What is happening in your Zettelkasten? Week starting 2025-08-17

ctietze

What's going on in your lives and Zettelkasten in August?

Let's touch base!

I can't offer 1:1 calls like @Will usually does, but you're invited to next Tuesday's Open Office hour (18:30 Berlin time) in recompense

Will

Current ZK Report

Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:

• I've been experimenting with using the ZKM to stabilize my mindfulness practice with mixed success.
• Western American Literature ENGL4730, my university class, starts next week, so I'm trying to focus on my writing and reading for that.
• I'm continually fascinated with OpenAI's ChatGPT and how to use it to foster philosophical dialogue, creativity, and writing.

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• Cather, Willa. Willa Cather: Four Great Novels, Pioneers!, One of Ours, the Song of the Lark, My Ántonia. Skyhorse Publishing Company, Incorporated, 2014. [[202507242012]] ENGL4730
• Maclean, Norman. A River Runs through It. Edited by Barry Moser, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993. [[202507301741]] ENGL4730
• Johnson, Denis. Train Dreams: A Novella. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. [[202508131745]] ENGL4730
• Walter, Jess. So Far Gone. First edition, Harper, 2025. Johnson, Denis. Train Dreams: A Novella. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. [[202508131745]]
• Nisargadatta. I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Edited by Sudhakar S. Dikshit, translated by Maurice Frydman, 2nd American ed, Acorn Press, 2012.

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

Bolden.

The "My rolling twenty-day zettel production" is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I do my journaling in Bear to keep personal journaling separate from my knowledge work.

Let me know if you want to see, discuss, or critique these notes.

My twenty-day zettel production

I hope my contribution is helpful, and you have even better ideas.

iylock

@Will said:

• I'm continually fascinated with OpenAI's ChatGPT and how to use it to foster philosophical dialogue, creativity, and writing.

What are your current experiences with Chat GPT and philosophical dialogue?

wjenkins81

I've made some progress in adding language learning materials (natural languages, not programming languages) to my Zettelkasten.

The nature of learning another language is that you are learning from many different resources... text, audio, video and so on. For a while I had some trouble figuring out how to pull these together into Zettelkasten-friendly notes.

The solution I found was to pick a particular resource (a nice big book) as a 'core' resource, make the main notes from that, and then to augment these main notes with parts selected from the other resources.

It's works ok so far, so I'll keep going with it.

One of the good things about text is how little computer memory it takes. But audio and video require a lot of memory to save and back up, so that complicates things.