From analog to digital and back again
i often read that people switch from an analogue card box to a digital one and then back again. is it a sign that both methods have advantages? does anyone have an idea of a hybrid solution? paper-digitizing-archiving... many thanks
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@chrisaldrich may have some words for you about this...
Technically, I have a hybrid Zettelkasten because I use paper as thinking canvases.
The idea is not that sexy: Paper serves as an extended working memory, if I need to extend it.
I guess the analog Zettelkasten wouldn't be so tempting, if people wouldn't be addicted to their phones and social media. The power of the digital tools comes with the cost of increased distraction, artificial lighting in your eyes, strange eye movement patterns etc.
I don't read e-books, don't have a smartphone (which could change
), don't have social media accounts (other than an Instagram account which serves as an inbox of people presenting study results) and practice a nootropic lifestyle (e.g. regular movement breaks, specific mini-workouts to minimise the damage of sitting, biorythm stuff etc.).
This is why nothing is pulling me away from the screen.
I am a Zettler
I'm curious how many instances you've seen of people saying that. I only know of a few personally and they're generally pretty rare in my experience (and moreso for people with long term practice), so having additional examples and their reasoning would be useful. Most people I've seen switching do so under the spell of what I call "shiny object syndrome" rather than for concrete productivity or usability reasons.
There are definitely different sets of affordances between the two modalities. Digital can provide a close approximation of most paper affordances, but I find that in practice, more digital users rely on mass concordance search (or tagging) rather than having well-indexed notes as would be needed in paper versions. (Also as a result, many digital zettelkasten users really have more of a digital commonplace book practice rather than something closer to a Luhmann-artig practice.)
Most of my personal paper-based practice is for the highest level of notes and mapping out ideas and creating outlines (the ability to move pieces of paper around quickly is far easier for me in paper form than digital). In my experience having a digital-first workflow that can be printed and filed is usually more easily maintained than a manual-first and digitized later practice.
Maintaining well-curated and usable versions of notes in both analog and digital format is a lot of work, particularly if you've got a prolific practice. Most people aren't good at maintaining one, much less a copy (even if it exists solely as a back up), so I personally wouldn't recommend it. I suspect if you try both even for a few weeks, you'll find yourself gravitating toward one or the other based on your own idiosyncratic needs. At that point, choose the one that works best for you and continue on.
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
My hybrid solution consists of two text files, one to list Sources, and a "Card List" to list main cards as Einsteigspunkte (entry points) to the slip box. My slip box contains 4x6 index cards with only two note types: Source Notes and Main Notes.
I give each source a four digit ID:
0230 Ready for Anything/Allen; kindle
0231 Getting Things Done/Allen; kindle
0232 Long Psychology of Education; concept schema exemplars
I number source notes with the Source ID, e.g. 0232-4, etc.
My Card List contains mostly top-level cards, and sometimes child cards (further on the branch) only if they contain a keyword of interest (i.e. a place I would want to enter a thread). I use Luhmann's alphanumeric numbering for the main cards.
The Card List effectively also serves as a keyword index as I will add keywords to a card title.
I like that I can leverage digital to search quickly for a source or card location, but keep the fun of taking and making notes on paper.
That's it. This is why I am testing now paper Zettelkasten. Even if I don't know if I will keep it in this form, how I will make it evolve or even if I will come back to computer, but I have to emphasis the well being of keeping away from a screen for the "brain fatigue". I am not addicted to my phone - mine is four years old and does'nt work well anyway, but a lot of professional tasks keeps me on screen. I'm kind of tired and my brain, which has natural difficulties to focus, can't handle more at a point. I don't want my ZK to add to this digital tireness.
I worked with paper all last year and I was productive. Not in a ZK way, but I made a lot of paper notes, it was more natural for me to take a pen and a sheet of paper than to open a new file on my computer. It is frustating some times, when I can't edit what was previously written or when my hand is too slow for my brain. I really appreciate the materiality of paper, the spatial organization of my notes, the fact that I can handle them in a visual and tactil space. Not much the shiny object syndrom here, but a reflexion about how good I feel when I work and interact with my notes.
On computer, I don't use much the search function. I also have the habit to put tags into my filenames like :
[[240406122656 This a note @Notetaking @Wow]], I just need to filter on a search file bar. I miss the spatial and tactil aspect as well. But there are some really convenient elements to work with - the possibility of easily erase and write over without destruction of the note, for example.Hello,
I always notice a certain insecurity.
My concerns are that I don't want to simply send my recordings to nirvana due to certain circumstances.
Data loss is possible both analog and digital.
Another issue is cognitive processing. Isn't analog more in line with the nature of the brain?
Hand-brain coordination is different with a pen.
But I should have asked my question more precisely.
Is it possible and is there a system with which I can practise both types of information storage?
I was thinking of a system, a kind of mini-scanner, and I have already made rough sketches of how such a tool could work.
I would like to discuss this idea with someone. Discard or develop?
Thank you very much
Hello @John_P
It is, but it would be easier in the other way : from digital to paper. You write your zettel with your keyboard, keep it into a digital archive, and print it to add it into a paper archive.
They other way, paper to digital, is less convenient. You'll obtain
.jpgor.pngarchive, which are picture format . Maybe the technologie of some scanners with handwriting recognizition has improved, but it requires extra monitoring of the result.It all depends on the desired outcome. If you just want to back up your physical archive, scanning could be an acceptable solution. If you want to work with the digital version of your archive, scanning is not the most efficient.
An other solution could be keeping your notes into a physical archive and your index into a digital archive.
About pure handwriting : I don't know. We need to use our hands, it's true, but writing is also a brain effort - forming words is a cognitive function which is the same from typing to writing- and hands on the keyboard make a muscular and spatial effort as well. I've found some articles of authors who promote writing by hand, but the scientific studies didn't convinced me. It seems to have a great mystification around the handwriting power.
The first real plus of a physical archive is... physical. Notes like object into your hand, the opportunity to put them in front of you, to rearrange them wherever you need to. You can emulate it with digital tools however.
An other real advantage of a physical archive is that it keeps me away from my screen. Less stress, less distraction, easier to focus, less blue light from the screen.
It is also technological agnostic.
As a test, I scanned a couple hundred index cards in a small Brother document scanner ADS-1700W. The goal was to have a digital archive of my handwritten cards. Just a simple backup, no intention to have filenames match card titles and no goal for searchability or OCR. The order of scanning matched the order they were in the box, so they would stay "in order".
Things I learned:
1) Write in black ink if you plan to scan, blue will not show well on the black and white mode.
2) Hopefully your scanning software will be smart enough to delete the "blank pages"; i.e. the images or pdfs created from scanning the blank back sides of cards.
3) It was a relatively quick procedure, but still tedious.
4) 300 dpi is plenty of resolution
5) Don't think I will worry about making back ups, just take my chances.
6) If I do decide to back up frequently, would try one of those high-speed photo scanners that can batch 30-50 cards at a time in an auto-document feeder.
Relatedly, some of the scanning apps on our phones now are pretty good. The "Adobe Scan" app will scan a card just as fast as you can point your phone. Multiple mode will scan multiple before saving- would get one big pdf though.
I've been using the Scanner Pro app by Readdle, which has many benefits - "point and shoot" convenience from your phone, individual or combined pdfs, and scan into / organize in folders.
I started using it just for scanning receipts (for company expenses) but quickly moved to scanning full-size sheets of paper. The resolution is excellent.
Some brief notes for those interested in exploring this analog to digital space (pardon the pouring out of my zettelkasten here):
I've previously done the experiment of archiving handwritten (and typewritten) notes from cards to my website either as a user interface feature or an archiving feature. See details at https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/20/handwriting-my-website-with-a-digital-amanuensis/
One might also consider using digital pens like the Livescribe to write in analog with the ability to easily upload and/or share digital copies (along with OCR).
Another interesting example here is Rocketbook's "Cloud Cards" which allow one to write on index cards and save them (with OCR) into the cloud. Though here there aren't as many options for organization or quick search. The tough part is that the cards can become quickly expensive at scale since they're designed to be erased and reused. I also personally don't like the writing surface as well as actual paper, though the required pens aren't bad at all.
I've had one friend recommend Phoenix Slides as a photo archiving system with some user interface affordances which may be of use in an analog to digital workflow. Perhaps this might be interesting for those interested in a digital image-based zettelkasten in the vein of what Aby Warburg would have recognized?
Another potential contender in this photo archival/use space might be Trophy from the Rory Rosenzweig Center.
For others interested in exploring solution spaces, there's some interesting prior art I've been collecting here: https://indieweb.org/handwriting
I've also got a collection of digitization efforts by various academics who have taken researcher's collections of notes and digitized them for study, and this might provide some interesting background research for doing this with one's personal collection. They range from the incredibly simple (scanning to pdf documents) to the more complex (Luhmann's collection).
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
@chrisaldrich said:
Phoenix Slides is just a macOS slide show app; I don't see how it's notable for Zettelkasten use. I used it often back in the mid-2000s when I needed to give a slide show of a folder of images, and it was also good for reviewing and selectively deleting photos on an SD card, but now the macOS Finder is about as good for such purposes, so most people won't need Phoenix Slides unless they want a specific option it has that Finder doesn't have. If people need a cross-platform digital asset management app, something like Adobe Bridge or Eagle would be more relevant, as mentioned in a previous discussion.
@Andy @chrisaldrich As far as photo archiving / retrieval goes, I use NeoFinder. It is an excellent tool. However, I'm not sure what features you are looking for. But it is much more than a slide show app.
I was thinking of using them for repositories which could be re-arranged into outlines (slideshows/mindmaps/etc.) for potential writing output purposes (articles, books, etc.) Linking and metadata are table stakes feature now, but having (especially visual) back end affordances to allow for quick outlining/rearrangement and ultimate output seem to be missing from the note space.
I haven't tested this particular one out yet, but at least one associate who is a major programmer in the wiki space indicated it had that ability which might be helpful. It's certainly a feature that few applications currently have and one which may be useful to have user interface examples of for those going down these routes.
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
@chrisaldrich: I don't think Phoenix Slides is what you're looking for. It's just a simple image browser and slide show app (and not a "slide show" like Powerpoint, but rather a "slide show" displaying image files in sequence on the screen); it has no organizational/rearrangement capabilities, much less hypertext.
@GeoEng51: Thanks for mentioning NeoFinder. It vaguely reminds me of DiskCatalogMaker (which has fewer features), which I hadn't used or thought about for many years (as I have no more CDs to catalog), and indeed NeoFinder (which used to be called CDFinder, I notice) can import catalogs from DiskCatalogMaker.