Zettelkasten Forum


Discourse graph and Zettelkasten

It would be nice to see how to combine the Zettelkasten with the QCE/discourse graph by Joel Chan [1]

There might be an interesting mapping exercise between reference/source notes, literature notes, zettels or atomic notes and cluster/hub notes and

Does someone have some experience doing or working using both?

[1] J. Chan, “Discourse Graphs for Augmented Knowledge Synthesis: What and Why,” Aug. 2021.

David Delgado Vendrell
www.daviddelgado.cat

Comments

  • @daviddelven: Based on past discussions in this forum and elsewhere, it's clear to me that many people use semantic schemas for knowledge representation, like the one that you mentioned above, in their note systems. For example, in a prior discussion on note typology I said:

    There are many relevant ontologies that one could use to organize one's note system. The venerable IBIS and the more recent AIF are two that have inspired the organization of my own note system.

    I think the answer to the question "should we agree on a common language" is: No, if we are not working together on a common project, then we do not need to agree on a common ontology any more than we need to agree on a common markup language.

    IBIS or issue mapping, which I mentioned in that discussion, has been around since the early 1970s and greatly influenced how I think about my note system. It's similar to what Joel Chan wrote about in the recent paper that you cited. I mentioned in a prior discussion on question notes how I combined ideas from IBIS and from The Craft of Research to create a semantic schema that's not too different from what Chan proposed. Chan doesn't mention IBIS, but it is mentioned by some of the texts that Chan cites, such as D. Scott McCrickard's Making Claims: The Claim as a Knowledge Design, Capture, and Sharing Tool in HCI (2012). Many scholars have been working on similar ideas for decades.

  • @Andy Thanks for bringing me up all these previous discussions. Very valuable.
    I'll have to process them meticulously.

    I wonder why we call them "question, claim or evidence" notes as they are atomic, or if we should refer to the Note type that hosts them (i.e. Literature note or Atomic note/Zettel?).

    There might be different types of them depending on the ownership (author's question or your own question?; third-party claims or your claim?; other's evidence or your evidence?). Depending on which type, you could place those "notes" within different main type notes.

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • @daviddelven said:

    I wonder why we call them "question, claim or evidence" notes as they are atomic, or if we should refer to the Note type that hosts them (i.e. Literature note or Atomic note/Zettel?).

    You will have to answer that question for yourself in your own system; I don't use the terms "literature note" or "atomic note" so your question does not make sense in terms of my note system.

    There might be different types of them depending on the ownership (author's question or your own question?; third-party claims or your claim?; other's evidence or your evidence?). Depending on which type, you could place those "notes" within different main type notes.

    I tend to think in terms of dialogue mapping (group facilitation technique based on IBIS), which does not attribute the elements to different authors/owners; everything is collectively owned, and the whole issue map is a collective project. Ontologically that is how I think about it: we are all in this thinking business together. But I also need to cite my sources, which I do within each note. But I do not indicate, as an attribute of the note, that it is mine or someone else's: the note ontology is completely communistic in that respect.

  • @daviddelven: After some further online research about Joel Chan, I discovered that a web page he wrote (on the Scaling Synthesis website) has the title: People naturally try to enact typed distinctions in their notes. I would say that statement is also a good empirical generalization of some of the discussions in this forum!

  • @Andy Indeed! Especially I always liked Maggie Appleton's way of elaborating her discourse, as well.

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • Joel Chan's 2021 paper cited above also mentions at one point that "there is a subculture of academic researchers who repurpose qualitative data analysis tools like NVivo and Atlas.ti to do literature reviews". At the end of the paper Chan also mentions the kind of hypertextual personal knowledge base software that everyone in this forum knows.

    What Chan doesn't mention is that people are also repurposing such personal knowledge base software to do qualitative data analysis! I mentioned in a prior discussion on tagging individual sentences that Ryan J. A. Murphy described how to create "an integrated qualitative analysis environment with Obsidian", and others in this discussion forum have described similar projects. Various tools such as qualitative data analysis software, argument mapping software, and hypertextual personal knowledge base software, are converging into a single integrated environment for what Chan calls "knowledge synthesis".

  • edited February 2023

    One way to distinguish Zettelkasten methods is by how they define notes and how they define the links between notes.

    A minority of Zettelkasten users seek to formulate clear, rigorous inferences when they link notes. They use 'inference-dominant' Zettelkasten methods.

    Those who use inference-nondominant Zettelkasten methods--a majority of Zettelkasten users--link notes without putting much effort into distinguishing variations in link quality.

    Inference-dominant methods are best for users who need to produce communications that will be subject to critical scrutiny by others. Such communications include analyses of any type and are often needed by academics, lawyers, consultants, and leaders in all fields.

    Inference-nondominant methods are best for users who seek to produce lots of content. If you want to publish three posts to your blog each day, you would be a good candidate for these methods.

    Just as we used link quality to distnguish inference-dominant methods from inference-nondominant methods, so too we can distinguish different kinds of inference-dominant methods.

    In this thread, the more well-known methods mentioned were Joel Chan's QCE Method and The Craft of Research's method, which leans heavily on the Toulmin Model of Argument.

    Joel Chan's QCE method is demonstrated in simplified form, in a Zettelkasten, in this video. The fundamental types of notes are questions, claims, and evidence, and the fundamental types of links are relations of support, opposition, or is-answered-by.

    The Craft of Research's method has evidence, claims, warrants and reasons which are linked by relations of support and opposition.

    Joel Chan gives a more complex example on this web page.

    Joel Chan's method was constructed to promote collective sense-making and is better suited to that task than the Craft of Research method which was constructed for individual researchers.

    Even the authors of the Craft of Research method acknowledge that their procedure can bewilder the most diligent practitioner:

    If all this seems complicated, know that you are in good company: the relationship of warrants to claims and reasons has vexed logicians since at least the time of Aristotle. (164)

    Just as Joel Chan's question, claim, evidence method has more rigor than inference-nondominant methods have, so we can choose a method that fills some of the gaps left by Joel Chan.

    Specifically, we can insist that all unstated premises and assumptions be made explicit. When producing communications for others, stating every premise and assumption easily becomes tedious and pedantic. But for the rigorous knowledge worker, such an exercise has great value. It forces the user to test every inference, simulating the test that opponents will certainly perform.

    For example, Joel Chan lays out, in graphical form, an argument about the efficacy of banning bad actors in online forums here.

    The argument map intentionally leaves out a number of claims. By inserting the missing claims, one can get a stronger grasp of the argument, home in on its weakest points, and gain greater understanding of premises' relations of dependency. This more rigorous analysis does not require significantly greater effort and yields outsized benefits in the form of deeper insight.

    A more rigorous map of Joel Chan's argument can be seen here.

    The principles underlying this more rigorous method are explained in this video.

    Post edited by Nido on
  • @Nido: Thanks for all that! What you call the inference-dominant/nondominant distinction is what I might call the degree to which users have formalized a schema of link types (including, but not necessarily limited to, the types of inference traditionally studied in logic and argumentation), which also would be related to node/note types and their level of granularity.

    @Nido said:

    Joel Chan's method was constructed to promote collective sense-making and is better suited to that task than the Craft of Research method which was constructed for individual researchers.

    IBIS and dialogue mapping were also invented for collective sensemaking. I'm surprised that Chan does not seem to mention IBIS directly since his schema reinvents IBIS, more or less, 50 years later.

    I wouldn't say that Joel Chan's schema is more well known than IBIS or the Toulmin model. The latter two have been around for decades and are frequently mentioned in the argumentation theory literature (for example, both are mentioned in the Handbook of Argumentation Theory by Frans van Eemeren and colleagues (2014), along with many other concepts and systems), but I have never seen Chan's schema mentioned in the literature.

    Specifically, we can insist that all unstated premises and assumptions be made explicit. When producing communications for others, stating every premise and assumption easily becomes tedious and pedantic. But for the rigorous knowledge worker, such an exercise has great value. It forces the user to test every inference, simulating the test that opponents will certainly perform.

    Yes, this is an important principle and is now a standard instruction in argument mapping. (I'm reminded of Robert Ennis's 1982 article "Identifying implicit assumptions", Synthese, 51(1), 61–86.) The study and practice of such argument analysis techniques can greatly improve the rigor and systematicity of one's thinking, both in private and when writing for the public. The uncovering of implicit assumptions also tends to happen naturally in groups of people when using dialogue mapping.

    In IBIS, there another important kind of implicit element that is analogous to implicit assumptions: implicit questions. Jeff Conklin said that what people often do is "the answer reflex": stating positions (i.e. claims, answers) without making explicit the question(s) behind the positions. IBIS puts the identification of questions into a central role (Chan's QCE schema could do this too). This is important because just like people often fail to identify implicit assumptions, they can also fail to identify questions.

    Types of questions that Jeff Conklin listed in Dialogue Mapping are: deontic questions (e.g. What should we do?), instrumental questions (e.g. How should we do it?), criterial questions (e.g. What are the criteria?), meaning or conceptual questions (e.g., What does X mean?), factual questions (e.g. What is X? or Is X true?), background questions (e.g. What is the background to this project?), and stakeholder questions (e.g. Who are the stakeholders of this project?). There are probably other important types of questions too.

  • @Andy You have given me a lot of fascinating resources to investigate further. Thanks.

    I won't be saying anything that is new to you, but here are some of my thoughts on the issues you've raised.

    1. Digital argument mapping tools encourage some degree of formalization and, thus, rigor, on the user's thinking. But they tend to keep the arguments of different texts in distinct files.
    2. Digital Zettelkasten tools encourage linking across texts and across disciplines but are agnostic with respect to rigor.

    I do not want to formally analyze everything I read. Only the good stuff. But I always want to have the option of adding rigor as my thinking evolves.

    So, the solution is to have the option, when desired, to use argument mapping methods in the Zettelkasten tool.

  • @Nido: Agreed. If people were to think, after reading what I've said, that my whole note system is a crystalline castle of immaculate reasoning, they would be wrong. As Luhmann said of his Zettelkasten, "The entirety of these notes can only be described as a disorder", and it's no different for me, but there are floating islands of order in the disorder.

  • Thus, @Nido and @Andy , using a Digital Zettelkasten tool when creating those "islands of order", where do you deploy the argument-oriented action within the ZK framework: discovery phase or development one?

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • @daviddelven: I know from reading this forum that there are many answers to that question, since different people have their different methods. I am interested to hear what @Nido or others have to say.

    For me, it depends on the purpose of particular notes. For example, some of my notes are for personal development: for those notes, I do all the argument structuring within the note system (or ZK or personal knowledge base or whatever you want to call it) because there is no external product other than my way of life. Other notes are for projects, such as writing projects: those notes are tagged with the project name and are structured as arguments to some degree, but are not completely structured because I do the final writing or production of the project not in the note system, but instead elsewhere—usually in Scrivener for writing projects—and that is where the final organization happens. After I finish the project, I try to transfer some of what was developed in Scrivener back into the note system, but I don't put an extreme amount of effort into it.

  • @Andy That's a very explicit and interesting workflow. Once we jump into the practical ground level, where tools and their architectures appear, it's quite fun.

    @Andy said:

    For me, it depends on the purpose of particular notes. For example, some of my notes are for personal development. For those notes, I do all the argument structuring within the note system (or ZK or personal knowledge base or whatever you want to call it) because there is no external product other than my way of life. Other notes are for projects, such as writing projects: those notes are tagged with the project name and are structured as arguments to some degree, but are not completely structured because I do the final writing or production of the project not in the note system, but instead elsewhere—usually in Scrivener for writing projects—and that is where the final organization happens. After I finish the project, I try to transfer some of what was developed in Scrivener back into the note system, but I don't put an extreme amount of effort into it.

    I'm also especially interested in the "lessons learned" from projects. Like many of you, I combine personal and professional development, producing outcomes from both. Producing them forces you to go through an additional layer of arguments that might become valuable for further discoveries and development.

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

  • @daviddelven said:

    I'm also especially interested in the "lessons learned" from projects. Like many of you, I combine personal and professional development, producing outcomes from both. Producing them forces you to go through an additional layer of arguments that might become valuable for further discoveries and development.

    Yes, absolutely! I like the way you said that. Stated more abstractly, some related concepts are action research, learning cycle, and reflective practice. Those are all names for the overall continuous development process within which argument technology is used.

    Also, often it is not easy to separate a discovery phase from a development phase, a point that was made by Horst Rittel, one of the inventors of IBIS:

    The designer's reasoning is much more disorderly, disorderly not due to intellectual sloppiness, but rather to the nature of design problems. There is no clear separation of the activities of problem definition, synthesis, and evaluation. All of these occur all the time. A design problem keeps changing while it is treated, because the understanding of what ought to be accomplished, and how it might be accomplished is continually shifting. Learning what the problem is IS the problem. Whatever he learns about the problem, becomes a feature of its resolution. From the beginning, the designer has an idea of the 'whole' resolution of his problem which changes with increasing understanding of the problem, and the image of its resolution develops from blurry to sharp and back again, frequently being revised, altered, detailed and modified.

    — Horst W. J. Rittel (1987/1988). "The reasoning of designers". Arbeitspapier A-88-4. Institut für Grundlagen der Planung, Universität Stuttgart.

  • Also, often it is not easy to separate a discovery phase from a development phase, a point that was made by Horst Rittel, one of the inventors of IBIS:

    The designer's reasoning is much more disorderly, disorderly not due to intellectual sloppiness, but rather to the nature of design problems. There is no clear separation of the activities of problem definition, synthesis, and evaluation. All of these occur all the time. A design problem keeps changing while it is treated, because the understanding of what ought to be accomplished, and how it might be accomplished is continually shifting. Learning what the problem is IS the problem. Whatever he learns about the problem, becomes a feature of its resolution. From the beginning, the designer has an idea of the 'whole' resolution of his problem which changes with increasing understanding of the problem, and the image of its resolution develops from blurry to sharp and back again, frequently being revised, altered, detailed and modified.

    — Horst W. J. Rittel (1987/1988). "The reasoning of designers". Arbeitspapier A-88-4. Institut für Grundlagen der Planung, Universität Stuttgart.

    I love this reference, as a common branch paradigm to many different design-related domains.

    David Delgado Vendrell
    www.daviddelgado.cat

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