During Lock down in April I picked up a book that's started me on a path, the book
How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. This started me down the path of the Zettlekasten (slip box), which is basically a card index knowledge management system.
Zettelkasten is a non-linear note filling system used by Niklas Luhmann (see below), which resulted in a communication partner or his so-called “second brain”.
Zettelkasten is a German word, Zettel means note or slip of paper, Kasten indicates box, a Zettelkasten is a box of notes thus Slip box in English.
Luhmann’s slip box is a collection(actually he had two collections) of hand-written slips internally connected by references, very much like the hyperlinking of the World Wide Web invented in the late 1980s [1] but happened on paper instead of the Internet back to the 1950s.
While it’s very close to a personal wiki in form, but how these two are created and what they are capable of are fundamentally different, a Zettelkasten could be implemented by a wiki, but a wiki doesn’t have to be a Zettelkasten, most of them are not. [1]
The method is really useful for researchers and writers. The empirical account "Communicating with Slip Boxes An Empirical Account" by Niklas Luhmann explains the actual apporach. Luhmann was a prolific writer of books and papers. He used is slip box, to pull together his ideas, so he was able to overcome one of the biggest blockers to writers and researcher alike, procrastination.....
Your system of notes should become larger to increase the system’s number of elements, and notes should reference one another to increase the system’s number of its elements’ relations.
This works with both digital and paper-based notes. Fundamentally, when you let notes point to each other using some kind of reference, you’re creating hypertext. This concept is well known on the web where hypertext is presented as links you can click on in your browser.
Essentially, wikipaedia is the ultimate Zettelkasten. A wiki is a linked knowledge base. The slip note box, being your own knowledge store, cross linked and cross referenced. I've been trying to find the perfect software solution to this problem, for many years.
My ultimate answer needs to be a very simple linked and cross referenced system, that will run on any platform and is totally portable. I'll write about that journey separately. It's work a look at my other recent blog "Eclectic Thoughts" where I explain some of the background and the journey whilst doing the Phd research program at De Montfort back in 2013.
The three types of card (Slipnotes) are:
| Kind | Paper | Digital |
|---|---|---|
| Contents | A slip contains a list of references to top-level subjects | A single file contains links to top-level slips |
| Index | A slip contains major subjects with references to related slips | A single file contains links of different subjects to related slips |
| Bibliography | A slip contains bibliographic information of literature sorted alphabetically | bibliographic information embedded at the bottom of every file |
Source: https://tevinzhang.com/digital-zettelkasten/
References
[1] https://tevinzhang.com/digital-zettelkasten/
[2] https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/
[3] http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes
[4] https://blog.brett.info/2020/10/
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