Recent Posts776
General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive
« Last post by Dormouse on November 01, 2019, 07:13 PM »In going through the reading, I am surprised at how little we seem to know about what Luhmann did.
We know he read, and made notes on cards that he put in a card index. We know that he placed those cards in the card index by finding a 'parent' so that there would be a logical sequence. But how did he find that parent, if it wasn't the card he did before? Index and keywords? That's the only possibility I can think of. Then reading cards and links until he finds the right place. Could be quite a lot of reading presumably except when he was putting in a whole sequence of related cards. Feels inefficient.
Since we know he was highly productive, that suggests to me that large parts of his zettelkasten were actually active in his mind most of the time. Then finding the right place would be simple refinement. He'd have a good idea of where each sequence of cards went.
That familiarity is less likely with a digital zettelkasten. But we have text search and tags to compensate? Do they compensate? It will still work best if it is a relatively limited field that is being worked on at a time. like a PhD. Also suggests that the system did mirror his actual thinking and memory and that he would have used it to top up and remind him of things that might be fading in his mind. As well as being something he could use to develop thoughts and plan books.
But much of the time, the placement of a card must have been fairly artificial. He had to put it somewhere. Not waste too much time. The implication is that we shouldn't overworry about links either. Put them in when they make sense, have none when we don't recognise a genuine link. We don't need them for the system to work. But we do need the iterative reflection and note making.
We know he read, and made notes on cards that he put in a card index. We know that he placed those cards in the card index by finding a 'parent' so that there would be a logical sequence. But how did he find that parent, if it wasn't the card he did before? Index and keywords? That's the only possibility I can think of. Then reading cards and links until he finds the right place. Could be quite a lot of reading presumably except when he was putting in a whole sequence of related cards. Feels inefficient.
Since we know he was highly productive, that suggests to me that large parts of his zettelkasten were actually active in his mind most of the time. Then finding the right place would be simple refinement. He'd have a good idea of where each sequence of cards went.
That familiarity is less likely with a digital zettelkasten. But we have text search and tags to compensate? Do they compensate? It will still work best if it is a relatively limited field that is being worked on at a time. like a PhD. Also suggests that the system did mirror his actual thinking and memory and that he would have used it to top up and remind him of things that might be fading in his mind. As well as being something he could use to develop thoughts and plan books.
But much of the time, the placement of a card must have been fairly artificial. He had to put it somewhere. Not waste too much time. The implication is that we shouldn't overworry about links either. Put them in when they make sense, have none when we don't recognise a genuine link. We don't need them for the system to work. But we do need the iterative reflection and note making.
