How would you present your Zettelkasten to others?
Hello!
I have my Zettelkasten public on my blog and I'm not happy with how I present it to the public. I publish all my permanent notes (except Bibliographical ones) as they are, including links to each other and the whole slip box index.
However, I keep thinking what would be the best way to present a Zettelkasten to others, thinking from an information architecture perspective. How can I help others navigate my Zettelkasten without too much introduction in a self-service way?
I know how I use my Zettelkasten, but that doesn't necessarily mean that others will understand right away. I also don't want to change how I use it. It's tailored to me, and I think it should stay that way.
I want to change how I present these notes so that others can navigate within the Zettelkasten more easily. Has anyone thought about it before?
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
I wonder what you could meaningfully do here. Imagine you keep this for 10 years. Thousands of notes later, navigation will become harder and harder.
How do we deal with an editable ZK on our computers? With structures, and entry points.
Alphabetical lists of notes, and tag lists, too, break down. Curated structures as views into the vastness of your knowledge graph will work.
So if you actually just render your ZK directly, I would try to
Publish regularly. The index will be a snapshot of what you're working on.
The index then will change, of course. At least with this, you'll have a way to tell readers what you're working on now.
What else can you do? Maybe archive the contents of the index so that you feed a curated, structured index or table of contents. You can't show everything, of course, otherwise you, well, would show everything and not provide any helpful abstraction or condensed navigation. You need omission and reduction in order to get to a higher-level point of view, which you personally will make use of as your notes grow and grow, and especially people who are not you will need to make sense of anything they see at all.
A visitor to your website will have all of your problems navigating, but x1000.
If you need to search for something that you know exists, and find what you searched for, consider making an overview of sorts for this. A structure note. You could search again later and re-re-re-discover what you already have, but visitors to your website can't, and they have no clue what you might have.
It's the septic tank metaphor again, but even more pronounced: where in your Zettelkasten, less-used (or actually useless) stuff just falls to the ground and the good stuff stays 'on top', visitors will only ever see parts of the very topmost layer.
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
It is not an easy problem to front.
I've developed some thoughts about the idea of a "Public Zettelkasten" or even a "Shared Zettelkasten" in the past. All theoretical, anyway, no practice, no experience on trying.
I think there are few issue to manage.
Not only information architecture, but at least there are
Zettelkasten is a "personal thing" by definition, exposing it to public so that it can be useful to others can need a design focused on usability, that is to say needs of external users.
Almost by definition or convention, at least for a "typical" zettelkasten, what tipically other people receive from a zettelkasten author is an output derived from the zettelkasten, written according to the requirements of usability, rather than the zettelkasten core directly. And how is made the output depends on the type of your user target, too.
The good or bad result of the publishing depends on your purpose, too, do you want to provide others a zettelkasten example, a reference, or a real knowledge transfer about some knowledge field?
The result and the work needed to improve it depends on how much notes themselves are already "descriptive", (or "explanatory", better) when read by others, too.
If I think my zettelkasten read by others, it is very very messy, sometimes inconsistent, even contradictory. It contains notes that I'd discard, too. Many notes are not complete on itself, and my notes in general doesn't capture all the "mental context" that make the notes useful. I have many notes that for me are meaningful, others surely consider them very "anemic". Much of the meaning that notes have for me is "not written" into the note, it is the symbiosis between me and the note that forms the value. I think that the inability to express the whole context of our thought and the whole value that the notes have for us, if the zettelkasten is not designed for publishing purpose in mind from the beginning, make the Zettelkasten difficult to transfer to others.
I can't expect a note of mine, as I usually write it, to give another person what it gives me
If I have the purpose of transferring knowledge to others, I think that zettels of my zettelkasten need to be "thicker" in context and meaning.
For the information architecture there is a similar issue, our zettelkasten is tailored around our mental model that can be different from others and many dynamics are implicit and not expressed by notes; I often don't follow navigation tools provided by my notes but I bypass them according to my memory, and I always know where I am, more or less, I always have into my mind many maps of my Zettelkasten. Another user doesn't have this implicit support.
So, maybe there is need of more supportive organizational structure that makes explicit what is implicit.
For example Structure Notes that act like "maps or compass" of the knowledge I've developed.
I think that I would need to add many "public-friendly zettels" that support the use of the other zettels. Some "entry points", maybe.
Or maybe I have to write my zettels similar to "wikipedia notes", maybe, more descriptive and self-explanatory and with a more curated linking.
I think, anyway, the best thing is to submit your work to someone and see if this person gets something out of your zettelkasten.
Before any initiative, it is probably better to collect an assessment.
I think that many ideas about having a public zettelkasten can be mutuated by Wikipedia world and Digital Garden World. They are public model by definition.
I can think about two well know examples of zettelkasten that today are public and pretty known, Luhman Zettelkasten and Matushack notes. I haven' t read luhman notes, I can't say how is understable and browsable such stuff. I've read many times matushack work and it is as useful as hard to grasp at start :-).
But they have been very useful fo others, so even if a zettelkasten is not friendly to use it doesn't mean that it is useless.
I'll take a look at your zettelkasten, maybe browsing it will give me some ideas. Maybe is rather usable even doing nothing :-)
Perhaps, one way is to give up on the idea of creating reader-friendly Zettelkasten, the reader here being people but yourself. The effort won’t be worth it.
Another way is to think of the output using your Zettelkasten to be the presentation of how Zettelkasten enabled your writing. Say, if you write a blog article using your Zettelkasten. You have used a subset of your Zettelkasten, each note contributing to a part in your writing. Why not show your Zettelkasten notes (or references to them) along side the article itself? Rather than showing your Zettelkasten in its entirety, much of which may be intractable out of your personal context, this demonstrates how your creativity materializes through Zettelkasten. This is an idea that came up to me after seeing how Bob Doto in his /A System for Writing/ book suggested to keep a “Used in” reference for each note.
Or, I would actually be okay for someone else’s Zettelkasten to be not user-friendly. It’s a personal note, after all. But I would like the capability to perform full-text search or to have a book-like index mapping terms/concepts to the IDs of notes in which they exist. So long as I can get to a starting point somewhere in the network, I should be able to explore and expand on my own. You don’t have to spoon-feed me. It’s your notes, after all.
I actually like using the “unlinked reference” feature in my system. This is basically the (rip)grep command scanning all notes for search term and surfaces connections that are not explicitly made through hyperlinks. It’s a fun way of serendipitous discovery on my own notes. It would be just as useful on someone else’s notes. Maybe we should consider full-text search engines to be a standard part of note-taking systems, especially for public-facing ones.
Beeing more practical than in my post above.
Trying to have an improved information architecture with a feasible effort, I think that creating structure notes as maps that represent "curated views" of selected notes over your Zettelkasten can be a good thing.
Your users can use these notes as guided maps, as overviews, as "where I am/where I can go" support into your space of notes.
Into a Zettelkasten written by others I'd like to have something like this.
into my Zettelkasten I already have many notes like these maps because I consider it useful for me, too. If you develop the habit of building structure notes (or map of contents, or the same thing that is defined in many different ways) in an emergent way that cover the space of note you have a good information architecture for free.
Maybe it is the same advice of @ctietze , if I understood correctly
@candost, the presentation on your website is in-depth and bold, and works better than you think. I found the structure intuitive as someone familiar with the Zettelkasten method, but newcomers won’t always have that context. Adding a link that appears on the header or footer of every zettel, like: "If you're new to the Zettelkasten note-taking method, check this out." (Link to your note "1a: How Zettelkasten Method Works"). It will go a long way in preventing confusion.
Move the search bar, which is buried under "More," to a front-and-center position. It’ll reduce the cognitive load for new users and make your structure more approachable.
Consider tagging major clusters or themes — leadership, software engineering, philosophy, psychology, software architecture and design, urban and industrial design, exercising, finance, Formula 1 racing, and eating healthy. This gives your fans an entry point that isn’t just the index or raw links.
Beyond the UX, some people will understand what you do, and some will not. Don't worry about the ones who don't. Make notes like nobody is watching, and you'll attract passionate people who share your ideas. Paraphrasing Kevin Kelly: forget trying to appeal to everyone. You only need 1,000 true fans. Build it for them. I'm a fan because it’s rare to see someone think so structurally and write so freely. Consider the post a fan letter.
Will Simpson
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
Wow. Thank you, everyone, for all the recommendations, suggestions, and ideas. I deeply appreciate you all taking the time to share your thoughts.
I understand that the Zettelkasten is private, and making it public will require a different setup. I already acknowledge that. Also, I don't think zettelkasten needs to be private.
What I was thinking is that, ideally, each note has one and only one idea, and they should be written in a way that you can merge with others and don't need a lot of editing, and you can publish.
I am also struggling to bring ideas out of my zettelkasten and develop blog posts. I'm rarely succeeding in that. I had a few posts but I wrote the majority of the posts independently from Zettelkasten. That's something I'm still struggling and want to learn how I can leverage zettelkasten to write my blog articles.
That's why I made them public, because I knew I would force myself to find a better structure to use Zettelkasten.
That's what I was also thinking. I need to learn how to use index notes better and make new index pages for certain topics.
My main problem is that I often have more than one thing I'm focused on. I have a lot of draft articles I'm writing and topics I'm learning. Most likely, I have the other problem that I need to solve first: focus on one thing at a time. Then this might work.
I think I'm leaning toward more like matushack notes. I discovered this whole world with Andy and after years, it still looks like a great idea to me
I am not sure if I clearly expressed myself in my first message. I don't want to learn how I can give up on the idea of creating a reader-friendly Zettelkasten. Quite contrary, I want to think about how it can be done in a better way than I do today. I already consider myself the reader of my blog as a whole. I write for myself first. But still, if 1000 are visiting the website, I would love them to see how much effort I put into learning a topic and how all things are connected and let them get lost in reading one note after another, jumping into different realms.
This is a good idea. I'll think about it and will probably add it. Thank you!
This is also a good suggestion. I'm thinking about changing the whole navigation but I need more consideration of what I want to put up front.
If I find 10 true fans that I can debate ideas and chat, that's already a win for me
If that is how you work and move forward, could be that "just focusing on 1 thing" is not in the cards, and that showing the messiness of the corner you work from is part of embracing to work in public.
Somewhat related pictures of computer game development legends for inspiration:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@georgebsocial/114470304307399749
If appreciation for your effort is a motivator (which is fair!), then also try to show the mass of everything? Maybe render a graph of the network? That usually looks impressive, or at least interesting. Doesn't help with reading much, usually, but that's not goal for this tool.
Can't recommend Luhmann as an example -- the stuff wasn't designed to be read, while Andy essentially does micro-publications, with a reader in mind. (Or did, I heard he moved thinking-in-public to Patreon letters, partly to reduce maintenance burden.)
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
Thanks for sharing your ZK. I did not realize until a second look that your index is arranged by tags. Very interesting. I think it would be cool to be able to toggle between a pure alphabetized keyword list and one that is grouped by tag. Very cool. Thanks.
@candost Nice job on your Zettelkasten! It looks like your index is simply a list of all your tags and that your tags are quite specific. Is that correct (I don't actually see your tags in your zettels, but that may be a function of what you are showing on your web site)?
I have adopted a similar approach in my ZK.