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Anyone using Zettelkasten?
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 15, 2019 at 09:45 AM
Well said, Simon! And thanks to Dr Andus for the update on DynaList’s linking – verschlugginer app, I didn’t think of trying that out!
And I think that also answers the linking thing - I’m absolutely convinced Luhmann wouldn’t have bothered with all that ZK linking if he’d had modern software to resort to. Although being a meticulous chap, I suspect he’d have liked software that gives each individual item its own unique ID.
Posted by Christian Tietze
Apr 24, 2019 at 07:58 AM
Simon wrote:
> I was not really gripped by linking in the Zetelkasten method. I
>appreciate that Luhmann didn’t really have any option when working on
>card, but with advanced searches these are a moot point for me. I much
>prefer tags as I can tag everything with multiple tags and narrow down
>what I’m looking for.
That’s a fair complaint at first, but tags can only create assorted clusters of notes. (Any computer program displaying the results in a list will have to apply some kind of sort function, but that’s rather accidental.)
Luhmann was creating an interwoven web of notes, not just clumps of cards. The physical nature of his note cards resulted in him exploiting the juxtaposition of cards as another signifier of relevance: what’s close together belongs together, if you will.
I wrote about the different kinds of ties between notes on the Zettelkasten blog once: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/kinds-of-ties/
I think Luhmann would’ve settled for a Wiki of sorts because of its capability for organic growth. Do not underestimate the value of manually placing links between notes. That’s a key point. Otherwise, you only have grouped notes without any structure. You will want to reduce entropy and impose structures to improve access to information and strengthen associations.
—if you are into creative knowledge work, that is. If you only want to file stuff, well, file away and tag and use semantic searches. That should do the trick.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 24, 2019 at 08:35 AM
Yes, well said. This is where software can become dangerous - the more automated a process becomes, the less actual thought and manipulation (a vital cognitive stimulator) is involved in putting together links between specific fragments and thus forming “idea platforms” (rather than mere interlinked data). That’s why I tend to use, aha, Numbers to create mind maps and flow diagrams nowadays. No, it’s not a proper mind mapping tool, but I have to create links physically, and can drag text boxes/microtables around on the (more or less infinite) canvas as I struggle to formulate my web of associations. To my mind, this is more creatively productive than other methods. OneNote is another option, of course.
And as Christian says, if you’re simply talking about filing and retrieving, FoxTrot Pro works as an exceptionally efficient semantic search tool (as do dtSearch, Copernic etc. on Windows).
Christian Tietze wrote:
> —if you are into creative knowledge work, that is. If you only want to file stuff, well, file away and tag and use semantic searches. That should do the trick.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 25, 2019 at 12:21 PM
Quite by chance, I stumbled across this ingenious (and, it appears, fairly recent) piece of software, based specifically on the Zettelkasten approach:
synapsen
http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen/
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 25, 2019 at 12:58 PM
Hi, Bill,
Poking around on the website, I noticed that they claim to have been working on the app since 1996. It does look interesting, but it can’t run on the latest version of Java (or so they say).
Steve Z
MadaboutDana wrote:
Quite by chance, I stumbled across this ingenious (and, it appears,
>fairly recent) piece of software, based specifically on the Zettelkasten
>approach:
>
>synapsen
>
>http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen/