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Luedecke's Zettlekaten
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Posted by Christian Tietze
Mar 14, 2014 at 04:34 PM
>In other words, Luhmann’s “choices” often simply were triggered by the
>inherent limitations of a physical index card system - he probably would
>have been so happy to overcome them and replace them with something more
>adequate both to IMS, and to
>thinking-about-what-you’ve-got-within-your-IMS-of-then.
That’s exactly how I feel when it comes to Daniel Lüdecke’s Zkn³ software, although my concerns are only miniscule. Zkn³ mimics paper-based Zettelkästen too much for my taste.
I consider the concept of “Folgezettel” (note sequences) one of Luhmann’s most important developments. Zkn³ supports this as well. Basically, you start with one note and put it in the archive. You add more notes, numbering them accordingly. Now you discover something new and want to add this to note #23. Because a note with the no. 24 exists already, there’s no room it seems. But instead of putting the new note at the end of the archive, you branch off where it makes sense: you label it no. 23a and put it after no. 23. A tree-like structure emerges with time.
This way, at least theoretically, you could put whole texts into the archive, spread across lots of notes and sub-branches. Just grab everything between #23 and #24 and the pile is guaranteed to be of related content.
This was necessary because paper offers limited space only. Text files don’t. You can put whole book manuscripts in one single text document.
I don’t encourage doing so, though. Large files are harder to handle mentally, I suppose. I like to make notes atomic: short, concise, self-contained. I can deal better with that. Could be just me.
If the order of notes doesn’t matter because you could (a) either put everything related into one single document, or (b) use convenient hyperlinks (like WikiLinks[1]) to create traversable connections, then you wouldn’t need to enumerate notes like Luhmann did.
Instead, I found the date way more valuable. So I put a date-time stamp like “201403141728” in front of my notes, which stands for the current moment of time at UTC+1: “2014-03-14 17:28”. Notes which are related thematically aren’t put together this way, but I don’t need this feature anyhow since I neither have to overcome paper-based limitations, nor do I want to store book manuscripts in my Zettelkasten note archive. There are project folders and text outlines for this stuff.
When note identifiers are this arbitrary, you can just as well put them at the beginning of each paragraph you write. Your whole Zettelkasten can be in one single file and it wouldn’t matter since you have full-text search capabilities built into every text editor available. Thinking in files in convenient, but it isn’t necessary. (There’s a post on my website on this.[2])
—-
[1]: Most wiki software create links if you write words in CamelCase or surround them with [[double brackets]]. That equals zero cost to create links between notes.
[2]: The post on identity is at: http://christiantietze.de/posts/2014/02/add-identity/
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 14, 2014 at 05:02 PM
Christian Tietze wrote:
>Instead, I found the date way more valuable. So I put a date-time stamp
>like “201403141728” in front of my notes
I also follow this method. This is where ConnectText’s special “date topics” come in particularly handy, as they get organised by date, they can be browsed through a calendar, as well as searched with date-related operators. Here is what date topics look like in edit and view mode:
http://welcometosherwood.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/ct-screenshot-2.jpg
http://welcometosherwood.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/ct-screenshot.jpg
>you have
>full-text search capabilities built into every text editor available.
You could say that search based on textual content—as well as filtering based on labels or categories—do the thematic relating of the notes for you automatically, even for connections between topics that you may have missed before.
Posted by Christian Tietze
Mar 15, 2014 at 11:39 AM
I know ConnectedText only because MK at http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com blogs about it a lot. Its means to connect notes seem more “rich” than what regular Wiki-style links do. Anyway, I think it’s an interesting application. Since I have no Windows computer availible, I can’t review this application myself, sadly. I don’t know a lot about software for Windows except some pretty basic stuff, so the reviews in this forum are a valuable resource. Thanks for the screenshots!
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 15, 2014 at 01:38 PM
Christian Tietze wrote:
I know ConnectedText only because MK at
>http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com blogs about it a lot. Its means to
>connect notes seem more “rich” than what regular Wiki-style links do.
>Anyway, I think it’s an interesting application. Since I have no Windows
>computer availible, I can’t review this application myself, sadly.
I think he uses it on a Mac with Parallels, I believe, and someone on his blog also suggested Wine:
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/connectetext-on-ipod.html
As for the linking possibilities in CT, there are a few. If you use date topics, then firstly there is a chronological order, and the topics are linked automatically to and through a calendar (e.g. clicking on a day brings up the notes taken that day, ordered by time). Then you can of course link notes directly using the double brackets.
Then you can use so-called attributes for example to link notes according to some key characteristics (e.g. the elements of the bibliographic reference, such as authors’ names, publication date, title, publisher, publication type etc.). And then there are the categories (labels), which you can use to classify the note content according to the main themes (qualitative coding, in a sense).
An additional layer of classification can be done by the “named blocks” feature (which is more like a QDA coding feature), but it’s quite complicated to use and i think it’s not fully mature yet as a feature.
Finally, it’s also possible to link to external files, including to specific pages in a PDF (though it’s a manual process using markup, so it’s more fiddly than some other dedicated referencing software—but this is where templates come in).
Here is what my reading note template looks like for my Zettelkasten in CT (not sure if the forum software will display it all, let’s see):
[[$NOTOC:]]
=Quote=
=Comment=
=Reference=
[[Author:=Smith, K.]] ([[Year:=2003]]). [[Title:=The Best Book in the World]]. Cambridge, MA: [[Publisher:=Harvard University Press]].
=PDF=
[[$APP: “C:\Program Files\Tracker Software\PDF Viewer\PDFXCview.exe” /a “page=68” “C:\Users\Dr Andus\Documents\PhD\Literature\Smith_2003.pdf” | Page 68]]
[[$CATEGORY:Smith, K.|best books]]