Mindscapes: The Zettelkasten as a Thinking Environment • Zettelkasten Method

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Mindscapes: The Zettelkasten as a Thinking Environment • Zettelkasten Method

Habitats of the mind: Your Zettelkasten is a thinking environment.

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Andy

The geeks (which includes probably everyone reading this) know this already, but it is worth mentioning that the term integrated thinking environment (ITE), used in this blog post, is a variation on the term integrated development environment (IDE) that software developers use to refer to the kind of software that they use to develop software.

Ryan J. A. Murphy wrote a blog post in 2021 titled "Obsidian, Roam, and the rise of integrated thinking environments—what they are, what they do, and what's next" that used the term integrated thinking environment to refer to recent personal knowledge base software, making the analogy to IDEs. And back in 2009, before there was much buzz on the Internet about personal knowledge bases, Sam Kleinman wrote a blog post titled "Integrated writing environment" that used the same IDE analogy.

One could extend the IDE analogy even further to analog Zettelkästen, although insofar as an ITE is analogous to an IDE, the analogy applies more naturally to software than to paper.

@Sascha wrote:

The Zettelkasten Method delivers what Memex promised. My guess is that the early developers of hypertext technologies focused too much on the technical realization. [...] I myself do not place myself in the tradition of Bush or Nelson, but in the tradition of Luhmann. This is important to me because I do not believe that the development of technology is the best next step.

I think it is natural for Sascha to identify more with Luhmann, given the location of both of them in Bielefeld. However, for anyone who is using a digital personal knowledge base instead of paper, there is much to learn from past research on personal knowledge base technology that was inspired in part by Vannevar Bush's vision of the Memex and by Doug Engelbart's vision of knowledge augmentation. Stephen Davies and colleagues summarized the state of the research in the first decade of this century. What Davies described as the ideal personal knowledge base sounds not much different from what Sascha and others have called an ideal ITE:¹

To pull all these ideas together, imagine a distributed system that securely stores your personal knowledge and is available to you anywhere, anytime: from any computer, or from a handheld device that you always carry with you. Furthermore, the knowledge it contains is in a flexible form that can readily accommodate your very thoughts. It contains all the concepts you have perceived in the past and want to recall—historical events, business plans, phone numbers, scientific formulas—and does not encourage you to isolate them from one another, or to prematurely commit to a structure that you might find restrictive later. The concepts can be linked together as in a graph, clustered visually on canvases, classified in multiple categories, and/or arranged hierarchically, all for different purposes. As further information is encountered—from reading documents, brainstorming project plans, or just experiencing life—it is easy to assimilate into the tool, either by capturing snippets of text and relating it to what is already known, or by creating new concepts and combining them with the easily retrievable old. External documents can be linked into the knowledge structure in key places, so that they can be classified and easily retrieved. It is effortless to augment the content with annotations, and to rearrange it to reflect new understandings. And this gold mine of knowledge is always exportable in a form that is compatible with other, similar systems that have different features and price points. Such a tool would surely be a boon to anyone who finds their own mind to be insufficient for retaining and leveraging the knowledge they acquire. As Vannevar Bush stirringly wrote: "Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems."

Davies wrote the preceding passage about a decade and a half ago. Technologically, we already have the kind of systems that he described. So Sascha is right that the development of technology is not the next best step.

The most important issues for an ITE or PKB or Zettelkasten are applied epistemology and methodology: how to apply what we know about knowledge and knowledge-work. The authors of good research methods manuals have always known this. Today people who are newly interested in ITEs or PKBs or Zettelkästen, and who see knowledge as a key part of their whole personal life, may be learning this too, and Sascha is eager to teach them.

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1. Stephen Davies (2011), "Still building the memex". Communications of the ACM, 54(2), 80–88. See also: Stephen Davies, Javier Velez-Morales, & Roger King (2005), Building the memex sixty years later: trends and directions in personal knowledge bases, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. ↩︎

ctietze

I want to point out that Thomas Teepe mentioned "Integrated Thought Development Environment" ~8y ago on the blog, so that's earlier than 2021 https://disqus.com/home/discussion/christiantietze/building_blocks_of_a_zettelkasten/#comment-2786462786

Andy

@ctietze said:

I want to point out that Thomas Teepe mentioned "Integrated Thought Development Environment" ~8y ago on the blog, so that's earlier than 2021 https://disqus.com/home/discussion/christiantietze/building_blocks_of_a_zettelkasten/#comment-2786462786

That's great! I'm not surprised that there have been forum comments using the term. The Murphy (2021) and Kleinman (2009) blog posts that I mentioned came to mind as dedicated blog posts on the subject that used the IDE analogy in their title, but I imagine there have been other blog posts using the analogy, and forum comments like Teepe's.

Of course, Doug Engelbart was ahead of all of them: Howard Rheingold's famous 1985 book Tools for Thought mentioned that Engelbart used the term integrated working environment in 1963, which predates even the first IDEs in the 1970s:

The problem-solving assistance Engelbart had dreamed about alone in the 1950s became the "integrated working environment" he proposed in 1963, which in turn grew into the toolbuilders' toolkit that he and his small group of colleagues used to build an "intellectual workshop" throughout the remaining seven years of the decade. By the early 1970s, the wider community of ARPA-funded computer researchers and representatives of the business world were joining the bootstrapping process.

ctietze

Xerox PARC and friends were ahead of everything back then.

I wonder how much creativity we collectively lost when the U.S. restricted use of LSD Can't find another explanation to why this all happened back then

Ydkd

Didn't quite got the part about distinction of writing and revision - is it about atomic notes which ZK makes easy to juggle freely and form any sequences versus keeping all the info in single file?