One note = one object of attention
The idea of one note = one object of attention is rocket fuel—a change in attention = a link to a new note. The level of detail depends on the elevation of the perspective you are paying attention to. If you are studying to be a sports trainer, the details you'd view ketosis with would be different from those of a person studying contemporary art design. The trainer might have a note mentioning William Wegman, and the artist might have a note mentioning macro balancing, but neither should feel the need to do a deep dive into topics outside primary areas of exploration. That doesn't mean notes have to be exclusive, without the flavor of life.
This object of attention was sparked from watching Bianca Pereira, Linked Knowledge Does Not Work.
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
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I do like the idea that a note should "focus on one object of attention". This feels a little more permissive than a singular atomic idea.
Focusing on an object as the goal for a note allows us to add a few lines of context to the concept on the card. As long as the added context or personal thoughts relate to the object of the note they can be added. I think this facilitates memory, makes it easier to recall the importance of something when you re-encounter the note later, and may help linking as well.
I borrowed the ideas of a single focus per Zettel, and links indicate a focus shift from Bianca Pereira's video in the Zettel Critique Assistant GPT, which includes the following instructions.
I need to update the README.md of the GitHub repository for this project to credit Bianca Pereira's video presentation.
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.
This is an excellent analogy - thanks! It will help me considerably when deciding when it's time to create a new zettel.
Makes me think that this different phrasing resonates so much. I recently talked to Christian about this talk and my reaction was "nothing new".
I think I need to go back and change a couple of things in the article on atomicity I am writing.
I am a Zettler
Same. I believe it's all been said and part of the "one slice = one idea" summary, e.g. as laid out here:
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2646/more-programmer-nonsense-re-atomicity-writing-and-thinking
Is the observable process to change the focus a factor?
How is "idea" more restrictive than "focus of attention"? Does the former imply something about reality, in the Platonic sense of idea maybe, while the latter is merely subjective?
These are genuine questions, please chime in
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
Zettels have a focus, which can be broad or narrow. It helps to think of "focus," as in photography. A "narrow-focus Zettel" might deal with a single, well-defined topic or question, while a "broad-focus Zettel" (or structure note) might cover a range of related issues, questions, or arguments.
If you can summarize and explore a concept or argument in depth within a single note, use a narrow-focus Zettel. If not, use a structure note, which has a broader focus. In either case, a WikiLink indicates a focus shift.
The word "idea" says little about attention--ideas can be vague, and in English, "idea" tends to connote vagueness. I prefer actionable rules to terms such as "idea" or "atomic," which don't convey as clearly and concisely what the note writer is supposed to do.
The focus of a structure note is "zoomed out" and more expansive (to continue the analogy with photography) than a narrow or "single-focus" Zettel. It may include several focal points, indicated by annotated WikiLinks or references, which signal a shift in focus.
WikiLinks can be more or less tightly related to the focus. To encourage broader exploration, navigation around the Zettelkasten, and indexing, I suggest, in addition to the main body of a Zettel, where more closely related links go, adding a "SEE ALSO" section in Zettels for less closely related references to other Zettels.
A more complete treatment would include examples of these points.
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.
@ZettelDistraction said:
I notice that there are at least two relevant photography concepts here: field of view and depth of field. The metaphorical application of these different concepts to a Zettelkasten could be better differentiated.
I very much agree with this. I've said before how a note schema can provide rule-like constraints that help specify where to "cut" units of information and decide how to relate those units.
Misleading discursive digression deleted.
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.
Deleted.
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've just finished watching the video.
What can I say... I already do these things :-)
They are good ideas, for me, but not so revolutionary or surprising.
I don't think I'm the only guy that acquired these features only by practice, "without lessons".
Maybe my experience in object oriented design, cited in the video, guided me in developing this mindset.
Or more probably, i think it is a natural convergence guided by needs for many people, when there is need to represent thoughts more complex than very simple ideas.
@andang76 said:
You may have seen the discussion "More programmer nonsense Re: Atomicity - Writing and Thinking" that @ctietze started last August on abstraction in programming and in writing (which I noted could also be called subsumption in the context of hierarchy).
Although my background is in visual arts, I think that the application to knowledge organization of photography concepts is not as intuitive as the application of logical concepts. Knowledge organization seems much more like logic than like photography to me. But perhaps mathematician @ZettelDistraction can provide some concepts from geometry or some other area of mathematics that would bridge the gap between the logical and the optical.
Perhaps single-focus and multi-focus are good enough. A single metaphor won't resonate with everyone. Commercial art is often said to have a single focal point (look here, feel this), whereas Fine art, in some accounts, raises a question and may have several focal points.
Perhaps focus of attention is a better phrase, but there are diminishing returns multiplying distinctions.
I have been burning myself out writing code and instructions for a Zettel Assistant GPT. The focus metaphor from photography seemed to help the GPT write decent critiques. I am writing for a GPT trained on data that OpenAI will not open to the public.
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 start reading now :-)
I've already developed some convergence last months between OOD and ZK, anyway.
The concept of atomic note, for example, easily maps to separation of concerns, single responsibility principle and reaching of modularity in general.
The metaphor of photography is good for me. But I think that the main focus in the video is about the bokeh effect, rather than the narrow-wide angle https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh
See for example the main image:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Josefina_with_Bokeh.jpg
The child is the main idea of the note, the blurred background is the context around the idea.
Sometimes for a good picture it is not enough having only the foreground, we need a background (that doesn't catch the eye too much).
When you change the parameters, you have a very different photo, a different subject, so a new idea even photographing the same place.
Reflecting on my notes, they are more similar to this child with a blurred background, rather than a child in front of a totally white background
Look out! Danger ahead. We're about to wander like confused mice in a thicket of my random and confusing thoughts. I'm only slightly better at writing while thinking than talking while thinking.
These new ways of framing atomaticity don't contradict the old ideas; they reframe them in different ways that I identify with.
If you are referring to "a change in attention = a link to a new note," then yes.
As an example, when I was writing about "Exploring the Multifaceted Concept of Ambient," I wandered off course in my note-taking, riffing on the poetic notion of "ambient love." I noticed a new focus of attention, which signaled that I should make a link and a new note. This tip, which was reinforced by watching the video, struck a chord with me about when I should start a new note.
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
Thank you for sharing that video! A couple of my takeaways from the video as a new Zettler
-a pile of notes with links is still a pile of notes. I've been feeling this especially as my ZK grows and becomes more visually confusing (I am thinking of the graph view on Obsidian) and it becomes less clear how exactly I am supposed to take advantage of these many links. I need to take advantage of structure notes more often.
-I also like the description of note links as a relationship with the potential to become its own note. I think the structure note is one of those kinds of notes that results from the relationships between notes.
I wonder what is good cause for spinning a link off into its own note? I am guessing some sort of new information or insight that makes the already explicit and bidirectional link more nuanced? Something that necessitates elaborating on the relationship between two objects of attention and not just acknowledging that relationship.
I only watched a little of Bianca Pereira's video, but it seems to me that the concept of object of attention is close to the logical/semiotic concept of sign. (Not to be confused with symbol.) I suspect that Pereira was using photographic depth of field to isolate one area in a photo from other areas, analogous to isolating one sign from other signs. The areas in a photograph can be interpreted individually as icons (a type of sign) and together as a geometric diagram (another type of sign), and the symbols (another type of sign) in a note system can form a symbolic diagram, which in some software can be visualized as a geometric diagram (e.g. the "graph view" in Obsidian). Here the bridge concept connecting the photographic and the symbolic is the diagram. I don't doubt that this first guess needs to be further refined.
You've asked the million-euro question. When does a note's focus become too broad to be useful in multiple idea streams? There is a spectrum of cases for creating a link. It depends on your POV. If you are a materials engineer, you'd make separate notes when experimenting with plastic polymers. If you are a music major and, for some reason, you create a note on plastics, nobody would fault you for grouping multiple polymers in a single note.
In my example above, the link is not a continuation of the idea stream as much as it is a new and novel focus. Rather than making a bullet point and adding 'ambient love' in the larger note, I made a link, and the new note makes both notes available for reuse with other idea streams.
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:
In terms of the semiotic interpretation that I started just above @Will's previous comment, this could be restated as: the materials engineer has a more extensive repertoire of signs (and a more detailed diagram) about polymers than the music major. The music major only has one sign, polymers, whereas the materials engineer has a panoply of signs.
Andy, you have a philosopher's flare with words. When creating a note, one of the signals to make a link and a new note would be when the sign changes. The music major has but one sign, whereas the materials engineer would confront many signs and want each of them reusable when her attention is focused on a new problem.
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
I thought of an example analogy that may make the parallel between photographic depth of field and diagrammatic detail extremely clear, although it may be a trivial example.
Let us suppose that we have a photograph of a terrestrial globe centered on the western hemisphere. The globe has countries labeled in a large typeface, but sub-country political units and cities are labeled in a small typeface. The photograph has a very shallow depth of field, so that only a band around the equator is in sharp focus. You can read the labels of the cities and sub-country political units within that band, but further out toward the tropical circles you can only read the country names, and closer to the poles all names are blurred out. You could call this object of attention a "central Neotropical focus".
If we view a note system with such a "central Neotropical focus" that has notes about all the visible labels in the photograph, a graph view of the note system would show a geometrical diagram with a set of labels equivalent to the readable set of labels in the photograph, with more detail around the equator and less detail elsewhere. Something similar would be true for a single note with a "central Neotropical focus". (The analogy could apply to a whole note system, part of a note system, or a single note.)
If you wanted to "shift focus" to, say, a "central North American focus", the analogy would be that you would rotate the globe so that it is centered on North America, adjust the depth of field as desired, and the graph view of your note system, or the content of your note, would be equivalent to the set of labels now visible in the photograph, with more detail in the area of central North America and less detail elsewhere.
In contrast, the photographic field of view analogy is, of course, the same as zooming in or out on a virtual globe.
@andang76: By the way, I visited the Bokeh article on Wikipedia and noticed that the photo you posted above is from Wikimedia Commons. It has a cc-by-2.0 license that requires you to give appropriate credit and link to the license. An easy way to do this is to link to the page of the photo on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons.
@andang76: I see you added https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh after the photo above, but I would say that's not the best photo credit for a couple of reasons: (1) someone may edit the Wikipedia page and replace that photo with a different photo and thereby destroy the relation between that URL and the photo, and (2) it's not perfectly clear that the purpose of the link is to provide credit for the photo. It would be better to say something like: "Photo: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Josefina_with_Bokeh.jpg" OR "Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Josefina_with_Bokeh.jpg". Those URLs are for the photo's page on Italian Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, respectively.
Thank you for setting me straight on depth of field versus field of view. There is a balance between metaphorical accuracy and the instructional value of the analogy. I might use another analogy if metaphorical accuracy distracts those who know better.
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 should point out that there is no conflation of depth of field with field of view in my original statement, which relies only on an analogy with depth of field in photography:
Those instructions to the Zettel Assistant GPT can stand as is. My subsequent statements veered into field-of-view territory.
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.
If I've understood well, having the approach "one focus for note" rather than "one idea for note" is more flexible in two ways:
I'm not fully convinced that this change of approach is a real turning point:
For the first, I could already consider two different focus on a thing as two different "ideas" about that thing. The key point is simply: what really are the stuff we call "ideas" in our zettelkasten?
It seems that this question already arise in the topic.
Idea is a terrible term for me, so elusive...
Furthermore, zettelkasten theory already "teach us" that we would follow our POV when we are taking notes. So, we already reason as photographers...
For the second, for me it's simply having the idea not totally alone in the note, but surrounded with enough context. I think making the right context to the main idea in the note is an exercice we all do, maybe unconsciously.
Curated linking in the note, for example, is already a good context.
It could be interesting trying to do practical examples of notetaking according to the theories developed in this thread.
hard to figure if it works remaining in the realm of the full theory.
If you had to rewrite a note following this approach, what do you obtain?
In my case, I still don't understand if I had to change something...
Great idea! Post one of your notes, and I'll show you where a shift in focus should lead to a new note. This will sharpen the focus of both notes. Please post a note NOT about note-taking or zettelkasting.
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
Some time back, in a thread on the topic of ideal zettel length, I commented that while many of my zettels were in the 100 to 300-word range, a few of them were 1000+ words. The latter related to me trying to capture a particular memory of some event or person from my youth as a contribution to a series of zettels on my personal history. The longer zettels were entirely consistent with the concept of writing zettels with one point of focus rather than just an atomic idea. There was no logical way to break up these long zettels, in any case, so I didn't worry about them. But this is a good example of the type of zettel that might apply to the "one point of focus" philosophy.
In my own interpretation of the atomic concept in notetaking, according to my reminiscences of old chemistry study, I think that the most important feature of atoms is not "smallness", but "not further breakable". (atom derives from greek, átomos, indivisible).
So, a note for me is atomic if it is not further breakable without loss of meaning, knowledge relevance or sense.
It is atomic if, when I try to split in two parts, I obtain a loss of something.
It's according to this meaning that I (try to) follow the "write atomic notes" principle.
And I think it is consistent with your long zettels, too.
Surely atomic notes are very often short notes, too, but is not "small size" the property that generates the big benefits when I write notes. Size is not an issue for me.
Oh, it's hard to find a suitable zettel for me taken from my real notes.
Maybe because I feel many of my zettels are already near the probable shape the method propose.
Even further, I've to translate from italian to english...
Maybe it's better to write a "toy zettel" and figure how to transform it using this approach.
It isn't new. It's an attempt to articulate and make accessible some notions that have been expressed differently. The word "atomic" can connote context-free, self-contained, indivisible isolation. However, if my notes are totally disconnected, there's no point in maintaining a Zettelkasten. Atoms are said to be indistinguishable. In that case, my Zettelkasten consists of one note.
Perhaps I should consider atomic notes as the fuzzy blobs that scanning electron microscope images of individual atoms reveal. Despite the suggestion of interconnected individuality, I would avoid this analogy. Quantum mechanics isn't intuitive, and quantum analogies tend to be overused and reveal more about what the analogist knows--or doesn't know--about quantum mechanics.
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.