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Here is a picture of German author Arno Schmidt with his "Note box": https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140114arnoschmidttv3-jpg/9332150/

by ralfd 7y ago

Here is a picture of German author Arno Schmidt with his "Note box": https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140114arnoschmidttv3-jpg/9332150/2-format43.jpg https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140... Btw: He is regarded as an important author who is famously not read, as his magnus opus is even difficult to hold with a weight of 13 pounds: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seasons-biggest-novel-has-1-3-million-words-and-outweighs-a-bowling-ball-1474642359 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seasons-biggest-novel-has-1... And Niklas Luhmann himself explaining his Zettelkasten (the archive with 50000 notes beside his desk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFP5i_0ibE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFP5i_0ibE What he is explaining is not important, what I want to show is that it looks like utter (creative?) chaos for someone not Niklas Luhmann.

ttepasse 7y ago
Fun fact aside: Arno Schmidt's grandnephew is Dave Winer. We know Winer today more as the chief populariser of RSS but his life's idea is more in Outlining, organising your thoughts in nested lists and, since he's a programmer, coding in and on outline structures. If I remember correctly from his blog Winer and Schmidt never had much contact, language barrier and such, so it's more of a coincidence.