10 ms·

Zettelkasten has to be the least explained concept I've discovered online. Sure, they'll explain the _technique_ of it, but I've almost never seen any solid exa

Zettelkasten has to be the least explained concept I've discovered online. Sure, they'll explain the _technique_ of it, but I've almost never seen any solid examples of it in _use_. I was so excited when I first heard of it, but I'm a person that learns by seeing examples and I couldn't find any good ones anywhere. Does anyone have any good examples they've seen?

dredmorbius 7y ago
"Getting Started": https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/
- darkpicnic 7y ago
  Trust me, I've read every page of Zettlelkasten.de. It's a nice site (and I like their software) but there is no fleshed out examples that I've seen on it. Again, I get the concept, but I want to see examples in use.
  - flyingcroissant 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHwtkAtdkx1IZoI7FZf1X50qyzRnmw_Vy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHwtkAtdkx1IZoI7FZf1X...
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Could you clarify what specifically you have questions about, and/or what docs are perhaps slightly better (or worse). Or documentation for other concepts you've found useful? Regards Zettlekasten itself: the key notion to me is simply capture and reference. Those are the dual-natured heart of the system. The rest is just mechanics. Important mechanics, in cases, but mechanics all the same.
    - darkpicnic 7y ago
      Everything I’ve read on Zettelkasten has been the equivalent of trying to learn to program by reading a reference book. Sure, I could technically learn Python by reading an exhaustive list of methods, classes and operators, or I could pickup a book which explains key concepts through an example project and examines the syntax through a specific context. I learn best by example, personally, and I’ve never seen good examples on this topic myself.
      - no_identd 7y ago
        I think the point most guides overlook consists of the internal semantics of using a Zettelkasten, Luhmann essentially used it to create a paragraph (Zettel) & subchapter (Zettel Sequence, but note they of course sometimes he'd not manage to fit an entire paragraph on one Zettel due to margin limitations) branching & branchable, recursively self-referential choose your own adventure hypertextbook, from which he'd then generate regular textbooks. Hence why he said that his books basically wrote themselves — to write a book, he'd 'just' enter the Zettelkasten, and copy out everything he'd already written there on the topic, picking between branches & branchings as he went back, forth & side-to-side within it. Hence why if one looks close, one can find Luhmann seemingly self-plagiarising paragraphs from books he'd previously written. I suspect a similar mechanic sits behind the (in this sense very ignorant) accusations of self-plagiarism against Slavoj Zizek. As such, one might wish to instead consider using Hypertext Fiction tools for creating a Zettelkasten, such these two (proprietary software, Mac OS X only, unfortunately): http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/ http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/ Note that there exists an EXTREMELY useful plugin for Tinderbox which implements Stretchtext: https://natematias.com/stretchtext/ https://natematias.com/stretchtext/ Now gimme a combination of what roamresearch.com does with the above, but using the data structure of Hode: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode But with support for zzstructure like hyperthogonality: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/issues/11#issuecomment-344051368 https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/i... And secretly use the patching patches feature of pijul.org in the background so version control actually becomes sanely doable, throw in elastic tab stop support, and maybe an entire kitchensink in which someone let a mixture of ChrysaLisp, SmallTalk, Hazel, Scala 3, /r/nosyntax, Inferno, RINA, GNUnet, & every single proof assistant and theorem prover sit for a tad bit long, and then MAYBE we can stop living in the dark ages of computing. (Yes I'm bitter) P.S.: Identity Transclusion ≠ Instance Transclusion P.P.S.: Birth & Death of Javascript, anyone?
- Schlaefer 7y ago
  I sat in the same boat as OP and that page wasn't that helpful. It's starts backwards with - How many of things I know nothing about should I have. - Don't use this aspect in the thing, use the other. … And every article is a text wall of minutia addressing questions which are going to be relevant later on, but are just information overload if you try to understand What is it?
  - pfortuny 7y ago
    The page honestly reads like Hesse’s “description” of the glass-bead game: lots of things and no true explanation.
    - marvinblum 7y ago
      Thanks for your feedback, I'm still working on my writing skills :)
      - pfortuny 7y ago
        I was not trying to be snarky, it is just that one gets a feeling but no specifics.
coolswan 7y ago
Tbh, I haven't seen a real-life example that perfectly clones this method but I've adopted parts of the system that makes sense for my own workflow. I think that's how it should be approached. Luhmann developed this in a non-digital world after all.
- marvinblum 7y ago
  Yes I agree to this. It has some very nice concepts which can be adopted to a software solution, but he designed it for his personal use.
jboynyc 7y ago
I used to assign a short piece by Luhmann on how to read that describes his note-taking technique with some concrete examples. At the time I used my own translation (based on the text in Short Cuts published by Zweitausendeins), but I see somebody else has now translated (most of) it here: https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmann-on-learning-how-to-read.html https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmann-on-learni...
killjoywashere 7y ago
I’ve kept a personal wiki since about 2007 for my notes on medicine and pathology. The “structure discovery” function it enables is very similar to Zettelkasten. I would submit the affordances of physicality can’t be replicated in software without AR.
- talkingtab 7y ago
  I would like to understand why you think that, could you explain a bit why it cant be replicated?
  - killjoywashere 7y ago
    Don't read my drivel, there's an authoritative book on this: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office
jacobolus 7y ago
This kind of method used to be very common among scholars, before computers. You can probably still find some in use among retired professors who started their careers 60 years ago and already had a system in place when computers started to replace physical organization systems. Nowadays there are still many people who use digital equivalents.
rdiddly 7y ago
Any wiki is basically an example, isn't it? Or if I'm not quite ready to defend that statement, I can at least say, you could use (or maybe misuse) any wiki-builder to build a Zettelkasten. Just impose a length restriction on each page's content. But I don't know how much of the advantage of the Zettelkasten is tied to its being in the physical realm. On the one hand, the more physically rich an experience (of browsing or traversing or entering info for example), the more it will tend to stick in memory. On the other hand one of the things computers are good at is remembering indexes and linking them to other places where that index was mentioned.
baxtr 7y ago
I think the internet as such was thought of linked document, which comes very close to that concept
loudandskittish 7y ago
Here's an article by someone using a similar system where I think how it's actually used in practice is described pretty well: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/ https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-bo...
- sveng 7y ago
  That is interesting; here’s another from Ryan Holiday that goes deeper: https://forge.medium.com/the-incredible-creative-power-of-the-index-card-b799250033c9 https://forge.medium.com/the-incredible-creative-power-of-th...
chrisweekly 7y ago
I've had precisely your reaction, and am stoked to share my enthusiasm for Roam (https://roamresearch.com https://roamresearch.com) -- a graph-based system for codex / memex / personal knowledge-base / zettelkasten++
- chris_st 7y ago
  I'm trying to like it, but I keep running into bugs... and I haven't been able to find a point of contact on their web page to describe them. But, yeah, when it works it's very nice indeed.
  - chrisweekly 7y ago
    yeah it's super-early-days; they won't even take my money yet. import and export and mobile (and hopefully encryption at rest) are all coming
- tvanantwerp 7y ago
  I've recently started using Roam, and I'm really enjoying it so far. Probably the easiest information capture and reference tool I've used to date--it makes it very simple to get things down without slowing you down. Only major downside so far is no mobile app, but I know they are working on one.
- darkpicnic 7y ago
  I checked out Roam (thanks for the rec!) and though I REALLY love the concept, I'm a little nervous to keep a massive interconnected knowledge base with a SaaS. Currently, I use Devonthink and though it's not perfect, I'm just so relieved I can have data on my machine with the storage system I choose. I miss the days of software storing data on my computer or where I want. As a backend engineer, I just think: "Man, this data is just sitting in a db somewhere for any engineer to grep." Until we get to a point where everything is just encrypted by default, I just can't see myself trusting software like this.
learningerrday 7y ago
Gordon Brander's pattern wiki is probably the best contemporary example I can think of that implements the Zettelkasten pattern: http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/ http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/ I think part of what can make the concept hard to see in practice, is that it's both the Zettelkasten artifact, and your methodology for adding and linking concepts when you're learning
bloodm 7y ago
https://strengejacke.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/introduction-into-luhmanns-zettelkasten-thinking.pdf https://strengejacke.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/introductio...
Philipp0205 7y ago
Exactly the same thing happened to me. I was reading hours into this topic and nobody was able to explain this topic in a convenient way. I even read the German sourced. But there was one article standing out: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel... It is a wall of text too but the best explanation I've found yet.
slightwinder 7y ago
Have you looked at the original? Luhmann Original Zettelkasten was scannend and is online available. Though, it's all german. Tutorial: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhaltsuebersicht https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhalt... Zettel 1: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_1_NB_1_1_V https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...
keeprunning 7y ago
ha, yeah very muich in the same boat. been following some of the zettel blogs for years and have read an ungodly number of posts, but it still hasn't entirely clicked — that said, I've moved entirely to plain text for note-taking and it's been a godsend moving out of evernote.

dredmorbius 7y ago

"Getting Started": https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

darkpicnic 7y ago
Trust me, I've read every page of Zettlelkasten.de. It's a nice site (and I like their software) but there is no fleshed out examples that I've seen on it. Again, I get the concept, but I want to see examples in use.
- flyingcroissant 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHwtkAtdkx1IZoI7FZf1X50qyzRnmw_Vy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHwtkAtdkx1IZoI7FZf1X...
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Could you clarify what specifically you have questions about, and/or what docs are perhaps slightly better (or worse). Or documentation for other concepts you've found useful? Regards Zettlekasten itself: the key notion to me is simply capture and reference. Those are the dual-natured heart of the system. The rest is just mechanics. Important mechanics, in cases, but mechanics all the same.
  - darkpicnic 7y ago
    Everything I’ve read on Zettelkasten has been the equivalent of trying to learn to program by reading a reference book. Sure, I could technically learn Python by reading an exhaustive list of methods, classes and operators, or I could pickup a book which explains key concepts through an example project and examines the syntax through a specific context. I learn best by example, personally, and I’ve never seen good examples on this topic myself.
    - no_identd 7y ago
      I think the point most guides overlook consists of the internal semantics of using a Zettelkasten, Luhmann essentially used it to create a paragraph (Zettel) & subchapter (Zettel Sequence, but note they of course sometimes he'd not manage to fit an entire paragraph on one Zettel due to margin limitations) branching & branchable, recursively self-referential choose your own adventure hypertextbook, from which he'd then generate regular textbooks. Hence why he said that his books basically wrote themselves — to write a book, he'd 'just' enter the Zettelkasten, and copy out everything he'd already written there on the topic, picking between branches & branchings as he went back, forth & side-to-side within it. Hence why if one looks close, one can find Luhmann seemingly self-plagiarising paragraphs from books he'd previously written. I suspect a similar mechanic sits behind the (in this sense very ignorant) accusations of self-plagiarism against Slavoj Zizek. As such, one might wish to instead consider using Hypertext Fiction tools for creating a Zettelkasten, such these two (proprietary software, Mac OS X only, unfortunately): http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/ http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/ Note that there exists an EXTREMELY useful plugin for Tinderbox which implements Stretchtext: https://natematias.com/stretchtext/ https://natematias.com/stretchtext/ Now gimme a combination of what roamresearch.com does with the above, but using the data structure of Hode: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode But with support for zzstructure like hyperthogonality: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/issues/11#issuecomment-344051368 https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/i... And secretly use the patching patches feature of pijul.org in the background so version control actually becomes sanely doable, throw in elastic tab stop support, and maybe an entire kitchensink in which someone let a mixture of ChrysaLisp, SmallTalk, Hazel, Scala 3, /r/nosyntax, Inferno, RINA, GNUnet, & every single proof assistant and theorem prover sit for a tad bit long, and then MAYBE we can stop living in the dark ages of computing. (Yes I'm bitter) P.S.: Identity Transclusion ≠ Instance Transclusion P.P.S.: Birth & Death of Javascript, anyone?
Schlaefer 7y ago
I sat in the same boat as OP and that page wasn't that helpful. It's starts backwards with - How many of things I know nothing about should I have. - Don't use this aspect in the thing, use the other. … And every article is a text wall of minutia addressing questions which are going to be relevant later on, but are just information overload if you try to understand What is it?
- pfortuny 7y ago
  The page honestly reads like Hesse’s “description” of the glass-bead game: lots of things and no true explanation.
  - marvinblum 7y ago
    Thanks for your feedback, I'm still working on my writing skills :)
    - pfortuny 7y ago
      I was not trying to be snarky, it is just that one gets a feeling but no specifics.

coolswan 7y ago

Tbh, I haven't seen a real-life example that perfectly clones this method but I've adopted parts of the system that makes sense for my own workflow. I think that's how it should be approached. Luhmann developed this in a non-digital world after all.

marvinblum 7y ago
Yes I agree to this. It has some very nice concepts which can be adopted to a software solution, but he designed it for his personal use.

jboynyc 7y ago

I used to assign a short piece by Luhmann on how to read that describes his note-taking technique with some concrete examples. At the time I used my own translation (based on the text in Short Cuts published by Zweitausendeins), but I see somebody else has now translated (most of) it here: https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmann-on-learning-how-to-read.html https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmann-on-learni...

killjoywashere 7y ago

I’ve kept a personal wiki since about 2007 for my notes on medicine and pathology. The “structure discovery” function it enables is very similar to Zettelkasten. I would submit the affordances of physicality can’t be replicated in software without AR.

talkingtab 7y ago
I would like to understand why you think that, could you explain a bit why it cant be replicated?
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  Don't read my drivel, there's an authoritative book on this: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office

jacobolus 7y ago

This kind of method used to be very common among scholars, before computers. You can probably still find some in use among retired professors who started their careers 60 years ago and already had a system in place when computers started to replace physical organization systems. Nowadays there are still many people who use digital equivalents.

rdiddly 7y ago

Any wiki is basically an example, isn't it? Or if I'm not quite ready to defend that statement, I can at least say, you could use (or maybe misuse) any wiki-builder to build a Zettelkasten. Just impose a length restriction on each page's content. But I don't know how much of the advantage of the Zettelkasten is tied to its being in the physical realm. On the one hand, the more physically rich an experience (of browsing or traversing or entering info for example), the more it will tend to stick in memory. On the other hand one of the things computers are good at is remembering indexes and linking them to other places where that index was mentioned.

baxtr 7y ago

I think the internet as such was thought of linked document, which comes very close to that concept

loudandskittish 7y ago

Here's an article by someone using a similar system where I think how it's actually used in practice is described pretty well: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/ https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-bo...

sveng 7y ago
That is interesting; here’s another from Ryan Holiday that goes deeper: https://forge.medium.com/the-incredible-creative-power-of-the-index-card-b799250033c9 https://forge.medium.com/the-incredible-creative-power-of-th...

chrisweekly 7y ago

I've had precisely your reaction, and am stoked to share my enthusiasm for Roam (https://roamresearch.com https://roamresearch.com) -- a graph-based system for codex / memex / personal knowledge-base / zettelkasten++

chris_st 7y ago
I'm trying to like it, but I keep running into bugs... and I haven't been able to find a point of contact on their web page to describe them. But, yeah, when it works it's very nice indeed.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  yeah it's super-early-days; they won't even take my money yet. import and export and mobile (and hopefully encryption at rest) are all coming
tvanantwerp 7y ago
I've recently started using Roam, and I'm really enjoying it so far. Probably the easiest information capture and reference tool I've used to date--it makes it very simple to get things down without slowing you down. Only major downside so far is no mobile app, but I know they are working on one.
darkpicnic 7y ago
I checked out Roam (thanks for the rec!) and though I REALLY love the concept, I'm a little nervous to keep a massive interconnected knowledge base with a SaaS. Currently, I use Devonthink and though it's not perfect, I'm just so relieved I can have data on my machine with the storage system I choose. I miss the days of software storing data on my computer or where I want. As a backend engineer, I just think: "Man, this data is just sitting in a db somewhere for any engineer to grep." Until we get to a point where everything is just encrypted by default, I just can't see myself trusting software like this.

learningerrday 7y ago

Gordon Brander's pattern wiki is probably the best contemporary example I can think of that implements the Zettelkasten pattern: http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/ http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/ I think part of what can make the concept hard to see in practice, is that it's both the Zettelkasten artifact, and your methodology for adding and linking concepts when you're learning

bloodm 7y ago

https://strengejacke.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/introduction-into-luhmanns-zettelkasten-thinking.pdf https://strengejacke.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/introductio...

Philipp0205 7y ago

Exactly the same thing happened to me. I was reading hours into this topic and nobody was able to explain this topic in a convenient way. I even read the German sourced. But there was one article standing out: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel... It is a wall of text too but the best explanation I've found yet.

slightwinder 7y ago

Have you looked at the original? Luhmann Original Zettelkasten was scannend and is online available. Though, it's all german. Tutorial: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhaltsuebersicht https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhalt... Zettel 1: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_1_NB_1_1_V https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...

keeprunning 7y ago

ha, yeah very muich in the same boat. been following some of the zettel blogs for years and have read an ungodly number of posts, but it still hasn't entirely clicked — that said, I've moved entirely to plain text for note-taking and it's been a godsend moving out of evernote.