by LOC subject heading and has 407 proto-zettels... which is also clunky since they aren't linked. So yeah. Better late than never.
Is there some way you can combine the good parts of your current system into a Zettelkasten? The latter is quite flexible (despite all the "rules" you sometimes see). You may find a hybrid that, in incorporating the good parts of each, is better than either.
That's what I'm trying to figure out. I am absolutely collecting, but because I deal with pretty obscure subjects and sources, it's intentional. I don't expect anyone to tread these paths in depth again in my lifetime, and by then participants will have passed away. I'm also picking up bits and pieces of tangentially related material that I may mention offhand or reuse later.
The current workflow goes like this:
1. Pick a source that looks promising. For example: Associated Press, “Southern Skies Raining Pot-Laden Planes,” Fort Lauderdale News, June 4, 1975, Newspapers.com.
2. Add the source to my reference manager and write a citation code. For the above article, I chose NA:AP:SSR.
3. Consume the source and take notes. (These vary widely, from in-person interviews to news broadcasts.)
4. Integrate the notes into the 'encyclopedia.' Every individual note is added to any entry (the proto-zettels) where I might expect to find that information.
I've used an orchard analogy to explain the process: step one is picking the promising fruit, step two is slicing the fruit and getting it ready for juicing, step three is juicing, and step four is 'concentrating' the juice.
A typical 'proto-zettel' entry in my current system looks like this:
A step that hasn't been taken here since I'm focusing on going through my material is re-writing the individual notes as a cohesive whole. Right now my dilemma is how to handle events, biographies, airplanes, etc., keep my sources cited, and whether to compose true zettels from the notes, the entries, or a combination of both. On top of all that, my time is at a premium since I have a full-time, offline job.
@TinkerToy I am so intrigued by your orchard analogy, especially as I am currently wondering if I should do my dissertation's lit review organization via zettels! Thanks for posting!
@jeannelking Thanks! I had to come up with a simple way to describe what I was doing, and I just kind of stumbled into the orchard analogy. It started with 'juicing' because I tend to 'squeeze' every drop of useful information out of a source.