Findability, Searching, and Creativity
In a comment on another thread,
@Edmund said:
Where I'd push back: the distinction I'm drawing is about how meaning is generated, not how things are found. Findability is a separate problem, and collapsing the two loses something important.
I'm not too sure what "meaning is generated" indicates here, so I will take the liberty of interpreting it as "creativity", or something in that neighborhood. I don't say that findability, or more generally search, is everything but I think they are often closely connected. I would like to present an experience of mine that illustrates why I think that.
Long ago, before computers, when card catalogues contained actual cardboard cards, I wanted to find out better ways to bind thick reports at work. No one at work seemed to know. I went to my local library branch and looked through the card catalog until I found a compound term that seemed to fit. I don't remember what it was any more.
I went to the indicated shelf in the stacks and found some works but none of them helped to solve my problem. But wait! What's this? In the same shelf, over at the right, I spotted a book on hand bookbinding. It was a charming little book with good line drawings of the type I especially appreciate. I'm a book lover but I had never heard of hand bookbinding. There were other books on the subject too.
I checked out the book and read it over. There were a few project types that I could actually use and seemed to be easy enough. And overall, even more complex projects seemed possible without much in the way of special tools.
This was the start of a major hobby that I enjoyed for many years. Naturally this led to some reading about old techniques, learning about different papers and endpaper marbling, and eventually calligraphy, which also became a good hobby. I made some of my own tools. I even figured out how to replace the nib of a cheap fountain pen and replace it with a working goose quill point (very touchy to do and not very repeatable!).
So here was a search failure that led me directly to a whole series of creative craft interests and historical learning. It was made possible because of the "objective" (a library science concept) of "collocation", of putting similar things close together. It was a much better outcome than if I had simply found exactly what I thought I was looking for.
This experience, and others like it if not as dramatic, made me understand that search, creativity, and stimulation of new ideas can be closely connected. In turn, I have tried to design my own Zettelkasten implementation to help surface potential similarities during searches.
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@tomp, your subsequent interest in hand bookbinding, etc., as a hobby seems to be very dependent on your personal characteristics. What made all of that interesting to you, whereas someone else could have gone to the library searching for "better ways to bind thick reports at work" and walked away empty-handed, personally unchanged from that visit to the library? One personal characteristic that comes to mind is curiosity.
I do think that curiosity is a big factor. The experience is also precisely an instance of what Luhmann wrote of:
Another day and I might have been more focused, and never noticed the bookbinding area of the shelves.
I think one can train oneself to be more open to this kind of experience, even on a simple search for a fact or idea. I have also experienced that while I am writing, developing a paper for example, I notice new ideas and connections that are not related to the subject of the writing.
I explored these ideas by creating an imaginary scenario, and then found I reacted to it as if it were real. I devised it while I was thinking how with some writers, their footnotes can be more interesting than the book itself. I invented a footnote, and then... Here is what I wrote in my z-card:
"Simulated by an imaginary footnote
"The characters of Sally and Martin, in chapter four, keep circling each other in a curiously formal way, with modifications at every turn. It has been overlooked before but their actions mimic very closely the courtship ritual of the peacock."
My Reactions:
- Want to
- re-read the chapter because I never noticed this;
- read up on the peacock's courtship ritual to see if I agrees;
- read up on other animal courtship rituals to see if they might map even closer to the book's story;
New questions!
- have other books have incorporated (on purpose or otherwise) similar known mating rituals?
- how many other parts of books are drawn directly from animal behavior?
- how many stereotypic human activities appear to be that ritualistic?"
I have devised a few other scenarios like this, and they were fun and illuminating.
Most of the time when I run a search in my Zettelkasten, unless I have a very specific need, I feel like I am asking "What do we have on X?". The way my search panel presents the results is designed to let me get a good sense of this and make exploration easy, much like those physical library shelves. It's very easy for me to navigate to any of them to check it out.
In truth, I have a poor episodic memory and I need to be reminded of things frequently. Here's a search example for "system":
The boldface headings show a flattened version of the path to the hit(s). Each step of the path is clickable and will navigate me there. Of course, the Zettel hits themselves are clickable too.
You might notice that most of the path names seem provisional, and that's so. I've been generating a lot of thoughts and ideas to be explored later, and this is how I'm dealing with them. You may also notice that there isn't much consistency in the construction of the paths. That's all right because my system finds them for me anyway. I don't have to remember tags or keywords, I just have to recognize them when I see them.
I can visit any section of the outline by clicking on its link and all its z-cards will be there to see even if they didn't happen to match the search term.
The "Subject Matches" tab (not shown) shows search hits on the outline organizing labels, that is, on the subject terms rather than the z-cards. These terms are more or less equivalent to tags, so I get a search on tags for free.
@tomp your experience of finding the book binding text while searching for something entirely else is often called "serendipity". The way books are shelved in libraries helps to increase the chance that even if you don't find the thing you're looking for, along the way you might find other things of potential interest. Modern digital search often decreases this effect which was more common in the analog spaces of card catalogs and library books on shelves.
This experience is some of the unseen or elusive "magic" that Luhmann was referencing in his card “Geist im Kasten?” ZKII 9/8,3. You have to have the experience of searching for things and either finding or not finding them and running into entirely different ideas along the way to appreciate this sort of serendipity which is facilitated by physical zettelkasten practice. Otherwise it all seems very mundane. It's hard to see or demonstrate serendipity, and so people only see the papers and boxes and leave disappointed.
See also:
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
Yes, of course I know this. Shelving together, as well as using subject terms to reflect similarity or relatedness, are methods to create collocation. There are also synergy and syzygy. I'm interested in enhancing all three "S"s as best I can.
Actually, I have a z-card about it:
"The Zettelkasten Triad (Serendipity, Synergy, Syzygy)
:id: tom.20260317232754.1
:created: 2026-03-17 23:28
:seealso: tom.20260317173731.1 How Zettelkasten Work
:seealso: tom.20260311232848.1 Zettelkasten and the Five Levels Of Thinking Support
:seealso: tom.20260317233456.1 Zettelkasten And Surprise
:seealso: tom.20260318003715.1 Zettelkasten As A Game Of Trivial Pursuit
The holy triad of Zettelkasten creative support:
Serendipity - Find the unexpected.
Synergy - Feel the reinforcement.
Syzygy - Ride the resonance.
"
I don't mean to downplay the activities of developing arguments, working out theories, and writing support. Not at all. I just hope for more.
I still enjoy seeing a well-made card catalog, preferably wooden, even when it's no longer in use. I don't enjoy current electronic replacements. Nostalgia, I suppose.
I completely agree, and I hope that we can achieve some of that magic in our electronic systems too.
Luhmann wrote exactly that, of course, referring to disappointed visitors. I think there are many would-be Zettelkasten practitioners who drop out or move on because they don't feel they are getting the magic they were promised.
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