I agree this is a powerful approach to focus one's reading for capture of what is important. When studying my past zettels for the purpose of connecting one to others, I notice that many are about "concepts" or "ideas". These often contain more than one of your 6 elements. For instance, one of my zettels could include one or more metaphors plus an argument and a counterargument. I notice the concept, then only later recognize the elements within it. In that sense, could not "concept" be a sort of container for more than one of the elements in your list? Or, does this imply that my zettels are not sufficiently "atomized"?
Thanks Sascha for an excellent primer on the internal machinations of our favorite machines beyond the usual focus on the storage/memory and indexing portions of the process.
Said another way, a zettelkasten is part of a formal logic machine/process. Or alternately, as Markus Krajewski aptly demonstrates in Paper Machines (MIT Press, 2011), they are early analog storage devices in which the thinking and logic operations are done cerebrally (by way of direct analogy to brain and hand:manually) and subsequently noted down which thereby makes them computers.
Just as mathematicians try to break down and define discrete primitives or building blocks upon which they can then perform operations to come up with new results, one tries to find and develop the most interesting "atomic notes" from various sources which they can place into their zettelkasten in hopes of operating on them (usually by juxtaposition, negation, union, etc.) to derive, find, and prove new insights. If done well, these newly discovered ideas can be put back into the machine as inputs to create additional newer and more complex outputs continuously. While the complexity of Lie Algebras is glorious and seems magical, it obviously helps to first understand the base level logic before one builds up to it. The same holds true of zettelkasten.
Now if I could only get the printf portion to work the way I want...
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. —Umberto Eco
@chrisaldrich You can't drop "Lie Algebra" like that!!1 -- I don't see the connection you imply from skimming the Wikipedia entry and now I'm curious: what kind of connection did you have in mind there?
which they can place into their zettelkasten in hopes of operating on them (usually by juxtaposition, negation, union, etc.) to derive, find, and prove new insights.
Don't read too much into it. The Lie Algebra reference was just a surface level analogy as I don't expect anyone here to have any experience in the topic beyond knowing that it's a complex and beautiful area of mathematical theory. As you may know it's got some powerful and interesting results, but it's a difficult subject to even begin delving into as it requires a reasonably high level understanding of the areas of analysis, complex analysis, abstract algebras, topology, matrix theory and linear operators. All of these may take several years of graduate study before you can begin to dip your toes into the complexities of Lie Algebras. I think that most are still just trying to get some of the basics of zettelkasten much less the deeper implications it may have. Perhaps one day we'll run across the Sophus Lie or Évariste Galois of the advanced zettelkasten space? Or maybe the Langlands-Zettelkasten program?!
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. —Umberto Eco
@Mauro said:
Has your view remained the same eight years after publishing this article, or have you added more types in your reading workflow? @Sascha
No, I didn't add any knowledge building block. If you think about these building blocks as atoms, I am discovering subatomic particles and working on their implications (something like difference, extension vs intension, epistemic entity vs ontological entity, completeness).
Ironically, I don't have worked on an analytical proof of completeness (proof needs to be read with caution!) for this collection, since I don't have settled on a model that allows for a completeness test.
Test for completeness: Think of such a test as using a model that has theoretical completeness built in. For example: Viewed from the side, your shoulder has theoretically 360° of rotation (IN THEORY.... ). Each upper body gymnastic exercise can be located on this imaginary circle. Based on this model, you can make a judgment of the completeness of your theory on the (gymnastic) upper body basics. If you have additional evidence for the priority weight of each section of the circle, you can make stronger statements.
This is how I reverse engineered the upper body basics presented by Ido Portal in a deliberately cryptical series of videos:
This is just of the many examples on how to make ontology practical.
Just following up on a comment in your more recent article on the Principle of Atomicity, I came back to this earlier article on the six types of knowledge building blocks.
I have another type of building block in mind. I'm not sure if it is a new building block or if it fits into your existing categories. It comes from my attempt, over the past few years, to write a personal history containing ancedotes or experiences, usually with a lesson or message.
For example, I recall an experience when I was about 10 years old, hiking alone up a mountain on a hot summer day. As I climbed out of the forest onto the upper rock slope, I was surrounded by scrub oak trees and patchy grasses. I sat for a rest on a large boulder. Closing my eyes, I sank into the flow of the moment - my slowing breathing and heart rate, the sun and wind on my face, the insects buzzing around me, and the deep quiet. It became a contemplative, almost meditative, moment (although I didn't know what meditation was, at that age). Many times in my life I have recalled and even re-imagined that experience. It always brings certain feelings but also new ideas.
I don't want to get into the experience (or the lessons learned); I simply want to ask this question: do you consider this experience and related thoughts/feelings a knowledge building block? It doesn't seem to fit into any of the types you mentioned, at least not without some "pushing", and when writing them, I have had a hard time trying to atomize them further, in any meaningful way.
I don't want to get into the experience (or the lessons learned); I simply want to ask this question: do you consider this experience and related thoughts/feelings a knowledge building block? It doesn't seem to fit into any of the types you mentioned, at least not without some "pushing", and when writing them, I have had a hard time trying to atomize them further, in any meaningful way.
A few months ago, I said: "often I write notes that simply describe my experiences that I think are important. A helpful concept here is the concept of modes of discourse that I mentioned last June. Sometimes we write in different modes such as description, narration, and argumentation."
This is an explicit note type in my note system: "experiences" or more precisely "description of experience" or "first-person experiential description".
@Andy Thanks for those comments and the links. Your practice of having a note type of "experiences" fits well with what I have been doing in the personal history portion of my Zettelkasten.
Just following up on a comment in your more recent article on the Principle of Atomicity, I came back to this earlier article on the six types of knowledge building blocks.
I have another type of building block in mind. I'm not sure if it is a new building block or if it fits into your existing categories. It comes from my attempt, over the past few years, to write a personal history containing ancedotes or experiences, usually with a lesson or message.
For example, I recall an experience when I was about 10 years old, hiking alone up a mountain on a hot summer day. As I climbed out of the forest onto the upper rock slope, I was surrounded by scrub oak trees and patchy grasses. I sat for a rest on a large boulder. Closing my eyes, I sank into the flow of the moment - my slowing breathing and heart rate, the sun and wind on my face, the insects buzzing around me, and the deep quiet. It became a contemplative, almost meditative, moment (although I didn't know what meditation was, at that age). Many times in my life I have recalled and even re-imagined that experience. It always brings certain feelings but also new ideas.
I don't want to get into the experience (or the lessons learned); I simply want to ask this question: do you consider this experience and related thoughts/feelings a knowledge building block? It doesn't seem to fit into any of the types you mentioned, at least not without some "pushing", and when writing them, I have had a hard time trying to atomize them further, in any meaningful way.
This would be what I call in this article a "fact". However, the article is a bit dated. The inventory still holds, but it has been modified. I now call this an empirical observation.
According to this inventory, you'd capture the atom by capturing the content of the experience and the way you gained this experience.
This experience would be a lot of fun to capture, since there is no end to the richness of both the content of the experience and how you gained it. And just reflecting on both the difference and the interconnectedness would bring a lot of insights to this experience. Another layer would be the experience of remembering it. The total experience would be the content and how you remember it, and the experience of remembering it is in itself worthy of a reflective note.
So, in a way, the note would be an "experience note", which falls under the category of "empirical observation", which I called "fact" back then.
Reading for the Zettelkasten Is Searching
Comments
Do you tag zettels by the type of information they have in them? Or at intra-textual tags?
Dear physicians, please...
It's physicists
Haha. @ctietze
I am a Zettler
Fixed
Thanks!
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
I agree this is a powerful approach to focus one's reading for capture of what is important. When studying my past zettels for the purpose of connecting one to others, I notice that many are about "concepts" or "ideas". These often contain more than one of your 6 elements. For instance, one of my zettels could include one or more metaphors plus an argument and a counterargument. I notice the concept, then only later recognize the elements within it. In that sense, could not "concept" be a sort of container for more than one of the elements in your list? Or, does this imply that my zettels are not sufficiently "atomized"?
Thanks Sascha for an excellent primer on the internal machinations of our favorite machines beyond the usual focus on the storage/memory and indexing portions of the process.
Said another way, a zettelkasten is part of a formal logic machine/process. Or alternately, as Markus Krajewski aptly demonstrates in Paper Machines (MIT Press, 2011), they are early analog storage devices in which the thinking and logic operations are done cerebrally (by way of direct analogy to brain and hand:manually) and subsequently noted down which thereby makes them computers.
Just as mathematicians try to break down and define discrete primitives or building blocks upon which they can then perform operations to come up with new results, one tries to find and develop the most interesting "atomic notes" from various sources which they can place into their zettelkasten in hopes of operating on them (usually by juxtaposition, negation, union, etc.) to derive, find, and prove new insights. If done well, these newly discovered ideas can be put back into the machine as inputs to create additional newer and more complex outputs continuously. While the complexity of Lie Algebras is glorious and seems magical, it obviously helps to first understand the base level logic before one builds up to it. The same holds true of zettelkasten.
Now if I could only get the
printfportion to work the way I want...website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
@chrisaldrich You can't drop "Lie Algebra" like that!!1
-- I don't see the connection you imply from skimming the Wikipedia entry and now I'm curious: what kind of connection did you have in mind there?
Your enumeration of basic operations spawned a couple of new ideas for my recent atomicity explanation project:
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2646/more-programmer-nonsense-re-atomicity-writing-and-thinking
Thanks!
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
Don't read too much into it. The Lie Algebra reference was just a surface level analogy as I don't expect anyone here to have any experience in the topic beyond knowing that it's a complex and beautiful area of mathematical theory. As you may know it's got some powerful and interesting results, but it's a difficult subject to even begin delving into as it requires a reasonably high level understanding of the areas of analysis, complex analysis, abstract algebras, topology, matrix theory and linear operators. All of these may take several years of graduate study before you can begin to dip your toes into the complexities of Lie Algebras. I think that most are still just trying to get some of the basics of zettelkasten much less the deeper implications it may have. Perhaps one day we'll run across the Sophus Lie or Évariste Galois of the advanced zettelkasten space? Or maybe the Langlands-Zettelkasten program?!
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
Has your view remained the same eight years after publishing this article, or have you added more types in your reading workflow? @Sascha
For me they are "content types".
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
No, I didn't add any knowledge building block. If you think about these building blocks as atoms, I am discovering subatomic particles and working on their implications (something like difference, extension vs intension, epistemic entity vs ontological entity, completeness).
Ironically, I don't have worked on an analytical proof of completeness (proof needs to be read with caution!) for this collection, since I don't have settled on a model that allows for a completeness test.
Test for completeness: Think of such a test as using a model that has theoretical completeness built in. For example: Viewed from the side, your shoulder has theoretically 360° of rotation (IN THEORY....
). Each upper body gymnastic exercise can be located on this imaginary circle. Based on this model, you can make a judgment of the completeness of your theory on the (gymnastic) upper body basics. If you have additional evidence for the priority weight of each section of the circle, you can make stronger statements.
This is how I reverse engineered the upper body basics presented by Ido Portal in a deliberately cryptical series of videos:
This is just of the many examples on how to make ontology practical.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha
Just following up on a comment in your more recent article on the Principle of Atomicity, I came back to this earlier article on the six types of knowledge building blocks.
I have another type of building block in mind. I'm not sure if it is a new building block or if it fits into your existing categories. It comes from my attempt, over the past few years, to write a personal history containing ancedotes or experiences, usually with a lesson or message.
For example, I recall an experience when I was about 10 years old, hiking alone up a mountain on a hot summer day. As I climbed out of the forest onto the upper rock slope, I was surrounded by scrub oak trees and patchy grasses. I sat for a rest on a large boulder. Closing my eyes, I sank into the flow of the moment - my slowing breathing and heart rate, the sun and wind on my face, the insects buzzing around me, and the deep quiet. It became a contemplative, almost meditative, moment (although I didn't know what meditation was, at that age). Many times in my life I have recalled and even re-imagined that experience. It always brings certain feelings but also new ideas.
I don't want to get into the experience (or the lessons learned); I simply want to ask this question: do you consider this experience and related thoughts/feelings a knowledge building block? It doesn't seem to fit into any of the types you mentioned, at least not without some "pushing", and when writing them, I have had a hard time trying to atomize them further, in any meaningful way.
@GeoEng51 said:
A few months ago, I said: "often I write notes that simply describe my experiences that I think are important. A helpful concept here is the concept of modes of discourse that I mentioned last June. Sometimes we write in different modes such as description, narration, and argumentation."
This is an explicit note type in my note system: "experiences" or more precisely "description of experience" or "first-person experiential description".
@Andy Thanks for those comments and the links. Your practice of having a note type of "experiences" fits well with what I have been doing in the personal history portion of my Zettelkasten.
This would be what I call in this article a "fact". However, the article is a bit dated. The inventory still holds, but it has been modified. I now call this an empirical observation.
According to this inventory, you'd capture the atom by capturing the content of the experience and the way you gained this experience.
This experience would be a lot of fun to capture, since there is no end to the richness of both the content of the experience and how you gained it. And just reflecting on both the difference and the interconnectedness would bring a lot of insights to this experience. Another layer would be the experience of remembering it. The total experience would be the content and how you remember it, and the experience of remembering it is in itself worthy of a reflective note.
So, in a way, the note would be an "experience note", which falls under the category of "empirical observation", which I called "fact" back then.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha Thanks for those additional comments - fits well with what I have adopted in my Zettelkasten.