Zettelkasten Forum


Tell us what ideas you're grappling with this week. April 14, 2023

edited April 2023 in Your Current Projects

How has your week been? What are your plans for the coming week? Tell us about the state of your zettelkasting journey.

My week has been wonderful. I got my Python programming project to a stage where I could release it. I've slowly restarted working in the woodshop. My health is starting to stabilize. I'm getting back in the gym with regularity. I guess you all didn't want to hear all that personal stuff.

Zettelkasting has been slow, and life is distracting. My seminar is wrapping up. Only 2 more classes, a larger writing project, and a public reading left. This will take up much of my time over the next 3 weeks. My seven-day zettel production reflects my zettelkasting speed. Most of the content is ENGL501 Traditions of Food Writing related.

The exception is a podcast I captured into my ZK. From time to time, we get asked how to capture various content. Reading a book or article has its methods and challenges, but other forms of content exist. Yesterday I captured a podcast and would like to share how I did it. This is one way, not the only way or even the best way, but its how I did it.

The podcast was This Is Your Brain on ‘Deep Reading.’ It’s Pretty Magnificent. - The Ezra Klein Show (sorry, behind paywall) interview of Maryann Wolf

Maryanne Wolf is a professor at U.C.L.A. School of Education and Information Studies, and she’s one of the world’s leading experts on how reading works in and — even more importantly — how it works on the brain, how it changes the brain. She’s the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of a Reading Brain,” and of “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World,” among other books.

In this particular case, I had access to the transcripts. I captured a copy of the transcript and read along with the podcast highlighting the parts that sparked my attention. I paused the podcast to make quick notes in the transcript and highlighted them. I used a Keyboard Maestro script to capture all the highlights into one big zettel 1119 words and almost all direct quotes. I'll now process the zettel reframing the quotes, checking sources, deleting, atomizing, arguing, and linking deeply with the ideas already in my ZK.

I was lucky to have a transcript to follow. The podcast was an hour long, and capturing it to its initial stage probably took 1 ½ hours. I likely will joyfully spend more hours thinking about the topic and integrating the ideas.


My seven day zettel production

Post edited by Will on

Will Simpson
I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
kestrelcreek.com

Comments

  • @Will The podcast sounds fascinating :smile: Unfortunately, the NY Times and I do not get along, so I will have to find another way of finding out about Maryann Wolf.

  • @Will Thank you so much for this link! The contemporary information environment degrades our cognitive faculties. Making very careful notes is one remedy.

  • Busy week last week. Did manage to get a lot of stuff done:

    • professionally: learning about natural gas and its distribution. Interesting stuff, not nearly as complex as the transport of electricity. Lots of overlap between the two in concepts, so that makes for interesting notes;
    • some programming on the side: I've add automatically generated Maps of Content (MoC) to my Zettelkasten. A MoC is a note which contains all notes in a single "cluster" in my Zettelkasten. I'm using the Clauset-Newman-Moore greedy modularity maximization algorithm. Yes, I had to look that up. Interesting conclusion: I already keep a manual list of notes that I use as starting points when working with my Zettelkasten and it turns out that list is a 90% match with the MoC's I'm generating. I'm not sure there's an added value in automatic generation, since I already know the clusters based on the connections. Also, a list of notes without context doesn't really add anything for me. I guess I'll find out if it's useful;

    As for next week, there's a new edition of a book I use quite a bit for work. So I'll try and read some of that and find out if there's going to be a lot of follow-up notes to the notes I have from the previous edition.

  • @r1tger, thanks for sharing what you are up to. Can you recommend a long-form article or book on electrical transport for the non-expert public? I remember Bill Gates saying electrical transmission was a key factor in a flourishing future.

    a list of notes without context doesn't really add anything

    What helps me is to include a one-sentence summary with the note title. Every link appears like this. My macro that creates links creates a link that looks like this:

    The Value Of Taxes [[202009220805]]
        - Taxes aren't a fee but a payment for a service.  You pay for your electricity. Why wouldn't you pay for your roads, air quality, or food safety?
    

    A MOC then becomes a sorted list of links with one-sentence summaries. The summaries are written at the time of note creation and a malleable. Some MOC (structure) notes have additional original content mixed in if the mood or opportunity presents itself. Here is a sample. Each note has its summary; this is just a list but has more context.

    What are you reading?

    Will Simpson
    I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • @Will said:
    @r1tger, thanks for sharing what you are up to. Can you recommend a long-form article or book on electrical transport for the non-expert public?

    I think you've asked this before :-). I did talk to some US-based colleagues recently and they recommended the educational materials from the Office of Electricity. The Smart Grid stuff looks nice, but I haven't looked at anything in depth. Maybe there's something that meets your interest, it looks accessible/readable enough.

    A MOC then becomes a sorted list of links with one-sentence summaries.

    I include such a summary for each note in the MOC. All my notes start with a single sentence summary (abstract) of the note, so I extract the summary and add it to the MOC. I think I saw the tip of having such a summary somewhere on the forums here and it really helps me working with notes "at a glance". I see the value in manually creating MOCs (does it become a structure note then?) since it requires more in-depth exposure to the notes in the MOC. I'm not really convinced doing MOCs automatically is working for me, since it takes away the "working with the notes" part. I'll see where I'll end up.

    What are you reading?

    Boring, boring stuff if you're not into it.

  • edited April 2023

    @r1tger What's the input of your MoC generator?

    If it just operates on the folder of your notes and looks for anything, this could maybe become a tool for discovery of departments in one's notes that haven't been fleshed-out yet.

    I see the value in manually creating MOCs (does it become a structure note then?) since it requires more in-depth exposure to the notes in the MOC. I'm not really convinced doing MOCs automatically is working for me, since it takes away the "working with the notes" part. I'll see where I'll end up.

    Well -- There's no "Structure Note"™️, it's just lowercase "structure note", and if e.g. the MoC is a list, then the note's structure has the form "list". So yes ;)

    I would expect that generating overviews and to keep them as-is likely doesn't add that much value over what was previously there. Manual curation and intervention would make these more valuable. Reviewing this takes time, of course. But maybe finding new clusters could be worthwhile.

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • @ctietze said:
    @r1tger What's the input of your MoC generator?

    The input is 714 Markdown files, with 11 MOCs :-). Notes use standard Markdown links to refer to other notes by ID.

    If it just operates on the folder of your notes and looks for anything, this could maybe become a tool for discovery of departments in one's notes that haven't been fleshed-out yet.

    This already sort of works for me, I found a note in a MOC that I've related to more notes, which moved the note to a different MOC.

    I would expect that generating overviews and to keep them as-is likely doesn't add that much value over what was previously there. Manual curation and intervention would make these more valuable. Reviewing this takes time, of course. But maybe finding new clusters could be worthwhile.

    It's another tool in the toolbox. Most of the automation stuff I try are intended to provide starting points for improvements to notes or output created with my Zettelkasten. It's a "gets you 40% of the way there/started"-thing, but I have to put in the remaining 60%. It's fun though, and keeps me interacting with my Zettelkasten in a way that's not just input/ouput of ideas.

  • It's fun though, and keeps me interacting with my Zettelkasten in a way that's not just input/ouput of ideas.

    Yeah, I totally get that :) If the script is share-able, I'd love to see it eventually

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

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