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Keeping zetel notes: productive or counterproductive approach.
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Posted by Dellu
Dec 4, 2018 at 09:46 AM
My problem with the zettel notes is the amount of time and effort required to collect, curate and write the notes. I am in an impression that one person is better to put these notes into his/her draft (or simple reading notes, as in the traditional excerpt) than collect those in zettels forms because:
- the zettels require a lot of hard work, just for the mechanical part (not necessarily for the understanding part) because you try to make the note self-explanatory and linked to other notes.
- she might forget about it at all; ideas can be buried in zettel notes as well (think of collecting thousands of zettels, there is no guarantee that the ideas in the zettel will be available and visible all the time. We still need the help of indexes or searches).
- that the ideas will be outdated
- that, a good literature search (search into a pdf database) can provide as good idea as these zettels are supposed to provide
- time sink: a way to a burnout. One can collect thousands of zettel notes without generating any actual product (publication). That can lead to a burnout, and giving up the whole system.
I understand why one might use these kinds of methods with the paper-pen system. There is no easy way of finding ideas (concepts); need to have some good way of physical organization. With the presence of powerful computer searching algorithms, the value of writing a zettel doesn’t seem to worth the time and effort required to develop it.
I would be glad if the users/fans of zettels teach me where I am wrong.
Posted by Luhmann
Dec 4, 2018 at 10:56 AM
I personally highlight text as I read it, then export all my highlights from each book or article as a single document to an outliner which supports tags (Dynalist or Outlinely). I then structure the text so that I can easily zoom in to a section, chapter, or section (I highlight the titles for these as I read, which makes it easier). Then, if I’m working on a project I add relevant tags to those sections (or individual quotes) that are useful for me. Not completely automatic, but much less time consuming than other methods I’ve seen described, and the structuring/review process helps me remember what I read.
But also remember that my namesake operated at a time before full text search and machine learning. His method made sense for his time, but I’m not sure it makes sense for our own. Search often reveals relevant stuff on my computer or cloud files that was never tagged or stored properly…
Posted by Paul Korm
Dec 4, 2018 at 11:02 AM
That’s the gist of the problem, isn’t it. Is there a method of note taking that is objectively, measurably, and universally effective? Something we should strive to learn and adopt. I don’t see how there could be. There are too many personal and situational variables. There are obvious prescriptive rules that are sensible for everyone (take notes in a language you understand; don’t use disappearing ink). But, “effectivity” is dependent on the individual and their situation, or even the narrowly specific task at hand. I’ve been taking notes for 60+ years, with good professional success, but I have not hit about a note taking method that I found so persistently effective that I never wanted to deviate from it. The search continues :-)
It would be interesting to look into what makes for effective machine learning / AI, and try to do a sort of backformation to apply that knowledge to our flesh and blood interest in finding effective note taking methods.
Dellu wrote:
>Assume you like to write in blue ink, and Hugh likes to write in black
>ink. You have these preferences. Assume a study came out showing that
>black ink assists memory retention. Shouldn’t you change your ink?I
>would definitely do; our preferences are not always the most effective
>ways of doing things. That is why we all hung out in this forum: we want
>better, faster, and more efficient tool/method of doing things.
>
>
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 4, 2018 at 12:16 PM
Some thoughts on this subject:
I am not a professional note-taker. By that I mean that I am not a researcher or student. My daily note taking mostly consists of random bits of information that I feel I may need to recall sometime down the road. I also take notes for specific projects. These usually do not require me to examine long texts and create my own original thoughts about the content. But every now and then I do have to do that and I’ve found that creating a Tinderbox document like the one Beck demonstrate’s in her video (though not nearly as chock-a-block full of information) helps me to understand the information better. I suspect that this is the major benefit of the Zettelkasten system. It is not just that you have a note-network you can refer to in the future, but the process of setting up that system and using it has facilitated a deeper understanding of the material. The fact that it takes a lot of work to build and grow a system like Beck’s is irrelevant in my opinion, because it is part of the learning process, and not just a mechanical exercise in filing notes away.
I think it is worth noting that Beck’s Zettel-Tinderbox system is for a specific purpose: recording and understanding the material for her research project. It is not a system she has built for all her notes on every topic she may study. (At least that’s not the impression I got from the videos.) An effective system for working in one project may not be optimal for another.
Of course the flexibility to make new note systems is one of the benefits of Tinderbox.
Steve Z.
Posted by steve-rogers
Dec 4, 2018 at 01:44 PM
As an academic, I am also faced with the challenge of taking, storing, and accessing notes from literature and seminars. It’s an important skill that I am constantly trying improve. I first became aware of the Zettelkasten approach after stumbling upon Christian Tietze’s excellent website (https://zettelkasten.de/) and losing myself there for a few hours. Like many people here, I was also fascinated by Beck Tench’s recent post (as well as the rest of her site, if you haven’t had a look). I plan to think more about how Zettelkasten techniques might fit into my own work and to try the experiment. However, I do share Dellu’s skepticism about how useful these granular, single notes will be when removed from the context of the bigger picture provided by the source material.
Another approach that I like very much, that I haven’t seen mentioned here, was described by Scott Lougheed on his website:
https://scottlougheed.com/2015/07/17/summarizing-literature-with-omnioutliner/
Scott is an environmental social scientist and describes an approach to note taking in which sections of a text are highlighted and copied to the clipboard. Scot then switches to outliner software and paraphrases the concept as an outline item and pastes the verbatim copied text as a child to that item. Scott uses DevonTHINK and Omnioutliner on MacOS, but the approach is platform-independent. The advantage of using DT and OO together is he then pastes a link back to the original highlighted text in the “Notes” field of the OO item for a permanent reference pointer. The advantage of this approach is the parent-child relationship between the summary and the highlighted text is conserved and can be manipulated within the structure of the outline and the “chunk” of information may also be copied to another outline document when, for example, assembling a literature review or planning other writing projects such as manuscripts or grant applications.
I mention this here because the approach seems to share some of the strengths of Zettelkasten. The notes are taken in a granular manner - one idea per outline item note. Also, the reader restates the concept the note in their own words, thereby (hopefully) internalizing the information more effectively than if they simply highlighted sections of a text and exported annotations to a text/RTF file. However, the structure of the document preserves the context of each individual note in a way that a folder containing single ideas from multiple input documents would not (even if they are linked by links or some numerical scheme).