Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. July 29, 2024
Swimming with Ideas
This is yet another opportunity to share with your friends what you are working on. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you're learning. Sharing helps me and, hopefully, you, too. It helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I'd love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼
Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes/ideas:
I'm writing this report to give a snapshot of my recent accomplishments and what's coming next in my ZK journey. Wow! I had a mind-blitzing Zoom chat with @ZettelDistraction. I'm sorry I didn't take notes during our conversation, and I claim to be a smart note-taker. Ha! We rattled on about UUID strategies, indexing, and the aesthetic superiority of The Archive over Zettlr. I would have loved to talk about the Zettel Assistant Custom GPT—a tool I find incredibly helpful.
Rich and I are reading Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa and will discuss it during our Saturday coffee meetings. Han's ideas about inactivity are profoundly thought-provoking. In the first chapter alone, I spent five hours scrutinizing and zettelkasting his arguments. Although I don't fully agree with all of Han's notions about inactivity, he has a way of making me think about my philosophy of life.
A few philosophical ideas have taken root in my mind recently. One is Han's concept of inactivity, and another is the idea of ambling, strolling, wandering, and being a flâneur/flâneuse. L. M. Sacasas' essay The Ambling Mind, which stresses the value of walking and how it "calibrates the tempo of our minds to the rhythm of thought," eloquently aligns with many of Han's ideas. I've rediscovered unprocessed notes from my reading of Frederic Gros's A Philosophy of Walking in my 2016 Evernote archive. It is now sitting in my 'proofing oven" and is primed for ZK treatment.
Inspired by @ZettelDistraction, I've developed my own Custom Note Critic GPT, which I'll share if you are interested. He focuses more on the formatting of the note, and I've made mine a writing tutor, pointing out areas where I can be more concise and more engaging and explain my ideas with confidence and clarity.
Books I'm reading or read this week:
- Best, Laura. (2017). Cammie takes flight. Nimbus Publishing. [[202407181659]]
- Prose, Francine, and Nanette Savard. Reading like a Writer [a Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them]. HarperCollins, 2007. Audiobook
- Doczi, György. The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture. Shambhala, 1981. [[202404231538]]
- Han, Byung-Chul, and Daniel Steuer. Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity. Polity Press, 2024. ISBN 978-1-5095-5802-5 #philosophy BookShare [[202407151806]]
- Nicholson, Geoff. Walking on Thin Air: A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps. The Westbourne Press, 2023. Everand [[202407271940]]
- Thornton, Sarah. Tits up: what sex workers, milk bankers, plastic surgeons, bra designers, and witches tell us about breasts. 2024. BookShare
Zettelkasting Soundtrack:
Oscar Kowalski
Hania Rani - Piano Day - YouTube
Alanna Crouch
★★★★★
The "My rolling ten-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 would like to see, discuss, or critique any of these notes.
My ten-day zettel production
I hope my contribution is helpful, and I hope someone has even better ideas.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. 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
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
I thought I rattled too much. Did you find the Zettel validation code useful? I'm happy to go over the Zettel Assistant.
I would like to see this. In the spirit of the Paris Olympics, we could have a "GPT-off" to compare GPT output, Zettel by Zettel.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego (1st-order): Erel Dogg. Alter egos of Erel Dogg (2nd-order): Distracteur des Zettel, HueLED PacArt Lovecraft. I have no direct control over the 2nd-order alter egos. CC BY-SA 4.0.
As suggested by @Will in the previous thread, I viewed a couple of example note-taking sessions available in YouTube.
The one by Andy Matushak was harder to digest mainly because it was a bare recording of his live stream, without any editing or voice-over. Much of his thought process was revealed through his editing on screen, which he mostly did silently. Unfortunately the letters are so small on the screen, and I couldn’t get much of it unless I watched the video thoroughly and closely on it. I might come back to this one later when I have motivation to stare closely at my computer screen for an extended period of time. Although I missed specifics, it was still interesting to see someone “struggling” to form thoughts and put down useful notes.
@ctietze ’s series of videos on perusing David Epstein’s Range were much more informative from the outset. I could listen to them most of the time and watch it on screen when following the detail of editing is necessary. Unlike Andy’s, Christian edited and added voice-over to his videos. That significantly improved its value as a demonstration of Zettelkasten.
It’s funny how Christian was cynical about U.S.-style self-help books the whole time. I agree that their information density is quite low, but there are often some knowledge to be gained even if limited and buried within tired, oft-repeated anecdotes. I wish to develop skills to just extract them without wasting time reading the rest. I’ve heard that style apparently strikes a chord with U.S. consumers, however; i.e., books following the format sell better. I wonder how the rest of the world does their fast-food/business-oriented style publication.
Christian’s demonstration of his method was useful—extracting points, meticulously citing references, creating links, creating bibliography entries of original academic papers, trying to quote the original sources instead of taking them at face value, etc. It’s all basic stuff but still takes a lot of time, energy, and effort when done properly, as he demonstrated. The result appears to be worth it. A decent knowledge graph, even though only its portion was shown. I could see a lot of reusability in what he created within his larger Zettelkasten.
In some sense, the demonstration posed me a conundrum as well. Here, Christian was gruntling about the book itself, but expended much effort to create useful, meaningful notes out of it. Even though he was not so convinced by the thesis the book presented, the overall gain was still positive.
There is only so much time to read books, and you will waste a lot of time unless you choose them wisely. Creating notes of good value is even more time-consuming. I’ve been wanting to pick books more wisely, but my random curiosity tends to go wide and shallow instead of narrow and deep. With a stack of highlights and notes dumped from my Kindle waiting to be “progressively summarized,” I’m wondering how I should go about it, or should I bother at all.
Anyway, my attempt to incorporate effective Zettelkasten into my intellectual workflow continues. Thanks all here for feeding me good foods for thoughts.
Choosing what to read is crucial. There are numerous strategies for this, and it's best to utilize more than one of them. Find a mentor, find a reading curator you trust, and read everything from a particular author. Some publishing imprints are better than others. Curate potential books; interview them as if they were new employees; check the TOC and the biography; and read the intro.
How do I deal with Kindle Notes and Highlights?
1. Some books are read, and then the notes are refactored.
2. Some books are refactored a chapter at a time. I don't return to reading until notes from previous chapters are refactored.
3. Notes and highlights are run through regex101: Kindle Notes, formatting them as quoted text and adding the appropriate cite key.
4. A new note is created with an inbox tag so I can keep track of those notes I'm currently refactoring.
5. As the note is refactored, I use a breadcrumb/marker to keep track of how far I get in each refactoring session.
6. Once I've refactored the entire set of Notes and Highlights, I then think about splitting it up and linking it.
7. Start round two at step 5.
I recommend thinking about the refactoring process when highlighting something or making a note. Each highlight or note will be something you will have to refactor and integrate later, so learn to be selective. Avoid highlighting everything you think is interesting. Going after ideas you envision will provide benefits, as well as ideas you want to explore.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. 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
Happy to have settled on Bear and simply using tags in place of the context setup of features and plugins I used to use in Obsidian. I am now mostly catching up with unprocessed content, especially fleeting bits of journals that I intend to Zettel.
I am still struggling a bit with that part of the method, distilling Zettel-worthy content from inarticulate thought, but I wager it's just a matter of sitting down for 1h and designing what goes where (especially where to store "incubating" material).
I am also idly reading Bob Doto's A System for Writing but having read most of his important articles on his blog and knowing what I want out of my system, I'm mostly treading known content at this point.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Bear + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
I've learned to gain knowledge even from sources that are mediocre, questionable or low quality in general :-)
In these cases, I don't capture the "truth" of the source, but what sparkles in my mind after I've read it. Protest, perplexity can be driven to activate our thoughts, they push to argument our position, for example.
I've cited my last personal episode some days ago. From a very poor crytical analysis about the success of Taylor Swift (silly critic about a silly subject :-) ), I haven't taken the arguments of the critic, but how we shouldn't not do a critical analysis
I think that when our minds actively work, something valuable emerges at the end of the process.
This is a great point to keep in mind. And I guess that’s how we create meaningful notes for ourselves. Even when creating literature notes, we don’t have to have a mindset that they should be a sort of summary to “literally” understand and take notes of the author’s points to keep them around for potential later use. Engagement or potential of it should guide me work on those to-be structured notes from my past readings of mediocre materials. I shouldn’t be making CliffsNotes.
I do have a habit of following sources whom I “trust” to have decent book recommendations. The issue, I think, is that over time, they just accumulate and become impossible to sort out. This is basically endless, as each good work almost always derives from quite a few other decent pieces of work. You eventually figure out what they deem “classics” or “seminal work,” but there still are many of those.
That leads me to another personal project to figure out the way to use Zettelkasten for prioritizing my reading. As in collaborative filtering used in product recommendations in various web sites, I’d like to figure out if there is a way to “surface” materials relevant to your current query:
“Hey, with the current note(s) you are looking at, we have such and such related books and web articles in Zettelkasten, though we only have their references/citekeys and not literature notes and all…”
Eventually I want to work on effective organization of my notes to make this kind of thing possible. It doesn’t seem very simple, though.
I do something roughly similar with my Kindle notes and highlights. I first use this JavaScript snippet:
https://github.com/TristanH/bookcision
to export them as JSON dump. Then, as I use Emacs/Org Mode for my PKM, I run my own conversion script to generate a scaffolding for my literature notes in the Org format:
https://github.com/okomestudio/orgutils
(It’s still for personal use, so I haven’t put much effort in making it available for a wider use.)
Though the process is a bit more cumbersome than using some other app that already has API integration, I’m reasonably happy as I can keep living within Emacs this way.
The suggestion of “don’t highlight anything and everything” is a good one, and I wish could be a more judicious highlighter. One thing that makes me overuse highlighting is that I often use audio (audiobooks, podcasts, etc.) alongside its text source, and in that case I often use highlights as if they are bookmarks, to remind myself to comeback to the points of interest later for perusing. It’s a tradeoff — I want to get some reading done while walking or doing something else, but I cannot really think or read deeply when reading is done with audio. I’ve done so much “reading” of this kind that I have a load of unprocessed “reading” notes.
Coming back to them and working on Zettels is fun, but sheer amount of it makes me wonder if I am just overloading myself. In some sense, I’m now trying to reduce fast food intake and rely more on home cooking.
That sounds like a valuable insight
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
I feel your pain. My to-read list has grown to contain hundreds of recommendations. I've given up sorting the list because of the opportunity costs. I try to annotate each recommendation with a source. When it comes time to choose a book to read, I gravitate to the most recent books on the list or some other title not even on the list that grabs my attention. The problem is that the list grows at a rate ten times faster than my reading speed.
We are discussing a tool for this on the thread— A System for Writing - Bibliographic Mapping — Zettelkasten Forum.
Here is another idea I've been thinking about. The reference manager, Zotero, could be useful in determining if a book or article was referenced in the ZK but has not yet been read. I have a habit of adding references to all the books and articles I refer to in my ZK into Zotero. I will look into whether there is a way to record whether I read the reference. I will have to be more vigilant about entering ALL books and articles I write about in my ZK into Zotero.
Stay calm and increment forward.
Like you, I found that I couldn't "really think or read deeply when reading is done with audio." So I gave up. I only listen to fiction, which I enjoy, but they usually don't contribute to my ZK. It is impossible to multitask when reading and note-taking. The same problem happens when processing a video, only in this case, you are stationary.
I value processed notes far more than unprocessed notes. This may be sacrilegious, but on occasion, I'll have an inbox slaughter. I'll cull a dozen or so of the oldest unprocessed notes and move on. I feel lighter, and it reenergizes me. Your mileage will vary. Yet another advantage of having an note inbox.
Is what you are talking about? It is my struggle, too. I want to find ways to sink into and be nourished by my zettelkasting. Reading, writing, and time management skills (in the broadest sense) form the path forward.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. 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:
Perhaps the best, most visible way to indicate reading status (read, in progress, etc.) in Zotero is by using colored tags, which appear next to the title in the list of publications.
In a previous discussion on "maintenance for reference management" (2021), I described a method that should work to find out which items in your reference manager are unused in your Zettelkasten, if you need that information. (I've never needed it.)
Thanks for the link to the forum thread. I’ve read with an interest and indeed, @Edmund is going in the right direction I think. I’d like to develop a personal work flow somewhat similar to his and contextualize the literature that I have already in my PKM…
From that thread, I’ve noticed that there already are services that offer “literature mapping” mainly for academic papers (e.g., app.litmaps.co and scite.ai). It’s not surprising those already exist and usable; after all academic papers are fully linked via bibliographic references and much of them already digitized.
I have actually wanted a (consumer) book version of this. Most of us non-academics don’t want and should not need to interact with knowledge at an academic level; that’s what academics are paid to do. Most lay people’s contact to knowledge is outside academic paywall, so more people would benefit from knowledge already available in the consumer market.
While ago, I thought about working on such a project myself, but I could not quite imagine that enough people would use it, and data curation needs Wikipedia-style collective effort, which is unreliable and asking too much. There is also a privacy element; most people hesitate to make public their second brain. Understandably, doing is so feels like you are exposing a vulnerable part (or whole) of your mind. Besides, platform owners can easily create a better service using the contents they own, so indie efforts didn’t seem worth it.
But I think that a literature mapping of a site like Five Books would be very interesting. How do their knowledge cluster? Which book would be most relevant to zoom in on the cluster of your interest? There, I see an improvement in how we could pick what to read next.
Yes, so for audio reading, I also try to pick materials for which deep reading is not necessary. But I often cannot resist picking more interesting books, as “reading while walking” is such a good way to get moderate exercise in and clear up my mind after too much work in front of computer, which is the sad reality when I get employed as a software person.
And now that we have useful transcription services for podcasts and even YouTube contents (I use Snipd), it has become much easier to create notes from audio contents. It’s good that I have an option to do this but not so good that I could get addicted to superficial consumption instead of slower, more meaningful digestion of fewer materials of more significance.
I responded to part of @zettelsan's last comment here, which seemed to be a more relevant place for it.
This week, I wrote down another dream (a fraction of what I remember) and some reconstructed doggerel pieces I posted elsewhere in the forum. After a few prompts, DALL-E produced a credible dream illustration.
Dream2024080322 The Recital
Last night, I dreamed about a Russian piano professor and his student playing a recital in an auditorium where I was in the audience. The student came out, bowed, sat at the piano, adjusted his seat, and then played the first few notes of an "Age of Steel," Prokofiev-like piece when the professor interrupted. "Stop! Stop! If you don't follow direction, don't play." The student sat for a minute, whined to his teacher that he wished to continue, and then began smashing key clusters at the right end of the keyboard. This time, the Academician allowed himself a fleeting, barely perceptible closed-mouth smile before scowling through the rest of the performance.
SEE ALSO
[[Dream2024052701]] Authoritarian Party
#dream #russian-conservatory #madman
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego (1st-order): Erel Dogg. Alter egos of Erel Dogg (2nd-order): Distracteur des Zettel, HueLED PacArt Lovecraft. I have no direct control over the 2nd-order alter egos. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Hi there,
This week I mainly struggled with concepts of Folgerzettel and heterorarchy.
I found that even using fz for my filenames I ended up creating category-like zettel on top-levels numbers and then dig it.
Thus I studied both posts here and Bob Doto blog posts and I'm trying to restructure my zk a bit.
It could appear I emphasize fz too much and don't use it the right way.
A bit lost but I will keep studing next week to sort out all of it.
Maybe I will revert filenames to simple words, maybe I will keep fz...
And I also filling my zk with stuff about soil structure and permaculture.
@jbz I find the main thing for Folgezettel is not to get hung up on structure or perfect placement. I use it as a way to force myself to find at least one link, and the somewhat branching file list it creates makes it easy. But in the end, I don't sweat where a note goes. What matters is that it goes somewhere in the system in a somewhat sensible place.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Bear + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
With some trepidation, and revision in real time, more nonsense.
Ode on a PDA
Composed in a quasi-Homeric light
Without the intervention of the Muse
To aid me in my o'er ambitious flight--
A tumbling Icarus--while it pursues
Things better left unsaid in prose or rhyme.
The obstacle, it pains me to recall:
Akrasia, my unsuccessful struggle
To master Time, no longer in its Thrall.
The answer eluded all reflection
Why previous attempts had come to naught—
To do not what I felt but what I Ought—
To live a life of Action, not of Thought!
So pondering, I paced, 'till it occurred
To wander to a CompUSA store!
Locked behind enclosed glass on the First Floor:
A Personal Digital Assistant!
To organize my time once unconstrained!
Imposing Order where but Chaos reigned!
The salesgirl tried to pitch a service plan
That cost me more than I could well afford.
"The unit, nothing more," I volunteered.
"You're making a mistake to spend so much
But not insure your PALM—have you lost touch?
And what about accessories?" she pushed.
"The unit, nothing more," I stood my ground.
She tried again to see if I'd back down:
"One day, you'll drop it! Life and records smashed
Beyond repair, no recourse, all hope dashed—
You have no choice: insurance or despair!"
Resolved, I let an awkward silence play:
"I'll self-insure!" The salesgirl turned away.
SEE ALSO
[[Silly202408011009]] Splashdown
[[LOST202407080750]] Lost and not found
#doggerel #poems-lost-and-reconstructed
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego (1st-order): Erel Dogg. Alter egos of Erel Dogg (2nd-order): Distracteur des Zettel, HueLED PacArt Lovecraft. I have no direct control over the 2nd-order alter egos. CC BY-SA 4.0.