Request for comments: Zettelksten post

marick

With some trepidation, I ask for comments on Hypertext 2: Zettelkasten:

A Zettelkasten is a particular sort of hypertext document as well as a technique for creating it. My aim in this post is to give you an understanding of a Zettelkasten document – its parts and its whole – and, more importantly, show something of what it’s like to work with a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten will appeal to some people much more than to others, and I’d like you to be able to predict where you’d fall on that spectrum. Presenting vignettes of my own work (lightly fictionalized) is the means I’ve chosen.

I say "trepidition" because I'm a novice. I justify a novice writing for novices in three ways, most important here being the third:

3. Cunningham’s Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” With luck, I’ll learn faster as experts correct me.

Sascha

Hi @marick

I think you got it pretty close on how Luhmann worked with his Zettelkasten. Well done after only 2 months.

I have some specific objections:

1. The Zettelkasten is not a writing tool. Luhmann used it as one and he built it as a prompt machine which needs to be understood in light of his specific circumstances. I append a section from the upcoming English translation (will be edited). The Zettelkasten Method provides a flexible framework to build all kinds of machines. It can be a writing tool. It can also be an integrated thinking environment that is quite more encompassing than the prompt machine of Luhmann.
2. The narrow perspective of the note's content as claims is perfectly in line with how Luhmann worked. But the downsides of viewing the note's content through this framework results in a typical limited ability to exploit the range of the Zettelkasten's behavior: if you think note=claim repositories, you will create a specific behavior. I recommend reading these two articles for a wider perspective. Complete guide and Implementation vs principle I think you will have an easy time to get the ideas because of your software engineering background.

However, Luhmann used his Zettelkasten in a completely different way because of external necessities. I'll give you one example: To play the academic footnote theatre, having a lot of footnotes with references, is part of telling that your text is academically crafted, and there was a lot of work necessary. Back then, articles were stored in physical journals. If you wanted to read them outside of the library, you had to create a physical copy, which could be costly if you did it a lot. If you read the article, it may not be relevant to your current projects. So, you had to decide whether they might be useful for later projects. If they were useful, you had to store the stash of papers somehow and hope that you would recall the article, where you stored it, and that you had stored it. Luhmann bypassed this problem by having one place to store the ideas he had connected to the articles he read and by creating multiple meaningful contexts in his Zettelkasten, in which the results of the articles would resurface, together with the references, allowing him to play the academic footnote theatre. In his time, Luhmann's Zettelkasten enabled him to increase the likelihood that each read article would resurface and become useful for later projects. That allowed him to read the articles differently because he increased the possibility that his time, energy, and attention were used productively. We no longer have this problem. Quite the opposite. We no longer need to fight for access; we have to filter overload. For Luhmann, a one-liner would prompt him to write and allowed him to place a footnote. In his specific context, this was gold. Today, this is a trivial task that can be automated with AI. I attached a quick example in the appendix.