Atomic Notes on Writing Slowly

Two Million Notes and No Dictionary: Learning from Semyon Vengerov's Cautionary Tale

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:49:05 +1100

Russian bibliographer Semyon Vengerov (1855-1920) spent his life accumulating two million filing cards, but he died before he finished the dictionaries and bibliographies he set out to create.

His definitive account of Russian books from 1788 to 1893 was supposed to extend to 25 volumes, of which he completed only three. His biographical dictionary of Russian writers included six volumes, but these only covered the first three letters of the Russian alphabet. He published four volumes of his Sources for a Dictionary of Russian Writers, without making any more headway on the dictionary itself.

So was he a visionary scholar or did he end up simply overwhelmed by the weight of his own ambition?

And for anyone building a personal knowledge system today, for anyone doing their own research, for anyone making their own notes, his story raises an uncomfortable question: are we just accumulating notes, or are we actually creating something?

Historian Mark Gamsa summarizes it this way:

“For some of his critics, Vengerov’s colossal undertaking ended in deserved failure. In this view, his story is at best a cautionary tale about a scholar overwhelmed by his material; at worst, it is one about a wrong choice of profession” (Gamsa 2016).

Literary scholar Angela Brintlinger is more specific about the problem:

“Vengerov was unable to cull and organize the materials he gathered into true biographies. He was overwhelmed by the process and by the facts themselves. Vengerov’s approach to biography suffered from a very particular problem: wanting to include everything, he never finished anything” (Brintlinger 2018, 96).

To be sure, Vengerov died before he finished what he’d started. But having published prolifically and influenced a generation of Russian scholars, was he really a failure? Or does calling him one say more about the unrealistic scope of what he promised than about the value of what he actually achieved?

What Are Notes For?

If you find yourself writing notes and later discover that you now have rather a lot of them, there’s an underlying question which begs to be addressed, if not fully answered: what are they for?

Many people write notes simply because the act of writing is a way of thinking. They might agree with physicist Richard Feynman that writing is thinking. At the very least, you can’t really write without thinking. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann made an even stronger claim: you cannot think without writing, at least not systematically. As he put it in a note lodged carefully in his Zettelkasten:

“Behind the Zettelkasten technique stands the experience: You can’t think without writing - at least not in a sophisticated way, selective access to memory in demanding contexts. This also means: without marking differences, one cannot think.”

From this perspective, notes, at least in the first instance, are complete in themselves; they are thinking made visible.

Vengerov went much further than this. He appreciated “the love of, or rather the passion for scholarly labour as such, almost independently of the results that follow from it” (Byford 2003:7). He understood you actually had to enjoy the task, moment by moment. He lionised the painstaking, meticulous scholarly work epitomised by the Benedictine monks of Western Europe:

“The very process of work gives a true scholarly labourer a kind of pure psychological pleasure.” (Ibid.)

Well I’ll admit I’ve experienced a little of this in writing here about a now obscure Nineteenth Century Russian bibliographer. I mean, what am I thinking? Many though, myself included, write notes because we want to produce, well, writing: blog posts, articles, video or audio scripts, books even. In short, we want a public outcome. And given this aspiration, there might be a frisson of anxiety about whether, like Vengerov, we’re just going to end up with two million notes and no dictionary.

Lessons from the Cautionary Tale

So having encountered Vengerov’s extraordinary story, and taking it as a cautionary tale for note-making maximalists like me, here’s what I’m taking from it:

Under-promise and over-deliver

Vengerov wrote and published a great deal and was very influential. He was a great success! The only problem, really, is that he didn’t finish the dauntingly massive projects he himself had set out in public to finish. This made it look as though he failed. But in reality, who could have succeeded at the gargantuan tasks he embarked upon? In 1899 a contemporary of Vengerov’s, V.F. Shishmarev, argued:

“The love of learning compensates for all failures and all shortcomings that inevitably accompany the practical realization of any project.” (Byford 2003: 3).

I’m not so sure. For me, it’s worth finishing things, perhaps by limiting their scope.

Vengerov’s approach (announcing a massive 25-volume project and then appearing to fail to deliver it) contrasts sharply with that of Linus Torvalds, the founder of the near-ubiquitous computer operating system Linux. Torvalds famously opened his project with great modesty, claiming in his initial 1991 announcement that it “won’t be big and professional” and “probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks.”

By setting expectations low, every achievement became a triumph rather than a shortfall. Linux now powers everything from smartphones to supercomputers.

The lesson here isn’t that you should lack ambition. It’s that you might consider announcing smaller milestones, while still, privately, pursuing larger goals.

Bite off less than you can chew

Take a step at a time, package it up, and call it a product. Then take another step.

Bent Flyvbjerg, the expert in mega-projects, claims the most successful large projects are completed by means of modularity. The Empire State Building, for example, was completed one storey at a time. A similar, relatively small process repeated over and over produces something bigger. Each floor was a complete unit; if construction had stopped at any point, there would have been a usable (if shorter) building.

Applied to note-taking and writing, I take this to mean: publish the limited article before attempting the extensive book. Release the provisional blog post before promising the comprehensive guide. Each complete smaller work is both valuable in itself and a building block for something larger.

Work collaboratively and delegate

Perhaps Vengerov could have finished his huge projects if he’d assembled a team to help him. As a postgraduate student, I was tangentially involved in a large dictionary project, and it was very clear back then that a project of this nature requires a large number of participants. Very rarely is such a task a one-person show.

Ironically, Vengerov was highly influential with the next generation of scholars whom he had trained. Perhaps his greatest legacy was the influential Pushkin seminars, which he started in St Petersburg in 1906. The formalist school, many of whose members he had taught, owed a great deal to him. But his own projects seem to have lacked the kind of team effort that might perhaps have seen them to completion. He knew how to teach and inspire others, but it seems he couldn’t translate that into collaborative production on his own work. My conclusion is, if you can’t do without a team, you should at least attempt to assemble one. Or, you know, just get someone to help you.

Use the data, don’t let the data use you

Fortunately, Vengerov’s students emulated his scholarly meticulousness without getting bogged down in his precise method. As Brintlinger puts it:

“Without the ‘data’ preferred by their professor, the biographies produced by the students would have lacked precision and verisimilitude; however, at the same time, the students moved past Vengerov’s fact-bound research to try to draw connections and make judgements about the psychological reasoning behind the actions of historical individuals.” (Brintlinger 2018, 114).

For me, this is perhaps the most important lesson. Notes, research, and data are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Vengerov’s students understood that scholarship means doing something with the facts: analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, and ultimately, publishing. The two million filing cards were only valuable if they led somewhere beyond themselves.

A modest promise

So was Vengerov a failure? That depends on what we measure. He didn’t complete his stated projects, true. But “having published prolifically, Vengerov nonetheless did not complete his life’s work. He did leave an archive containing about two million filing cards” (Gamsa 2016). Importantly for Russian literary scholarship, he left a generation of scholars who learned from both his successes and his struggles.

This is the point where I might be expected to reach a conclusion, so here’s my attempt at one: the perfect comprehensive work may never be finished, but imperfect, incremental contributions can still matter enormously. Breaking down the task and making modest promises: these options always remain open. Far better to have published three volumes than to have left twenty-five in perfect form in your head. Better to have published one real volume than three imaginary ones. And if you do have a huge project in mind, it wouldn’t hurt to inspire others who will continue the work, perhaps in ways you never imagined.

Your two million notes might never become the definitive work you once envisioned. But they might become something else: something smaller, more focused, and actually useful. Or better yet, they might help you think clearly enough to create a series of smaller somethings, each complete in itself, each, like my little essay on Semyon Vengerov’s two million notes, a modest promise fulfilled.

—-

Now read:

What to do when you’ve made some notes: start writing.

Inside Georges Didi-Huberman’s monumental note archive.

Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn’t fit in his Zettelschrank.

Thoughts are nest-eggs: Thoreau on Writing.

References

Brintlinger, Angela. “Lives and Facts: Biography in Russia in the 1920s.” The Slavonic and East European Review 96, no. 1 (2018): 94â€“116. www.jstor.org/stable/10…

Byford, Andy. “S. A. Vengerov: The Identity of Literary Scholarship in Late Imperial Russia.” The Slavonic and East European Review 81, no. 1 (2003): 1–31. www.jstor.org/stable/42…

Gamsa, Mark. “Two Million Filing Cards: The Empirical-Biographical Method of Semen Vengerov”, History of Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2016), pp. 129â€“53. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.10…

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Artists Books at the NSW State Library

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:35:39 +1100

I visited the State Library in Sydney recently, where I was inspired by an exhibition on artists' books, called Paper Universe: The Book as Art. It’s open till 3 May 2026 and is well worth seeing.

There were books on display too about how to make your own books, which I also found inspiring.

And when I looked in on another exhibition about housing in Australia, I couldn’t help noticing that the Sirius Building, a famous brutalist landmark in Sydney, looks an awful lot like a set of books lined up along a shelf. I’ve never heard anyone say that this was the architect’s intent, but you can judge for yourself.

Photo of the Sirius Building by Katherine Lu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p…

I guess I have made my own book: I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.

And for all the Writing Slowly goodness you can sign up to the weekly digest.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:57:06 +1100

ROOTS - Return Old Online Things to your own Site.
That’s what Lisa Charlotte Muth is doing at her website. And that’s what I’m doing with posts like Some urgent note-making questions find answers - bringing scattered material back together.

#IndieWeb #PKM #Blogging #NoteTaking #DigitalSovereignty

Some urgent notemaking questions find answers

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +1100

From time to time I attempt to answer questions about note-making on Reddit.

It’s a tough job with few perks, but someone has to do it and for no obvious reason that person is me¹. So here’s a fresh bunch of my recent comments, with a disclaimer that, field-tested as they are, they’re not guaranteed to make you rich, famous or even mildly handsome, even if that’s how it’s worked out for me. I guess life is unfair like that.

Anyway, here goes.

Question: Where does AI fit into your note taking?

“I considered using AI to scan and auto link related ideas, but even this seems like robbing me of the chance to “think” as I examine possibly related ideas, so for now I am trying to be totally manual in the slip box. Anyone else tackling these questions? What successful strategies do you have for getting the thinking benefits while still getting the busy work benefits of AI?”

My Answer: The temptation to skip the thinking process is far from new.

In 1924 Sergey Povarnin, yes that Сергей Поварнин, Soviet author of How to Read Books for Self Education was warning of it:

“There are readers who think that with such ‘card indexes’ they can replace their mind… In short, a new ‘improvement’ in our culture. No need to work with the mind. Ready-to-wear boots, ready-to-wear pants, ‘ready-to-wear’ thoughts.”

He was OK with the card index itself; the problem was imagining you could use it to stop thinking.

And for the last 17 years I could have outsourced my note-making to a service like Freelancer. But I didn’t even consider it back then, so why consider it now? It would be like hiring someone to go to the gym for me (which I admit I have contemplated).

Question: Should I keep my Zettelkasten?

“I have now essentially two systems of notes, and I’m not sure how to reconcile them. Should I rework these new notes back into my Zettelkasten and just focus on publishing that? Should I keep two systems of notes? Has anyone run into this issue before?”

NB: A Zettelkasten is a box with paper slips in, a once-popular way for scholars and writers to make and keep their notes, and by extension it’s the name of a contemporary method for making digital notes too; but is there a Zettelkasten method?

My Answer: Just give everything a unique ID so you can link to it from anywhere.

I’ve had this issue to some extent, but it was the Zettelkasten that freed up my writing. Before that I’d write sprawling stuff that was all over the place. This kind of writing felt like it was too digressive, so I’d try to focus — but this made me just clam up. Or I’d write a long piece but get bored part way through and drop it before finishing.

The Zettelkasten approach helped me focus without making me feel like I was writing the wrong things. Then I started stitching my various notes together to create longer pieces of work. Eventually the practice started freeing me up to write digressive pieces again, without feeling irrationally guilty about it. So now I have my structured Zettelkasten and a whole pile of longer pieces in various states of completion.

My ‘solution’ to this (though is it even a problem?) is to give each and every piece, however short or long, a unique ID.

That way I can always refer to any piece of writing, and always find it again.

I’m inspired by Niklas Luhmann, who didn’t just write sociology notes, he also wrote many manuscripts in several drafts. Towards the end of his life he mainly worked on the manuscripts since he had a backlog of publishing to get through. Like him I’m ultimately more interested in publishing than in perfecting my notes system.

Question: Highlighting for literature notes

How do you highlight content? I’ve always tried progressive summarization, but I feel like I don’t have that much time.

My Answer: For me, highlighting is a shortcut to nowhere.

I’ve found my highlights don’t get used for anything. My conclusion is that highlighting may look like useful work, but in practice it just isn’t.

Resulting rule of thumb: if it’s worth highlighting it’s worth writing a short note about it; and if it’s not worth writing a note, it’s not worth highlighting.

What I do instead: write a note. If I read something and think “that’s interesting”, I make a note and force myself to record why I find it interesting. This seemingly slows me down, but then I don’t waste time creating unused highlights that looked interesting for reasons I didn’t record and have now forgotten.

Caveat: while reading, I write literature notes that include bibliographic details, followed by a list of interesting points I notice, together with a page reference. I might write: “Opinionated summary of ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ - p.127.” I’d follow that with a reference to the note that expands on this. In practice, I don’t actually get round to writing a new note for every reference. Some never get followed up. The Zettelkasten approach is a way of triaging my thoughts, creating useful friction so I only follow up what really matters to me.

Question: Should Mini Essays Be Kept Outside of the Main Notes Folder?

I like writing mini essays to help me understand things better, but I’ve read that main/atomic notes should be short and focused on one idea. Should mini essays go in a separate folder, or can they live with my main notes?

My Answer: Your ‘mini-essay’ concept has been tried and tested for many decades and it works. Keep them with your notes so you can easily reference them and expand them.

Maybe tag them ‘mini-essay’ so you can review them collectively in future.

I’ve found - once my Zettelkasten got big enough - I tended to work by assembling clusters of atomic notes, rather than jumping straight to mini-essays. The Zettelkasten approach facilitates this ‘bottom-up’ method of writing.

Andy Matuschak shows how he wrote a modular mini-essay made out of about 60 atomic notes. He redrafted it and turned it into a polished essay which he then published. The original mini-essay is called Enabling environments, games and the Primer. It’s clearly a work-in-progress, but it’s a lot more comprehensive than just a single atomic note. It’s an example of what he calls ‘evergreen notes’ in the sense that it grew from a seed into a larger plant (though I’m not actually sold on that metaphor, but still).

I described the process in full, in an article which is itself assembled from modular components:

How to write an article from your notes.

I certainly keep my ‘mini-essays, or ‘sub-assemblies’ or ‘intermediate packets’ or ‘alpha drafts’ or whatever, in my main collection of notes. This enables me to link to them and add future links to them. But one very important step is to ensure that where the writing is made up of smaller parts, the backlinks are clearly noted, so I’m not inadvertently self-plagiarising.

To me a mini-essay is just a structure note, but with the contents of the linked notes transcluded and then lightly edited together. You can certainly see this with Andy’s note, referenced above. Parts of that note are little more than hyperlinks connected together with connecting phrases. But the hard work is precisely in connecting disparate ideas by means of writing. This kind of stitching work doesn’t usually produce a publishable article straight off, but it does help with an early draft.

That’s all for now, but if you’re strangely hooked on this stuff (not your fault, and no one here is judging) you might now like to go even further with:

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.. And for all the crunchy, fresh Writing Slowly goodness you can sign up to the weekly digest.
It’s exactly like a bunch of radishes, but made out of email.

Well, me and lots of other people. ↩︎

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:26:31 +1100

The Digital Humanities Now website has come out of hibernation and kicked back into gear. OK, so it took me a whole year to notice this, but better late than never to spot a very interesting resource.

#DigitalHumanities #AcademicWriting #AcademicResources #ResearchTools

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +1100

Guy Kawasaki says ‘move fast and break things’ is a myth. True! But since he can’t quite escape its toxic allure, I’ll say it for him, loudly and proudly:

Move slow and fix things. [guykawasaki.substack.com]

Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters is available now.

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:06:21 +1100

Every interface is an argument about how you should feel. - Phantom Obligation | Terry Godier

This is my view of writing and note-making apps, but we can change them, to feel how we want, not how someone else wants us to.

Make your notes a creative working environment.

The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne's Missing Commonplace Book

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:34:34 +1100

Last month, while my sister was moving house, she discovered a box of papers she’d never seen before. Inside was a collection of documents, decades old, that our parents must have gathered and kept from our childhood. There in a carefully wrapped pile was a sheaf of my sister’s old school reports. And next to them was a set of poems I must have written way back when I was a primary school student.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of venturing into the attic or the basement and finding long-forgotten documents like these. But this chance rediscovery got me thinking about just how much has been lost to time.

Mostly we don’t bother archiving, and even when we do, there are later moments when we decide to spring-clean, rationalise, declutter, or tidy up.

These are all euphemisms for destroying the evidence.

Not that we shouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t help wondering at the sheer immensity of what must have been lost to history in this way. Admittedly, my childhood poetry and my sister’s school reports aren’t entirely essential for the public record, but what about the other items that well-meaning tidiers have chucked out? Some proportion of them, surely, must have been priceless.

Writing survives through luck and neglect

Given all the destruction of the centuries, and even just the spring-cleaning, it’s amazing that so much of the past still remains available to us, especially through the writing of contemporaries.

To take just one famous example: Leonardo da Vinci’s notes were almost lost because he left them to his favourite student, whose son inherited them and neglected them in a mouldering attic. Despite — or perhaps because of — the neglect, the notes survived and so today we can still marvel at Leonardo’s quickness of thought, virtuosity of line, and genius of innovation.

It’s a big win for forgetting to clear out the attic.

We’re not quite so lucky with John Donne, the poet of the English Renaissance, whose name, for some reason, is pronounced ‘Dunn’. His poems survive, but his commonplace book is currently lost — though its trail is tantalizingly clear.

According to Katherine Rundell’s lively biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Donne gave it to his eldest son, who left it to Izaak Walton’s son in his will. That made sense because Walton was Donne’s friend and biographer. But Walton’s son in turn left all his books and papers to Salisbury Cathedral. And that’s where the trail goes cold.

The commonplace book is completely missing.

Perhaps one day they’ll rediscover Donne’s commonplace book. If it’s ever found, Rundell says, it will cause ‘joyful chaos’ among the Donne community. On reading this I couldn’t decide which I loved more: the delightful concept of joyful chaos, or the endearing fact that there’s such a thing as the Donne community.

Donne’s genius depended on gathering scraps

The loss, for fans of the poet, is particularly frustrating because Donne wouldn’t be Donne without his commonplace book. He lived in what we might call the golden age of commonplacing. It was an era that nurtured his collector’s sensibility and his obsession with hoarding the quotations of others. As Samuel Johnson said disapprovingly, in Donne’s work “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”

But this magpie tendency, as Rundell calls it, to gather and juxtapose, was hardly a flaw; it was central to his genius. Throughout his poetry, Rundell says, “one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition and ends up somewhere fresh and strange.”

Though Donne himself coined the term ‘commonplacer’ (another fact I learned from Rundell’s biography), the practice itself was codified by Erasmus, the doyen of Dutch humanism. He instructed readers to create headings at the top of each page, such as beauty, friendship, faith, hope, the vices and virtues. Then, while reading, you’d note down anything striking: a story, a fable, a pithy remark, a clever turn of phrase. The result was both a form of scholarship and a map of your own obsessions. Donne’s book, says Rundell, surely included: angels, women, faith, stars, jealousy, gold, desire, dread, death.

But of course, we don’t know. We haven’t seen it.

The purpose of the commonplace book wasn’t mere collection. As Erasmus explained, whenever a witty occasion demanded, you’d have “ready to hand a supply of material for spoken or written composition.” But despite this, the commonplace book wasn’t really designed for regurgitation. It offered raw material for a combinatorial, plastic process; a process that was half evidence-building and half treasure-hunting.

Like any intellectual pursuit, commonplacing created anxiety about doing it right. Even back then the market naturally monetised that worry, by selling ready-made commonplace books with the quotations already filled in. I find this amusing, but buying pre-compiled wisdom surely defeated the point. It’s the early equivalent of getting a chat bot to do your homework for you: easy but almost pointless.

The work itself is the point.

Sir Robert Southwell, President of the Royal Society, left some headings in his commonplace book forever blank (Academia and Tedium, tellingly), while others left him scribbling in increasingly tiny handwriting at the foot of the page, crossing out headings to make space. Each commonplace book is the unique record of the workings of a unique mind.

Donne built palaces from unrelated bricks

You can see the commonplace book’s influence throughout Donne’s poetry. In a single poem he might reference Aristotelian logic, Ptolemaic astronomy, Augustine’s discussion of beauty, and Pliny’s theory on poisonous snakes. In a poem about sexual inconstancy, he compares women to both foxes (apparently fairly normal for his day) and goats (apparently and understandably unusual).

The Twentieth Century poet T.S. Eliot understood what made this work. “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work,” he wrote, “it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.” For ordinary minds, experience remains chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. But for Donne, as Katherine Rundell observes,

“apparently unrelated scraps from the world were always forming wholes. Commonplacing was a way to assess material for those new connections: bricks made ready for the unruly palaces he would build.”

Donne himself was alert to the danger of mindless compilation. In his poem “Satire 2,” he mocked writers who merely copied others' words and regurgitated them as their own: like someone who eats your food and then claims the resulting waste as their supposedly better creation. Harsh, but memorable. And yes, the analogy certainly did make me think of ChatGPT and its copyright-denying siblings.

But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Others' wits' fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things out spew,
As his own things; and they are his own, ‘tis true,
For if one eat my meat, though it be known
The meat was mine, th’ excrement is his own.

What lessons emerge from a book we’ve never seen?

First, you can’t simply jam together random quotations and expect to produce thoughtful prose. Johnson accused Donne of yoking heterogeneous ideas together by violence, yet Eliot saw that Donne’s “perfectly equipped poet’s mind” achieved something remarkable. The rest of us may need to work harder to overcome the illusion of integrated thought and produce the real thing.

Second, commonplacing risks collecting other people’s words without fully digesting them. Apparently there’s a German word for the kind of writing this can produce: Zitatsalat, ‘citation salad’. There are other methods — the Zettelkasten system, for instance, which I prefer — that encourage reflection and connection-making from the outset. I’ve taken a minimal approach to making notes, with just these affordances.

Third, it’s important to publish, not least because unpublished notes often end up lost. Leonardo da Vinci’s notes barely survived. Donne’s commonplace book is long gone (though I encourage you to check down the back of your sofa just in case). A scholar of the philosopher Charles Peirce recently told me that after Peirce left his voluminous papers to a university library, they reused them as scrap paper. Happily, someone realized the error before too much damage was done. And to cap it all, my own poem about the toe of the year nearly didn’t make it. And these days, when you’re gone someone will eventually press “delete.” Better to get your words out there while you can.

A short postscript:

Indeed, this very article was almost the victim of delayed publication. I wrote this, mostly, three months ago. Then my iPad’s note-writing app developed a mysterious glitch which made the app and all its notes unusable. Only the happy fact that I’d backed everything up ensured my words would be saved from the digital wreckage. Otherwise, oh the horror, as with Donne’s Commonplace book, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

—

Further reading:

Rundell, Katherine. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. ( see especially pages 36-39, the source of most of the quotes here )

Leonardo da Vinci’s notes

Overcome the illusion of integrated thought

A minimal approach to writing notes

Get your words out there by publishing first

—

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in that handy email format you know and love.

Why your note-making tools don’t quite work the way you want them to - and what to do about it

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:40:47 +1100

Every so often I stumble upon a really clear articulation of a concept that makes sense of something I’ve been feeling but didn’t previously have a word for. I knew there was something there but I didn’t have the language to express it.

One of the most interesting articles I’ve come across recently is Artificial memory and orienting infinity by Kei Kreutler.

In this particular case the concept illuminated is the subtle, niggling tension between what I want to use my digital writing tools for and what they actually do. My writing tools, and possibly yours too, nearly do what I want, but not quite. What’s that about? Well, on reading this article, the tension became a whole lot clearer.

Kei’s article attempts to makes sense of memory in pair of dimensional scales: latent-living and taxonomic-associational.

Latent Memory
Refers to knowledge stored but not actively used.
Exists in archives, databases, or written records.
It is inactive until accessed or brought into practice.
Living Memory
Knowledge that is actively transmitted and practised.
Maintained through oral traditions, rituals, and cultural engagement.
Keeps information dynamic and relevant in everyday life.
Taxonomic Memory
Organises knowledge into structured, hierarchical categories.
Examples: Encyclopaedias, scientific classifications.
Emphasises order and standardisation for clarity and retrieval.
Associational Memory
Links ideas through relationships, stories, or spatial metaphors.
Examples: Songlines, memory boards, or thematic connections.
Encourages flexible navigation and creative associations.

These four modes describe the different ways societies and individuals store, organise, and activate knowledge, ranging from static archives to dynamic cultural practices and from rigid hierarchies to fluid networks.

A summary of the framework described in Kei Kreutler’s article.

I’ve found this framework really illuminating. In particular the taxonomy highlights for me the point that our tools and methods lead to different outcomes. We shouldn’t expect latent, taxonomic memory devices (archives and catalogues) to perform the same functions and achieve the same outcomes as living, associational memory devices (lore-in-action).

It’s well worth reading the whole article. This four-fold framework clarifies the tension I often feel between my note-making intentions and my note-making tools. Whereas the standard tools tend towards latent, taxonomic memory, I’m far more interested in living, associational memory. And until now I didn’t quite have the right words to express this.

Well, this theory is all very well but how does it play out in the real world? Here’s a very practical example of what living, associational memory might look like in practice. The philosopher David O’Hara uses his bookshelves as a teaching device. As he discusses philosophy with his students he pulls the relevant books from his shelves, to create a pile of a dozen or more texts that he calls a ‘shelfie’.

Stored in the bookcase these books are latent memory, but this memory is activated by the discussion; it comes alive. Left on the shelves the books are ordered in some form of standard order (by subject or alphabetically, or whatever), but as they get pulled off the shelves to illustrate the discussion they become ordered by association. Then the hour is up and the little pile is re-shelved.

Every so often, my partner insists on reorganising our bookshelves in our living room. Apparently we have too many books, which is obviously not possible. Anyway this shuffling of the stacks drives me unreasonably crazy, makes me feel like I’ve undergone a lobotomy - and now, finally, I understand why: my extended mind has been messed up. My living, associational memory is undone, I’m being assailed by entropy.

So what’s the practical relevance of all this? Open up your note-making tool, whether that’s Obsidian, Notion, Apple Notes, a text editor, a collection of notecards, or a physical notebook, and ask yourself: is this designed for latent/taxonomic memory or living/associational memory?

I bet no one’s ever suggested that to you before, so how can you tell? You can look at how it wants you to organise things. Does it push you toward folders and tags, and hierarchies? Does it emphasise search and retrieval? That’s taxonomic thinking. Or does it encourage links, and serendipitous discovery, and bringing ideas into conversation with each other? That’s associational.

Then look at what it encourages you to do with your notes. Is it easy to transmit your precious knowledge (I’m guessing it’s precious), to share it, to get it out of your note-system to interact with the world? That’s heading in the direction of living memory. Or does it encourage you to store your knowledge away, to archive it rather than pass it round or create something with it. That’s oriented towards latent memory.

None of these dimensions are wrong in themselves, but knowing which type of memory your tool is optimised for helps explain that nagging tension I was feeling. You might be trying to use a filing cabinet like a conversation partner, or vice versa.

The question isn’t “which tool is best?” but “does this tool match what I’m actually trying to do?”

—–

Some further reading:

Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget

In this post I explore the dual nature of memory and forgetting through note-making and discuss how my notes become “conversation partners” with my future self - because I’ve forgotten what my past self thought. But I also consider that selective forgetting may have some advantages.

Don’t throw away your old notes

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this post is directly relevant to living vs. latent memory, because it’s about the Zettelkasten as a “conversation partner between my old self and my current self” and it considers how to create the right conditions for serendipity and associational connections.

My favourite tool is this notebook I made

This is about how I modified TiddlyWiki to suit me better. I wanted a rhizomatic tool for writing, and since I couldn’t find one I really liked, I adapted one for my own purposes. You might not need to invent your own tools, I said, but each of us gathers uniquely the unique contents of our own toolbox. And yes, when I grow up I want to be an aphorist.

How to write a better note without melting your brain

This is a practical guide to writing a note that might actually reach its potential. I also discuss Tim Ingold’s contrast between “textilic” (weaving) vs. “architectonic” (architecture) modes of creation, which I’m pretty sure is relevant to associational vs. taxonomic thinking.

What to do when you’ve made some notes: Write something

This post is all about the latent/living dimension, because here I’m suggesting that the point of making notes is to make something else with them, probably for others to read. Yes, it turns out I am quite opinionated about what I want to achieve with my tools. And if you click this link you’ll see a picture of me hard at work in my study overlooking the Sydney Opera House. That has to be worthwhile.

—–

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:25:30 +1100

Looking back at 2025: a year of writing slowly but thinking with curiosity. 🖋️

From the note-making of Roland Barthes and Leibniz to reflections on AI and Japanese learning methods, here is a full archive of last year’s posts: Link

#Writing #Zettelkasten #PKM #AI #Learning #Blog #2025 #Shuhari

The posts of 2025

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:04:00 +1100

I’m much better at writing new stuff than consolidating the old, but it’s time to review what’s been posted here during 2025. Short posts excluded, it’s quite a lot, considering I’m Writing Slowly.

There’s also a list of the posts of 2024 and the posts of 2023 too.

And don’t forget to check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
To get the latest posts straight to your in-box, subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email newsletter.

People

Roland Barthes on the purpose of writing notes

The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman’s Monumental Note Archive

Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn’t mean you have to

Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn’t fit in his Zettelschrank

What Tim Berners-Lee Has to Teach About Effective Notes

Daniel Wisser’s notecards as art and archive

A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke

What I Learned from Bob Doto about Making Effective Notes and Writing a Book

I’m unqualified to diagnose the following writers with ADHD but I’ll do it anyway

Mastering Any Skill, the Japanese Way. A review of Analysis of Shu Ha Ri in Karate-Do: When a Martial Art Becomes a Fine Art by Hermann Bayer, Ph.D.

Writing and Making notes

Maybe you can create coherent writing from a pile of notes after all

Semantic line breaks are a feature of Markdown, not a bug

Create a note system that indexes itself

Publishing Slowly. An article about my first book launch of the year.

My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts

Roland Barthes on the purpose of writing notes

The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman’s Monumental Note Archive

Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn’t mean you have to

Tame the chaos with just foour folders for all your notes

Five solutions to link rot in my personal note collection

Why not publish all your notes online?

From tiny drops of writing, great rivers will flow

I found a way to create order from my jumbled ideas

Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn’t fit in his Zettelschrank

What Tim Berners-Lee Has to Teach About Effective Notes

Daniel Wisser’s notecards as art and archive

What I’ve learned from non-linear narratives

A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke

What I Learned from Bob Doto about Making Effective Notes and Writing a Book

What to do when you’ve made some notes: Start writing

Don’t throw away your old notes

Don’t let your note-making system infect you with Archive Fever

I’m unqualified to diagnose the following writers with ADHD but I’ll do it anyway

I designed a book in three and a half hours

If there’s more than one way of seeing, there’s more than one way of organising

Watch in awe as a fleeting thought becomes a lasting note

Plenty of ways to write online

Open, free and poetic. The Web is 34 years old!

Is there a Zettelkasten method?

Use case for the Zettelkasten. Why use a Zettelkasten? Why indeed?

Back to the Information City? How knowledge visualisation shapes the journey

Zettelkasten podcast episodes

Keeping a diary is a way of living

Publishing means no more hiding. Publishing my book, I had the strange feeling of having crossed an invisible but very powerful threshold.

Create your own mental models

Why niche blogs and Small Rooms still win - even in the age of technofeudalism

Imitating the greats? Imitation can be a very effective form of learning, but it’s worth considering who to imitate, and how.

Trying to write slowly in 2025

The Unity of Pen and Sword: Understanding Bunbu Ichi

Learning

The future of the humanities is wide open

Influence is everything: novelty its flimsy dress. What happens when once fashionable ideas get left behind?

I designed a book in three and a half hours

Mastering Any Skill, the Japanese Way. A review of Analysis of Shu Ha Ri in Karate-Do: When a Martial Art Becomes a Fine Art by Hermann Bayer, Ph.D.

Back to the Information City? How knowledge visualisation shapes the journey

Curious about Hypercuriosity

Create your own mental models

Imitating the greats? Imitation can be a very effective form of learning, but it’s worth considering who to imitate, and how.

What does it mean to transcend the rules?

Keeping a diary is a way of living

Japanese Shu Ha Ri: Is it Better Than Western Learning Methods?

There’s a fundamental flaw in how we learn about expertise

Shu Ha Ri and the philosophy of interior design

The Unity of Pen and Sword: Understanding Bunbu Ichi

AI

What comes after content?

It’s a great time to be writing the future

To understand the future of AI, look to the past

Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn’t fit in his Zettelschrank

Hot takes on our future with AI

Provocative words about learning, teaching, AI, and the timely value of history

There’s a fundamental flaw in how we learn about expertise

Other

The Sydney I know isn’t like what they’re showing on the news

Japanese paper films. Yes, in the 1930s the Japanese made a whole bunch of short movies using rolls of paper instead of celluloid.

— Check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And you can also subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email newsletter.

The right kind of optimism in 2026

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:36:14 +1100

Happy New Year! May the next 12 months bring you peace and joy and blessing.

Here are a handful of hopeful articles to get your 2026 started on a positive note. I especially recommend the first one which I found deeply inspiring.

All the news the media missed in 2025 fixthenews.com (via Miraz Jordan.)
“The right kind of optimism is disciplined. It begins with the premise that action changes outcomes, then organizes institutions, incentives, and narratives to make that premise true.” mongabay.com.
The Sydney I know isn’t like what they’re showing on the news writingslowly.com.

Trying to write slowly in 2025

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:53:31 +1100

Before I really got going with the Zettelkasten approach to making notes (and with micro.blog) I was publishing only a handful of posts here each year.

But then my productivity exploded.

In 2023 I published 202 posts here, and this post equals that count for 2025, even though the year isn’t done yet.

In 2025 I also edited a collection of essays and published my own book.

So I’m quite happy with the year’s output. And thank you for reading along with me, I really appreciate it.

But don’t worry, in 2026 I’ll still be trying to write slowly.

This little book would make a great present for the artist, fighter, learner, teacher, or straight-up Japan-lover in your life. Just saying.

Imitating the greats?

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 08:26:57 +1100

Imitation can be a very effective form of learning, but it’s worth considering who to imitate, and how.

Writers often seek to imitate the greats, but it interesting how far the star of some supposedly timeless writers can fade. Here’s William Zinsser, the well-read author of ‘Writing to learn’, on how he did it.

“Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it. S. J. Perelman told me that when he was starting out he could have been arrested for imitating Ring Lardner. Woody Allen could have been arrested for imitating S. J. Perelman. And who hasn’t tried to imitate Woody Allen? Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical—which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become.”

So who are these people I’ve never heard of, I wondered, who could all have been arrested for imitating one another? I mean, they couldn’t, could they? It’s not actually illegal, is it? Or did Zinsser mean plagiarism?

It turns out that Ring Lardner was an American sports journalist and satirist whose work was greatly admired by many of the major authors who were his contemporaries. In his high school newspaper Ernest Hemingway used the pen name, ‘Ring Lardner Jr’. Lardner became a friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and he inspired the writing of John O’Hara (another great writer whose name is seldom heard these days). In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger gave Lardner a backhanded compliment by having his protagonist, Holden Caulfield, name Lardner as his second favourite author. So for Hemingway at least the juvenile imitation seems to have extended to impersonation.

Clearly I need to read some Ring Lardner.

S.J.Perelman was a humourist, writing especially for the New Yorker. He was admired by T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Garrison Keillor, Frank Muir, and Woody Allen. Another writer I’ve never heard of, who seems to have been inspirational. But then…

“Who hasn’t tried to imitate Woody Allen?” Is a question I’ll leave hanging in the wind.

Author and academic Adam Roberts has an interesting post about Jonathan Buckley’s novel, One Boat (2025), which appears to use Laurence Durrell’s adjectives as a model for how one of his own characters might over-write their diary. Durrell is an author whose star has certainly faded, even though he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. And his style is certainly not admired these days. As Roberts says,

“giving his narrator these Durrellisms: the point of this adjectival affectation, or addiction, is to characterize her as someone groping, somewhat desperately, for expression, or the impossibility thereof”

Well, whether this is a deliberate imitation in order to show a diarist whose purple prose, like Durrell’s gallops away from them, or whether, as Adam’s seems to suspect, it isn’t, whether Buckley was doing something very clever and ‘meta’ with his character’s imitation, or whether he was just getting away with it, all the same, the novel was long listed for the Booker Prize.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.

Why niche blogs and Small Rooms still win - even in the age of technofeudalism

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 23:08:29 +1100

Views? I’ve had a few

Blogging is about creative expression, but as Tom Critchlow observes, it’s also about finding the others. I love blogging, and I have a personal blog that I love writing on. I guess you already know that, right? But I have to admit it, the Internet doesn’t treat blogs particularly well. The issue is that there’s no discovery flywheel for a blog. Google search is unlikely to make you visible, so you have to do all the work yourself of promoting it to potential readers. And as everyone knows, attention is a scarce resource these days. In contrast, social media thrives on showing people what you’ve made and algorithmically fine-tuning this to reach as many of the right people as possible.

I don’t love social media. In fact I do my best to avoid it. But I don’t mind forum sites so much, where the moderation keeps things at least a little civil.

Well, happily, my blog does have readers, a few at least.

To monitor reading figures, I use a very basic analytics service which respects users' privacy.

I could see from the dashboard that by June 2024 my site was getting about 1,200 views in a month. That’s amazing - thank you, to all of you, especially the keen ones right at the front taking notes! You’ll do well in the test later.

This is what a thousand people look like, though they’re not always as keen as this lot.

By July 2025 the count had risen to 6,000 views a month, where it now hovers. This may seem like a small number compared with how many times Beyonce’s been listened to, but it also compares very well with the number of people I can shout to across a crowded bar.

Now the most viewed individual post in June 2024 gained 216 views. It’s a more select crowd, but a crowd all the same! (Thanks for cheering, by the way).

A crowd of 250 people is still a crowd.

And a year later it was still gaining 64 views per month. Here’s the thing though. The same post with 216 views on my website reached considerably more readers on Reddit. It had 3,200 views there, which is about fifteen times more eyeballs! And a year later it had doubled that count.

And one of my more popular posts on Reddit has had 14,000 views, which, amazingly, is more views than this tennis match had!¹

This tennis match had 10,000 viewers - almost as many as my crappy post on Reddit

But that’s not the very most popular post of mine on Reddit. That would be this more recent one, with 71,000 views, a lot like this exciting football match:

These audience size images, by the way, come from Visualizing crowd sizes.

It’s ironic that my most viewed piece of writing is a single sentence long and it contains a very obvious spelling mistake.

Now to me this looks like a very big stadium. Top sports teams and pop stars would be happy with those numbers. But if you’ve posted stuff on the big platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Xitter (I’m told the X is pronounced ‘Sh’), you’re probably already laughing at these ‘tiny’ numbers. By jumping off your roof into a paddling pool with a goat in it you’ve probably enjoyed millions of views. You’ve probably gone totally viral. You’re probably a certified influencer too. But the thing is…

I don’t want to be a serf on someone else’s plantation

I can’t stand technofeudalism, in which a few billionaires own the platforms and we’re just sharecroppers in their extractive systems. Unhappily, as economist Yanis Varoufakis observes in his book, Technofeudalism, it’s the state of the world these days.

I’m never going to jump off my roof into this paddling pool, not even for views. Not even for likes.

I want a different world (I know, right?), in which data portability and interoperability are the norm, so that if I want to switch platforms I can take my ‘connections’ with me. As Professor Sinan Aral, author of Hype Machine, has imagined, “consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another.” This wouldn’t just be good for me, it would be good for the whole ecosystem, since it would give the neo-feudal platform overlords an incentive to provide a better service than that of their competitors. The Three-legged Stool is just one vision of how this could work in practice.

Meanwhile, I support services that already support interoperability. My blog is hosted by Micro.blog, which encourages me to syndicate it to other places, including Mastodon and BlueSky, which also support (some) interoperability. I’m anticipating the arrival of the Pluriverse by building it, one blog post at a time.

On the other hand, there’s a certain logic to performing where the audience is. When I was a kid I used to practice my music in public by busking. And I always busked where the crowds were, not down an empty back alley where no one was listening. My parents disapproved, until I told them how much I was earning.

If you believe your work is worth reading, then you probably also believe it’s worth getting it read by more than one person.

It’s a bit of a contradiction. Even progressive organisations like New Public, which exist ‘to reimagine social media’ nevertheless use extractive venture-capital platforms like Substack, which allegedly profits from hosting Nazis. This seems a far cry from New Public’s mission of ‘building digital public spaces that connect people, embrace pluralism, and build community’.

So these large systems that promise to promote your kind, helpful informative posts, also promote hate-speech and genocide.

But what’s the alternative? Shout into the void?

Actually, Molly White, with more than 20,000 subscribers, wasn’t happy with Substack, and she decided she didn’t want any platform dependence at all, so she rolled her own, and gave detailed instructions for anyone who might want to do the same.

Unfortunately, this isn’t simple. It’s not terribly difficult, but the bar is just high enough that it’s obvious that most people won’t bother. I mean, everyone has principles, don’t they, until the moment they see the phrase, “MySQL wasn’t configured properly”?

I’m not going to help out the haters, but I wouldn’t mind getting a few views, but also I’m not a tech wizard.

It’s a dilemma.

So where online are the people who might find my writing worthwhile? I might have some good reasons to prefer my blog over social media, but that doesn’t mean my audience does. Let’s say I’m writing a post about getting more readers. If I want to help people with this post, I need to think a bit about who it’s for and where these people usually go to get their information.

On reflection, it seems the obscure niche subjects I like writing about are well-suited to online ‘small rooms’ like subreddits, forums and discord groups, rather than ‘big rooms’ like Facebook and TikTok, where ‘context collapse’ is the norm.²

That’s because I’m not posting memes and ‘hot takes’. No goats were surprised by amateur divers in the making of this article. I’m trying to provide thoughtful, eccentric observations for thoughtful (not at all eccentric) readers, so context is everything. This means my interim solution is to post first on my blog, then syndicate where I can, then cross post to small rooms, manually when necessary. It’s a work in progress, but I do seem to be making a little progress.

My book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters is available right now and it’s selling fine, even though it’s a niche subject and I’m a marketing team of one.

A second reason I’m keen on my own website is that it’s a way of keeping a record of the canonical version of my online writing. The big platforms can just disappear overnight, taking everything with them as they go. Disappearance is also part of business as usual for social media. For example, Pew Research found that in 2023, 1-in-5 (20%) English language tweets had become inaccessible just three months after posting on Twitter (now X). I’d prefer to have some control over the longevity of my work. That’s why syndication is a good plan. Unfortunately, many of the big platforms don’t support it at all. The only way to syndicate is by hand, by copying and pasting. It’s feasible (I do this occasionally with Reddit), but not very efficient.

This matters because the way we organise our online lives bleeds into the way we organise the rest of our social interactions. If it’s just assumed without question that the online space is a fiefdom, then democracy everywhere is undermined.

For wise words on this subject, read Governable Spaces, by Nathan Schneider.

OK, so I know what I’m doing here (at least in one sense of that phrase), but what about what you should do? One piece of advice I do have is to notice how many people actually are reading, listening to or watching your stuff. Really notice. It might be a room-full, or a stadium-full. Every one of your readers, listeners or viewers has spent precious time and effort to engage with your thoughts, and whether or not it pays your bills, that’s amazing and worth pausing a moment to appreciate.

So here’s the point where we pause for a moment to appreciate the wonder that anyone at all is noticing our stuff.

Wow.

But unfortunately that’s all the advice I can give right now. Yes, I’d like to think niche blogs and Small Rooms still win, but that surely depends on how you define ‘winning’. I’m probably doing it all wrong. AI is rapidly transforming the whole landscape of discoverability. Organic search is less and less viable when AI summaries are everywhere. Perhaps, as some are prophesying, the humble hyperlink is dead.

So rather than tell you how to reach your readers (as if!), I have a question for you: how do you reach your readers already, right now, and how do you expect to in a near future dominated by lots of AI hype and quite a bit of AI reality?

What’s changing for you? Are you pumping up the paddling pool right now in preparation for a pivot to YouTube and massive fame? Would you still write if you had a single reader? And do you appreciate the readers you do have?

Oh, it turns out I have quite a few questions.

For still more questions and precious few answers, subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email digest.

It’s naive to trust Reddit’s figures, but that’s what they say, and you can’t do your own analytics. Well, I can’t anyway. ↩︎
I’m borrowing a taxonomy of social media that includes big rooms, small rooms and many rooms. ↩︎

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 07:32:19 +1100

What’s your most valuable note?

@eleanorkonik@pkm.social asked:

“Any examples where a tiny note became unexpectedly valuable?”

Here’s my reply.

In 2018 I wrote a note describing how I’d like to visit Japan and learn more about the concept of Shu Ha Ri.
Better late than never I did visit Japan, and I ended up writing the book on Shu Ha Ri.
There was a lot of value in that one short note.

Create your own mental models

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 16:26:33 +1100

When he was still in high school my cousin took to pulling old cars apart, completely, then putting them back together. This was a real learning experience, and the beginning of an entire career working with motor vehicles. François Chollet, author of Deep Learning with Python, said:

💬 To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn’t come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models. - as quoted by Simon Willison.

This is what I’m doing with my collection of working notes, my Zettelkasten. I disassemble ideas and concepts, de-contextualise them, and reassemble them into new arrangements under quite different circumstances. From fragments you can build a greater whole.

Sometimes ‘invention’ is mashing together two or more existing ideas in new and unexpected ways. But sometimes it’s simply rebuilding an existing idea from the ground up, to create something previously unimaginable.

I wrote my book about the Japanese concept of learning, Shu Ha Ri, because in the fifteen years since I first encountered this concept, no one else had written a clear introduction. It’s quite literally the book I wanted to read for myself. Well, I certainly didn’t invent the idea, but in writing the definitive introduction I’ve certainly taken it apart, examined it from every angle, worked out how to explain it to others, and put it back together.

On Friday I received a nice text from a martial arts instructor, who’d been handed the book by someone else:

💬 I absolutely loved it. First time in a long time I immediately reread a book.

And so I hope you’ll enjoy giving the book a test drive too.

Photo by Geoff Charles, 1962. National Library of Wales. Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales on Unsplash

Check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And you can also subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email newsletter.

Publishing means no more hiding

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 22:15:04 +1100

Revelation must be terrible, knowing you can never hide your voice again. – David Whyte

Publishing my book, I had the strange feeling of having crossed an invisible but very powerful threshold.

It was while signing copies at a small and very supportive gathering, that it dawned on me that the thoughts that used to be just in my head are now public and exposed to the world – and since I’ve lodged this work in every State Library in Australia, they’ll never again be totally private.

I had thought I just wanted to publish my words, to release my book into the wild, as it were, to allow it to find its readers.

So it never occurred that I might have been benefiting in some way from the obscurity of the drafting process.

Not that I want to hide my voice – far from it.

Nor that I’m expecting a million readers. Again, far from it.

But the knowledge that I now have one unique reader – you – with whom my words will perhaps connect whether I bid them or not, well that changes things somehow.

And it’s certainly a revelation to realise there’s no going back.

My book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, is out now. Please check it out.

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I fell down a rabbit hole writing about Hypercuriosity! 🤯 Inspired by Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s work.

Read how being curious about everything defines my process: https://writingslowly.com/2025/09/30/curious-about-hypercuriosity.html

#Hypercuriosity #Curiosity #ADHD #Writingslowly

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 09:32:10 +1100

Having written about the need to create your own writing environment, I found this post showing the writing spaces of 12 Booker Prize nominees quite illuminating. Each one seems like a small but mighty theatre stage (HT: kottke.org).

#WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritersLife #WritingTips

Curious about Hypercuriosity

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:51:28 +1100

One reason I make notes and write is that I’m curious about everything.

I’ve written previously about how to be interested in everything. And I’ve also written about busybodies, hunters and dancers - three different styles of curiosity.

It was the ‘dancer’ style of curiosity that resonated most with me:

“This type of curiosity is described as a dance in which disparate concepts, typically conceived of as unrelated, are briefly linked in unique ways as the curious individual leaps and bounds across traditionally siloed areas of knowledge. Such brief linking fosters the generation or creation of new experiences, ideas, and thoughts.”

So I was interested to see that Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments and founder of Ness Labs, Has been exploring what she calls ‘hypercuriosity’, which may be associated with ADHD.

Well, I guess I’m the living proof. I set out this evening to write about my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning for Artists and Fighters but I ended up writing about something completely different instead: hypercuriosity.

Come to think of it, that’s how the book got written in the first place, by pursuing my curiosity. And come to think of it, that’s how I do practically everything.

In writing the book I was particularly attracted by the value placed on the Japanese concept of shoshin (初心), ‘beginner’s mind’ - a quality often downplayed in Western contexts, where experts are supposed to already know everything.

I’m more interested in not knowing - and then going to great lengths to find out.

Links:

Brar, G. (2024, November 14). The hypercuriosity theory of ADHD: An interview with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Evolution and Psychiatry (Substack).

Gupta, S. (2025, September 16). People with ADHD may have an underappreciated advantage: Hypercuriosity. Science News.

Le Cunff, A. (2024). Distractability and impulsivity in ADHD as an evolutionary mismatch of high trait curiosity. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 10, 282.

Le Cunff, A. (2025, July 15). When curiosity doesn’t fit the world we’ve built: How do we design a world that supports hypercurious minds? Ness Labs.

If you’re curious to catch the latest Writing Slowly action, please subscribe to the weekly email digest. All the posts, delivered straight to your in-box.

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:23:08 +1100

📚Tsundoku emergency temporarily averted.

Keeping a diary is a way of living

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 16:49:25 +1100

“A diary is not only a text: it is a behaviour, a way of life, of which the text is a by-product" - French theorist Philipe Lejeune. Source: Arts & Ideas Podcast.

Exactly so. I have a journalling habit, which fuels my Zettelkasten, (my collection of linked notes), which in turn fuels my writing. This in turn affects my life, which I journal about. It’s a virtuous circle.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
And did you know you can sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest?

Zettelkasten podcast episodes

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 09:35:45 +1100

Here are a couple of podcast interviews where the Zettelkasten approach to making notes is discussed in detail. Enjoy!

William Wadsworth (Exam Study Expert) interviews Sonke Ahrens, author of How to Take Smart Notes. Apple Podcasts.

Sönke Ahrens on Niklas Luhmann’s writing process:

“The main part of the writing process happened in this in-between space most people, I believe, neglect. They write notes, they read, they polish their manuscripts, but I think few people understand the importance of taking proper notes and organising them in a way that a manuscript, an argument, a chapter can evolve out of that.”

Jackson Dahl (Dialectic) interviews Billy Oppenheimer, Ryan Holiday’s research assistant, on staying attuned for clues. Apple Podcasts.

“I adopted/adapted Ryan Holiday’s notecard system, which he learned from Robert Greene. And it’s just literally boxes of 4x6 notecards. I’ve never seen Robert’s actual cards, but I have seen Ryan’s. His are filled with shorthands: a maybe a phrase, a word, or a single sentence that conveys a story from some book. They are little reminders capturing the broad strokes of something. You notate it with the book and page number so you can go back and find the specific details.”

“Niklas Luhmann also has another great idea about making notes for an ignorant stranger… Because that’s what you are when you come back to it. We think, “There’s no way I’m going to forget this story.” You come back to it, and it’s highlighted and underlined. You’re like, “What was I loving about this?” I try to make the note cards for an ignorant stranger. You should be able to pick one up and have enough context to make out what this thing is. And so in a similar way, in the margins of books, I try to do that for myself.”

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 22:04:51 +1100

An atomic note isn’t just about ideas; it’s about time. Start smaller, stop sooner, and your notes become easier to reuse and connect. ✍️ Post here: The shortest writing session that could possibly work.

#NoteTaking #KnowledgeWork #zettelkasten #writingtips

Back to the Information City? How knowledge visualisation shapes the journey

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 21:00:00 +1100

I was intrigued by Mark Bernstein’s¹ co-authored article revisiting the concept of the city as a visual metaphor for information in the era of hypertext.

Intrigued, because I’m not convinced the city makes things clearer. In fact the first thing that came into my mind was Steven Marcus’s claim from way back that urban dwellers experience a particular kind of estrangement. They sense that “the city is unintelligible and illegible”. This appears in a collection of essays on the Victorian city, in an essay titled ‘Reading the Illegible.’ (1973:257).

This idea - that the city can’t be read - put me in mind of Jonathan Raban’s proto-postmodernist book Soft City (1974), where he contrasts the book with the city, the legible with the illegible.

“The city and the book are opposed forms: to force the city’s spread, contingency, and aimless motion into the tight progression of a narrative is to risk a total falsehood. There is no single point of view from which we can grasp the city as a whole. That indeed is the distinction between the city and the small town. A good working definition of metropolitan life would center on its intrinsic illegibility. (p. 219)

As it happens, it seems that the article authors' conclusion is that the Information city is not a particularly promising metaphor to guide the navigation of complex information structures:

“It seems clear that the Information City is better suited to constructive than to exploratory hypertext.”

This ties in nicely with my take on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s view that creativity is more about ‘itineration’ (wayfinding) than ‘iteration’ (making an object).

Would it be possible, then, somehow to depict the wayfinding process in and of itself without in advance also reifying the landscape? I’m imagining a walk through an unfamiliar place, which through repetition gradually becomes familiar, and may be rendered yet more familiar by establishing idiosyncratic markers, the way Ariadne’s thread guided Theseus through the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

*[Image source]: Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.*

The authors say of their attempted information visualisation:

“The Information City may be superb for some and intolerable for those who might prefer to work in a Piranesi dungeon.”

My view is that despite the efforts of UI creators, we don’t really have a choice in this matter. We are already living in Piranesi’s dungeon, in which meaning is lost and found and lost again, and where forgetting is as important as remembering.

That said, I’m as wary of the dream of information legibility as I am of the dream of urban legibility. The metaphor that works for me is of an immense and unknown forest, the deep forest of accumulated knowledge. Though travelers may have no sense of the ultimate extent of the forest, and even if there is no thread, they can make one as they explore. They may still provide a report, like a travel journal:

“Here is the route I took, and here are the landmarks I discovered on the way.".

This deep subjectivity allows for a limited form of objectivity:

“with my report in hand you too can follow this path through the trees.".

*[Image source: Hasui Kawase], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

References:

Bernstein, Mark, Silas Hooper, and Mark Anderson. “Back to the Information City.” Paper presented at HT 2025: 36th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Chicago, IL, September 15–18, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1145/3720553.3746664.

Dyos, H. J., and Michael Wolff. The Victorian City: Images and Realities. Vol. 1. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

Ingold, Tim. “The Textility of Making.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep042.

Raban, Jonathan. Soft City: The Art of Cosmopolitan Living. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974.

He’s the creator of the Tinderbox notemaking app. ↩︎

Use case for the Zettelkasten

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 19:17:22 +1100

Why use a Zettelkasten? Why indeed? Geeky online legend Gwern was rather negative:

Most people simply have no need for lots of half-formed ideas, random lists of research papers, and so on. This is what people always miss about “Zettelkasten”: are you writing a book? Are you a historian or Teutonic scholar like Niklas Luhmann? Do you publish a dozen papers a year? Are you the 1% of the 1%? No? Then why do you think you need a Zettelkasten?

He argued that tools for thought don’t actually aid thought and that the obviously useful alternative is ‘systems that think for the user instead’.

Wait, what? Systems that think for the user?? I disagree with this very strongly. Sure, it’s true that as they stand, ‘tools for thought’ are no substitute for humans putting in the effort. But I don’t see that as a valid criticism.

The human effort is the part that matters. The effort of thought is actually a feature not a bug. Human thought is preferable to AI computation not because it’s more efficient (although it very often is) but because it’s more human, and humans warm to the activity of other humans.

For instance, in early 2025 a Lithuanian explorer attempted to cross the Pacific Ocean in a one-man rowing boat. He made it to within 740km of the Australian coast, when he was assailed by a cyclone and prevented from sleeping for several days straight. In extremis he finally set off his SOS beacon and the Australian navy came to rescue him, despite the 16-metre-high swells they had to brave. The adventurer only just made it out alive. Returned from the dead, back on shore and reunited with this wife in a photogenic moment he sank to his knees as she embraced him.

Now this was all very interesting, despite the fact that the very ocean water that was trying to capsize him routinely crosses vast distances with no problem. No one cares about the brine, no one feels for its plight and the media never report on its travails. Did you ever see a headline like this:

“Alone and exhausted, a desperate ocean wave makes it gratefully to shore”?

No you didn’t. That was a rhetorical question. Human interest stories work because it’s humans that we’re interested in.

*Won't someone think of the poor wave?*

Improbably, this wasn’t the only Lithuanian paddler to survive a run-in with Australian waters in recent years. The previous year a Lithuanian kayaker slipped into some rapids on Tasmania’s Franklin River, where he was jammed between rocks and pinned down by a flow of 13 tonnes of water per second. Again, he was the subject of a daring and extreme rescue. Meanwhile, no one thought twice about how the water felt.

And no one cares either when it’s AI that’s supposedly doing the ‘thinking’. It’s inanimate. But they do care quite a lot about a solitary Lithuanian in mortal danger. And so on. I’ve never visited the Franklin River, which this photograph I took in New Zealand clearly illustrates.

Getting back on track, the thought that goes into making notes matters, quite simply because thought just does matter. Conversely, when ‘systems think for the user’, well, whatever that is, it’s not thought.

But beyond this, I can’t help wondering why we need to justify at all a practice so basic as simply making notes and linking them. My half-formed thoughts might not be as good as Gwern’s (OK, they definitely aren’t), but at least they’re my half-formed thoughts.

In a co-authored conference paper, Mark Bernstein, creator of the Tinderbox app, makes what ought to be an obvious point:

“It may frequently be the case that we ourselves do not know the ultimate uses of our notes, yet still find note-taking rewarding.” - Bernstein et al., 2025, Back to the Information City

Reflecting on Gwern’s dismissal of the Zettelkasten approach, I’m reminded of self-help guru Oliver Burkeman, who had a different criticism to offer. He said he had tried a Zettelkasten but found it too organised. That got me wondering, how much mess is just enough?

For what it’s worth, I’ve found the Zettelkasten approach very practical and quite productive, despite my not being particularly organised. Here’s a book it helped me write and publish: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

And of course, my Zettelkasten is helping me to carry on Writing Slowly. You can follow the frenetic action with the weekly digest - a blog magically transformed into an email. Amazing!

Reference:

Bernstein, Mark, Silas Hooper, and Mark Anderson. ‘Back to the Information City’. Paper presented at HT 2025: 36th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, September 15–18, 2025, Chicago, IL, USA. 2025. Preprint PDF.

#Zettelkasten #PKMS #notetaking #toolsforthought #Lithuanian #HT2025

Is there a Zettelkasten method?

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:14:50 +1100

Quite a few people write and speak about the Zettelkasten, a simple way of maintaining a note making system, but is there really any such thing? An online forum comment drew my attention, since it captured something I’ve been thinking about for a while:

“I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a method. The very adjective is a mistake. What exists are a few very general guidelines, essentially revolving around the idea of atomic notes and some form of connection between them. I am not saying this as a criticism of the method or anyone. I have been using “the method” since 2020 and appreciate zettelkasten.de. But there is no method. There is not much to write about “the method” as if it were something beyond those two guidelines.” - u/Magnifico99 on Reddit.

Here are my thoughts and I’d like to know what you think.

There’s no single method, but many

“I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a method… What exists are a few very general guidelines… But there is no method.” - u/Magnifico99 on Reddit.

I really agree with this. There is no single ‘method’. Instead there’s a seemingly obsolete practice of writing notes on small slips of paper and arranging them so they can be found again. Then there’s the digital version of this, which differs from how most note-making apps expect their users to do things.

“What exists are a few very general guidelines, essentially revolving around the idea of atomic notes and some form of connection between them.” - u/Magnifico99 on Reddit.

Well, yes, that’s pretty much it. At any rate, there’s not all that much more to it than that. And I appreciate a minimal approach to making notes.

It’s not a method, but an ‘approach’

I usually employ the phrase Zettelkasten approach. That’s because there clearly isn’t just a single Zettelkasten method. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, unwitting patron saint of contemporary Zettelkasten discussions, kept two different Zettelkästen, and everyone else who ever made notes on cards also did it a bit differently from everyone who was doing something similar. I’ve read several 19th and 20th century manuals on writing and note writing - and they all prescribe slightly different approaches, which are all a bit different both from how Luhmann did it and from how most people do it now.

We can experiment with writing notes

But this fuzzy definition isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength. It means the field is wide open for us to experiment and to discover and share what works for us, each of us, guided, but not constrained, by a handful of simple principles.

I see the Zettelkasten in the context of what science historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger calls “epistemic things” (1997). By discussing the Zettelkasten, we’re actually engaging in the process of creating it ¹. Conversely, if ever the conversation stops, that’s when the concept is over. As the Russian literary theorist Mikhael Bakhtin (1986) said,

“If an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue”.

But isn’t it a waste of time?

“For a few years now, I have not been able to read anything about Zettelkasten on the internet without clearly feeling that I am wasting my time or indulging in some form of entertainment."- u/Magnifico99 on Reddit.

Despite writing quite a lot here about note-making (sorry to waste your time, dear reader), I agree with this view too. Since the basic guidelines are simple, there’s only so much to be said about them before confusion ensues.

In particular, I’m frustrated by a ballooning of idiosyncratic vocabulary. For example, ‘evergreen notes’? This is kind of helpful, though it seems to be conflating note-making with journalism. For journalists an evergreen article is one you can write at any time of the year and publish later, since it won’t get old. It’s what the newspapers publish when all the journalists are on holiday around Christmas and New Year.

Andy Matuschak reuses this concept for his evergreen notes, to describe something slightly different: a note that stays fresh because it can always be added to. I don’t usually add to my notes. Instead I resolve this differently - not by editing and updating my notes, but by writing new, linked notes, so I can clearly see the evolution of my thought over time.I’m also a little frustrated by the proliferation of supposed note types. What’s the difference between a ’fleeting note’ and a ‘permanent note’?

These concepts are like training wheels on a bicycle. They’re useful until you don’t need them, but as with training wheels, there’s a possibility they may impede learning, for some people.

I’m even more frustrated with all those YouTube videos and AI-generated articles purporting to come from helpful experts but actually just regurgitating the previous videos and SEO fodder.

It seems like everyone who ever heard of the Zettelkasten approach has also made a YouTube video or ten about it. And if you look at the chat bot marketplaces you’ll see that there’s an explosion of AI Zettelkasten ‘helpers’ that all offer various half-baked schemes for writing all your notes for you. I counted more than 50 before I gave up. It all seems to add up to nothing but a pile of pointlessness.

So where’s the silver lining?

In two words: community and practice. Low-key community, that is, and real-life practice.

Low-key community

Low-key community is one silver lining to all this rumination. There’s a loose assortment of people (on Reddit/zettelkasten, zettelkasten.de, maybe the Obsidian forums and personal knowledge management (PKM) forums somewhere — and even some readers of this very website) who are interested in better writing and clearer thinking. We are using the Zettelkasten approach as a social object, around which to gather and work on.

These people don’t necessarily agree with one another. In fact disagreeing is one key hallmark of a ‘discourse coalition’ (Hajer, 2009), where everyone who talks about the same thing gets to mean something different by it, then argues over the definitions ². Although this may sound obtuse, it’s actually quite productive. That’s because it’s in the nature of objects of knowledge to be unfinished or unattained - maybe perpetually.

objects of knowledge in many fields have material instantiations, but they must simultaneously be conceived of as unfolding structures of absences: as things that continually ‘explode’ and ‘mutate’ into something else, and that are as much defined by what they are not (but will, at some point, have become) than by what they are. - Cetina (2001: 182).

Not that, but this. Not quite agreeing on the contours of the Zettelkasten approach is evidence that it’s worthwhile (at least for us) to continue to explore the concept. The more you look into it, the more you see.

“objects of knowledge appear to have the capacity to unfold indefinitely. They are more like open drawers filled with folders extending indefinitely into the depth of a dark closet.” - Bennet (2005). Chat GPT made this great image, but for now your job putting handles on drawers appears quite safe.

Real-life practice

The other silver lining, the main one really, is real-life practice. Writing is and remains an ‘organizational technology’ for thinking (Eddy, 2023). By writing notes, and experimenting with doing it better (whatever better means), people are gradually improving their skills at writing and thinking productively and meaningfully.

Until the hype settles down, AI is revolutionising our understanding of the significance of literacy, but the need to organise our thoughts effectively will probably increase, not decrease. Making notes, whatever the ‘method’ or ‘approach’, will continue to have a place in the intellectual toolkit.

That’s my view and I’m sticking to it until you convince me otherwise. I’ve found the Zettelkasten approach to making notes very helpful and I know others have too.

Now read:

Don’t let your note-making system infect you with Archive Fever.

What to do when you’ve made some notes.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. It’s a short and accessible introduction to the concept, available now.
And if you liked this article, why not subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email digest?

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. University of Texas Press.

Bennett, T. (2005), ‘Civic Laboratories: Museums, Cultural Objecthood and the Governance of the Social’, Cultural Studies, 19(5): 521-547. Preprint PDF

Cetina, Karin Knorr (2001). Objectual practice. Ch.12 in The practice turn in contemporary theory. Ed. Theodore R. Schatzki. London: Routledge, 17-18. P. 182

Eddy, Matthew (2023). Media & the Mind : Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Hajer, Maarten A. (2009). Authoritative Governance: Policy-Making in the Age of Mediatization. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Hajer, Maartin (2024). Teaching discourse and dramaturgy. Ch. 20 in St. Denny, Emily, and Philippe Zittoun, eds. Handbook of Teaching Public Policy. Cheltenham, UK ; Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (1997). Toward a history of epistemic things: Synthesising proteins in the test tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rheinberger argues that scientific research is driven by the investigation of “epistemic things”—entities or phenomena that are not yet fully known or understood. These “things” emerge within “experimental systems,” which are the material and conceptual arrangements of research. Rheinberger claims these systems don’t just reveal pre-existing objects but actively shape and bring forth these epistemic things through the ongoing process of experimentation. In this way the unknown plays a key role in scientific discovery. ↩︎
“A discourse coalition is a set of actors that, via their activities in particular practices, shares and reproduces a particular construction of reality (cf. Hajer 2009). Note that actors within a particular discourse coalition do not necessarily agree with each other on matters of substance; yet they share a language to express their concerns and fight their fights. Hence, they will also search for solutions within the confines of the reality that that particular discourse allows one to express.” (Hajer 2004:300). ↩︎

Open, free and poetic

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:08:37 +1100

The Web is 34 years old! Following on from Plenty of ways to write online, here are some really practical resources to help you create your own presence online :

Keeping the Web free, open and poetic.

Old hands will probably find a few useful tips here too.

Oh, and here’s another great big list of useful personal website stuff. Actually, I’m making a note of this for my own ‘going down the rabbit-hole’ purposes:

Resources List for the Personal Web

It’s also easier than ever to publish a book. Check out mine: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And to stay connected, subscribe to the weekly email digest.

*Image source: Public Domain, Wikimedia.

#indieweb #webwriting #worldwideweb #blogging

Plenty of ways to write online

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 09:32:57 +1100

It’s now easier than ever to write online if you wish to. Here’s a list of more than 40 blogging platforms. Many are free or have a self-hosting option, and you can pretty much choose your own adventure here, so why not get going?

Manuel’s list of blog platforms

Now, some say writing on your own website is a wasted opportunity, because hardly anyone will read it. A better way, they say, is social media. That’s simply because the social media algorithms bring good writing to the surface to present it to far more pairs of eyeballs.

OK. The big problem with this advice is that the main platforms are capricious. They change their rules all the time, they lock you in, then boot people off for no reason, while still enabling trolls. They destroy databases with no warning; they promote genocide and fascism while claiming they’re not publishers so owe no responsibility, and they generally behave on a spectrum between exploitative and sociopathic.

You get what the algorithm gives you. This is both a meagre blessing and a wicked curse.

My partial solution is to publish on my own site while syndicating elsewhere. I keep the ‘canonical’ version here on my own website, while publicising it in as many other online locations as I wish. This is a little more work, but gives me control without total invisibility. And some of the syndication can be automated, through RSS and APIs.

POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world|Molly White

But there’s also another side to the equation. How small exactly is a ‘small’ audience? My blog has a few views. If I was doing live events I’d be truly delighted with the numbers! And since you’re reading this, now seems like a good time to thank you personally. Yes, thanks for reading!

Social media is a river. Your post there might get a lot of eyeballs but it’s very quickly lost in the ceaseless flow. In contrast, a blog post like this one is smaller and slower, but more enduring. If you’re reading this from the future, thank you for proving this point!

And anyway, to get a message across, millions of readers aren’t necessary for most people. Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic email has a million readers, and Mr Beast has about 300 million followers on YouTube. Well, good for them. But does it really matter to the rest of us?

In his post, Hope for the Web, James says:

“Every personal website is a glimmer of hope, a metaphorical star in the sky that shows how wonderful the web can be.”

That’s right! And writing online is a conversation with yourself too, a conversation you might not otherwise have. the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard might have agreed. If he was around now I bet he’d be publishing a personal website.

“Metaphorically speaking, a person’s ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong”. Søren Kierkegaard, introduction to Provocations

The opportunity is yours and the time is now, to write for many, to write for a few, to write for yourself. So what are your Provocations?

It’s also easier than ever to publish a book. Check out mine: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for artists and Fighters. And to stay connected, subscribe to the weekly email digest.

Watch in awe as a fleeting thought becomes a lasting note

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +1100

I’ve been asked a great question about my writing process:

Curious to know, is this post, and other short ones like it, basically repurposed main notes from your zettelkasten? And, if so, care to show an example of “before and after?”

Tldr; No.

To be honest, this question put me on the spot. I often write posts on the run, and the post in question was no exception. I couldn’t think where the quote at the top of the post had come from. It isn’t in my Zettelkasten, my collection of working notes. But then I also keep a big swipe file of tasty quotes (collector’s fallacy is real!)… and when I looked, it wasn’t in there either.

But then I remembered: I have several writing projects on the go at one time, and I’d been reading through an old manuscript that I haven’t touched for some time. As I did so, this particular quote stood out for me. It inspired a new thought and so the writing of this short post was effectively me writing a new Zettelkasten post on the fly. How so?

See what I did here?

First, I recorded the quote that attracted me, giving the full reference so it can be re-found later. I was inspired by the idea that our supposedly singular vision is actually two separate processes, rods and cones, working in unison.
Next, I made this my own by recording my own reflection: even more striking, we have two separate eyes, yet still see only one image.
Third, I added a meaningful title: If there’s more than one way of seeing, there’s more than one way of organising. This small point about how vision works could be a metaphor for social and political organisation - that’s what I started to think. What may look like one unified effort is very often the combined result of many adjacent processes working together to create the effect of unified action. And if this is the case, then there’s surely more than one way of doing it. I didn’t elaborate, since, as I said, I wrote this on the run. But what’s implied by the post’s title gives me a jumping off point for future notes (like this one).

The bit where you say: So what?

Maybe I’m overstating things, but then maybe this short post is a model of how I approach writing notes in my Zettelkasten:

First, it shows that you can write a fleeting note anywhere - even on your website if you like (don’t tell me you haven’t got one - it’s the hottest new trend, I’ve heard). And it’s just one idea, which means it’s the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful. So I’ve now transferred this post to my Zettelkasten, where it will combine and recombine for future use.
Second it shows how from fragments you can build a greater whole. That’s how I usually write posts, especially the longer ones. But even just a single quote plus a single thought, as here, can add up to a simple post.
Next, it shows how it’s valuable to add something of your own, rather than just collecting random quotes without commentary. Remember: nothing says “I didn’t think this through for myself” like a direct quote.
Fourth, it demonstrates the value of a strong title. In this case, the title is doing a lot of the lifting, since…
Fifth, I posted this online before I’d even finished the note, which means it exemplifies the maxim, publish first, write later.

Now what the post failed to demonstrate is the great value of links to other ideas. After all, a linked note is a happy note. So to atone for this gross omission, I’m doing it now. And just look at all those links!

Make the most of your note

This whole exercise, of working and reworking notes, is strongly inspired by a great line in Bob Doto’s book, A System for Writing:

“The note you just made has yet to realize its potential.”

I just love this saying. And I’ve written in more detail about this exact process, in How to write a better note without melting your brain. In that article I go through a worked example of how to turn a crappy note into a useful note. But unlike me you’ve probably never written a crappy note, so don’t bother reading it.

——

Thanks for reading this crappy note. You might like to sign up to the weekly email digest, for all the week’s Writing Slowly fragments, presented in a (slightly) greater whole.

And look out for my new book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

Hot takes on our future with AI

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 23:00:00 +1100

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Writers. Of this little book, let’s just say it’s quite keen on humans.

Meanwhile, here are eight hot takes on the latest problems, questions and opportunities AI is giving us. It was going to be just three, but the hot takes are coming thick and fast right now. If only there was a technology that could just summarise everything so we don’t have to read it. Until then…

Economist Maximilian Kasy says AI has already seized The Means of Prediction, but it’s not be too late to do something about it (published October 2025).
The sycophants will inherit the earth, or The machine began to waffle, by John Naughton.
AI can’t break it, because higher education is already broken. Timothy Burke reflects on a painful diagnsis by T.J. Kalaitzidis. See also Joshua Kim’s Three Questions for Brown’s TJ Kalaitzidis.
GenAI is “a tool powerful enough to explode many of our inherited pedagogies. That may not be a bad thing. From the ashes, we can build something more profound, more equitable: and more aligned with the realities of thinking and doing in the world.” - TJ Kalaitzidis How generative AI fixes what higher education broke
Scholars are asking: What good is writing?
According to Aaron Benanav, AI just makes work worse.
AI is the new dumb waiter, says Douglas Rushkoff in conversation with Andrew Keen.
Dror Peleg says AI is too busy to take our jobs. Also in conversation with Andrew Keen.

And do I have my very own hot takes on AI? Well yes, as it happens, I do.

Gaslit by machinery that calls itself a person. It’s worse than a beehive in a raincoat.
Jules Verne could have told us the Internet is not a real person. After more than a century, why do we keep falling for La Stilla Syndrome?
Embracing your humanity is the way forward. It’s what we’ve got so we might as well lean into it.
It’s a great time to be writing the future. Enough with the pessimism: let’s get to work!
What comes after content? We’re finding new ways to create, and we always were.
Soon we’ll all be writing the books we want to read. You pump your own gas, so why not write your own books? (Yes, it’s a provocation).
Despite AI the Internet is still personal. A little love letter to writing online for fun and no profit.
To understand the future of AI, look to the past. Look, they have this thing called history and we can learn from it.
Another way we might change our speech and writing to subvert our digital overlords. I just want ChattyG to give me some fancy wordplay. Is that too much to ask? (Yes, it is).

Thanks for reading. Why not check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And if you like this website, you can always sign up to the weekly email digest.

If there's more than one way of seeing, there's more than one way of organising

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 23:24:13 +1100

💬 “Our eyes are built for two perspectives. During the daytime we rely on our cone cells, which depend on lots of light and let us see details. At night the cone cells become useless and we depend on rod cells, which are much more sensitive. The rod cells in our eyes are connected together to detect stray light; as a result they don’t register ﬁne details. If we want to see something in bright light, we focus the image on the center of our retina (the fovea), where the cone cells are tightly packed. To see something at night, we must look off to the side of it, because staring directly at it will focus the object on the useless cone cells in the fovea. The way we see in bright light differs from the way we see in shadows. Neither is the ‘‘right’’ way. We need both.” - Gary Klein (2009) Streetlights and Shadows. Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision-making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

On reflection, more can be said along these lines. Another way of looking at this ‘double perspective’ of human vision is to note that it constantly depends on some kind of accommodation between our two eyes working simultaneously and in concert.

So although vision is actually several processes taking place at once, we insist on perceiving it as one unified process. We can’t help it. We’re made to synthesize. But that doesn’t mean it is one process.

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 23:00:36 +1100

The cat is characteristically ecstatic to see that the proofs of the new book have arrived. Not long now before it’s published!

Update: I did it. Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters is now available. I hope you enjoy it!

#amwriting #booklaunch #comingsoon #nonfiction

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:40:00 +1100

💬 On Notebooks and Thinking Better Thoughts

Once we’ve let our thoughts mature for a while, we’ll want to produce something for other people to look at, an artifact.

Exactly so.

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 23:42:42 +1100

As Alan Jacobs says, reading more books and reading books more - they’re not the same thing.

I designed a book in three and a half hours

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 23:50:58 +1100

A while ago, well, quite a long while ago, I designed a book in three and a half hours. Fun, yes, but it wasn’t very publishable.

Now, years later, I’ve finally got round to updating and redesigning the whole thing.

Yes, I’m still writing slowly but I’m excited to say it will soon be available for sale - so watch this space for more information.

I’m unqualified to diagnose the following writers with ADHD but I’ll do it anyway

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 23:16:49 +1100

Yes indeed: confidently diagnosing deceased note-making writers with ADHD, while in possession of no medical qualifications myself, is a temptation I simply cannot resist.

For example I have wondered about:

Leonardo da Vinci, whose notes were “a collection without order”;
Leibniz, who created a haystack of notes (oh, and calculus);
Aby Warburg, who suffered from Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections; and
Hermann Berger, a Swiss author who wrote a novel about a Zettelkssten (two actually) but didn’t publish it.
Then there’s cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, who invented a whole new methodology for his Arcades Project, which he didn’t finish. Wikipedia. He’s certainly a candidate for unqualified posthumous ADHD diagnosis.

As I said, it’s interesting, but for now I’ll stop there.

—-

This post started life as a comment on Reddit. If you’d like more from me, but in a weekly email, why not subscribe right now?

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 19:11:13 +1100

💬 “The things that make us different, in the right context are superpowers. You know, Saul Steinberg said the thing that we respond to in any work of art is the struggle of the artist against his or her limitations.”

Austin Kleon, interview on The Echoes Podcast, 10 June 2025.

This makes me feel like there’s an awful lot of wrong context lying about. I guess we all need to find a place where we can thrive, or else make it ourselves.

The original quote is from Kurt Vonnegut’s recollection of a conversation with Saul Steinberg.

#creativity #writerslife #deepthoughts #inspiration

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 23:24:54 +1100

💬 Most attempts at providing computerised tools for writers have thrown out the affordances that previous analogue systems offered, almost without noticing their loss. - writingslowly.com on Ted Nelson’s evolutionary list file.

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:05:38 +1100

“Sometimes it’s just nice to know there are other people out there quietly thinking things through.” - writingslowly.com

Don't let your note-making system infect you with Archive Fever

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 01:15:09 +1100

I’ve previously written about a notional archival illness, Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections. This was first described a century ago, only half-jokingly, by art historian and note-making obsessive Aby Warburg.

More recently, in his 1994 lecture Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, literary theorist Jacques Derrida diagnosed a different but equally peculiar modern ailment: an insatiable drive to archive.

This was more than just a scholarly tendency to hoard footnotes or to lovingly alphabetise newspaper clippings. Derrida’s mal d’archive was more deeply affecting than that.

According to the controversial French academic it was a fever, a pathology. A yearning to capture and preserve everything, paired paradoxically with an anxiety that you will never preserve enough. At its heart, Derrida’s archive fever is about the tension between memory and forgetting, order and chaos, permanence and loss.

Thinking about this reminded me not only of my recent survey of ‘Lord Acton syndrome’, the condition of taking so many notes that the publishing is delayed until it’s too late, but also of my recent article about the famous German mathematician Leibniz, who though he was a polymath and a genius struggled to keep up with his thoughts and ended up with what he himself called ‘a haystack of notes’.

The archive, Derrida reminds us, is never neutral. To preserve is to select; to keep is also, quietly, to discard. The archive is shaped not only by what it includes, but by what it omits. And the very tools we use to preserve memory - folders, tags, digital systems, pens, paper, cloud storage - are themselves implicated in this tension. We may believe we are building a sturdy house of knowledge, when in fact we are just rearranging the flimsy strands of a collapsing haystack.

Enter the Zettelkasten.

At first glance, the Zettelkasten (German for “slip box”) appears to be one answer to archival chaos: a nimble, flexible note-taking system pioneered by sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

The idea is deceptively simple. You write brief notes, one idea per note, each on its own card or slip of paper (or, more often now, its own digital file), and you link them together. Over time, your note network grows into a kind of self-generating ‘machine for thinking’. Luhmann reportedly wrote over seventy books this way, which seems either inspiring or slightly oppressive. Even if your publishing aspirations are more modest than those of Luhmann, the Zettelkasten remains a minimal approach to making notes, with just enough structure to be useful.

It’s a way of creating useful order from jumbled ideas.

It’s a seductive promise: to extend the capabilities of the mind by means of a simple and enduring technology. And unlike your original mind, this extension offers to be tidy, hyperlinked, and searchable. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out.

For all its elegance, the Zettelkasten user may be particularly susceptible to archive fever. After all, it invites a certain meticulousness. Depending on how you’ve arranged your collection of notes, there might be backlinks to curate, IDs to assign, tags to standardise, structures to develop. And perhaps the more notes you take, the more you feel you must keep taking, in case a gap in your thinking opens up like a sinkhole beneath your carefully ordered index. You tell yourself it’s all in the service of writing. But where’s the actual writing? You look around and all you have is notes. (Ok, I’m talking about me. I’m the problem, it’s me.)

Worse still, the Zettelkasten risks becoming a kind of theatre in which the archivist plays all the roles. You are author, librarian, critic, and (if you’re honest) museum tour guide. The notes become exhibits in your own little Wunderkammer, endlessly polished and cross-referenced, but seldom visited by readers, unless you count yourself.

This is not knowledge in motion, but knowledge in preservation. Formaldehyde, rather than fermentation.

Yes, like artist Georges Didi-Huberman or writer Daniel Wisser, you certainly can make an art exhibit of your notes, but even for these exhibitionists that’s not their main use.

Derrida might have smiled (or smirked) at the spectacle: an entire digital architecture built in the name of writing, which gradually replaces the writing itself. This sounds a bit like one of those endlessly self-referential short stories by Borges.

Or perhaps it’s the fulfillment of Walter Benjamin’s prophetic vision of writers turning their notes into books, only for readers to turn them straight back into notes again. Archive fever, indeed.

So what’s to be done? Must we abandon the organised note-making system (Zettelkasten or not) and return to the chaos of loose Post-its, abandoned notetaking apps, and half-remembered thoughts?

Not necessarily. For those looking for the right steps to keep their note-taking healthy, productive, and only mildly feverish, a few gentle suggestions follow this frankly metaphorical photo I took of some stepping stones :

How to stop your note-making from sickening you with Archive Fever

1. Write to use, not to keep.

The Zettelkasten is a tool for thinking, not a vault for dead thoughts. Each note should be a stepping stone toward something else, whether a paragraph, an article, or a question. If you find yourself taking notes for their own sake, pause. Ask: “What will I do with this?” Maybe you really do want to just make notes and nothing else, but you can at least do so consciously. Paradoxically perhaps, if you don’t yet know what you’ll do with your notes, it may be worth writing notes on that.

2. Avoid false completion.

The temptation to keep refining your note structure, re-tagging old notes, or tweaking your metadata can feel productive. It isn’t. It’s admin cosplay. So set limits. Let some chaos in. Perfect order is the enemy of output. Work out for yourself how much mess is just enough.

3. Be a writer, not an archivist.

It’s easy to become the librarian of your own private Alexandria. But unless you’re planning to give guided tours, your job is not to curate but to communicate. Make sure that the balance of time falls on writing with your notes, not merely writing about your notes. Admittedly you’re reading an article by someone who seems to write a suspiciously large number of articles about writing. But I promise you, I am actually writing too. My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts. And if you stick around you’ll be seeing some more writing here that isn’t just about writing. Amazing! Update: I wrote a book! Even more amazing!

4. Don’t fear forgetting.

One of the drivers of archive fever is the fear that if you don’t write it down, it will be lost forever. But forgetting is part of thinking. Not every spark is worth kindling. Not every thought needs to be remembered. Let some go. The limited time you have to make notes is a useful constraint. With practice you’ll begin to hone in on what really matters to you and leave the rest alone.

5. Periodically burn it down.

No, don’t burn it down. That’s extreme. Actually, don’t throw away your old notes (unless you really want to, I mean I’m not the note police). But do consider pruning your Zettelkasten now and then. Archive fever feeds on accumulation. Keep the compost rich, not cluttered. If you haven’t looked at a note in two years and can’t remember why you wrote it, trust that you’ll survive without it. Especially with a digital note collection, you can archive a lot so it’s there when you want it, but safely out of the way the rest of the time.

To archive is human. But to resist getting infected with archive fever simply takes a few straightforward precautions.

So by all means, maintain your notemaking system, whether you call it a Zettelkasten or any other name. Cultivate it. Nurture it. Just don’t confuse it for the writing itself. Notes are like breadcrumbs: useful only if they lead you somewhere. Otherwise, you’re just feeding the birds. I think that’s what I was getting at with the photo of the stepping stones, since unsurprisingly I have never photographed a trail of breadcrumbs. Though coincidentally I did photograph some rainbow lorikeets being fed today:Ok, so what to do when you’ve made some notes? Make something with them. Start writing.

Now it’s true, some people might say, No, no, you can and should write notes for their own sake, because writing notes helps you think and is therefore worthwhile in its own right.

Respectfully, I am not one of those people. For me at least my notes are only as useful as what I do with them.—Thanks for reading! Why not check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters?

And to keep up to date, subscribe to the weekly email digest.

Reference:

Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression.'Diacritics 25/2 (Summer), trans. Eric Prenowitz. 1995, 9-63. Originally from ‘Le concept d’archive: une impression freudienne’, at Memory: the question of archives conference, June 5, 1994. London.

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +1100

📷 Photo challenge day 25: decay.

My worm farm is amazing! By turning waste into compost these little wrigglers perfom a kind of magic.

It’s also a metaphor for my writing process. I don’t worry if the input is rotten. The output will be quite different.

Don’t throw away your old notes

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +1100

Do you have so many ideas that they overwhelm you?

Do you make brilliant notes then wonder how you’re ever going to keep up with the extra work they seem to entail?

Did you ever read a book, take notes, then get excited about all the new possibilities you’ve discovered, only to end up feeling oppressed by the masses of half-finished thoughts you’ve started to entertain?

Has your pile of notes made you wonder about doing some idea ‘spring-cleaning’?

Have you started to consider: perhaps I should delete some of this? Maybe I could just start fresh?

Tech writer Scott Nesbitt has. In a post entitled Dealing with your ideas he suggested a plan. Addressing those who just can’t let go of their ideas, he said:

“ask yourself these questions when confronted with your ideas:

Will you be able to devote time to those ideas in the near future? By near future, I mean the next two to four weeks.

Are there markets for those ideas?

Can you fully develop the ideas into something tangible?

If your answer to any of those questions is no then send the idea into the trash bin.”

This approach, I must admit, is quite tempting. It reminds me of an interview in which Paul McCartney said he forgot dozens of tunes he and John Lennon came up with.

“We didn’t have tape recorders. Now you can do it on your phone. So you would have to form the thing, have it all finished, remember it all, go in pretty quickly and record it. Now, because you can get things down on a device, I’ve got millions of things I want to record and do.”

He said this was probably for the best, though, since the only tunes they could remember for long enough to get down in the recording studio were the very best, most memorable ones.

The Beatles recording in 1966. Public domain

Perhaps we’re recording too much these days. If you make your own notes, your ideas will gradually pile up. “Millions of things” might begin to feel a bit much. You might think of culling the least useful ideas. But is this approach best for your Zettelkasten or any other note-making system?

I think not. Don’t throw away your old notes says Bob Doto, author of A System for Writing. He argues you should keep your notes and add new notes that comment on them.

“Instead of erasure, we want to create possibility. We want to create the conditions for serendipity and insight to take place. To echo Jakob Greenfeld, we want to create enough surface area for luck to have a place to land. We want to create the conditions where opportunities for writing are always at the ready.

I agree fully with Bob Doto here. Some of my most worthwhile notes are the ones where I’ve gone back and instead of throwing out an old idea, I’ve argued with it, revising the original note not by erasing it but by writing a new one. Instead of deleting the old thoughts I create for myself a commentary, a secular midrash.

The Babylonian Talmud. Notice how the commentary around the edges is considerably wordier than the original text in the centre, which it interprets without erasing. Public domain.

In this way my Zettelkasten becomes a conversation partner between my old self and my current self, between the past and the present. And that trail of back and forth discussion becomes a resource for my future self. If I threw out my notes I’d be losing that wonderful resource.

So I respectfully disagree with the idea of throwing out old ideas. Besides my Zettelkasten I have old notebooks going back years - right back to the age of 13. Every so often I revisit them to get back in touch with the person I used to be, who seems so different from, yet so familiar to my present self. This isn’t just nostalgia. I use this material as a resource, a source of inspiration and a prompt for disputation. I see my Zettelkasten, similarly, as a permanent companion.

What’s more, reading my old notes, most of which I have forgotten, is a fruitful and creative source of surprise. My past self surprises my present self, which leads to new insights and new directions.

Isn’t forgetting just as important as remembering?

I guess there’s some kind of basic tension between keeping things and getting rid of them. (I’ve read Lewis Hyde’s wonderful book, A Primer on Forgetting). Many systems handle this very well - my worm farm, for example. It doesn’t destroy the unused veggies, it transforms them into something new. But written records tend to stick around rather than decompose elegantly. My view is that notemaking helps you remember… and it also helps you forget.

I very much approve of Luhmann’s concept of the Zettelkasten as a ‘septic tank’ or ‘settling pond’. But I also appreciate the challenge that what really matters is not the notes but the uses to which they are put.

But what to do with old fleeting notes that are just hanging around?

Well yes, it is an issue. Scott Nesbitt’s article, the one that got me thinking about this, has a clear answer (for him):

“Get rid of those ideas. Stuffing them away like a squirrel hoarding nuts for winter isn’t going to do any good. It won’t get you any closer to making those ideas a reality. You’ll just increase your digital or paper clutter. Older ideas will be buried under newer ones.”

Personally, I just don’t bother. Not only are my old ideas not in the way (they’re just parked, and probably fermenting), but also, it’s sometimes useful to be able to uncover them. I have a tag for my notes, “archive” (see Tiago Forte’s PARA system). If there’s something I’m really not using any more, it goes in that bucket. Then I forget about it. But if I’m ever searching for something related, it will still resurface.

I find it more of a problem to lose stuff than to have it hanging around, but that may not be true for everyone. An American journalist once interviewed the great and prolific French novelist Jules Verne. Verne said he had 13,000 notes on fiches, paper slips. But he also said he destroyed all his old notes so he wouldn’t accidentally repeat himself in his newest novel.

And I’m not going to argue with Jules Verne.

I should also add that I have certainly destroyed or lost plenty of “fleeting” notes of all kinds. Actually, I don’t care about them at all. Only when a note makes it to my Zettelkasten do I start to love it :)

What about you?

Were you ever tempted to throw out your old ideas? Are you happy to have reduced the load, or do you miss them now they’re gone?

This article is based on my previous post on the Zettelkasten subreddit, entitled What should you do if you have too many ideas to process?

What to do when you've made some notes: Start writing

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +1100

I’ve previously suggested “just make notes”, and perhaps by now you have created plenty of notes. Fantastic! You can congratulate yourself. You are making progress. Even a small pile of notes is much more useful than a big pile of nothing.

“But what now?” you say. “What am I supposed to do with all these notes? I mean, it just looks like a random pile.”

Fulgence Tapir was overcome by his notes but you don’t have to be.

The next step: produce something from your notes.

Don’t worry about organisation, indexing, keeping track. It’s literally impossible. There’s too much to know. The noble quest for perfect notes is a digression. There is no league table of note-makers. There are no note-making prizes. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s notes were said to be “chaotic”, yet he published prolifically. Notes may have been the method, but the aim was writing for publication.

What comes next, then? Don’t wait until your notes are correctly sorted, perfectly aligned with the Dewey Decimal System or with the cycles of the moon. No, this is what comes next: a single finished product.

The way to move forward is to make a completed product from the notes you have to hand. It can be small. Perhaps it had better be small. What are big things made of if not smaller things?

The Internet is great for this because it’s very friendly towards short texts of all kinds. Social media posts and threads, blog posts, ‘listicles’, YouTube or podcast scripts, email newsletters, short stories on fan sites. They’re all quite short and you can write one fairly quickly when you have your notes beside you.

Strange as it may seem, doing a PhD is also great for this, even though it takes years, because there are plenty of mini-projects along the way. For example:

literature review (5,000 words),
project proposal (<10,000 words),
conference or workshop paper outlining your work program and progress (2-3,000 words),
article in The Conversation, or similar general-public facing site (1,000 words),
draft chapter for your supervisor’s review (2-4,000 words).

The list goes on. And if you’re not pursuing a PhD, you can make a list that’s relevant to you. Every large project can be broken down into smaller, achievable parts. Just make something, and like a stairway to heaven, the way forward will appear.

“Ah, but I can’t make anything,” you say, “I can’t find the right notes.”

Just join one note to another, then do it again. Build a short, finished piece of writing the way you would build a Lego model: one block and then another block, until it’s done. Follow the links in the notes if you like. They form a trail of breadcrumbs through the forest, to relieve you of having to remember where you were going. And that’s how you write a whole article really, or even a whole thesis or a whole book. It’s always just one piece and then another piece until it’s done.

“Oh, but this is just an unreadable mashup of random, disconnected thoughts”, you say.

Yes, exactly that. This is what is known to experienced insiders as a first draft. And the first draft is supposed to be the worst draft. After that, things just get better.

So here is the process in a nutshell: get it done, then get it good. Write a first draft, then write a second, edited draft. Rest assured, the second draft will be better. And so on.

A word of warning: don’t mistake a note for a finished piece of writing. A note is the shortest meaningful piece of information, or the shortest viable writing session. If it works well that’s because it links to other notes. When you write for any kind of publication you always need to be aware of the context of your writing. And it’s rarely if ever suitable just to dump a note or two into it. Editing is an unavoidable, essential, and essentially creative step.

Well there you have it, and now you have left the sheltered county of notes and entered the big, wide realm of writing. Enjoy the journey and good luck!

A completely accurate image of my writing process, accurately captured by the latest advances in AI.

You can read some more on my writing process, which oscillates between notes and drafts.

What I Learned from Bob Doto about Making Effective Notes and Writing a Book

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +1100

Historian Dan Allosso hosted a reading group a while back (time flies) to discuss Bob Doto’s excellent Zettelkasten primer, A System for Writing.

See the video.

All of these live online events seem to take place in the middle of the night here in Sydney. Since I value my sleep, I don’t attend at 3am. But I’m still paying attention, and happily Dan posted the discussion online. About half-way through (58 minutes), the author himself appeared and I found the discussion very helpful. So here are my notes on what I managed to pick up from the conversation (even though I was cheerfully distracted by Eric’s cat).

*We're asleep when you're awake, look!*

In a nutshell: the discussion included Bob Doto’s advice on effective note-taking and book writing. He emphasised a flexible and iterative approach. Atomic notes form the foundation, and they fuel a self-informing process where notes spark further investigation. The writing process itself is iterative; it involves “bricolage,"¹ to transform notes through heavy editing and reorganisation into a coherent whole. Key to successful book writing is clear audience definition and a commitment to extensive revision, along with a focus on accessible structure rather than solely on indexing. Finally, the system’s effectiveness relies on integrating the various stages (reading, note-taking, and writing) into a continuous, cyclical process, where the value of experimentation and adaptation, including judicious use of AI tools, is recognised.

Note-making Approach

Use declarative statements as note titles to clearly indicate the content
Think of atomic notes as quotes (whether from others or yourself)
Allow the system to be somewhat flexible rather than overly rigid
Let the note-taking process be self-informing - one note can heighten interest in a topic and lead to more connections

Writing Process

Don’t just cut and paste notes - transform them through heavy editing
Start by getting ideas on the page rather than trying to write perfectly from the beginning
Build writing through “bricolage” - assembling pieces and then crafting them into a coherent whole
Fill gaps between ideas with connecting material as needed
Be prepared to spend significant time editing and reorganizing
Don’t be afraid to repurpose your own writing from other contexts (e.g., comments, essays)

Book Writing Insights

Clear audience definition is crucial but challenging
Expect to spend months doing intensive editing (Doto mentioned “10-hour days”, to which I say: Doto don’t be a hero)
Be prepared to print chapters repeatedly and heavily revise them
Focus on making the content accessible through good structure rather than relying on an index
Consider making a detailed table of contents to help readers navigate. Be willing to “muscle through” difficult sections - there’s no shortcut

System Integration

Allow the Zettelkasten system to become more fluid over time (i.e. become less rigid in following the ‘rules’)
Different parts of the process (reading, note-taking, writing) should inform each other
Don’t get too caught up in (note) definitions; focus on functionality and value
Embrace the cyclical nature of the process - notes inspire interest which leads to more notes

Practical Tips

Start in the middle and build outward when writing
Use your notes as building blocks but be prepared to heavily modify them
Trust your instincts about when something needs more explanation or connection
Be willing to revise extensively to maintain consistent tone and flow
Consider using AI tools (like ChatGPT) selectively when stuck, but always rework the output

What I learned from this discussion

Bob’s emphasis on flexibility might offer genuine relief to some people. A lot of the online chat about personal knowledge management and so on seems to radiate a certain anxiousness about getting it right and avoiding mistakes. The system described here though isn’t about perfection. It adapts to your pre-existing schedule, your quirky (or dependable) thinking patterns, and your particular brand of chaos, whatever that may be. Notes can sit dormant for months before suddenly becoming relevant. Writing happens in fragments, and that’s fine because they’ll be assembled later into something coherent.

It’s been said the best systems bend without breaking, and my writing system is pretty bendy and not very breaky. The real insight I gained from reviewing this discussion was about trusting the process enough to let it be imperfect. The key is to trust that consistent engagement with ideas, however scattered, eventually yields something worthwhile. Well that has in fact been my own experience so it’s nice to see it confirmed.

It was also a reminder to stay asleep at three in the morning.

For more details of this system for writing, you might want to check out Bob Doto’s book of that name, A System for Writing, which I’ve previously reviewed.

I have more to say about this. Much more. ↩︎

Influence is everything: novelty its flimsy dress

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 23:17:24 +1100

What happens when once fashionable ideas get left behind?

I’ve often felt the culture moves on too fast, leaving so much on the table in terms of untapped potential. This is certainly true for pop music. Fashions come and go so fast that they leave great concepts stranded in time. You could write a great glam rock song in 2023, but you would have needed at all costs to avoid staying stuck in 1973. The trick is to avoid descending from homage into mere pastiche.

The Nemesis guide to being early described the fashion cycle as an endless process in which “each new thing is supplanted by another new thing, and no linear pattern emerges. Things very rarely reach the plateau of productivity, more often falling straight to Hades through the trough of disillusionment. No one seems to follow up on the hyped project of yesterday.”

THE NEMESIS GUIDE TO BEING EARLY nemesisglobal.substack.com
nemesisglobal.substack.com https://nemesisglobal.substack.com/p/the-nemesis-guide-to-being-early

But it's worse than that. It's not just that, mysteriously, no one merely *'seems'* to follow up. It feels like **they're not allowed to**.

Viewed from this perspective, it struck me that the fear of appearing unfashionable is strangely overdetermined in the culture. The Nemesis article compared it to arriving late, as opposed to being early. Oh, the horror! But it’s more serious than that. It’s a genuine, almost palpable, fear - a kind of internalized, psychological self-policing. Whatever you do, don’t be unfashionable.

But what does it really amount to? Whose interests could it possibly serve for us to frighten ourselves into not touching the sacred grave goods of fashions past?

The starting point may be the fear that the market will exclude you and your glam rock hit, that it will be a commercial failure. But the fear runs much deeper than that. What could I have to lose just by listening to such an artifact? The unfashionable carries its own peculiar contamination.

If you liked the Lemon Twigs 2023 album Everything Harmony, and that’s a very big if, you might also like Spilt Milk by Jellyfish and Third Eye by Redd Kross. And if you specifically liked the Lemon Twigs track What you were doing, you might also like pretty much anything by Teenage Fanclub, which is an obvious influence.

The Lemon Twigs don’t so much show their influences as trumpet them from the roof tops. And you might see this festival of ‘Mersey Beach’ homage as hopelessly nostalgic and twee, because what matters, as the Modernists said, is to make it new. But if you do listen to Spilt Milk by Jellyfish (especially ‘Joining a Fan Club’) you’ll notice that it really sounds a lot like Queen, who clearly influenced it, and also a lot like the Ben Folds Five, whom, in turn, it clearly influenced.¹

It turns out that influence is everything. Novelty is its flimsy dress.

Perhaps the cultural proscription against appearing unfashionable is a sleight of hand, a way of masking a deeper reality, that almost nothing is new, nothing is original, everything has antecedents. The Lemon Twigs, arguably, get away with it because they’re making a unique selling point out of unfashionable homage. We already know what kind of unfashionable homage we like and it’s tribute bands. The Lemon Twigs are unique because their music isn’t just unfashionable, it’s almost offensively so. In the Spotify era, why listen to them when the entire Beach Boys catalogue is already instantly available? They’re not paying enough tribute.

But then again, they’re not just copying the past. They’re re-examining it, reverse engineering it. It’s as though, from their resolutely analogue studio in a digital era, they’re making the music that might have been made if only the fashion cycle hadn’t consigned all its components into the oblivion of unfashion. It takes a new generation to follow up on the hyped project of yesterday, to uncover what endures.

Image: Pace layering, by Stewart Brand.
There’s something to be said for taking a longer look at moments in fashion than the fashion itself ever allowed. In an article entitled Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning, Stewart Brand claimed:

“The job of fashion and art is to be froth—quick, irrelevant, engaging, self-preoccupied, and cruel. Try this! No, no, try this!”

Well, I’m not so sure. You can enjoy the froth, but unlike art it’s hardly nourishing.

Fashion isn’t only froth, though. It’s an ideology. It’s evidence of faith in infinite potential. Potential, mind, not actuality. That’s the meaning of the scream of the overwhelmed teenager at the Beatles concert, to be abandoned the moment there’s a whiff of reality, or simply the moment the moment has passed.

The task of excavation is to identify the actual (but long abandoned) potential behind the over-hyped promise of infinity.

I’ve written here about the hype cycle of pop music, but it also applies to the hype cycle of your own field of endeavour, whatever it may be. By excavating past fashions, you too might uncover some overlooked nuggets of gold in the supposed dross of the past². Thanks for reading this far. If you liked it, try the weekly email digest.

on another listen, that Jellyfish album feels like a classic, out of time. ↩︎
Although there’s still ‘I left my shoes at home’ by Swedish mop-tops Tages? I mean, really? ↩︎

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 13:34:24 +1100

💬"When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway." - James Baldwin. Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 78. no. 91, 1984.

A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 19:35:06 +1100

English author Susanna Clarke, published her second novel, Piranesi (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing), back in 2020, just as many of us were languishing in COVID lock-down.

And while, happily, the lock-down days are behind us, the impact of this intriguing, melancholy, and poignant tale has remained in my mind.

Piranesi, the protagonist, tells his own story, as though in a journal, though he’s not convinced he really is called Piranesi and as we shall see, he strongly distrusts his own writing. Piranesi, if that even is his name, inhabits a strange and eerily beautiful place which he calls the House. It’s an enormous, partly ruined building, devoid of human inhabitants but containing a few wild sea-birds and hundreds of huge statues which fill its endless empty, capriciously tide-swept halls. Piranesi has no memory or even concept of any other world, even though he occasionally receives a solitary visitor, whom he names The Other, a man he sees as a friend, but whom readers surely suspect may well be Piranesi’s jailer.

The House, of which Piranesi, sees himself as ‘the beloved child’ is a kind of accidentally or collectively created memory palace (Wikipedia), full of signifiers but lacking signification - perhaps like a whole culture. Piranesi has formed his own deeply reverential meaning out of this place, even as the memory of his real home, London, has faded into oblivion. He writes:

“Batter-Sea is not a word… [i]t has no referent. There is nothing in the World corresponding to that combination of sounds. (p.23)”

This novel operates at three levels at least:

First of all it’s a very timely meditation on abusive, narcissistic power and its antidote. Among the various characters there are two opposing world-views. There are those who see the world as merely to be used, of instrumental value only; and those who recognise an intrinsic value, and therefore cherish it. The author herself elaborated on this contrast in a newspaper interview:

“the divide is between people who see the world for what they can use it for, and the idea that the world is important because it is not human, it’s something we might be part of a community with, rather than just a resource. That is something that Piranesi grasps intuitively – that was very important, something I wanted to say.” (Interview with Susanna Clarke, 12 September 2020.)

At a second level, you could perhaps see the novel as a study of the loss of the Renaissance memory palace in European culture - “a careful exploration of the many different ways of passing on, storing, or communicating knowledge,” as one reviewer put it (Martin 2020). We have almost forgotten just how important the memory was in the days before the printing press, and we have certainly lost touch with the many ways this was a different world from our own.

Thirdly, the novel is an extended allegory of the author’s own years confined to home due to a debilitating experience of chronic fatigue syndrome (see The Guardian’s interview with the author, 12 September 2020) - and by extension a timely allegory of the universal COVID lockdown experience of 2020-21.

In the same interview, Susannah Clarke said:

“I was aware that I was a person cut off from the world, bound in one place by illness. Piranesi considers himself very free, but he’s cut off from the rest of humanity.” (Interview with Clarke 12 September 2020).

The Roman writer Cicero famously referred to a Greek legend which told of the prodigious memory of Simonides of Ceos (ca. 556-468 B.C.), who left a banqueting hall shortly before a fatal roof collapse, then was able to remember the identities and locations of all the dead banqueters.

He said:

Simonides “inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store these images in the places so that the order of the places will preserve the order of things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax-writing tablet and the letters written on it.” (Boorstin, 1984)

Quintillian (AD 35-92), another Roman writer, described his own method of the memory palace in similar terms:

“Think of a large building and walk through its numerous rooms remembering all the ornaments and furnishings in your imagination. Then give each idea to be remembered an image, and as you go through the building again, deposit each image in this order in your imagination. For example, if you mentally deposit a spear in the living room, an anchor in the dining room, you will later recall that you are first to speak of war, then of the navy, etc. The system still works!” (Boorstin, 1984)

Image: The House, as ‘imagined’ by ChatGPT.

The last major iteration of the memory palace method, prior to the printing revolution, was that of Peter of Ravenna’s Phoenix, sive Artificiosa Memoria (‘The Phoenix, or Constructed Memory’, Venice, 1491). The author recommended imagining an empty church, then placing memory images in loci or places which were every five or six feet apart. In this way, the author claimed, he had placed 100,000 memory loci, even as a young man, and many more subsequently.

For Piranesi, the memory palace is a real, completely physical place. the House is real, but its referents are entirely obscure. If it meant something once, the meaning has been entirely lost. Piranesi loves the statue of the Faun ‘above all others’ he tells us, but has no idea why. It is left to the reader to recognise the pathos of the implied connection with C.S. Lewis’s fantasy world of Narnia, where a faun turned to stone is a key plot point. Perhaps this is a hint that the House is an external representation of Piranesi’s own memory. He has forgotten nearly everything, yet the loci of his missing memories remain.

In fact, for Piranesi, all memory systems other than the House itself are highly suspect. He distrusts the chalk writing he finds on the paving stones, and attempts to erase it. Later he realises his confidence in his own journals is entirely misplaced. He is his own ‘unreliable narrator’.

The problem of correspondence causes him anguish. He writes:

“I had a strong urge to fling the Journal away from me. The words on the page – (in my own writing!) – looked like words, but at the same time I knew they were meaningless. It was nonsense, gibberish! What meaning could words such as ‘Birmingham’ and ‘Perugia’ possibly have? None. There is nothing in the World that corresponds to them.”

This raises a wider question of how any kind of memory aid can really substitute for wisdom. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells of how the god Thamus, king of Egypt, rebuked Thoth, the god who invented writing:

“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” (quoted in Boorstin, 1984: 110)

While Piranesi can’t rely on his written words, and while he has no real idea what the statues in the halls are supposed to represent, he nevertheless inhabits a rich world of the imagination. Having forgotten the real world, Piranesi invents the referents for his secondary world. And by means of this imaginative faculty his fundamental humanity persists. Though Piranesi has forgotten his real existence as Matthew Rose Sorensen, and though all his writing is suspect, his faith in life remains and through it alone he retains his sanity:

“You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted. And I am comforted.”

His consoling self-image is starkly at odds with the persona given him by the Other, the malevolent antagonist, who names him Piranesi, presumably alluding to the 17th Century Italian artist who etched a series of monumental imaginary prison scenes, Le Carceri d’Invenzione.

“I am Piranesi. But I knew that I did not really believe this. Piranesi is not my name. (I am almost certain that Piranesi is not my name.)”

As in ‘The House of Asterion’, a short story by Borges which the author thought she had forgotten, the reader, alongside the protagonist, must “penetrate to the identity of the prisoner and thus to the meaning of the story” (Redekop, 1980: 96).

On his eventual, eventful return to the everyday world, Matthew Rose Sorensen manages to maintain his connection to this intuitive sense of human dignity which the House enabled him to activate. Passing an elderly stranger in a park, he recognises him from one of the enigmatic statues in the House:

“He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it! But I hesitated a moment too long and he disappeared into the crowd.”

The novel concludes as it begins, with an affirmation that the beauty and kindness we seek in the world - any possible world - is exactly as much or little as we can find for ourselves.

The ending of the novel alludes to Plato’s parable of the cave. Having visited the upper world and observed at first hand the direct light of the sun, the former prisoner tries in vain to enlighten his fellow inmates who remain within the cave, misunderstanding the nature of the shadows they dimly observe. Which is the real world? Matthew Rose Sorensen sees paper lanterns hanging like fragile stars, “spheres of vivid orange that blew and trembled in the snow and the thin wind”. He concludes:

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

On finishing the book I couldn’t help seeing the world I inhabit in a completely new light: viewed in this way the world is indeed a great memory palace created by our forbears, and around which we wander, only half cognizant of the significance of what we encounter. As the Italian author Roberto Callasso put it,

“We live in a warehouse of casts that have lost their moulds,” - Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988).

Our only option then is to try to create new meaning and hope from the broken, forgotten references that lie all around.

To those unable to recognise kindness and beauty where they are, perhaps every place and every possible world retains the nightmarish cast of the visions of the artist Piranesi’s labyrinthine prisons.

But to those who persistently pay attention with reverence, who continue to see and to name, despite everything, the world will respond by offering in return a difficult gift of freedom.

References

Boorstin, Daniel J. “The Lost Arts of Memory.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) 8, no. 2 (1984): 104-13. doi:10.2307/40256753. Adapted from Boorstin, Daniel Joseph., Luce, Clare Boothe. The discoverers. New York: Random House, 1983.

Susanna Clarke: ‘I was cut off from the world, bound in one place by illness’ The Guardian

Martin, Elyse, 2020. Beloved Child of the House: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and the Renaissance Memory Palace - Tor.com

Redekop, Ernest H. “Labyrinths in Time and Space.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 13, no. 3/4 (1980): 95-113.

Savas, Aysegul. “The Celestial Memory Palace.” The Paris Review, 7 Dec. 2018, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/07/the-celestial-memory-palace/

Verardi, D. (2022). Memory in the Renaissance, Art of. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14169-5_445

Piranesi image (Public Domain), https://piranesi.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/item/8012

Here’s another version of the ChatGPT image.

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Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:05:49 +1100

💬 “There’s a left-field way of thinking about the world that doesn’t follow the straight path. The route forward doesn’t have to lead in one true direction but potentially many.”

Non-linear narratives inspire non-linear notes.

What I've learned from non-linear narratives

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:05:24 +1100

I’m a sucker for non-linear narratives. You might argue this is due to my formative education at exactly the time postmodernist authors such as Italo Calvino were cooking up new forms of literature in which the straight path through the plot was deconstructed and turned on its head. Well, maybe. But truthfully a more formative influence for a teenage boy was the ‘Fighting Fantasy’ series of books starting with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which came out in 1982, the year I turned fourteen. Depending on which course of action the reader as protagonist chose, the next page wasn’t the next page at all. You would flip forwards and backwards to seemingly arbitrary page numbers, charting a unique course through the game-like story.

So as my reading tastes matured, I wasn’t at all awed by such texts as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where the commentary and footnotes are as important as the long poem that forms the main text itself. I didn’t balk at Cortazar’s Hopscotch, where there are at least three different paths through a story that bounces between ‘this side’ and ‘the other side’, Argentina and Paris.

And I wasn’t concerned that Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars seems to have no plot and looks a lot like a series of encyclopaedia entries. As Pavić said of it:

“each reader will put together the book for himself [sic], as in a game of dominoes or cards, and, as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it”.

(Image source: Robert E. Horne, Mapping Hypertext (1989). Archive.)

Then there was Raymond Queneau’s hypertext A Story as you Like It, which allowed the reader to express a preference after almost every sentence. (Source).

And Tom Phillips’s ‘treated Victorian novel’ A Humument didn’t upset me either. Instead I found it both puzzling and enchanting.

(Image source: humument.com )

There are plenty more such novels, and I’ve enjoyed all those I’ve read. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller remains one of my very favourite novels, and showed me what it was possible for a novel to be.

The only one of these oblique narratives I’ve found truly daunting is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Since the famously dense novel ends mid-sentence, and since that sentence is the start of the book’s first sentence, it feels eerily as though I’m still reading it.

What I’ve learned from all these narratives is that there’s a left-field way of thinking about the world that doesn’t follow the straight path. The route forward doesn’t have to lead in one true direction but potentially many. And my reading makes me want to pay my respects to the potentiality inherent in the multiplicity of avenues in front of me in real life.

These narratives point not only to different ways of telling stories, often uncomfortable but always intriguing, but also to different ways of learning. As the collection of essays, New Directions In Rhizomatic Learning (2023) suggests,

“Knowledge transfer is no longer a fixed process. Rhizomatic learning posits that learning is a continuous, dynamic process, making connections, using multiple paths, without beginnings, and ending in a nomadic style.”

New Directions in Rhizomatic Learning: From Poststructural Thinking to Nomadic Pedagogy. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2023.

But how does all this relate to my own writing practice, I hear you ask.

Well this multiplicity of possible ways forward is one of the great strengths of my habit of making atomic, linked notes. My network of notes is a rhizome not a tree.

With my atomic, linked notes, I’m not constrained to follow a single line of thought. Like those Fighting Fantasy books of my youth or Pavić’s dictionary, my notes allow me to jump between ideas and create new paths through existing knowledge. Each time I review my collection, I discover different routes and unexpected insights—just as each reader of Dictionary of the Khazars constructs their own unique experience.

This rhizomatic approach to knowledge isn’t just a quirk of my reading preferences or a holdover from teenage adventures in Firetop Mountain. It’s a fundamental way of engaging with the world—acknowledging that meaning spreads like mycelial roots in all dimensions rather than flowing in one direction. My notes aren’t just for information storage; they’re a little bit like a living organism where ideas connect and transform in patterns I couldn’t have predicted when first writing them. True, they’re not alive, but they are a little lively.

One of the greatest benefits of this approach is that I never need to decide early on what the final structure will be. Unlike the standard writing process—where you select a subject, create an outline, and then struggle to fill it—my work grows organically. The structure emerges gradually through connections rather than being imposed from the beginning. I can explore multiple narrative routes before making final decisions about arrangement.

Writing this way is far more enjoyable than the old way. Since I’m only ever focusing on one note at a time, the process feels effortless in comparison. Writer’s block doesn’t really happen. Rather than labouring to assemble my thoughts according to some predetermined plan, I watch my work grow almost autonomously through connections that reveal themselves. It’s a little bit like completing a jigsaw puzzle without being bound by the picture on the box—I can arrange the pieces how I like to create something I never knew was possible.

OK, so maybe this merely explains my impatience with jigsaw puzzles. I admit it’s not a perfect analogy.

That said, perhaps this is why I’ve always been drawn to those experimental narratives—they weren’t breaking rules so much as revealing that the straight line was only ever one possibility. Faced with potentially infinite branching paths, I find that the most interesting stories emerge from the bottom up, when I wander away from the planned route to create unexpected alternatives. I didn’t know what I was writing about when I started making the notes that eventually formed this little reflection. But now I do.

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Wed, 28 May 2025 22:29:40 +1100

When did you first hear about making notes the Zettelkasten way?

#pkm #zettelkasten #notetaking

Daniel Wisser’s notecards as art and archive

Mon, 26 May 2025 13:57:40 +1100

The Austrian author Daniel Wisser has a small exhibition in Vienna: Unter dem Fußboden – eine Zettelkasteninstallation.

60 index cards with sketches of stories will be on display in a note box (Zettelkasten) in the foyer of the Literaturhaus Wien, starting 27 May 2025.

More details.

I like the idea of an artist’s or writer’s notes as an art form in themselves. And I love that compound word, Zettelkasteninstallation.

—-

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What Tim Berners-Lee Has to Teach About Effective Notes

Sun, 18 May 2025 23:22:18 +1100

I stumbled across Tim Berners-Lee’s 1995 talk on “Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny” last month, and while it hasn’t exactly transformed how I think about writing notes, it has certainly confirmed the direction I’ve already been working slowly towards.

There’s a lot of discussion online about the best systems and apps for taking notes, and poeple keep devising new ones almost every day, but this is missing something revolutionary that’s hiding in plain sight. The inventor of the World Wide Web wasn’t just solving how computers share information—he was creating a blueprint for how our minds should work.

This got me reflecting how I’ve been looking to create/adapt/bodge together a method for writing that suits the strange way I think, rather than just accepting someone else’s off-the-shelf offering, however flashy. My own bespoke creative working environment.

So, according to Berners-Lee, how should our minds work?

Categorical Thinking Is a Trap

Traditional note-taking systems lock us into categories that limit rather than liberate our thinking. This is exactly the problem that Vannevar Bush, one of Berners-Lee’s intellectual heroes, identified decades ago. In Berners-Lee’s words:

“The problem Bush was addressing, or the problem of the individual researcher, was one of system topology. The poor person has successively narrowed and narrowed his or her field of interest in order to cope with the information overload, and soon is connected only to things of very local interest.”

In the past I’ve certainly experienced this. Notes tucked away in separate categories create knowledge silos. According to Berners-Lee the uncomfortable truth is that these systems fail us when we need them most:

“The topology clearly doesn’t work, because there is no path for the transfer of knowledge from one discipline and the next.”

Every category we create essentially generates another silo — isolated and cut off from the cross-pollination that creates genuine insight.

I’ve previously written about Gottfried Leibniz, one of the last great polymaths, who was able to make innovations in several different fields partly because he didn’t keep his wide-ranging thought in neat compartments, but in thousands of pages of unruly notes which he had no compunction to cut up and rearrarange. It’s hard to imagine what a person like this would have been able to do with the World Wide Web.

The Web Structure Liberates Knowledge

Berners-Lee offered a solution that applies perfectly to personal notes:

“In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes.”

His revolutionary insight?

“For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”

Traditional note-taking is like navigating with only predetermined routes. Web-structured notes give you the entire network, plus spontaneous shortcuts you never knew existed.

Keywords Restrict Natural Connections

Even our keywords and tagging systems can be too restrictive. In his 2006 paper on “Linked data - Design issues”), Berners-Lee warns about conceptual centralisation:

“If we make a knowledge representation system which requires anyone who uses the concept of ‘automobile’ to use the term ‘www.kr.org/stds/indu… then we restrict the set of uses of the system to those for whom this particular formulation of what an automobile is works.”

This seemingly technical point has deep implications for me as I’m writing and organising my notes. When I force myself to use rigid terminology or standardised keywords, I’m limiting the very connections my mind naturally wants to make. I’m not totally against using keywords, but Berners-Lee appears to be sounding a warning that has made me think a little more reflectively about what they entail.

Photo by Valeria Hutter at Unsplash.

Connected Notes Mirror Your Mind (OK, my mind)

The future of note-taking, in my humble opinion, isn’t about better folders or fancier apps, nor is it about succumbing to AI to write it all for us — it’s about reimagining how ideas connect. Taking a little bit of inspiration from Berners-Lee here’s what works for me:

Create notes that link directly to related thoughts, regardless of category
Use and even create my own language, rather than forcing standardised terms
Allow connections to form organically, mirroring how my mind actually works ( I mean, I think that’s how my mind works)
Focus on relationships between ideas, not so much on their classification

I’m trying to make it so my notes aren’t just a neat archive of what I’ve learned. Instead I want them be a dynamic reflection of how my thoughts work, so my writing process stays generative rather than restrictive. And my mind doesn’t work in folders and subfolders. It works in connections and associations that span domains and categories. The rhizome not the tree.

I expect there are people whose minds really do work in categories and who prefer to keep their notes in clear and fairly rigid folders. That might well work for someone else, but it’s not the only way to do things, and I found it interesting that the founder of the World Wide Web didn’t especially admire this approach.

And it might not just be about how my individual mind works. Perhaps it’s about how the world works too. Maybe the World Wide Web has been successful in part because it facilitates the expression of the web-wide world. One of the things I’ve appreciated from re-reading Berners-Lee is his vision of a Web that rather than constraining us, helps us to network both knowledge and people.

“The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world.”— Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web

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Wed, 14 May 2025 19:50:30 +1100

“The rapid passage of time is a complete antimeaning machine. Doesn’t life absolutely require tactical slowing down if a person, even a smart, serious, concerned one, is to find the time and space to make meaning?” - Eric Maisel

Tactical slowing down is great, but then writing slowly is a whole strategy.

Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn't fit in his Zettelschrank

Sat, 10 May 2025 21:32:19 +1100

Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (1646-1717), that complex polymath who (probably) invented calculus, used to write down all his thoughts then cut up the pieces and attempt to rearrange them. He once admitted this had resulted in “one big chaos”.

Leibniz said he had so many thoughts in a single hour that it took him more than a day to write them all down.

“Sometimes in the morning, in the hour that I spend still lying in bed, so many thoughts come to me that I need the whole morning, indeed sometimes the whole day or even longer, to set them down clearly in writing.”¹

These are just a couple of the intriguing facts I learned from reading Michael Kempe’s excellent biography, The Best of All Possible Worlds. A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days (Pushkin Press).

Image source: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsiche Landesbibliothek.

Though he wrote and cut up and rearranged mountains of notes, he didn’t publish much in his lifetime.

“I wrote countless things about countless things,” he wrote to the Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli in 1697, “but only published a few about few.” And he told the Hamburg lawyer Vincent Placcius: “If you only know me from my publications, you don’t know me.” ²

All this sounds quite dismal, but on the other hand Leibniz was a genius in several disciplines, who left behind “one of the largest literary legacies of any scholar in world history” (Kempe).

Furthermore, Markus Krajewski, scholar of media history, claims “any history of ‘assisted thinking’ with artificial intelligences finds a worthy starting point in Leibniz.”

Perhaps then his seemingly disorganised notes were just part of the genius.

Krajewski’s recent chapter “Intellectual Furniture: Elements of a Deep History of Artificial Intelligence.” sets Leibniz’s endeavours in the context of an intellectual history that stretches from the specialised furniture Leibniz acquired to arrange his notes, via the dawn of the computer age, all the way to the recent rise of artificial intelligence. Heady stuff!

In Hanover Leibniz kept a special cabinet for his notes, where he hung up the notes he had cut up in various combinations. This was his Zettelschrank, modelled on Thomas Harrison’s scrinium litteratum. After his death Johann Friedrich Blumenbach inspected this contraption and called it “the most fearsome and cumbersome machine that one could imagine”³. Well, I don’t know about that. Perhaps he didn’t have a particularly strong imagination.

Image source: Krajewski, p.186

This sense of being almost overwhelmed by information is really the prehistory of the situation we’re in now, where not only is there ‘too much to know’⁴, but AI is making more and more of it every second. Our information machines aren’t so much helping us to get the chaos under control as simply creating more and more chaos, faster than we can comprehend it, much less organise it.

Yes, we’re drowning in data, but it may be comforting to know that this is nothing new, and that despite the mounds of ‘stuff to know about’, some remarkable breakthroughs were still possible, and may be still. In 2013 Stephen Wolfram visited the Leibniz archives in an attempt to understand how Leibniz had achieved so much so early - and how he had also missed so much of what we now take for granted in the computational perspective on science.

With the utmost presumption, I’ve previously claimed that Leonardo, that other great polymath, might have benefited from a more coherent approach to making notes than his zibaldone. Dare I make the same claim for Leibniz?

Oh look, I just did.

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References

Kempe, Michael. The Best of All Possible Worlds. A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days. Translated by Marshall Yarbrough. London: Pushkin Press. 2025.

Krajewski, Markus. “Intellectual Furniture: Elements of a Deep History of Artificial Intelligence.” Chapter 8 in Bajohr, Hannes, ed. Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities. First edition. London: Open Humanities Press, 2025. PDF.

‘Leibniz, LLull and the computational imagination’ Public Domain Review.

von Rauchhaupt, Ulf. “Leibniz’ Manuskripte: Schönschrift war nicht seine Sache”. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2016.

Wolfram, Stephen (2013), “Dropping In on Gottfried Leibniz,” Stephen Wolfram Writings.

Leibniz, [no date], LH 41, 10 Bl. 2: “il me vient quelques fois tant de pensées le matin dans une heure, pendant que je suis encor au lit, que j’ay besois d’employer toute la matinée et par fois toute la journée et au de là, pour les mettre distinctement par ecrit.” Cited in Eduard Bodemann, Die Leibniz-Handschriften der Königlichen Öffentlichen Bibliothek zu Hannover 1895 (Hanover: Hahn, 1895), 338. Quoted in Kempe, 2025, ch 1. ↩︎
loosely translated from Ulf von Rauchhaupt’s article, “Leibniz’s manuscripts: fair handwriting wasn’t his thing”. ↩︎
quoted in Krajewski, p.188. ↩︎
Ann Blair’s memorable phrase: Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven London: Yale University Press, 2010. ↩︎

Sinister Zettelkasten?

Wed, 07 May 2025 20:03:02 +1100

The annual Sydney Film Festival just released its 2025 program, which includes Jodie Foster’s new movie, Vie privée.

The marketing shot makes the index file look mysterious and slightly sinister. There’s bound to be some secrets within.

Chris Aldrich has noticed the index card boxes (Zettelkästen, perhaps) in the background to the 2005 movie Wedding Crashers. As a result I’ve been particularly alert for index cards in movies. Can’t help myself.

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:06:45 +1100

“You only come to know these things in hindsight – when you look back and see the precarious chain of events, happenstance, and good fortune that led to wherever you are now. Before you reach that point, you have no way of predicting which idea will make a difference and which will die on the vine. That’s why you record them all. No matter how random, how small, how half-baked, how unfinished it may be; if you have a thought, record it right away.” ― Antony Johnston, The Organised Writer.

I found a way to create order from my jumbled ideas

Sat, 03 May 2025 09:55:28 +1100

From a single idea to many, to networks of linked ideas to reconfigured networks of knowledge.

This is a model of how students learn, devised by educational psychologist John B. Biggs and presented in his co-authored book, Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does.

The key concept here, ‘structure of observed learning outcomes’ (SOLO), is summarised quite well in Wikipedia.

(Image source: Biggs and Tang, 2011: 91.)

To me this diagram clearly relates to the process of writing and developing short, clear notes.

From a single note to many, to networks of linked notes, to reconfigured networks of knowledge.

The first, prestructural stage, though, isn’t simply empty in my experience. Instead I begin from a whole heap of ideas and thoughts jumbled together like pick-up sticks.

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File…

The problem is it’s too easy to stay in this prestructural stage, where thoughts and ideas are plenty, but they’re a jumbled mess. That’s because even when we make notes, our notes remain either poorly organised, or else well-organised, but set up according to some pre-established schema that hinders further conceptual development.

This metaphor of straightening and sorting a convoluted mess is also key for computer programming. For example, it’s evident on the cover of a well-known book, A Philosophy of Software Design, by John K. Ousterhout.

The first stage proper, the unistructural stage, in my estimation, relates to the capacity to create an atomic note, that is, a note that identifies, isolates and deals with just one thought, idea or concept. This is the key move, and the reason I like to refer to ‘atomic notes’ as the leading idea.

The second, multistructural stage refers to the ability to do this repeatedly, reliably, and systemically.

According to Biggs and Tang, these early stages involve increasing the quantity of knowledge. In my adaptation, this simply means making more atomic notes.

The third, relational stage involves the process of making meaningful links, which is at the heart of the Zettelkasten methodology, and is also crucial for wikis.

The fourth, extended abstract stage relates to the ability to reconfigure networks of concepts to create new knowledge and insight.

According to Biggs and Tang, these stages move beyond the quantitive acquisition of knowledge and towards the qualitative:

“This distinction between knowing more and restructuring parallels two major curriculum aims: to increase knowledge (quantitative: unistructural becoming increasingly multistructural); and to deepen understanding (qualitative: relational, then extended abstract). Teaching and assessment that focus only on the quantitative aspects of learning will miss the more important higher level aspects. Quantitative, Level 1, theories of teaching and learning address the first aim only, increasing knowledge.” (Biggs and Tang, 2011: 90)

This is how I move: from jumbled thoughts to clearer single notes, from single notes to many, from many to meaningful links, and then—if I keep going—to something new.

The SOLO taxonomy shows why this progression matters. It’s not just about gaining more knowledge, but about transforming it. Make modular notes, link them, and let new insights emerge. This isn’t just a way for me to remember what I’ve learned—it’s a way to learn what I didn’t know I knew.

And if it still feels like pick-up-sticks in your head, don’t worry, there’s time—the game is just beginning.

Now read: Atomic notes and the unit record principle.

Reference:

Biggs, J and Tang, C. (2011): Teaching for Quality Learning at University, (4th Edition. McGraw-Hill and Open University Press, Maidenhead). ISBN: 78-0-33-524275-7. PDF

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Sat, 03 May 2025 00:07:01 +1100

“It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much."—Leonard Woolf. Source.

My take: Choose your own race and finish it. The image is an example of how AI already looks unfashionable.

From tiny drops of writing, great rivers will flow

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 23:22:12 +1100

In his book, 📖 Writing Tools, veteran journalist Roy Peter Clark teaches that writers should break long projects into parts. In fact, that’s how he wrote his book. It started life as a year-long series of online posts, one per week, until finally he’d written fifty of them (I guess he took a couple of weeks off 😁).

It’s an obvious piece of advice that’s surprisingly hard to remember. Conversely it’s easy to feel daunted by big projects, forgetting that they are always made out of smaller pieces.

My working philosophy of creativity is that from fragments you can build a greater whole.

One small part joins up with another and another until soon, like rain, a trickle grows to become a flood. Clark says:

Tiny drops of writing become puddles that become rivulets that become streams that become deep ponds.

This is why I make short notes and join them together to create longer pieces of writing. I’m daunted by the larger task but not at all daunted by the quiet joy of writing one short note followed by another, and another.

This is what I call the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.

It may be short, but it’s endlessly repeatable. And the results can be quite impressive.

Clark also mentions that he sometimes asks his new writing students to indicate how many of them have run a marathon. Usually only a couple have, but when he asks how many think they could do it, if they were given a much longer period, nearly everyone raises their hands.

This reminded me of the rather lovely short film about the Australian farmer who ran his own marathon, one piece at a time. In this case he did just one mile every hour until the whole distance was run. And he did a whole lot of other work too. Improbably, this guy’s name is Beau Miles.

OK, that’s great and all, but how exactly do you do it, one drop at a time?

Here’s my take on how to write an article from your notes.

And here’s a book this process helped me write and publish: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

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Have you ever read a book by mistake?

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 20:32:27 +1100

Revisiting a backup file of my old notes reminded me of the time I was reading what I assumed to be a novel by Ruth Ozeki, but it turned out to be a novel by Cynthia Ozick, published in 1987, called The Messiah of Stockholm.

Anyone could have made that mistake, I submit.

At least, anyone who, like me, failed to read the cover properly.

And every single page with the author’s name in the footer.

In any case I loved the book, even though it wasn’t written by Ruth Ozeki, which I didn’t realise at the time.

It’s about a man who believes he is the son of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, who was murdered by Nazis and his magnum opus, The Messiah lost. Although it’s (fairly) clear he can’t really be the great writer’s son, a bookseller, Mrs Eklund, goes along with the man’s story. They strike up a relationship in which she ‘believes’ his paternity claims while he believes, or at least doesn’t question, her repeated claim that her husband, Dr Eklund is inside the flat above the shop.

Is he? Is he really?

And then Adela turns up, claiming to be the daughter of Bruno Schultz, carrying with her the manuscript of the lost book. Are they going to ‘believe’ this too?

So in a way it was appropriate that I should have mistaken Ozick for Ozeki. Displaced identity was the theme. I did wonder, though, why the Ozeki writing style about which I had read was not much in evidence in the novel actually in front of me.

So there is still the genuine Ozeki to be read. Let’s hope I don’t pick up by mistake a novel by Julie Otsuka. Unless that too proves to be excellent, in which case I’ll be happy.

Over to you. Have you ever read a book by mistake? And was it an unforeseen calamity, or an unexpected joy?

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:13:21 +1100

Writing notes is much more than just writing notes. Done right, it’s a way of working with ideas:

I’m organising my notes right now and stumbled over this quote:

You’re not building a note-taking system, but rather a way to capture, explore, and generate ideas. by Jorge Arango on page 181 Duly Noted

Chris Verbree https://vmac.ch/posts/2025-04-21-i-m-organising-my-notes-right-1745220311/

The future of the humanities is wide open

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 23:58:47 +1100

The humanities are shipwrecked

The university humanities are an ongoing shipwreck.

According to Zena Hitz, “the life of the mind is dying or dead in conventional institutions.” (Quoted in William Deresiewicz’s article, Deep reading will save your soul ).

And as John Halbrooks observes, “Our university administration clearly sees humanities faculty as a (barely) necessary annoyance, as is the case in most public universities these days. It is all about STEM fields and professional schools and grant money, especially as state appropriations for higher education have shrunk. The only values are economic. "

Image source: Jules Verne, Dick Sand: A Captain at Fifteen. Illustration by Henri Meyer Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, Alan Jacobs commented on how the liberal arts seem to be thriving beyond the universities, just as those institutions continue to shrink their own involvement. He quotes a WSJ book review that mentions the Catherine Project and the Lyceum Movement in the US.

Jacobs observes that a prospective student might find it hard to justify spending many thousands of dollars on a traditional arts degree when so much of the same or similar material is available outside that framework. As a professor at a liberal arts college, he offers a cautious welcome, two cheers perhaps, to the growth of the arts beyond the academy.

Also of note is the French phenomenon of radical philosophers establishing learning contexts beyond the university.

For example, there’s Le Collège international de philosophie, co-founded by Jacques Derrida. And there’s Le Université populaire de Caen, founded by Michel Onfray.

In the US there is Vital Thought, and in the UK The Reading Room, sponsored by Pluto Press. And older experiments such as the venerable and once vibrant Chautauqa movement still exist.

The outlook might be poor in the US, but in Australia applications to arts subjects have gone up, and this increase in applications is despite a massive rise in fees.

I find it unfortunate, sad even, that so much of the discussion about education has revolved around money. William Deresiewicz quotes a student, Matthew Strother, who says, “It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs”.

Whether it’s the price of the course of study, or the potential return on investment in the form of a well-paid job, or the creation of a compliant worker, why is it all about money and not about human flourishing?

Well, one obvious answer would be that these days it simply is all about the money.

Cracking capitalism at the edge of the academy

Yet a quite different answer to this question appears in the form of sociologist John Holloway’s concept of ‘cracking capitalism’ by abandoning our subservience to ‘abstract labour’:

“The real determinant of society is hidden behind the state and the economy: it is the way in which our everyday activity is organised, the subordination of our doing to the dictates of abstract labour, that is, of value, money, profit. It is this abstraction which is, after all, the very existence of the state. If we want to change society, we must stop the subordination of our activity to abstract labour, do something else.”

And this doesn’t sound quite so radical when you consider that we’re already doing something else, at least for some of the time.

We allocate a significant portion of our lives to activities that place financial considerations firmly in the background rather than the foreground, to pursuits which, in brute economic terms might be, well, uneconomic. We do all sorts of things for which there’s little financial justification.

Immense resources go into the sporting life in all its forms, for example, and in return it provides health, meaning and community. No one says: “we’re promoting youth sports so children will be fit for the modern workplace”. But if that’s so, why are they promoting youth sports? No one really asks. They just go ahead and promote sports. The sports club exists in order to promote sports, not the other way around.

As Latin scholar Justin Stover said in 2017, when he claimed that there is no case for the humanities, “Golfers do not need to justify the rationale for hitting little white balls to their golf clubs”. Instrumentalist rationality is nowhere to be seen. Or else it’s the inverse of university rationality. The golf club exists to enable the playing of golf, in a way that the university does not now exist to enable learning (learning, like golf, is a ‘social object’ with multiple benefits).

So why not approach the arts and humanities like this too?

No, seriously, why not?

Maybe it’s a category error. Holloway assumes his readers might not like a subservience to ‘abstract labour’, but perhaps the leadership of universities does actually want exactly this subservience. Stover claims that without the humanities, the university simply won’t be a university, but perhaps by now the very definition of the term has been transformed. In the old days the cynics used to say that Harvard was large investment fund with a university attached. But the real situation is far worse than that. As neo-liberalism metastasised further into financialisaton, the universities, like every other institution, changed their purpose, became mechanisms whose primary purpose is to establish relations of debt.

You may come away with a degree. You may as a result become more employable in the job market than you otherwise might have been. But these are not certainties. There is however one certainty: you will leave university with a substantial debt, a student loan which will follow you into your distant future like a hound of hell.

This matters because it turns institutions that only exist as universities provided they include the study of the humanities, as Justin Stover claimed, into institutions that only exist as universities provided they can encumber their customers with a significant long-term loan.

The cyberneticist Stafford Beer coined the unwieldy acronym POSIWID , meaning that the purpose of a system is what it does. And in that spirit we can observe that the purpose of higher education is to create student loans. In fact, since many don’t graduate, it creates many more student loans that it creates graduates.

Ironically, the advocates of qualitative evaluation by means of quantitative analysis, those whose ‘only values are economic’, will probably deny that this particular quantitative analysis has any relevance. The loans are obviously just a side-effect of the main purpose of the university, they will claim. Yet this is exactly the kind of evasion that Stafford Beer intended to highlight. They would say this, because they got the bulk of the cash.

Now what would it look like if higher education didn’t intrinsically entail higher debt?

Among several examples John Holloway gives of the ordinariness of resistance to abstract labour are the following:

“the university professor in Athens who creates a seminar outside the university framework for the promotion of critical thought”.
“the university teacher in Leeds who uses the space that still exists in some universities to set up a course on activism and social change”.

What we do in our leisure time is usually understood as being without economic value (or is extractive, as in watching TV adverts). Leisure is time when workers are not being productive. But maybe there’s a different kind of productivity going on here, following a different logic.

In the world of value, money, profit, Celine Nguyen has some valuable thoughts on research as a leisure activity, a concept she got from Karly W. John Holloway sees ‘cracking’ as “the perfectly ordinary creation of a space or moment in which we assert a different type of doing”.

What kinds of different?

Whether or not you want to change the world, the serious leisure perspective is a framework of analysis that might be useful here. Sure, it’s leisure, but it’s far from trivial.

*Image Source: researchoutreach.org/wp-conten…

Leisure is a serious business

This perspective charts the continuum of activities and approaches that ranges across a spectrum from the entirely casual to the entirely professional. There’s a lot to be understood about the wide regions between these two poles. Recognising the breadth of the field might help clarify the nature of the shifts that are taking place in our time.

Starting with casual leisure, we have passive entertainment such as reading, and active entertainment, such as writing. These are casual because there’s no particular expectation of any skills development or improvement.

Serious leisure, on the other hand, is predicated on taking it seriously (there’s a clue in the name), with a measure of dedication - serious time and effort spent to improve one’s skills and capabilities. Hobbyists and amateurs are both serious about their enthusiasms. The hobbyist differs from the amateur in that the former has no particular relationship with the professional end of the spectrum, whereas the amateur might well have such a connection. For example, the hobbyist might just pursue the activity alongside other hobbyists, while the amateur might also take part in classes and workshops led by professionals.

Beyond the amateur pursuit of serious leisure, the devotee engages in quasi-professional activities. For example, the amateur historian might research and write about local history, but the devotee might also publish it and present talks on the subject, in a manner similar to that of the professional historian. You can probably see that the line between the serious leisure devotee and the professional is not in fact very rigid.

Another way of describing this is that at the professional end of the spectrum, professional work blends into devotee work. Vocational activities might be seen as a kind of commitment to devote one’s working life to very serious leisure. Indeed, there are many professionals who would readily admit that they would willingly do their work even if they weren’t paid for it. What they do is serious, whether it’s called leisure or work, or anything else.

I want to emphasize here the long continuum from casual leisure, through serious leisure, all the way to professional activity and work. Each step along this continuum requires its own institutional context with varying degrees of recognition and membership, and different kinds of gateways and barriers to entry.

It’s amazing, at least to me, how walled off from the rest of the world the academy has become. So much of the institutional structure seems deliberately set up to break any sense of the continuum I’ve been describing between casual, serious and professional. The world of sports would collapse if it behaved like this. So would the music industry, the art world, and many other areas of human endeavour where excellence is valued. The outreach, extension and continuing education efforts of universities, at least in the British and Australian context of which I’m aware, seem a pale shadow of what they surely would be, if only serious leisure was taken seriously.

Looking at the Cinderella-like existence of many university extension programmes, it’s almost as though the pursuit of academic interests for leisure purposes is perceived as a threat to the institution, or an annoyance at best, rather than an opportunity, as though the academic experts are in some kind of competition with the devotees, the amateurs the hobbyists and even with the casual dabblers. Why should this be? Where does this sense of threat come from?

Perhaps employment precarity in an era of rampant casualisation comes into play here. As a senior academic once told me: “The gap between tenured professor and casual taxi-driver is surprisingly small.”

And perhaps status anxiety has something to do with it too. Viewed as a hierarchy with tenured professors at or near the top, casual lecturers near the bottom, just above the undergraduates, and the massed ranks of the leisure enthusiasts so low down as to be beneath consideration, the structure of the higher education sector begins to make sense.

With whole arts and humanities departments facing the axe, or already uprooted, the anxiety makes sense too. It must be hard to enjoy the view from the top of the tree when the entire forest is being clear-felled around you.

Then there is the matter of boundary transactions. Eliel Cohen (2021) documents how educational institutions “must engage in boundary transactions in order to maintain their unique position and identity”, but at the same time, these transactions risk undermining academic boundaries.

The remedy for this is hopeful, but it requires a radical reappraisal of the relationship between the top and bottom of the hierarchy. In fact, it requires the difficult recognition that it’s not a hierarchy at all: it’s an ecology.

Image source: Dick Sand: A Captain at Fifteen by Henri Meyer Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

Towards a healthy academic ecosystem

In a healthy ecosystem, diversity enables cycles of growth, flourishing, decline and regrowth to persist through time.

Similarly, in a thriving educational ecosystem, there is a healthy mutuality between the experts and the amateurs, between professionals and dabblers, that has been largely lost, but that stands a chance of growing back again. Once the largest trees have been felled, the weeds move in to protect the ground. That’s how I see the proliferation of history podcasts and YouTube channels at exactly the same time the history and literature departments are being pulped. The twilight of the Humanities at a university level has nothing to do with the burgeoning level of interest in the humanities among the general public.

I mentioned John Halbrooks and his gloomy view of the humanities. He might be gloomy but he’s not sitting around waiting for the axe to fall. Instead, he’s doing his part in re-connecting the academy and the general public, refurnishing the public intellect. His Substack newsletter, Personal Canon Formation, relates closely to an undergraduate course he’s teaching - on writing newsletters. He’s teaching humanities students to connect to a wider world that is interested and enthused by the humanities, and he’s leading by example.

So if you’ve read this far and are still thinking it’s all very well ignoring the money, pretending we’re changing the world by reading critical theory or Nineteenth Century novels, but that will just end in bankruptcy, here’s some news for you: The Chinese education sector is rapidly shifting towards what it calls the ‘silver economy’.

The silver economy involves seniors, a fast-growing sector of the population. In fact over the next decade about 300 million Chinese people will enter the retirement phase of their lives. With this huge demographic shift in mind it seems reasonable to predict massive financial benefits for education-providers who diversify, or else switch entirely to the older end of the market. This will be a difficult shift for the higher education sector in the English-speaking world, because the emphasis for many centuries has been so firmly placed on younger students. After all, each year there’s a new crop (of future debtors)!

But since, as we’ve heard, “the only values are economic”, and since higher education exists not to challenge the logic of capital but faithfully to reproduce it, I fully expect education providers sooner or later just to follow the money.

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References

Cohen, Eliel (2021). “The boundary lens: theorising academic activity”. The University and its Boundaries: Thriving or Surviving in the 21st Century 1st Edition. New York, New York: Routledge. pp. 14–41. ISBN 978-0367562984.

Alan Jacobs, we need to spend a lot of time imagining the humanities without the university.

Zettelkasten Forum discussion on self-improvement.

Serious leisure: What constitutes optimal leisure?.

William Deresiewicz, Deep Reading will save your soul.

To understand the future of AI, look to the past

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:35:18 +1100

The more sci-fi the AI scene grows, the more I find myself looking to the past in order to understand the moment we’re in right now.

The present feels weightless, as though established verities have become untethered from the earth and are already floating off into the upper air. But reviewing the past it’s clear we’ve done all this before, several times. It’s clear that this weightless feeling is an illusion caused by hype and a lifetime of drinking deeply from the heady propaganda of progress.

Here for example is nineteenth century author Victor Hugo, breathlessly eulogizing the ethereality of the printed book over the stolid weight of architecture:

“In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once.” — Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris

Hugo called the book “human thought, stripping off one form and donning another” - isn’t this a wonderful summary of the emotional, visceral responses to the arrival of human-like AI conversation?

And just as Victor Hugo’s words combine a grain of truth with a shovel-full of hyperbole, so does our reception of AI. OK, yes it’s amazing. Soon enough though it will seem ordinary, and perhaps even unfashionable.

Why not publish all your notes online?

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:33:53 +1100

I saw a large collection of public notes and it got me thinking about publishing my own notes. Why not publish them all online?

In his intriguing Zettelkasten, machine learning engineer Edwin Wenink has made 899 of his private notes public. (Writing Slowly)

I’ve been creating Zettelkasten-style notes for several years now, mostly to support the process of writing longer, more complete pieces. So my notes really aren’t intended for public consumption. Even though I’m keen on making my notes as clear, concise and modular as I can, still, many of them are rough, inconsistent, and probably incomprehensible to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves reading them. All the same, I can’t help feeling drawn to the idea of publishing them anyway.

That’s because I like the idea of “working with the garage door up” (as Andy Matuschak puts it), and I absolutely love poking around other people’s public note collections — their digital gardens, personal wikis, and half-formed archives. Some of them are beautiful and inspiring, full of loose threads and glimpses of thinking in motion. Others are baffling, and that’s part of their strange charm. They remind me of visiting craft villages in the 1980s where the potters, the artists and the metal-workers would occupy little studios in the converted stables of the old country house (in the UK, obviously!), and you could stand there watching them doing their thing. It was craftwork-as-performance, I suppose.

But should I do it myself? What are the upsides and downsides of putting everything — the messy, partial, and half-baked — out in the open, for casual visitors to gawk at?

Here are some reflections I’ve pulled together on the pros (+) and cons (-), mostly from a recent Reddit thread that helped me to concentrate my scattered thoughts and focus my ambivalence. I asked, ‘why not publish all your notes online?’ - and received some very interesting replies.

1. (+) Publishing makes writing feel more real — and more rewarding

For some people, making their notes public adds a bit of ‘shine’ — a small psychological nudge. If it’s out there, it feels more complete, more real, maybe somehow more legitimate. That can be motivating. Even if no one’s reading these public notes, the simple act of publishing gives a sense of purpose to the work.

Publishing-before-polishing might also help in pushing back against perfectionism — especially if you grew up with punishingly high writing standards or have internalised the idea that writing only counts if it’s finished, or polished, or part of something “serious.” Publishing unedited notes becomes a tiny act of kindness to yourself: this is where I’m at, and that’s enough. Dave Winer once said blogging is just “the unedited voice of a person”, or as Jana says, “just a person, putting out what they want”. And now that I think about it, that’s what I’m doing right now. Well then, maybe the next step is just to publish the whole lot.

2. (-) But it might make you second-guess everything

If your Zettelkasten, your collection of notes, is truly for thinking — not presenting — then it will inevitably include contradictions, changes of mind, odd tangents, and things that just don’t make sense outside your own head. And let’s face it, a lot of things don’t make sense outside my own head.

One person put it bluntly: “The Zettelkasten isn’t a place for refined thoughts. Mine is messy, gross, tangled, and full of opinions I might not want others to see.”

This reminded me of how sociologist Niklas Luhmann, he of the massive Zettelkasten, likened his notes to a septic tank. Now a septic tank may be useful, but it’s not a part of the house you’d usually show to guests.

And that’s exactly true for your notes, surely. The moment you imagine someone else looking over your shoulder, your writing starts to shift. You start trying to make the sludge less sludgy. You edit more. You second-guess your phrasing. You may even worry about being misunderstood, judged, or taken out of context. Maybe that’s the down-side of ‘shiny’. This kind of self-censorship, if it happens, risks getting in the way of the very thinking process — largely private and interior, says I — that the Zettelkasten is meant to support.

3. (-) Not everything belongs online

There’s also the question of privacy. A few people mentioned that their note collections include sensitive material — references to clients, personal memories, login details (eek!). It’s easy to blur the lines when everything’s in one system. You might start writing something private and only later realise it shouldn’t have been there.

You can, of course, separate public and private notes. Soren Bjornstad does this very clearly: what’s visible online, he says, is just one layer of a larger, mostly private system. That approach makes a lot of sense — but presumably it’s also a bit more work. The truth is, I’d almost certainly get this wrong. A single ‘public’ tag placed in error and all my deepest secrets would surely be revealed. The horror! (OK, no one would care, but still.)

4. (-) Other people might not find your notes useful — or even legible

My individual notes aren’t articles. They’re often fragments, sentence-stubs, or even diagrams, that mainly make sense in a wider web of meaning. A lot of the meaning resides in the links. Even when shared, they’re not necessarily built for outside readers.

One commenter was blunt: “Publishing notes in their native form must be the lowest energy effort I’ve seen so far.” Another said: “Unfinished thoughts online are pointless — no one but yourself would understand them.”

That may be true. But I think it depends on the format, the tone, and the audience. One person commented that they’ve seen and enjoyed notes that feel more like blog posts: short reflections that are personal but still intelligible. When someone’s writing with just a hint of awareness that others might be reading — even if the writing is still in note form — it changes the texture, and for the reader at least, this may be for the better.

5. (+) But sometimes a note is all you need

For others, sharing notes is about being part of an ongoing conversation. You don’t need to write a whole article every time you want to contribute something (looks like I do, because I’m fatally verbose, so sue me). A link to a note — if it’s relevant, coherent, and on-topic — can do the job. Especially in professional communities, it can be a way of saying, “I’ve thought a bit about this — now here’s where I’m at.” In this sense, public notes are a lot like social media posts. You’re happy to put them out there as a means of ‘finding the others’, but you don’t necessarily want them to be held up as your best work ever.

When your notes are already in reasonably good shape, and already feeding into talks, posts, and projects, publishing them just makes sense. They don’t need to be perfect — just coherent enough to be useful. And perhaps that’s the threshold that matters most.

6. (-) It’s not always easy to find the good ones

One reason I don’t always browse other people’s notes is simply that they’re hard to find — especially in niche areas. If someone’s notes intersect with something I care about, it can be a real delight to find them. But discovering those little gems usually takes time, context, or whatever the internet equivalent is for word-of-mouth.

Bring back webrings, someone said. I agree - at least with the sentiment. We definitely need new ways of unearthing this stuff. Personally I’m still keen on RSS as a kind of glue for the indieweb (I know it has issues but I just like it).

7. (+) Still, I’m always on the look-out

Even if I know I won’t “get” much of it, I can’t resist looking. I love the aesthetics of notes — the eccentric emoji-coding, the fiesta of links, the mad web-design skillz, the rhythm of someone else’s thought process made quirkily visible.

Note system aesthetics. What a niche to be in love with!

Sometimes I’m inspired, sometimes my curiosity is piqued. And sometimes it’s just nice to know there are other people out there quietly thinking things through.

8. (+) Public notes are a useful staging post

So this is where I’ve ended up: thinking of public notes not as polished end-products, but as sitting somewhere between private scraps and finished writing.

That’s the principle of the digital garden — you publish early, and let your saplings grow in public. Notes start as “seeds”, then grow into “shoots”, and eventually into “trees”. Some fall by the wayside. Some are pruned. Some sprout surprising branches. And by this time, the metaphor has worn a bit thin.

In his excellent collection of public notes Bill Seitz describes this as “tending your inner and outer gardens” — maintaining both a private system (where you’re free to be messy), and a public-facing one (where ideas get air, attention, and refinement). I quite like this approach.

In fact, it’s already what I do — at least loosely. My private notes feed into slightly more polished pieces: blog posts, public notes, odd fragments I toss online (I have an ineptitude for Mastodon and BlueSky). Some of those get reshaped later into longer essays or more structured arguments. Some don’t. But publishing early makes the next stage easier — and the stages after that more likely.

Thoreau and Emerson, those legendary nineteenth century American writers, wrote in their journals, gave public lectures, edited those talks into essays, and then eventually collected and revised them again for publication. Multiple iterations. A rhythm of emergence.

Maybe the 21st-century equivalent looks something like this:

fleeting notes / rough journal entries →
Zettelkasten main notes →
public notes →
blog posts / podcasts / videos →
essays / articles →
ebooks →
physical books (and back to the start - it’s a cycle)

Of course, not every idea travels the full distance. But the opportunity is there. And each stage helps shape the next.

So, should I publish all my notes online?

No, I don’t think so — it’s just not for me.

I like the rhythm of keeping the first iterations private, then working them into something a bit more coherent and longer, like this post you’re reading now. That’s what feels right for the present.

The image that for me best sums up this process of making short notes to create longer pieces of writing is that of my little worm farm. All sorts of scraps get dumped in at the top. And mostly unseen, the worms turn everything into nourishing compost. writingslowly.com
Writing Slowly https://writingslowly.com/2024/03/31/when-it-comes.html

But I’ll keep reading the note collections other people publish. And rest assured, writing slowly and selectively, I’ll keep sharing little bits of my own.

Some public Zettelkästen worth exploring

If you’re curious to see how others do it — and what kinds of forms a public Zettelkasten might take — here are a few that I keep coming back to (tbh this list is mostly for my own reference but you might also be curious):

Public Zettelkästen and Digital Gardens

Andy Matuschak’s Notes
A semi-public digital notebook, full of interlinked thoughts on memory, learning, and tools for thought. These are really mini-blog posts, surely with at least one eye to the reader.
Soren Bjornstad’s Zettelkasten
A thoughtfully maintained collection of Zettelkasten-inspired notes, with strong links and clear explanations. This is based on TiddlyWiki, which I also use, and I’m full of admiration for this tricked-out iteration (mine’s a bit more basic). But it’s not a Zettelkasten, since Soren says his collection of notes has outgrown that term.
Jon M Sterling’s Mathematical Zettelkasten
Dense, precise, and full of logical clarity — a beautiful, inspiring example of a Zettelkasten in a formal discipline. And I’ve written about it previously at A forest of evergreen notes.
Maggie Appleton’s Notes
Designer, anthropologist, and digital gardener — her ‘digital garden’ is playful, exploratory, well-organised and yes, impeccably designed.
Binny’s Digital Zen Garden
This is a creative take on the digital garden format — a bit philosophical, a bit experimental, and Binny wrote a book, Zettelkasten and the Art of Knowledge Management, so that’s cool.
A Working Library by Mandy Brown
Not strictly a Zettelkasten, but a really elegant example of thought-in-process, evolving across essays and notes. I wish my site was as nice as this. Sigh.
Barns Worth Burning OK, so this one’s not really a Zettlkasten either. It’s more like a pot-pourri of interesting fragments. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki? Certainly. In other words, I like it a lot.
Nikita Voloboev’s Wiki
Another sprawling and highly structured knowledge base, grounded in personal note-taking practice. I mean sprawlng as in “I approve”.
Zac Burry’s Garden
Yet again more of a digital garden, but still grounded in Zettelkasten principles: atomic notes, dense links, no blog-post polish.
Anagora
I don’t really understand this group site (if it even is that?) but it looks interesting.
Nagitimi85
Here’s a nice public notes collection that’s just getting going - published using Obsidian and Quartz.

Curated Lists and Directories

Maggie Appleton’s Digital Gardeners Index
A growing collection of personal wikis, gardens, and knowledge work experiments.
Lyz-code’s Best of Digital Gardens
A curated list of noteworthy digital gardens, tools, and workflows.
Awesome Digital Gardens
Another great index for diving into the many styles and structures people are exploring.

If you’ve got others to add, please let me know. And since you’ve read this far you might even like to subscribe to my weekly email digest - all the posts in one handy package.

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 17:25:51 +1100

In his intriguing Zettelkasten, machine learning engineer Edwin Wenink has made 899 of his private notes public edwinwenink.xyz.

These notes are a constant work in progress and not necessarily intended for your reading. Nevertheless, I submit them to your “voyeurism.”

(HT: Annie)

And previously, Andy Matuschak has recommended working with the garage door up.

But where’s the limit?

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 12:23:12 +1100

Some say that due to AI, “the vast majority of human beauty that will exist has already been created”. I’m pointing out the opposite:

It’s a great time to be writing the future.

Why? Well, by nature humans innovate. Humans equipped with AI?

They just innovate harder.

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 12:10:00 +1100

Legendary computer game Myst started life as an interconnected network of cards in the equally legendary app HyperCard. To be precise, 1,355 cards in 6 HyperCard stacks.

Now, through graph analysis the last secrets of that network are finally being ‘deMystified’.

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 12:00:27 +1100

An interesting Zettelkasten discussion.

malikalimoekhamedov.substack.com/p/bob-dot…

Five solutions to link rot in my personal note collection

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 23:10:20 +1100

Have you noticed that the problem of link rot on the Web is very real? Just writing a link to a separate page, without comment or annotation, assumes permanence and depends on that link persisting through time. But links don’t really work that way. They become obsolete far faster than feels comfortable. Because I didn’t like to acknowledge this, I now have a whole heap of old notes consisting of little more than broken links. Here are five possible solutions to this problem. Which ones make sense to you?

1. Write notes in your own words

It would have been better if my notes said what the link is about, and what interests me about it. Since realising the extent of this problem, and recognising that link rot is so prevalent, I try these days to be more careful in describing for myself the content or salient aspects of each source as and when I record the link.

Action: when referring to a web resource, summarise it just well enough that if and when it disappears, my reference to it will still make sense and be useful.

2. Refer to the Internet Archive

Apparently, many articles on Wikipedia now have broken links. That’s annoying, to say the least. One potential remedy might be to link directly to the archived version of the source on The Internet Archive, or maybe another archive site like archive.is

Action: where I doubt the longevity of the source, also link to the Internet Archive’s version.

Unfortunately online archive sites are themselves quite brittle and they’re vulnerable to hostile actions like being sued for breach of copyright, or even just running out of funding. Dependence on a single small charity as the memory keeper of the entire Web obviously creates a potential point of failure and sets us up for a big problem if and when the archive site itself disappears with a 401 error or worse.

3. Create your own personal archive

A heavy-duty solution would be to create my own archive of websites I’ve referred to. Bookmarking services such as Pinboard enable this. So does micro.blog, which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of the indie-web. These services don’t just store the link to a web page. They also create and store a snapshot of the page. But these services store the archival data in the cloud, which may present a problem in some circumstances. And both the services I’ve mentioned are tiny one-person enterprises which suffer from the risk of that one person shutting up shop. On the other hand, individuals have a greater longevity than massive corporations, ironically, and I’m writing this in the year after Google shut down Google Podcasts without any consultation.

Alternatively, self-archiving on your own computer is possible by using an application such as archive box. A reference application such as Zotero, whose primary function is to manage academic references, can also create a personal archive of pdf articles and other sources. I use this and find it very helpful. It also enables saving and cataloguing of web page snapshots.

Action: Consider subscribing to a bookmarking service, or even using an app like archivebox. Check out the archiving features of Zotero that I’m not already familiar with.

With an archive of all the sources you’ve ever referred to, there’s no danger of link rot in your own references. But this just defers the problem one level further from you. It hasn’t gone away. All the articles and sources you archive are still susceptible to their own link rot. You can only realistically archive a couple of levels of hyperlinks before the task is too massive to handle.

4. Don’t worry, be happy

Another more philosophical ‘solution’ to the problem of link rot would be to stop worrying and accept that everything changes. Going slightly further, one could recognise that forgetting is an essential aspect of remembering, and that memory systems also need a mechanism for forgetting information. The Internet’s main forgetting system is for addresses to change or disappear without notice. This is inelegant and has unfortunate side effects, yet it works, I suppose. If I imagined the Internet to be a stable repository of collective knowledge, I simply imagined it wrongly. I thought we were building a new Pyramid of Cheops, but our blueprints were those of the Tower of Babel. It turns out the Web is no more permanent than a dog breed. It’s the river you don’t step into twice. If we think we’re gazing up at the night sky we’re fooling ourselves. The web isn’t the night sky, it’s just a cave wall studded with fireflies. And so on. I told you this was philosophical.

More generally, human knowledge isn’t really like gold bars in a bank vault, which you can store indefinitely and retrieve when you like. Culture, of which the Web is one aspect, is a machine for remembering, yet it also fabricates and forgets. How this happens remains a mystery. By attempting to memorialise himself for his achievements, King Ozymandius became a byword for failure. The art historian Aby Warburg saw Memosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, as a sphinx holding a riddle. What does culture forget and what does it remember? And how does it do it?

Action: Err, none? Radical acceptance of impermanence? Just go with the flow?

5. Sow and then reap

The term ‘link rot’ has stuck because the organic process it implies seems nearer to the reality. Perhaps a better model of human knowledge would be that it’s like seeds in a seed bank. A seed bank can last a long time, provided you plant the seeds each season to grow new seeds to store over winter. This metaphor suggests that knowledge persists not through storage but through use. And this thought brings me right back around to my first solution to link rot: make notes in my own words. By writing my own version of the knowledge I’ve found, I’m passing it on to the next reader, who might just choose to do the same.

Action: Don’t try to store knowledge. Share, teach, discuss. Pass it on.

None of these solutions are perfect, or even workable. Nevertheless, just because the Internet forgot some information doesn’t mean I have to forget it too.

I wonder if there are any other solutions to this problem of the Web degrading over time. Please let me know.

Now read: Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget too

Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 22:46:54 +1100

Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing (my review) suggests setting up a Zettelkasten (a flexible collection of notes) with a small handful of folders.

These folders aren’t merely places to put notes, though. They suggest a specific workflow - a system for writing.

In-box
Sleeping
References
Main

Here’s a very brief summary of the process:

The In-box

Put your fleeting notes in the in-box so you know where they all are.

Make a regular time to process them into more permanent, polished main notes and move them to that folder.

The Sleeping folder

The ‘sleeping’ folder is a kind of in-box overflow. It’s for notes you just never seem to get round to processing. Put them in the sleeping folder and they’ll still be there when you finally feel like working on them (or you can just let sleeping notes lie). This keeps the In-box relatively small so you don’t get overwhelmed with unprocessed notes. Everyone has more thoughts than they can handle and probably makes more notes than they can handle too. It’s not a big problem - you just work on what you feel like working on and leave the rest. With this system you’ll at least be able to pick up where you left off.

The Reference folder

The reference folder is for reference notes. Let’s say you watched a movie and you want to make notes on it. Create a reference note with the name and all the details of the movie, then any notes you make can link to the reference note. This way you’ll never lose track of where a thought or idea or quote or image came from. You’ll have the details in the reference folder.

The Main folder

Main notes are a bit more polished than fleeting notes. They have a single clear idea, a title, a few links, and a unique ID.

Taming the chaos

That’s it.

Oh, and plenty of people think you need category folders or tags, like subject sections in a library. I admit this is a dominant way of thinking about knowledge. What else would you do, other than put it in categories? But this way of thinking is pretty much contrary to the spirit of the Zettelkasten. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was fertile because it broke down the established categories in sociology and re-constructed a major theory of society from the ground up. And art Historian Aby Warburg organised his Zettelkasten, a library and a whole institute against preconceived categories in his discipline.

Yes, chaos reigns, in a sense - but it’s structured, rhizomatic chaos.

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 07:42:49 +1100

Can you make too many notes? This guy did. #zettelkasten #notetaking #pkm

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 07:09:41 +1100

💬 This is a quiet space…

Moving to Sydney offered cheap train travel compared with Europe. “Never mind arriving,” I would say, “it’s great value just for the view.”

Looks like they’ve finally worked out the real value proposition.

Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn't mean you have to

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:55:04 +1100

It’s intriguing to discover a prolific author with a working collection of 148,000 notes, but it begs the question: can you make too many notes?

I mean, surely there comes a point where your note-making gets in the way of the outcomes you’re looking for, and the endless writing of notes starts to defeat its very purpose.

Well, maybe. Here’s a little cautionary tale from the Nineteenth Century, a time when both empire and facial hair were unrestrained by decency.

John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) was a significant British political figure of the Victorian era. Did he have one of those massive walrus mustaches that they all seemed to go in for back then? Well sort of, but he also had the type of beard that make it look like its owner has just swallowed a beaver, so frankly it’s hard to tell.

He was also an important historian who nevertheless published very little in his lifetime. The consensus seems to be that he took too many notes.

Acton’s Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Edn) entry reads in part:

“Lord Acton has left too little completed original work to rank among the great historians; his very learning seems to have stood in his way; he knew too much and his literary conscience was too acute for him to write easily, and his copiousness of information overloads his literary style. But he was one of the most deeply learned men of his time, and he will certainly be remembered for his influence on others.”

By the way, it’s topical to talk about Lord Acton. He has indeed been remembered, but chiefly for his prescient aphorisms:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

No prizes for guessing which Scofflaw-in-Chief this is a reminder of. Too many notes? Sad! But I digress.

That’s not all. Here’s Keith Thomas in an entertaining London Review of Books piece.

“It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with penciled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’’

According to Oman, in his book, On the Writing of History (1939), Lord Acton left behind only one good book, some lectures, and several essays scattered in hard-to-find journals. He also created a plan for a large history project that others would write after his death, but not in the way he had intended.

In 1998 the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse drew entirely the wrong conclusion from all this. He seemed to point the blame for Lord Acton’s little problem on the fact that all he had to work with was compartments full of paper notes:

“What may have been accomplished had Acton possessed more than a row of dusty pigeon-holes to store his notes and musings?”

Would perhaps a computer have helped him out, by any chance? Yes indeed:

“The advances in computing and communication technologies over the past thirty years have laid the material basis for overcoming the Lord Acton syndrome that continues to plague the historical profession. It is now possible for the Lord Actons of today to share an unlimited number of their notes, ideas, and annotations with the entire world of interested scholars with minimal cost. Paperless publishing through the Internet theoretically offers the means for transcending a centuries-old model of historical scholarship and breaking down the barriers between academic and amateur historians.”

Well, we’ve had another 27 years of the digital era since then, and it’s probably safe to say that while there’s certainly a ‘Lord Acton Syndrome’, the cure is not more computers.

If anything, the situation is even worse now, made so by the massive expansion of available information. Imagine what Acton would have done with all the many terabytes of historical data that’s now available at the click of a button.

That’s right: he’d have made notes on it.

In fact, Charles Oman had already understood the poor man’s real problem much earlier.

Oman saw that this limited output from such a capable scholar happened because Lord Acton tried to master everything before finishing anything. Apparently he had a great book in mind, but gathering all the necessary information became overwhelming for one person.

The lesson, for Oman at least, is clear:

“In short the ideal complete and perfect book that is never written may be the enemy of the good book that might have been written. Ars longa, vita brevis— one must remember the fleeting years, or one’s magnum opus may never take shape, if one is too meticulous in polishing it up to supreme excellence.”

Being too focused on perfection might mean our greatest work (or indeed any work) never materializes at all.

So take look in the mirror. Are you a walrus? Have you swallowed a beaver? No? Then you don’t need to copy Lord Acton’s note-taking excesses either. Make some notes, sure, but please don’t ‘do an Acton’ and die before you make something from them.

Footnote:

Oman complained about the seemingly hopeless diversity of Lord Acton’s interests, as evidenced from the wide range of his notes - from pets, to stepmothers to totems. Well, I’m not convinced this is a problem in itself. In the right hands it might even be an advantage. The real problem was that Acton doesn’t seem to have developed a system for writing, beyond the publication of his lectures.

“There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section. I turned over one or two from curiosity—one was on early instances of a sympathetic feeling for animals, from Ulysses' old dog in Homer downward. Another seemed to be devoted to a collection of hard words about stepmothers in all national literatures, a third seemed to be about tribal totems.” See also: The mastery of knowledge is an illusion

Acknowledgement

Ched Spellman posted about Lord Acton’s problem 15 years ago. Now I’m just commenting on Spellman’s commentary on Thomas’s commentary on Oman’s commentary. Yes, this is the Internet. What did you expect?

References

Hugh Chisolm (1910) ‘Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg’, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Vol 1, pp. 159ff. Internet Archive.

Timothy Messer-Kruse (1998) ‘Scholarly publication in the electronic age’, in Dennis A. Trinkle. Writing, Teaching and Researching History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers. London: Routledge. p. 41.

Charles Oman (1939), On the Writing of History. 1st Edition, London: Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9…

Keith Thomas (2010), ‘Diary: Working Methods’. London Review of Books. Vol. 32 No. 11 · 10 June 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary

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The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman's Monumental Note Archive

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:21:34 +1100

People sometimes ask, “who these days uses Zettelkasten-style hand-written notes to produce significant work?” There are literally thousands of examples from before the digital age (Leonardo for example), but what of today? Isn’t this kind of thing pretty much obsolete?

No, it’s not obsolete. I’m happy to say the practice is still very effective.

Georges Didi-Huberman (Wikipedia) is a prolific French art historian and philosopher who has written more than sixty books.

He works in and beyond the tradition of cultural luminaries such as Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, so it’s no surprise that like them he keeps his own massive collection of working notes.

How many? Well, a recent exhibition was based on “his immense working file, begun in 1971, comprising more than 148,000 notes” (“son immense fichier de travail, commencé dès 1971, composé de plus de 148 000 fiches”).

And his process?

“To summarize, I would say that the first work is slow, modest, obsessive: it is the creation and accumulation of cards in confrontation or dialogue with certain texts or certain images. The second is fast, exhilarating, joyful, made of discoveries: it is the reassembly of the cards, like a successful card game, on a vast table where the layout of the cards allows one to visualize a large number of them synoptically and to see unexpected constellations emerge. The third work must be rhythmic or musical: it is the writing itself, the handwriting on the entire blank sheet.
As soon as there was a box, there were other boxes and other boxes still. The file is a tool for memorization, a technical prosthesis for thought that allows one to forget many cumbersome, even paralyzing, things. But we must know how to put an end to obsessive activity and the love of repetition, in order to open ourselves more radically to the advent of differences, to the dance of joyful knowledge.” (Source pdf)

The exhibition took place at the IMEC archive (l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine) in Normandy, France. This is the same archive that holds more than 12,000 of the note cards of writer and philosopher Roland Barthes.

I’d have loved to visit the exhibition, since this is basically cat-nip for me. Here’s part of the introduction:

“Step into Georges Didi-Huberman’s studio! A philosopher and art historian, he meticulously collects fragments of texts, photographs, and images of all kinds. As a craftsman of thought, he assembles them to create visual and textual constellations to capture our reality. Imec invites you to explore this unique “dialogue machine” and enter the heart of a tirelessly repeated writing process: looking at images, collecting fragments of thought, and telling the world through the montage of ideas.” (Source)

Well, we might have missed the exhibition, but we can still watch a presentation on YouTube (perhaps with English subtitles).

And we can watch some of the short videos presented in the exhibition itself.

And finally, yes, there is a book of the exhibition.

This vast constellation of 148,000 notes shows that the art of creative note-making is alive and well. And this is not just an archive but a philosophy of thinking and writing. Didi-Huberman’s three-stage creative rhythm: patient collection, exhilarating reassembly, and musical composition, shows how fragments, properly arranged, may reveal unexpected truths. His practice is a reminder that notes exist not necessarily as endpoints, but as invitations to a dance.

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Wed, 19 Mar 2025 18:57:11 +1100

TIL of a philosopher and prolific author who maintains at the heart of their working practice a collection of more than 148,000 notes. It’s a fascinating story, catnip for #zettelkasten fans, and you’ll be reading it here very soon.

Roland Barthes on the purpose of making notes

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 07:00:00 +1100

When making notes on some reading it’s very tempting to try to capture everything, to squeeze every last drop of insight from a book, a lecture, a fleeting thought. It’s easy to get lost in the process, mistaking note-taking for the real work. But I’ve been reflecting on something French philosopher Roland Barthes understood: notes aren’t about hoarding knowledge or building a perfect archive. They’re about getting to the real point—writing. In this piece, I consider Barthes' perspective, alongside a couple of other thinkers who, like me, see note-making not as an end in itself, but as a way to get some words onto the page.

The writing comes first

Faced with a large, weighty source, it’s a temptation to try to make notes on the entire contents of the book or video in front of you. FOMO, fear of missing something out, is a driving force here. It’s hard to summarize a long work, and it can be tempting to make lots and lots of notes. If this feels like the monumental task, that’s because it is.

But unless you are literally writing an encyclopedia, your collection of notes is not an encyclopedia. It would be pointless and impossible to make exhaustive notes on a complex work such as a hefty book of philosophy. There’s no point trying to extract every piece of knowledge from a long book, like a juicer squeezing the last drop of juice from an orange.

Summary and paraphrase are your friends here, sure, but it’s also worth considering the fundamental purpose of making your notes.

French philosopher Roland Barthes, who used index cards (‘fiches’) extensively, recognised this. He understood that the purpose of scholarly notes is not: - to understand everything, - to remember everything, or - to record everything. No, the purpose of one’s notes, he held, is to start writing.

Barthes wasn’t creating a knowledge bank. He was writing.

He used his notes, sometimes several times over, as prompts, inspiration, and cues for his written and published output.

“D’origine érudite, la fiche devient le coin vengeur que le désir insère dans la loi compacte du travail. Principe poétique: ce carré savant ira dans le tableau de l’écriture, non dans celui du savoir.”

“From its scholarly origins, the note (fiche) becomes the vengeful wedge that desire inserts into the compact law of work. Poetic principle: this learned square will go into the table of writing, not into that of knowledge.”

Quoted in Krapp, p.12 n.31, citing Rowan Wilken, “The Card Index as Creativity Machine,” Culture Machine 11 (2010), 7–30. PDF.

OK, this is certainly an enigmatic aphorism!! “Vengeful wedge”? What does it mean? Well, I read it to mean that for Barthes, writing a note (“ce carré savant”) was less about knowledge for its own sake (“le tableau du savoir”) and more about the writing process (“le tableau de l’écriture”) it facilitated. In other words, he wasn’t making his notes primarily to know more, but first and foremost, to write.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills acknowledged a similar point in his influential essay ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’. He claimed that when working in and on their files, scholars are already writing.

“in practice you never ‘start working on a project’; you are already ‘working,’ either in a personal vein, in the files, in taking notes after browsing, or in guided endeavors. Following this way of living and working, you will always have many topics that you want to work out further. After you decide on some ‘release,’ you will try to use your entire file, your browsing in libraries, your conversation, your selections of people—all for this topic or theme. You are trying to build a little world containing all the key elements which enter into the work at hand, to put each in its place in a systematic way, continually to readjust this framework around developments in each part of it. Merely to live in such a constructed world is to know what is needed: ideas, facts, ideas, figures, ideas.” - C. Wright Mills, 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York, Oxford University Press. p.223f.

I take Mills to be saying something similar to Barthes here. In their different ways they were both observing that writing is primary. Mills fully recognizes that making notes obviously is a good or even essential means to understand your source material. But the key phrase here is:

“…decide on some release”.

That is to say, develop a concept of your intended output before you start reading a book. That way, your interests will fruitfully guide your reading and note-making. You can’t make notes on everything but you certainly can make notes on something.¹ So it’s useful to choose mindfully what that something is going to be.

Work on fundamental problems

One way of doing this is to use your note system to explore your enduring concerns, those issues and questions you find yourself returning to over and over. Mathematician Richard Hamming recommended keeping a list of fundamental problems. He said:

“Most great people also have 10 to 20 problems they regard as basic and of great importance, and which they currently do not know how to solve. They keep them in their mind, hoping to get a clue as to how to solve them. When a clue does appear they generally drop other things and get to work immediately on the important problem. Therefore they tend to come in first, and the others who come in later are soon forgotten." You and Your Research. A talk by Richard W. Hamming — Bellcore, 7 March 1986.

A framework for extensive and intensive reading

Extensive reading benefits greatly from having a focus like this. You read widely, only really concerning yourself with the problem (or problems) you bring to the text with you. This provides a framework for your note making and it renders the task manageable. Your list of key problems guides your note-making and helps clarify what really matters to you.

But what about intensive reading? This is where you stop skimming and study a single text deeply. An example would be the study of a religious text for spiritual purposes. In this case, it really does make sense to create exhaustive notes. You may even spend a lifetime doing so. In such an instance you might regard this particular text as one of your basic concerns, a question you keep returning to, over an extended period. Many people have found this approach helpful: rather than reading the book in the light of their concerns, they understand their concerns in the light of the book. Religious texts such as the Bible, the Koran or the Buddhist Sutras, are obvious candidates for intensive reading and note making, but there are secular possibilities too.

Intensive reading is alive and well. Several academic disciplines share the tradition of the group seminar, in which a seminal work is studied and debated intensively. However, it may still be fruitful to keep a few personal or professional priorities in mind, the better to focus the study.

My notes are about as useful as what I do with them

Over time I’ve reluctantly discovered that my notes are only as useful as what I do with them. Sure, they help me remember things, and to keep going where I left off. They are the space where I do my thinking — but crucially, provided I do it right, they help me write.

Barthes, Mills, and Hamming all point toward the same idea: I can’t just collect notes, I have to use them². So I try to let them nudge me toward deeper questions, toward projects that matter. I might be reading widely or I might be diving deep into a single text. Either way, the real challenge is knowing when to stop gathering and start using my notes to shape something of my own.

Why not subscribe to the weekly email digest? If you want to, that is. And maybe you do.

Even if you have no intention of writing anything public and you have no ‘release’ in mind I’d still suggest it may be helpful to find some kind of lens through which to view your reading, some means of focusing your concerns. Your notes may reveal this focus to you gradually, as you write them. ↩︎
OK, I can just collect notes. Who’s going to stop me? ↩︎

My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 22:41:42 +1100

Writing, at least for me, seems to be a messy, back-and-forth kind of thing. It’s a seemingly never-ending loop of laying ideas down, arranging them in some kind of order, and then wrangling them into something that vaguely resembles coherence.

It would be nice to imagine that writing is just a matter of sticking a bunch of pre-existing notes together like a jigsaw puzzle, but that’s just wishful thinking. In reality, it’s more like a collage created with scissors and glue. It’s scrappy, iterative, and sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding.

Here, I’m laying out my personal writing workflow, some thoughts on drafting (and redrafting, and re-redrafting), and how I juggle note-making with actually getting words onto the page.

A basic writing workflow

My basic writing workflow is:

rough notes and annotations (written anywhere, including my journal) ->
main notes (Zettelkasten) ->
structure notes (working towards outlines) ->
early drafts ->
edited drafts ->
final drafts ->
final final drafts LOL
published work

A key venue for my rough (fleeting) notes is my daily journal. Keeping a diary is a way of living. I write freely about anything and everything, then I excerpt interesting stuff into a proper note (aka a main note). Or instead I might just move straight to creating a new note. There’s no rule about which comes first, as long as I capture it.

Writing involves drafting and re-drafting

It’s not very realistic to imagine producing completed work simply by mashing together the contents of my notes, nor to create finished writing just from a pile of notes. That’s an attractive but hollow illusion. All the same, my notes certainly help the drafting process tremendously. Old writing manuals recommend creating an outline then drafting an essay. For me that would be a disaster. Where would I get the outline from? My notes allow me to work from the bottom up instead of from the top down.

It’s tempting to make light of the amount of work the drafting and redrafting takes, but for me it remains a substantial part of the writing process. The Zettelkasten offers a massive head start because it means I always have material to work with and because it’s a workshop in which to play with the structure and order of my ideas. It also allows me to continuously develop my unfinished thoughts. My notes are a creative working environment.

What to do with new thoughts while writing

I use my Zettelkasten notes to construct and inform drafts, but during the drafting process a new thought might come to me, or I’ll notice an idea that I need to add to or expand.

By this time though, I’m already well into the drafting and editing, so I don’t usually go back to create more notes. Perhaps I should, but that would interrupt the flow of the editing work. The exception is when I realise I need to leave the draft and do some more involved thinking/writing. I’ll usually do this by means of my Zettelkasten.

The consolation to not making more notes is that if I’ve actually finished a piece of writing, I can always cite that as a source in a future note, should the occasion arise. This has been a bit of a process of trial and error. Make too few notes to start with, and my drafting process feels under-fed.

There’s no ideal number of notes

It takes quite a lot of notes before I’m happily drafting a piece of writing. But I’m not really sure what the ideal number of notes would be to create a certain length of finished work, and I suspect there isn’t really a definitive way to know that.

That said, I heard an interview with Charles Duhigg (author of Supercommunicators), where he mentioned that while writing a book he makes 200-300 notes on index cards prior to writing each chapter. (Link - 32 minutes onwards).
That may seem like a lot, but each of these notes may contain just a few words.

Meanwhile, for each book he reads, author Robert Greene writes very approximately ten notes:

“After going through several dozen books, I might have three hundred cards, and from those cards I see patterns and themes that coalesce into hardcore chapters. I can then thumb through the cards and move them around at will. For many reasons I find this an incredible way to shape a book.” (Source).

As for me, there isn’t a set number of notes but approximately a dozen per book would be fine. Of course, an especially interesting or relevant source would merit considerably more.

When to stop writing notes and start writing drafts

So when does the note-making stop and the drafting start? Again, I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer to this question. Start too early and I don’t have enough material. Start too late and I’ve gathered far more material than I can use. Perhaps the ‘Goldilocks’ moment — when there are just enough notes to make a worthwhile first draft — becomes clearer with experience. Further, I find that starting a draft makes it easier to see what my writing is missing, so the note-making and the drafting overlap in time to a significant extent.

Towards the end of his career, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, godfather of the Zettelkasten approach, increasingly worked on the many unfinished manuscripts he had started, rather than on creating lots of new Zettelkasten notes. His Zettelkasten had been so productive that it had helped him write far more manuscripts than he had time to publish. Several of these have been edited and published after his death, and I understand there might be more still to come, since the gigantic task of digitising his archive isn’t due for completion till 2030. There’s more information (in German) on Luhmann’s process at The Luhmann Archive. Apparently he inserted typewritten pages into his manuscripts in a manner similar to the way he inserted notes into his Zettelkasten.

At the end of the day, my writing process isn’t about jotting down thoughts. It’s about playing with my ideas, reworking them, and eventually, after plenty of trial and error, shaping them into something worth reading. My Zettelkasten system helps keep the whole chaotic process from completely derailing, but the real magic (or struggle, depending on the day) happens in the drafts. There’s no cut-and-dried answer to when to stop taking notes and start writing. Start too soon and I’m flailing, too late and I’m drowning in material. Over time, though, I’ve gradually developed a feel for the back-and-forth of it.

Maybe writing is less about finding the perfect method and more about learning to live with the imperfections of the process. Or maybe that’s just me.

How do you work? Please let me know.

Now read:

What to do with your notes: start writing.

How to write an article from your notes: an example.

Artwork by Louise Bourgeois. I saw this at an exhibiton of her work at the Art Gallery of NSW.

If you’d like a weekly digest of Writing Slowly posts sent to you by email, it’s easy to subscribe.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, available now.

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:03:37 +1100

I’m always comparing my sloppy first drafts with other people’s heavily-edited published work. So it’s no wonder I’m down on my own stuff; this is a completely unfair contest of my own making.

That’s why I’ve found Dan Harmon’s advice enduringly helpful:

💬 Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit.”

In other words, ‘perfect’ is for editing, not for writing.

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 07:52:23 +1100

💬“I had in my mind to write three books about the world as it was, using concepts and images almost like characters. But I ended up making a long detour.” — Italian author, Roberto Calasso. (Source).

“Long detour” is an apt summary of a writing life, and fitting inspiration for my latest project.

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 01:03:26 +1100

I’ve found writing on Wordpress a bit of a chore. Plenty of features when all I wanted to do was post a little article. These days micro.blog suits me very well.
If you use Wordpress but would enjoy a simpler editing interface here are two newish options:

HT: John Jonston

What comes after content?

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:32:17 +1100

A few weeks ago I happened to win a voucher for the mainstream cinema chain in Sydney where I live.

I checked what was showing, and as a result didn’t even bother claiming the voucher. The kind of ‘top’ movies on offer are really not what I could imagine enjoying. Even if I did enjoy Marvel superhero movies, I can’t imagine wanting to see 45 of them (Wikipedia).

The decline of cinema is a bit sad, because I’ve loved going to the movies ever since the days when my aunt took me to see The Jungle Book, and since my dad took himself (and me) to the first Star Wars movie, and since even before that, my grandmother accidentally took me to see a war movie called Zeppelin. We were the only two people in the darkened village hall, but still, the sight of burning airships dropping from the sky was quite the deal for a seven-year-old.

I thought of this experience while reading an article by Justine Bateman entitled Hollywood is dead. It’s a shame to announce this death, and her take is a little overly-nostalgic. I mean, Hollywood was always a ruthless money-making monster. All the same, her prognosis seems accurate enough.

But what killed it, I hear you ask. The author’s opinion is that ‘content’ killed Hollywood. And yes, I’ve been negative about ‘content’ myself. If we’re not making content what are we making?

According to Justine Bateman, not only has ‘content’ dominated Hollywod, now the production of ‘content’ is being automated by AI in a creative death-spiral. In short the movies are turning to slop and as a result, the AI Grim Reaper is now knocking on Hollywood’s door.

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, she says. People are soon going to reject the AI ‘content’ slop bucket and look for something else: something that’s better because it’s more human. Bateman predicts:

“filmmakers will have to differentiate their work from that which AI can easily imitate. That means they will make unique, raw, and creatively daring work.”

Not only that, but audiences will rebel against AI in their wider lives and certainly reject it in the movies: “They will want something real, raw, and obviously human.”

If she’s right (and that’s a big ‘if’) this means that what we’re moving towards is something completely new and different. We’ve been wrong about AI. AI isn’t the start of a new era but rather the final scene of the old era. And it’s not only movies, there’s books and music too.

So what lies just beyond?

“the birth of the most incredible creative genres we’ve ever known. It will be new to us in the way jazz or rock and roll were new at the time, or French new wave films were back then. However, this will not be a return to anything from the past, but be something entirely new. Just The New.”

I’m mentioning all this because I think the argument also stands for writing generally.

I believe we’re on the cusp of a seismic change in the culture every bit as significant as the shift around 1910 when it was suddenly impossible to be a Victorian any more¹. Just as no one can be Charles Dickens these days, very soon, no one will be able to market anything that looks like what AI could produce. Sure, we’ll make use of AI tools in the background, but readers, listeners and viewers won’t accept what AI offers unless it has first passed through the distinctively human creative imagination.

Ultimately this is just the iron hand of fashion. What looks cutting edge today will date very quickly, so that before long AI will be what you won’t be seen dead wearing.

Things are going to be very different. And I agree with Justine Bateman when I say: more than ever, embracing our humanity is the way forward.

Her three-word manifesto, “Just The New”, has clear echos of the poet Ezra Pound’s late-to-the-party summary of the modernist movement, “Make it new”. Ironically we’ve been here before, in 1928, nearly a century ago. But then Pound was hardly being original. He was paraphrasing an old Chinese text from the 12th century.

Novelty is like that: everything’s new, but it’s made from the old pieces we find lying around us.

What comes after content isn’t really new at all. It’s the oldest thing we know: our desire to connect with another person’s imagination. When we get tired of supposedly ‘perfect’ AI creations, we’ll go back to loving the beautiful mistakes that make human art special. And this will happen sooner than we may expect.

The future belongs to artists and writers who remember what makes us human - our messiness, our feelings, our strange ideas. In a world over-run by AI, being truly human might be a competitive advantage or it might not, but it’s what we’ve got.

References:

Michael North, 2013. Novelty. A History of the New. University of Chicago Press.

Stansky, Peter, 1997. On or about December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World. Studies in Cultural History. Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly email digest. It’s exactly like an exclusive club to which you’re exclusively invited.
But you still just get a weekly email, sorry.

as Virginia Woolf famously claimed, about 15 years later ↩︎

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 23:40:44 +1100

The Lost Medieval Library Found in a Romanian Church medievalists.net
medievalists.net https://www.medievalists.net/2024/11/lost-medieval-library-found-romanian-church/

Old news, but new to me. I’d love to find a lost medieval library in a tower somewhere, but I might be on the wrong continent for that kind of discovery.

HT: @glynmoody@mastodon.social
Image: Ropemaker’s Tower, Mediaș, Romania (Source. CCby SA4.0)

My notes were full but my heart was empty. Doug Toft travels beyond progressive summarization

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 23:55:13 +1100

Doug Toft explores his journey to making better notes on his reading. He found trying to summarize what he’d just read was heavy work. And Tiago Forte’s approach of ‘progressive summarization’ wasn’t really helping him.

Perhaps there’s a better way. He quotes Peter Elbow’s great book, Writing With Power. The author says:

“If you want to digest and remember what you are reading, try writing about it instead of taking notes… Perfectly organized notes that cover everything are beautiful, but they live on paper, not in your mind.”

Elsewhere (maybe I’ll find where) I’ve written about how a good way to summarize or paraphrase, to ‘write in your own words’, is to imagine discussing your reading with a friend. You might say: “I read this great book. It was all about…”.

We can easily do this kind of summary in everyday social life, so why not try it with our notes?

Image: Detail of a relief from Ostia showing writers at desks. (Source)

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Fri, 21 Feb 2025 20:01:38 +1100

Well the book arrived this morning. Now I really am publishing slowly!

Publishing slowly

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 06:00:00 +1100

I’m writing so slowly that you might be wondering if I’m ever going to get anything published.

Well wonder no more. I’m happy to say extracts of my memoir, ‘The Green Island Notebook’ are published in the anthology Destinations & Detours: New Australian Writing.

Published by Detour Editions, the collection launches here in Sydney on Sunday 2nd March 2025, and if you happen to be in the vicinity, I’d be delighted to meet you in person.

Book Launch 2pm, Sunday 2nd March, at Randwick Literary Institute, 60 Clovelly Road, Randwick NSW

Watch out too for news of how you can get your hands on a copy, wherever in the world you find yourself.

And this isn’t the only news on the publishing front. I’ll be sharing details of some further publishing adventures very soon.

But don’t worry, whatever happens, I’ll still be writing slowly.

Update: Oh look, I wrote another book: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

Randwick Literary Institute, the venue for our book launch, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025. Here it is in 1957, and it hasn’t changed much since then:

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To care is to disobey

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 23:12:06 +1100

Currently reading: Pirate Care by Valeria Graziano 📚

These days, being kind to the wrong people could land you in jail. What’s up with that?

I’ve written about how two-word phrases are a great way of getting your message across. Now here’s one that really intrigued me: Pirate Care.

That’s the title of a new book from Pluto Press, and as soon as you hear it you get an idea of what its about:

around the world, caring for others has been criminalised by shameless lawmakers
in defiance, people are doing it anyway; care is a political practice of solidarity (that’s why the right tries to attack it)
we need to challenge another, sinister two-word phrase: organised abandonment.

As politicians ramp up their twisted theatre of cruelty to grotesque levels, care from the bottom up is ever more urgent. Because those wrong people who don’t deserve to be cared for? Next year, or even next month, that’ll be you.

Read the book from Pluto Press, listen to an interview with the authors and commons activist David Bollier, and check out the syllabus and project that the book grew out of.

Or just put on your pirate hat and take action.

📖 Graziano, V., M. Mars and T. Medak. Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity. Vagabonds Series, v. 7. London: Pluto Press, 2025. ISBN: 9780745349800

Making meaning where there is none

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 18:26:53 +1100

💬 “We live in a warehouse of casts that have lost their moulds,” - Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988).

This quote, from the author, editor and translator Roberto Calasso, reminds me of the mysterious novel Piranesi by Susannah Clarke.

The huge ‘House’ in which Piranesi, the main character, finds himself is filled with giant statues of no known provenance. It is quite literally a warehouse of casts.

Because he is familiar with the statue of a gardener, he believes, he understands what a garden would be. The statues point enigmatically to a reality beyond his experience - or at least beyond his memory. Piranesi makes meaning where there otherwise is none.

And so do we.

More:

Roberto Calasso’s obituary

Susannah Clarke discusses her novel Piranesi on BBC Radio.

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 22:33:42 +1100

Diversity is the only reality!

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:36:52 +1100

Useful Australian software? You’re probably thinking of Canva or Atlassian. And who even knows WiFi is Australian? But my favourite Aussie tool by far is Sublime Text, also made… here in Sydney.

I use it to write my #zettelkasten notes.

James Doyle is a fan too: ohdoylerules.com, and there’s a great discussion on Hacker News.

Create a note system that indexes itself

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 17:20:50 +1100

While studying the cataloguing and indexing systems of the early Twentieth Century I noticed that the index box was originally supposed to be a key to the records held elsewhere. In other words it was like a library catalogue.

The library catalogue doesn’t exist for its own sake. Rather, it’s the key to finding something else - the books stored on the library shelves. From the late 19th Century onwards, any bureaucratic organisation typically stored its records in filing cabinets (Robertson, 2021), usually numbered consecutively (numerus currens) as they arrived or were created. Then alongside these records the index box contained a parallel catalogue entry for each item (Byles, 1911).

Without a comprehensive index, it would be very hard to find anything in the records. Sure, you could find something at random, provided you didn’t care what it was, but without the index, finding a specific item would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. If the records system used running numbers it would be easy to find the most recent documents, and the longest-held, since these would be located at the end and beginning of the records, respectively. But finding anything in between these points, without an index, would be extremely time-consuming.

As I read about this approach to record-keeping, I realised that Niklas Luhmann’s system of personal academic notes, his Zettelkasten, displayed some similar features to this, as well as some crucial differences.

Luhmann was a German sociologist who famously published a massive academic output by relying on his large collection of handwritten notes, his Zettelkasten (note-box). His Zettelkasten was similar to the standard filing system in that it was a box of numbered index cards. But it differed in two important places.

First, on the whole, there were no other records. The index box simply referred to itself. The records and the index of the records were the same thing. (There were of course references to external academic sources, but I mean that Luhmann’s Zettelkasten didn’t refer to a separate location where he kept his notes such as a set of notebooks or another separate filing cabinet; rather, his notes were the records, and his records were the notes.)

Secondly, the numbering system wasn’t exactly consecutive (numerus currens), it was instead associative. In other words, the notes weren’t placed strictly in order of writing, but were arranged instead according to how their contents related to other notes. He started consecutively but then branched off by adding letters and numbers to the notation. For example, he would add a note that related to note 9 by creating note 9a, and so on (this is a slight simplification, but basically sound).

These two features, (‘records=index=records’ and ‘associative-not-consecutive-numbering’) taken together, meant that Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was effectively almost self-indexing. It was an index of itself, and there was hardly any other indexing work, other than adding cards in relevant locations, with a suitable ID number.

True, Luhmann’s second Zettelkasten did also have a keyword index, but this index of 3,200 keywords was quite limited relative to the large number of notes (67,000) it supposedly indexed. And this index didn’t reference every instance of his keywords. On the contrary, it didn’t need to be exhaustive because by means of their ID numbers the notes were arranged in long chains so Luhmann could jump from one relevant note to another, without needing to keep referring back to an index.

According to Luhmann scholar Johannes Schmidt (2018: 58):

“the file’s keyword index makes no claim to providing a complete list of all cards in the collection that refer to a specific term. Rather, Luhmann typically listed only one to four places where the term could be found in the file, the idea being that all other relevant entries in the collection could be quickly identified via the internal system of references described above.”

I really like the idea of a self-indexing system, and it somehow felt familiar, but I couldn’t think where I’d heard of this idea before.

Then I realised it’s been staring me in the face this whole time. One of my chief long-term inspirations is Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977), which was also a key influence for Ward Cunningham, creator of the first ever wiki, the Portland Pattern Repository.

A Pattern Language has enjoyed a cult following and has been identified as “one of the most widely read architectural treatises ever published” (Dawes and Ostwald, 2020), though not without criticism (Dawes and Ostwald, 2017). Anyway, here’s what the preface of that book said about the concept of a pattern language:

“A pattern language has the structure of a network. […] The sequence of patterns is both a summary of the language, and at the same time, an index to the patterns.” — ‘Summary of the language’ p. xviii https://patternlanguage.cc/

It’s interesting to compare and contrast these two examples of a pre-Web, analogue hypertext. Both demonstrate significant elements of this self-indexing aspect. What Christopher Alexander said about his pattern language can also be seen in Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. The sequence, whether of patterns or of notes, is both a summary and at the same time an index of itself.

What I take from all this is the reminder that I don’t need to work too hard at indexing, provided my notes include a few links to other relevant notes.

If every note had just one link, then all the notes would be connected. In contrast, though, a note with no links (an ‘orphan’), will be very hard to find again, except via a full-text search. So I need just enough indexing to be useful, and no more. As Luhmann himself said:

“The decision where to place what in the file can involve a great deal of randomness as long as I add references linking the other options” (Luhmann, 1987, p. 143, quoted in Schmidt, 58)

Well, now it’s time for a confession: my own collection of notes has no keyword index at all.

But I wonder how much of a keyword index would be useful for my own collection of notes. My feeling is that there’s little point in creating a separate keyword index for two main reasons, as folllows.

First, In the digital age we have at our fingertips something Luhmann never had: a full-text search capability. This means that any time I want to find all my notes containing a particular word, I can easily find them almost instantly. No need for an index just to find notes.

Second, it’s useful and efficient to do all my work on my notes in my notes. This means documenting my searches. Let’s say I want to find all my notes relating to a particular word, as in the case above. Rather than just doing the search, I also document it by creating a new note, perhaps named after the keyword I’m searching. The point is that there was a reason I wanted to do this particular search, and If I don’t document it, that particular information is forever lost. In contrast, by documenting my search I create a new note which may prove useful in future and which also acts as a kind of hub for future searches relating to this particular keyword.

This is similar, at least in spirit, to Luhmann’s ‘hub notes’ which Schmidt identifies:

“The cards containing a collection of references are furthermore of interest because they represent so-called “hubs”, i.e., cards that function as nodes that feature an above-average number of links to other cards so that these few cards provide access points to extensive parts of the file.” (Schmidt, 58)

There’s a brief but useful section on hub notes in Chapter 6 of Bob Doto’s book, A System for Writing, which clearly shows how these differ from structure notes. I found this distinction subtle but helpful.

Since I haven’t even got one, I’m not sure about giving advice on indexing, but if I was sure, I’d say this:

Make a keyword index if it pleases you to do so, especially where the keyword doesn’t otherwise appear in your note. But observe over time how much use you gain from your index. The concepts of ‘self-indexing records’ and ‘working on your notes in your notes’ may provide new insights into the value of your index-work.

References

Alexander, Christopher. A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction. Oxford university press, 2018.

Byles, R.B. 1911. The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts. London, Sir I. Pitman & Sons, Ltd.

Dawes, Michael J., and Michael J. Ostwald. “The mathematical structure of Alexander’s A Pattern Language: An analysis of the role of invariant patterns.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 47, no. 1 (2020): 7-24.

Dawes, Michael J., and Michael J. Ostwald. “Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: analysing, mapping and classifying the critical response.” City, Territory and Architecture 4, no. 1 (2017): 17.

Doto, Bob. A System for Writing. New Old Traditions, 2024.

Luhmann, N. Biographie, Attitüden, Zettelkasten. In N. Luhmann, Archimedes und wir. Interviews, edited by D. Baecker & G. Stanitzek (pp. 125–155). Berlin: Merve, 1987.

Robertson, Craig. The filing cabinet: A vertical history of information. U of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Schmidt, Johannes FK. “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.” Sociologica 12, no. 1 (2018). Reprinted as Ch 10 in Practicing Sociology: Tacit Knowledge for the Social Scientific Craft, pp. 101-115. Columbia University Press, 2024.

Stay in the Writing Slowly loop and never miss a thing (unless I forgot to press ‘publish’, in which case, yeah, you might miss a thing). Anyway:

Semantic line breaks are a feature of Markdown, not a bug

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 10:30:00 +1100

My writing process often begins with Markdown, a simple syntax for publication on the web.

I love Markdown, but one thing has always bugged me. It’s a quirk of Markdown that simple line breaks are ignored, so that multi-line text in the source document becomes one long paragraph in the rendered html output. In other words, simply pressing Enter doesn’t result in a <br /> linebreak. Here’s what I mean. You can see the difference between the original Markdown text and the output rendered in html:

This is a sentence. Now I’ve started a new line, but I simply pressed ‘enter’. Look, I did it again. In the Markdown original, this shows up as separate sentences. But in the processed html it’s all one long paragraph. Yes, one long paragraph, which you’re reading right now. So is this a bug or a feature? Is it a feature or a bug?
I added two spaces to the previous line to start a new paragraph.

A blank line has a more pronounced effect.

I’ve previously found this behaviour a bit annoying, but today I learned about semantic line breaks via sembr.org and it has completely changed the way I see line breaks working.

From now on I’ll just write every sentence on its own line, and then choose where I want the paragraphs to break, simply by ending the line with two spaces.

What’s the benefit?

This way I get to clarify my thoughts by limiting each sentence or clause to a single vertical line, while Markdown makes the paragraph formatting prettier for my readers.

As the semantic line break specification suggests,

By inserting line breaks at semantic boundaries, writers, editors, and other collaborators can make source text easier to work with, without affecting how it’s seen by readers.

I’m not sure the creators of Markdown intended this¹, but it’s how it works, and I can now take advantage of it. It used to bug me, but from now on it’s a feature.

This is an example of something simple that might be obvious to you, but which I didn’t understand till now. Do you have any other examples of similar obvious things that others may have overlooked? Or things you have overlooked that others find obvious? If so,I’d love to hear about them.

Thanks for reading. I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. It’s a short and accessible introduction to the concept, available now.
And if you liked this article, why not subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email digest?

the spec just says: “Yes, this takes a tad more effort to create a <br />, but a simplistic “every line break is a <br />” rule wouldn’t work for Markdown. " ↩︎

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +1100

💬 “It was mainly a matter of transcribing and rearranging my notes… My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge.” - John Gregory Dunne, The Studio, 1968.

Maybe you can create coherent writing from a pile of notes after all. writingslowly.com

Maybe you can create coherent writing from a pile of notes after all

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 19:42:07 +1100

“My notes were like plans for a bridge”.

I’ve argued that you can’t create good writing just by mashing your notes together and hoping for the best. That’s the illusion of connected thought, I’ve said, because you can’t create coherent writing just from a pile of notes.

Well, maybe I was wrong.

Perhaps a strong or experienced writer can do exactly that. Here’s John Gregory Dunne, the journalist husband of Joan Didion, in the Foreword to his 1968 book on Hollywood, The Studio:

I imagine he wasn’t just a good writer, though.

Surely he was first a very good note-maker.

I’d like to hear about people’s experiences, good and bad, of using their notes to create longer pieces of writing. Was it like building a bridge, or perhaps like building a bridge out of jelly?

HT: Alan Jacobs, who draws a different but very valid lesson from the anecdote.

Stay in the Writing Slowly loop and never miss a thing (unless you don’t get round to opening your emails, in which case, yeah, you might miss a thing. Anyway:

Read better, read closer

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 19:16:40 +1100

For anyone seeking clues on better techniques for reading, Scott Newstok, author of How to Think Like Shakespeare, has created a marvelous resource: a close reading archive. Here is where all your close reading questions will be answered, including, what is it? how do you do it? what have people done with it? and does it have a future in a digital age?

Close reading is one of those two-word phrases that seem to take on a life of their own. Anyone connected to the humanities has probably heard of it, but it’s not necessarily well understood. Is it finished? Apparently not. Not at all.

Professor Newstok’s close reading archive is an openly available companion to John Guillory’s cultural history, On Close Reading, published January 2025.

Newstok is also editor of a book on Montaigne’s view of teaching, which is how I discovered Gustave Flaubert’s endorsement of what might perhaps be seen as a kind of close reading avant la lettre¹:

“Read Montaigne, read him slowly, carefully! He will calm you . . . Read him from one end to the other, and, when you have finished, try again . . . But do not read, as children read, for fun, or as the ambitious read, to instruct you. No. Read to live.”

Now consider: three ways to make notes while reading.

For even more, please subscribe.

but don’t take my word for it, what do I know? Read the book and the close reading archive. ↩︎

Improve your notes (and your life) with two-word phrases

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 22:54:34 +1100

Since my notes are mainly modular, it’s fairly easy to connect two seemingly separate ideas or concepts to create a new one.

I’m intrigued by how important this activity of recombination has been in the history of innovation. For example, in 1929 the American inventor Edwin Link took the vacuum tubes, motors and bellows from his family’s player piano business and reconfigured them to create the Link Trainer. Despite its improbable origin and strikingly bad looks, this was a pioneering flight simulator that during World War 2 trained nearly half a million pilots. And it was made out of organ parts!

As I’ve said before, from fragments you can build a greater whole.

A phrase made only of two juxtaposed words, like ‘flight simulator’, can be a remarkably evocative thing. Choose the right two words and as if by magic, you’ve created a memorable phrase, a new brand, or even the kernel of an innovative technology.

In the social sciences they have been termed sensitizing concepts - which itself is a kind of two-word brand. When they’re working well, such phrases don’t really define something, rather they evoke it. In 1954 the sociologist Herbert Blumer, who originated that phrase, offered some examples from his field:

“mores, social institutions, attitudes, social class, value, cultural norm, personality, reference group, social structure, primary group, social process, social system, urbanization, accommodation, differential discrimination and social control…”

Note how many of these sensitizing concepts are two-word phrases. And note how many of these are still in use today. Pretty much all of them, although I’m not sure ‘differential discrimination’ trips off the tongue…

Such phrases are tremendously evocative. Once you’ve seen a concept like ‘social class’ or ‘cultural norm’, your whole world shifts slightly and it’s hard to un-see it.

Think, too, of some more recent examples, such as ‘tipping point’, ‘bowling alone’, ‘shock doctrine’, ‘atomic habits’. In each of these cases, the ability of the thinker to invent and develop the apposite phrase has effectively made their careers.

If the phrase is strong enough, it brands the originator with no further explanation needed. Even a seemingly awkward phrase, at the right time, can break out into popular recognition. Take ‘intersectional feminism’ - a concept that took a while to get going but then seemed to be everywhere and remains indelibly linked to the name of its originator, Kimberlé Crenshaw.

And then there’s ‘brain rot’, a term first coined in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden.

Fully 170 years later, brain rot was named as the Oxford word of the year for 2024. Well, sometimes it takes a moment for an idea to catch on. But in the end, ‘brain rot’ beat several shortlisted words, including ‘dynamic pricing’. Thoreau, incidentally, had an intriguing working method, where he saw his written thoughts as ‘nesteggs’.

In the world of business, the two-word phrase dominates. Think of Home Depot, Mastercard, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, FaceBook, Instagram, Bitcoin or even that parody two word brand, TikTok. Ironically perhaps, TikTok is specifically named as having helped make brain rot a discussion point.

There are endless definitive products known by two words cleverly jammed together by marketers in search of a trademark: Band-Aid, Chapstick (or is it lip balm?), bubble wrap, dry ice, fibreglass, ping pong, super glue and super-heroes, video tape, memory stick, cell phone and crock-pot.

Meanwhile, in the German-speaking world, they’ve created a whole culture from compound nouns. It must be the Zeitgeist ¹.

Back in the Anglo-sphere, though², whether its a product (vegan cheese) or a concept (standpoint epistemology), the two-word phrase rules. I’d go so far as to suggest that for any idea to gain an audience it could benefit from the two word treatment.

This ubiquity not only helps with promoting your bright idea, it also helps to show how to discover your bright idea in the first place. Just think of two previously unrelated concepts or objects and join them together. Mostly this won’t work, but sometimes, just sometimes, it will.

I used to live in the United Kingdom³, where the pubs⁴ sell ‘pork scratchings’. Sadly this is a popular snack, which is just wrong. Although, I will reluctantly concede that if you’re going to eat something called ‘scratchings’, you might do worse than the pork variety.

This illustrates a caution I want to end with: there may only be two words at stake, but you have to choose the right two words. Who ever heard of a car depot, a car stack or a car field? No, it’s obviously a car park.

Unless, that is, it’s obviously a parking station.

I’d love to hear what two-word phrases you’ve coined lately. And if you don’t want to miss out on writingslowly, you are strongly advised to subscribe to my weekly(ish) news letter. It’s like a blog but more fashionable because it’s an email. Now that’s progress!

References:

Blumer, Herbert. 1954. “What is Wrong with Social Theory.” American Sociological Review 18: 3-10.

Davis, Kathy. 2008. ‘Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful’. Feminist Theory 9 (1): 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700108086364.

Richmond, Michele. The Etymology of Parking. Arnoldia – Volume 73, Issue 2 The Etymology of Parking - Arnold Arboretum PDF

Image by Bzuk (talk) - Own work (Original text: I (Bzuk (talk)) created this work entirely by myself.), Public Domain, Link

Check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

look what I did! ↩︎
whoops, I did it again ↩︎
now I can’t stop ↩︎
public houses, that is ↩︎

Year in books for 2024

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 09:23:00 +1100

Happy New Year!

Here are some of the books I finished reading in 2024.

Happy New Year!

Do you have annual reading goals? And do you kep a record of your reading? I posted a little gallery of the books I finished reading in 2024. Micro.blog, the web service I use, is great for this. But it only works if I actually use it! Which is why only some of my reading was captured.

So my reading resolution for 2025 is to be more systematic in recording my reading.

In the past few years I’ve set a target. This has helped me to understand my reading cadence, but now I know it, I don’t really need a target any more. It’s not like there’s a big reward to be had for reading 1000 books a year!

How about you? How do you keep track? What works? And do you have any specific book goals for 2025?

Zettelkasten anti-patterns

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 18:32:34 +1100

When developing your Zettelkasten, your collection of linked notes, what have you learned not to do?

Mathematician Alex Nelson keeps a paper Zettelkasten, and has posted online about how he does it. He calls this Zettelkasten best practices.

But Nelson also lists some ‘worst practices’ to avoid, which he calls anti-patterns.

So I’m wondering, do you have any other examples of ‘Zettelkasten anti-patterns’ from your own experience?

For reference, here are the ‘anti-patterns’ Nelson identifies. I’m not going to explain these here, though, because you can read the post for yourself:

Using the Zettelkasten (or Bibliography Apparatus) as a Database
Collecting Reading Notes without writing Permanent Notes
Treating Blank Reading Notes as “To Read” list
Forgetting to write notes while reading

Are there any more Zettelkasten worst practices, and how have you avoided them?

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 08:15:51 +1100

Here’s one for the #Zettelkasten and #PKM tragics: a dive into the pre-history of ‘atomic notes’.
writingslowly.com/2024/11/2…

Atomic notes and the unit record principle

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 21:31:21 +1100

Thinking about atomic notes

Researcher Andy Matuschak talks about atomicity in notes, an idea also developed by the creators of the Archive note app, at zettelkasten.de.

To make a note ‘atomic’ is to emphasise a single idea rather than several. An atomic note is simplex rather than multiplex. And this form of simplicity relates to the idea of ‘separation of concerns’ in computer programming.

Back to the unit record principle

But the idea is much older than this. I found something very similar described in 1909, in The Story of Library Bureau.

Library Bureau was the company Melvil Dewey (of Dewey Decimal System fame) established in 1876 to sell library catalogue equipment. But in the late 1880s the company realised that library cataloguing principles could be adapted to the rapidly expanding business world, which would open up new markets for record-keeping equipment and furniture.

In The Story of Library Bureau, atomicity of information is called “the unit record principle in business”. This concept pre-dates the digital era and to a significant extent the digital era presupposes it.The unit record principle is simple, and these days it seems quite obvious. It’s the idea that all the information on an individual unit (whatever it is) can be stored on a single record. This is quite different from the previously dominant record-keeping practice of maintaining leger books. The unit record principle, it is claimed, is made possible by the system of index cards. This system, known commercially as the ‘business system’, was developed especially in the late 19th Century, in conjunction with the explosion of record-keeping requirements relating to the emergence of mass production.

The rise and fall of the wonder-working card system

Around the turn of the century office furniture suppliers expanded greatly. They both emulated the Library Bureau and competed with it. Each company - Rand Ledger, American Kardex, Clarke and Baker, and many others, developed its own range of office furniture and its own spin on what to do with it. To justify the wide variety of filing equipment they had begun to sell, they also marketed various record-keeping techniques, including the use of index cards rather than the more traditional ‘book-keeping’ methods. The efficiency of the unit record principle led directly to the development of electromechanical tabulating machines for processing data, which Herman Hollerith invented in 1889. Collectively this tabulating machinery was known as unit record equipment, as it relied on unit records, now in the form of punched cards. Hollerith’s company became CTR, then International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. In 1927 Library Bureau merged into Remington Rand. These businesses and their paper-based legacies eventually led directly to the digital world we all know.

Writing today: between a rock and a hard place

These days, we’re stuck between two quite different approaches to writing.

The first approach to writing is the word processing principle, which no one talks about but which is hidden in plain sight. Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and similar word processing applications assume there is no discrete ‘unit’. It just goes on and on, and on. Even the page, a unit previously well understood, has been obliterated by the metaphor of the endless roll of paper that Microsoft Word offers. Once you start writing there’s no indication of where or when to stop. By default, page breaks don’t happen. The text just rolls onwards to the next page, and towards infinity.

The second approach to writing is the endlessly flexible block approach taken by WordPress with its Gutenberg interface. This second approach is also seen in personal knowledge applications such as Notion and Capacities. In this metaphor you’re not really writing at all any more. Instead you’re just creating variegated blocks of content. A heading here, a paragraph here, an embedded quote or video or image here. Now there are plenty of ‘units’, but no guidance on what they are. They’re arbitrary, just ‘whatever you like’.

Notice how both of these leading metaphors - the endless scroll and the flexible block - are really more about the software than about a real concern for your writing process. Every medium contains (and assumes) its own demands, and it’s always been that way. For example, printing would never have taken off if everyone still expected book pages to be made of vellum, not paper. Gutenberg’s printing revolution more or less required paper (please correct me if I misunderstood this¹).

But paper has its own limits too. As you might have noticed, it’s hard to write on a paper notebook in the bath, or while running. So I’m not blaming modern digital tools for forcing you to work in certain ways and with particular assumptions about what’s possible. It has always been like that.

A more useful metaphor for writing?

In thinking about the unit record principle, an idea that seemed radical in the 1880s, I’m not simply indulging in nostalgia. Rather, I’m questioning whether our current metaphors for the medium of writing, though almost invisible, are as inevitable as they appear.

Meanwhile in my own practice I’m seeking to uncover something still missing in the 21st century: the shortest repeatable writing session that could possibly be useful. Not an endless scroll, nor an endlessly variable block, but a simple, atomic, modular note. Each note follows a basic, repeatable template, so these simple notes connect and link to one another, and so they may cluster and combine to form larger units of writing, while avoiding unnecessary complexity. From fragments you can build a greater whole.

Not everyone warms to this approach. I’m aware that since the rise of new database models, it may seem laughably old-fashioned to return to unit records. But I’m interested in the felt user-experience as a writer, not only in the underlying code. And for me, there’s still some wonder to be found in the old card system². Some scoff at the idea of splitting ideas up in this seemingly arbitrary way. Yet they don’t mock words, sentences, or paragraphs. These are all more or less arbitrary ways of making ideas atomic, and even database models need ‘entities’, not so far removed from the unit record principle, so I’m not sure what’s going on here.

In 1455 Gutenberg printed 180 copies of his famous Bible. Three quarters of them were printed on paper and only a quarter on vellum, which was much more expensive. ↩︎
not to mention several important practical affordances. ↩︎

How to write a better note without melting your brain

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 17:31:08 +1100

There’s a great line in Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing which goes like this:

“The note you just took has yet to realize its potential.”

Haven’t you ever looked at your notes and had the same thought? So much potential… yet so little actual 🫠.

Perhaps you jotted something down a couple of days or weeks ago and returning to it now you can’t remember what you meant to say, or what you were thinking of at the time.

Or perhaps you made a great note then, but now you can’t find it.

Or maybe you just know your note connects to another great thought… but you can’t for the life of you remember what.

Well I already make plenty of half-baked notes like these, but how can I make them better? It’s not something they teach in school, so most of us don’t even realize there’s untapped potential, if only we could access it.

So, how can I make worthwhile notes from my almost illegible scribbles on the fly? Well, here’s what works for me. Maybe it’ll work for you too.

When writing my notes, I just have a few simple rules that I mostly stick to:

📄 Plain text (Markdown) notes.
💡 Each note is a single idea with a unique ID.
🪄 Each note deserves a clear title.
🔗 Notes link meaningfully to other notes.

Each of these points is a learnable mini-skill in its own right, but none of them is complicated¹. And I don’t start from there. Often I really am just scribbling anything that comes to mind. But inspired by Bob’s note mantra, and in search of my note’s hidden potential, I get right to work.

It’s not much of a note, but it’s my own.

Here’s how I take a ‘bad’ or very basic fleeting note, and turn it into a serviceable main (or permanent) note²:

Start with a quick and dirty note, however rough. I might write it on a card. I might write it on my shoe:

"I'd like to write something about Tim Ingold's view of creativity".

OK, it may not be much of a note, but at least it's something to start with.

Next, if there’s a reference, make sure I’ve captured it:

"I'd like to write something about Tim Ingold's view of creativity. See: Ingold, Tim, 'The textility of making'. Cambridge Journal of Economics 2010, 34, 91–102 doi:10.1093/cje/bep042 pdf."

Now add a tiny bit of context, so my future self might understand the value I’m seeing right now but no doubt will soon forget:

"I'd like to write something about anthropologist Tim Ingold's view of creativity. He contrasts textilic modes of creation (i.e. weaving) with architectonic modes (i.e. architecture). The latter requires aiming for an ideal outcome, whereas the former entails going where the materials take you, going with the flow. In fact, creativity is more about flow than stasis, more about 'itineration' (wayfaring) than iteration (making an object), he says.

Reference: Ingold, Tim, 'The textility of making'. Cambridge Journal of Economics 2010, 34, 91–102 doi:10.1093/cje/bep042 pdf."

Also add at least one link. This note might link to another one called ‘Creativity involves flow’. And it’s inviting me to start another one entitled “Writing ideas”, so I’ll add that.
Finally, create a strong declarative title and an ID: “202411042258 Creativity involves weaving and wayfaring” So now I have an excellent note³ and it looks a bit like this:

202411042258 Creativity involves weaving and wayfaring

I'd like to write a little article about anthropologist Tim Ingold's view of creativity. He contrasts textilic modes of creation (i.e. weaving?) with architectonic modes (i.e. architecture?). The latter requires aiming for an ideal outcome, whereas the former entails going where the materials take you, going with the flow. In fact, creativity is more about flow than stasis, more about the process than the blueprint, and more about 'itineration' (wayfaring) than iteration (making an object), he says.

Links:

202411042250 Creativity involves flow.

202411042306 Writing ideas.

Reference:

Ingold, Tim, 'The textility of making'. Cambridge Journal of Economics 2010, 34, 91–102 doi:10.1093/cje/bep042 pdf.

Now my note is more useful than the original fleeting note that started it, because:

it’s a single idea (i.e. it makes a point);
it has a clear title; - I can find it again;
it links to my existing ideas; and
it has already spawned an additional new note.

True, this was a bit of work, but it will be worth it to be able to return to this note and make something else from it. It’s a repeatable process based on my four simple rules. This basic process for writing valuable and enduring notes has helped me gain clarity, focus and momentum, without getting overwhelmed by a fancy system. I hope it helps you.

I recommend just getting started and learning as you go, but if you want more detail:

read Bob Doto’s great book, A System for Writing, or
watch Morgan’s helpful video, How to take notes that actually help you think and write.
more from me on a minimal approach to writing notes.

I’d like to hear how you already make effective notes, so please let me know on micro.blog, Mastodon or Bluesky.

This article is based on a comment I made on the Zettelkasten subreddit.

Subscribe to a weekly email round-up of this site:

I’ve probably written something about each on my site, try the built-in search if you’re interested. ↩︎
These names are flexible. The point is, you start with a scrappy note and end with a serviceable note. ↩︎
Yes, I’m big-noting myself, as we say in Australia. ↩︎

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 10:04:10 +1100

🗨️ Keanu Heydari on the value of the #Zettelkasten.

“Maintaining a zettelkasten is, in itself, an exercise in Stoic care of the self (epimeleia heautou). This practice is not merely about external organization but about cultivating inner freedom through discipline, mindfulness, and deliberate engagement with knowledge.”

Not just notes: another meaning of 'Zettel'

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 20:24:33 +1100

In German, Zettelkasten, quite simply, means ‘note box’. But there’s another, more hidden meaning of the word Zettel (note) that even German-speakers may know nothing of.

All the same, it’s useful for thinking with.

Here’s Esther Yi in the New Yorker, writing about the epic task of translating Arno Schmidt’s monumental work of experimental fiction, ‘Zettels Traum’. Schmidt was one of several German authors strongly influenced by the Irish writer James Joyce (see this video).

“He compiled roughly a hundred and twenty thousand scraps of paper, or Zettel, in shallow wooden boxes, which he spread out on his desk. On each Zettel, there was written a bit of dialogue or sexual wordplay (“Im=pussy=bell’–!”) or a literary quote rerouted through his one-track mind (“the fleshy man=drake’s stem. / That shrieks, when torn at night”). After twenty-five thousand hours of knitting the pieces together, Schmidt handed the manuscript to his publisher in a large cardboard box tied with a curtain sash.

The title “Zettel’s Traum” is drawn from a German translation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The last name of the weaver, Nick Bottom, was changed to Zettel, which not only means a slip of paper but also the warp used in weaving¹.”

A Great Translator Takes on One Final and Nearly Impossible Project.

Arno Schmidt’s Zettelkasten is an extraordinary sight to behold. You can see it in a short video (at 4:15). And you can see a short video of the book he made from it, too.

I’ve wondered in the past whether this second meaning of Zettel - the warp thread in weaving - might explain the German term ‘Verzetteln’, which apparently means to get lost in the detail. Etymologically, this is probably the case, since this version of the word comes from a verb meaning to scatter. This is quite different from the origin of Zettel as a note, which comes from the Italian cedola. Reference

But I suspect the entire composition process of Schmidt’s novel Zettels Traum might itself have been a double entendre, since the book is meticulously woven together from countless threads, each of which is a note. As the New Yorker article observes, “If “Zettel’s Traum” is a tapestry, then Zettels are its Zettel.”

In following these lines of thought I’m strongly influenced by anthropologist Tim Ingold, who views weaving as a fundamental mode of creativity (it has to do with German etymology again), and who sees weaving and writing as closely connected.

These musings led me further, to Latticework, a prototype knowledge interface (i.e. fancy notes app) from Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak (of Andy’s Notes ‘fame’). I like how they also identify, at least in the word lattice, the warp and weft, in-and-out, texile-like nature of writing. It’s still very much a prototype, in the shape of an Obsidian plug-in, but it looks like a promising and intriguing start.

Image credits:
Photo of a weaver by Joel Heard on Unsplash. Still of Zettels Traum pages from a video by Ralf Wasselowski.

my emphasis ↩︎

Busybody, hunter, dancer - which is your curiosity style?

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:01:49 +1100

Are you curious about your world? If so, what does your curiosity look like? How does it feel, and how does it move? And could you expand your repertoire of curiosity?

In other words, could you practise curiousity differently?

Here’s political philosopher Perry Zurn on three kinesthetic modes of curiosity, the busybody, the hunter, and the dancer:

“If the busybody breaches the social world in order to collect novel bits of information, and if the hunter focuses intently on one piece of information that exceeds the knowledge network and yet already has social significance, the dancer may rupture knowledge and social networks by either jumping to a new idea or throwing existing ideas into a new frame. Driven neither by secrets nor by necessity, the dancer is an experimenter, breaking with traditional pathways of investigation. Their ideational sphere is characterized by discontinuity, the creation of new concepts, and by radically remodeling knowledge networks.” (Zurn 2019:40)

The first two modes, busybody and hunter, stem from time-honoured, traditional understandings of curiosity, which come from the classical Greeks and Romans onwards. The third mode, the dancer, is informed by the philosopher Nietzsche’s focus on dance as an analogy for the creative imagination.

For Nietzsche, life’s ultimate question was: ‘Does it dance?'

I’m intrigued by Zurn’s project of exploring the social and political implications of curiosity. It seems obvious that authoritarian regimes would discourage a curious public, but the connections between curiosity, creative freedom, and politics have hardly been examined in a rigorous manner.

Having read about Zurn et al.’s 2024 research on how Wikipedia users create and navigate knowledge networks, I’d now like to read Zurn’s book, 📚Curious Minds. The Power of Connection. This was co-written by Zurn’s identical twin, Dani S. Bassett.

Meanwhile, here’s a 🎙️podcast discussion about Zurn’s previous book, 📚Curiosity and Power. The Politics of Inquiry.

And my fall down this particular rabbit hole has led further down, to Lynn Borton’s excellent and encyclopedic podcast/radio show, 🎙️Choose to be Curious. OK, that’s my listening sorted for a little while.

I’m interested in all this, partly because I identify quite strongly with this ‘dancer’ mode of curiosity - making and pursuing links across otherwise disconnected fields.

Perhaps you might also find this perspective illuminating or useful.

And further, the typology of busybody, hunter and dancer also seems to have something to contribute to my understanding and practices of making notes. ‘Radically remodeling knowledge networks’, as Zurm puts it, is something I’m very interested in.

So if you too write notes, you might also get something of value from this discussion.

Curiosity: it might not be fatal

Three styles of curiosity - so which one is yours?

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 11:34:38 +1100

I’m interested in what it means to be curious. So I was intrigued by a new study about curiosity that I found via The Conversation.

The study examined the different ways nearly half a million Wikipedia users read their way through its massive network of articles. It turns out these can be characterised as three different styles of curiosity.

The authors write:

“By measuring the structure of knowledge networks constructed by readers weaving a thread through articles in Wikipedia, we replicate two styles of curiosity previously identified in laboratory studies: the nomadic “busybody” and the targeted “hunter.” Further, we find evidence for another style—the “dancer””.

And what are these different styles? In very brief summary:

“The busybody scouts for loose threads of novelty, the hunter pursues specific answers in a projectile path, and the dancer leaps in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge.”

I immediately identified with the ‘dancer’ style, though as the researchers' work reflects, it depends on the kind of information I’m looking for. Going deeper, I found the analysis of knowledge networks really interesting.

And the description of the ‘dancer’ style certainly resonated with what I’ve learned about note-making according to the Zettelkasten approach:

“This type of curiosity is described as a dance in which disparate concepts, typically conceived of as unrelated, are briefly linked in unique ways as the curious individual leaps and bounds across traditionally siloed areas of knowledge. Such brief linking fosters the generation or creation of new experiences, ideas, and thoughts.”

There’s a lot more to unpack from this article, and I’m going to be thinking about it for a while. For example, is there really a ‘goldilocks’ setting for curiosity - just enough to be useful, not so much as to overwhelm? I guess there must be, but I don’t know how you’d find it. For me the goldilocks setting isn’t to expand or else rein in my curiosity, but rather to find tools and especially techniques to enable me to make the most of my curiosity.

References:

Dale Zhou et al., Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership.Sci. Adv.10,eadn3268(2024).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adn3268

Image: Giordano Dance Chicago. Wikimedia, [Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International](Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International).

Why not make notes by hand?

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 23:17:05 +1100

It’s often said that making notes by hand is good for learning. Here’s 🎬Notes on Biology, a nice stop-motion short about the benefits of doodling in class.¹

There’s plenty of academic research on ‘the clear benefits of handwriting’:

Flanigan, A. E., Wheeler, J., Colliot, T., Lu, J., & Kiewra, K. A. (2024). Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36(3), 78. <doi.org/10.1007/s…>
Ose Askvik, E., Van Der Weel, F. R. (Ruud), & Van Der Meer, A. L. H. (2020). The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1810. <doi.org/10.3389/f…>
Van Der Weel, F. R. (Ruud), & Van Der Meer, A. L. H. (2024). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: A high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945. <doi.org/10.3389/f…>

But for a slightly different perspective, one that appreciates drawing, see:

Richardson, L., & Lacroix, G. (2023). Which modality results in superior recall for students: Handwriting, typing, or drawing? Journal of Writing Research, 15(3), 519–540. <doi.org/10.17239/…>

Now read: Three worthwhile modes of note-making.

Don’t miss another post (because that would be tragic).
Put your email address here and I’ll write to you slowly. I mean weekly:

and it only took me 13 years to find this! ↩︎

So many note-taking apps in the app graveyard - but not all are zombies

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 11:12:22 +1100

While clearing out my desk recently I found a USB thumb drive with a whole heap of old note-taking apps on it. This drive dates from 2017, not even seven years ago, but it seems like ancient history.

These note-taking apps come and go and the only ones worthwhile IMHO are the ones with a format you can keep using, or at least access. Several, I’m happy to say, had easily re-usable plain text files in a ‘data’ folder or similar.

So why am I mentioning this?

It’s a reminder that a lot can change in just seven years, that so many of the apps with locked-in features will shut down before too long and if your data isn’t easily retrievable, it will be lost.

In particular, I’d recommend keeping as much as possibly in simple plain text files (markdown would be fine) that will probably be readable for a very long time to come. Apps like Obsidian use plain text files, so it’s quite possible to enjoy a combination of up-to-date features and data longevity.

But Obsidian is probably the exception rather than the rule. The temptation is to imagine that the useful features the fancy apps offer are worth the price they charge: not cash but the requirement to use a data format that isn’t easily accessible or convertible. It’s fun to use these apps, right up to the day they shut down and you can’t get your information out of them. I noticed Evernote, once very popular, seems to have locked down its service so you can’t now access your notes unless you pay them a fairly high subscription fee. However, it’s under active development again, so the fee might be worth it. As least they had a format (ENEX) you could straightforwardly convert. Some apps don’t.

For the record, here’s a run-down of the apps I found on my long-lost USB stick, and the level of file-readability they offered. I’d be interested to know what old note-taking apps you have lying around, and which ones you still use.

Plain text files

DokuWiki
- plain text files, supports wiki style syntax
QOwnNotes
- markdown files
MemPad
- single plain text file with own metadata format
Zim - desktop wiki
- txt files with bracketed wikilinks

files that are readable, but not easily by my eyes

CintaNotes
- SQLite database file (you can export notes to .txt files, but you need to use the app to do so).
ResophNotes - Quick Notes on Windows
- xml files
- Last updated 2018. RIP? 🪦
My-personal-kanban by greggigon
- JSON?

file formats that are only realistically accessible via the original app

yWriter - novel writing software
- own format.
- This is potentially a great app for writers, but what’s up with that file format?
ConnectedText - Wikipedia
- Defunct. RIP. 🪦
- I used to love this. It’s a shame our time together is long over.

Text editors

Sublime Text
- Plain text files - supports Markdown and many programming languages
- Sublime Text is one of my all-time favourites, and it’s made right here in Sydney!
Q10 - text editor
- Last updated 2011. RIP 🪦
WriteMonkey 3
- plain text files - supports Markdown
- apparently still going, last updated January 2024
Bonsai5U3
- What even is this?

Update:

If you’re looking for newer apps to try, you could try these enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes.

How to write an article from your notes - an example

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 22:56:54 +1100

In July 2024 educational technologist Andy Matuschak published a long article outlining his observations on the debate over discovery learning versus instructional learning, and how it relates to the Holy Grail of educational technology: “a wildly powerful learning environment”.

Exorcising us of the Primer is a great article, but it’s just as interesting to see how this piece of writing came into existence in the first place.

Reverse-engineering a published article

Matuschak is known for having created an intriguing online instance of his notes, which he modestly calls ‘Andy’s working notes’. The article about learning is constructed from a sequence of these individual notes which he has been working on for several years.

His article evolved over time from his individual evergreen notes, which he eventually coalesced into an ‘outline note’ called Enabling Environments, games, and the Primer.

If you’re wondering how to create finished written work out of your individual notes, you’ll find it worthwhile to check out these different stages of Andy’s thinking and writing process. It’s worth exploring how he takes nearly 60 individual notes, combines them into the outline of a coherent argument, then takes that outline and re-writes it as a complete publishable essay.

You can see how the thinking process revolves around a few key ideas which themselves have been fleshed out with numerous notes. Key ideas here include:

These notes are similar to what Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing calls ‘high-level views’. Notice that the process of aggregation is modular, cumulative and iterative. The note ‘Taking knowledge work seriously’ is itself an outline note. And you can see there how Andy aggregates a series of individual notes to produce an outline for a presentation.

There are also sections in the outline which are underdeveloped, and flagged as such. For example, at one point there is the warning:

“==TODO this section quite under-defined in general; some important ideas aren’t yet captured here, but we also have big holes in our theories here==”

Elsewhere, he modestly comments:

“==I have to know more than this to publish, I think==”

On his Patreon page, Andy has reflected on his note-making experiences in a post for supporters only (there’s a short audio preview though). ‘Five years of evergreen notes’.

It’s a repeatable process

So we can see that before the article ever comes into existence there’s a whole set of notes that may or may not end up contributing to the finished piece.And then at some point an organising principle comes into view. In this case it was “Taking knowledge work seriously” and “Enacted experience” and “Enabling environments” and so on. Then these began to coalesce into a bigger, more focused idea, which was ‘Enabling environments, games, and the Primer’. Eventually, from all these atomic ideas, molecules formed, and they were refined until they became the final article, ‘Exorcising us of the Primer’.

That’s all very well, but how am I supposed to do this myself?

Make ‘buckets’ for your ideas

Well, you can take the bucket approach. Let’s say you have a vague idea for a piece of writing of some kind. It’s an idea that niggles at you, that begs to be explored, that you have a hunch might eventually become something you’d like to share with others.Now turn that idea into a bucket that you can gradually fill with content.

James Somers says:

“When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.” More people should write

The problem with a bucket is that it really doesn’t care what you put in it. And this extreme flexibility might not always be so helpful.

Dumping all your quotes and bookmarks into an app like Sublime or Arena or Evernote or OneNote is great and all, but when the time comes to write the article, all you’ll have to go on is a massive pile of other people’s words. You thought you were working but all you were really doing is saving the real work for later.

I used to do this as an undergraduate student. I’d spend ages marshalling all the ‘evidence’ (AKA quotes), thinking I was on the right track, then the evening before the deadline I’d be faced with the mammoth task of somehow turning all this raw material into an essay. It was painful. You can’t get away with just stitching together quotes from other people. And you can’t just mash together a set of notes and expect it to make an instant essay. You have to write it yourself.

There has to be a better way - and there is.

The great thing about the Zettelkasten approach is that it helps you write your own ideas as you go along. You don’t only copy-paste hot takes like I did just now with James Somers’s post about the mental buckets. Instead, you write your own stuff, one idea at a time, on separate notes that you can combine in multiple ways.

Notice that Andy Matuschak worked this way. If you read any one of the 60 or so notes that informed his final article you can see that each one stands up on its own as a solid nugget of original creative work. And because he put the effort in early in the process it must have taken less effort to finish the piece at the end. Of course it’s hardly no effort to write a solid article. But by doing it this way you can focus your late energy on quality writing rather than still having to grapple with a mass of quotes and snippets with no rhyme or reason, and no clear direction.

So the ‘bucket’ starts life as a single note with an idea on it. You gradually expand this idea, by adding new notes which link to it, or by linking to existing notes. and some of these notes might be structure notes - they might aggregate other combinations of notes, to give you a high-level view of where you’re going.

How I did it

If you squint, you can see that this very article was made by using the bucket metaphor.

First I made notes on Andy Matuschak’s process, without quite knowing what I’d use them for.
Then by writing these notes I realised I was interested in ‘how to write an article from your notes’.
This became a kind of bucket, even though I didn’t yet have the words to call it that.
And then, weeks later, when I read the stuff about the ‘bucket theory of creativity’, my latest reading was magnetically attracted to my pre-existing theme or preoccupation, and I added it to the draft of an article.
The draft still needed to be drafted. I didn’t just copy my notes one after another. But the process was made straightforward becasue I never had to wonder what would come next, or what the point was. These decisions were already formed.

The Zettelkasten approach doesn’t do the writing work for you, but it’s a helpful way of building up your ideas, note by note, until they become something you find worth sharing, like the post you’ve just finished reading, and which I hope you’ve found at least a little useful.

Read more:

A minimal approach to making notes

From fragments you can build a greater whole

How to decide what to include in your notes

Photo from Unsplash

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The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 09:58:05 +1100

Here’s my perspective on ‘atomic notes’.

They’re atomic in time even before they’re atomic in any other dimension.

An atomic note, for me, is the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.

I got this from computer game designers, who call the shortest viable unit of play an ‘atom’. A single life in Space Invaders (and yes, that shows my age). Just enough to make you desperate to keep going.

If you think about it, every note has to stop somewhere. So it’s not a big stretch to stop sooner rather than later, perhaps even before you’re really ready to stop… and to begin a new note.

But if your note-making practice is to write long notes making several points, then good luck to you, everyone finds their own working method.

You’ll still find several aspects of the Zettelkasten note-making approach useful.

For example:

giving each note a clear title,
linking your notes
creating reference notes so you don’t lose track of bibliographic information,
creating hub notes (or whatever you want to call them), to connect ideas together
enjoying just enough productive and creative mess

When I started I couldn’t see the point of ‘atomicity of ideas’. It was only gradually that I realised my long notes would be more useful if I made them modular.

There might be an analogy with what computer programmers call ‘separation of concerns’. You can build really big systems from simple components. It’s much harder to merge even just two complex components.

For a good illustration of this, see Herbert Simon’s parable of the two watchmakers.

Two watchmakers, Tempus and Hora, each make a watch with 1,000 parts. Whenever Tempus is interrupted or drops anything he has to start all over again. But the other watchmaker does it differently. Hora makes watches from assemblies of ten parts only, then assembling ten of these, then ten of these. So when Hora is interrupted, only a small part of the work is ever lost.

Reference

Simon, H. A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American philosophical society, 106(6), 467-482. PDF. Cited in W. Brian Arthur (2009). The Nature of Technology. What it is and how it evolves. New York: Free Press.

—-

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters - available now.

Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 22:10:59 +1100

I’ve lost track of the ridiculous number of ‘Zettelkasten apps’ now on the loose on the wild wild web. When I checked the ChatGPT marketplace, for example, I had to stop counting at 50. I was losing the will to go on looking at them.

Everyone makes the apps, it seems, but who’s left to use them?

If you’re one of those sensible people who just want to make useful notes, plain text files with Markdown are simple, elegant, versatile and durable.

It’s hardly magic.

You can create these notes with any basic text editor, but I’m keen on people creating a working environment that works for them. So if you’re looking for a few bells and whistles, here are four note-making apps that seem to offer just enough features and not too many. Oh, and they’re open source and free to use, so you know, use them. Go make your notes!

“Hey, check these out!"

Zettlr

“Zettlr offers first-class support for any style of curating your own Zettelkasten. Zettlr supports note IDs, internal Wiki-style links, related files, seamless navigation, and even a graph view.”

There’s a fairly good summary of how to use Zettlr for the Zettelkasten approach to making notes.

Who’s it for?
Academics and others who want to write and publish their research with Markdown and who aren’t totally scared of Pandoc and LaTeX but could do with a little support in that area.

Who’s it not for?
Anyone averse to Pandoc or LaTeX (although you can just ignore these and still use Zettlr).

NB

“a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application with plain text data storage, … Initializing a folder as an nb local notebook is a very easy way to add structured git versioning to any folder of documents and other files.”

There’s a very brief nb-for-Zettelkasten summary.

Who’s it for?
Anyone who prefers command line tools, likes the idea of syncing their notes using Git, and wants maximum format flexibility.

Who’s it not for?
Windows users who never worked out how to run Linux-native apps and who aren’t about to start now. Ditto for command-line refuseniks.

Foam

“a note-taking tool that lives within VS Code… Foam is open source, and allows you to create a local first, markdown based, personal knowledge base. You can also use it to publish your notes.”

Who’s it for?
Anyone who already uses VSCode (it’s Microsoft’s flagship code editor) but wants some note management goodness, and anyone who might otherwise use the paid notemaking app that Foam rhymes with.

Who’s it not for?
Timid souls who might be put off by apps that are ‘still in preview’.

LogSeq

“Logseq is a knowledge management and collaboration platform. It focuses on privacy, longevity, and user control. Logseq offers a range of powerful tools for knowledge management, collaboration, PDF annotation, and task management with support for multiple file formats”.

Who’s it for?
They say “Logseq is a networked outliner”, so if you love outliners it might well be for you.

Who’s it not for?
People who don’t love outliners, I suppose. Oh, and they’re planning to make LogSeq Pro a paid app, so it might not be for freeloaders (eventually).

Well, that’s the end of this little roundup. Please let me know what fantastic app you find most suits you - and why.

And for the record, I couldn’t find a note-making app I really liked so I made one myself (sort-of).

Image:
No it’s not a bunch of hyped-up influencers salivating over the latest batch of AI-enabled notemaking apps. It’s actually a Marshall University “arena registration” utilizing IBM punched cards, in 1968.

Source:
Dickinson, Jack L., and Arnold R. Miller. In the Beginning…A Legacy of Computing at Marshall University : A brief history of the early computing technology at Marshall University, Huntington, W.Va., in the forty years: 1959-1999. Huntington, Marshall University Libraries, 2018. PDF

Now read: A minimal approach to writing notes

My favourite tool is this notebook I made

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:11:01 +1100

I couldn’t find a note-making app that really suited me so I made one myself.

OK, that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s really just a heavily modified version of TiddlyWiki but it feels tailor-made. And working with it fits me like a glove. It’s a great example of making a creative working environment. That’s important. You have to make your own environment. Some people hate TiddlyWiki¹. That’s fine too.

I wanted a notemaking environment that would let me:

write atomic notes,
write in Markdown syntax,
link notes easily,
re-combine notes by transclusion,
easily search through all my notes without clutter; and
export notes without stress.

Here’s how I made my personalised notemaking app.

Base: TiddlyWiki. I can’t stand the look of the plain OG version but I love the notebook theme that can easily be added.
Backlinks: To enable backlinks I have found a couple of basic plug-ins really useful and would strongly recommend:
- TWCrossLinks. This adds a footer to your notes to show backlinks and freelinks.
- Relink. This enables automatic renaming of titles and other items across links.
To-Do: For a to-do list, I greatly admire Projectify, which I have used for work, but for personal use I like the super-simple but effective Chandler, written by the late Joe Armstrong (godfather of Haskell). He talks you through how he wrote it, which in itself is a mini-masterclass in how to customise TiddlyWiki.
Help: Finally I’ll mention the active and very helpful TiddlyWiki user forum.

I see TiddlyWiki as a rhizomatic tool - one of several. A rhizomatic tool, the way I see it, is one that foregrounds the network and its many connections, while pushing to the background the hierarchy, whether it be temporal, semantic, thematic or any other structure. Such a tool helps users to create “mobile, stable and combinable inscriptions” that enable “action at a distance” (Latour, 1987).

Since about 2020 a fad has been growing online of note-making apps that include rhizomatic affordances. That’s a fancy way of saying lotsalinks. These internal-link-friendly apps include Roam Research, Obsidian, LogSeq, Workflowy, and more venerably, TiddlyWiki. Much discussion has flowed about the nature of the Zettelkasten as a means to construct a networked system of notes. Little of this discussion has referred directly to Rhizome theory, but there are clear affinities.

I wanted a rhizomatic tool for writing, and since I couldn’t find one I really liked, I adapted one for my own purposes. You might not need to invent your own tools, but each of us gathers uniquely the unique contents of our own toolbox.

This post is a contribution to the ongoing Indieweb Carnival, July 2024 edition. Why not check out the other posts, on tools, and contribute yourself to August’s theme, which is rituals.

Some links to relevant material:

Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?

A network of notes is a rhizome not a tree

Inspired destruction: How a Zettelkasten explodes thoughts so you can have newish ones

Zettelkasten, Rhizomes, and You

A great summary of TiddlyWiki

The rise of networked notetaking

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004/1980). Rhizome PDF. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, pp. 3-28.

Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Me too! I hate the name TiddlyWiki, and I hate the word ‘tiddler’ and generally I hate the aesthetic. That’s why I’ve changed it. ↩︎

Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +1100

Do we really need to remember everything?

This is the question posed by Lewis Hyde’s memorable book, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past 📚

He says:

“Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. The tree of memory set its roots in blood. To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. To study the self is to forget the self. In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time. The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past. “Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.” We dream in order to forget.” ― Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

Forgetting is the essence of what makes us human

The subtitle of Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein, promotes the art and science of ‘remembering everything’. Yet Foer accepts that forgetting is an essential aspect of memory. He quotes the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges:

“It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.” – Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Overwhelmed by memories

Foer refers here to a particular short story by Borges about Funes the Memorious, a man who forgot nothing and was overwhelmed by his memories. Not only did his remembering take as long as the actual events, but - worse - he was mired in details, unable to discount enough detail to generalize.

But Borges was hardly the first to make this observation about the importance of forgetting. Pioneering psychologist William James, for example, wrote:

“In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting… “Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” – William James, 1890: 679-80. Quoted in Schooler and Hertwig. 2005.

Such views on the essential healthiness of forgetting are confirmed and extended by contemporary psychology (Schooler and Hertwig, 2005; Nørby, 2015).

Who can forget the Pied Piper?

While reading again these notes I have made about memory and forgetting, I remember an experience I had as an eight-year-old in primary school.

In the 1970s we used to listen to recorded stories through headphones and then we wrote our own responses. This was a kind of automated learning and at the time it seemed very modern. The school, which was brand new, had a small ‘audio studio’, where around six or eight children could listen to the same story at the same time.

On this particular occasion the task was to summarize in our own words the story we had just heard. I found this hard because I could remember everything that had happened. Instead of summarizing the story’s main points, I retold it in great detail. Obviously, this took much too long.

I guess we were meant to write something like:

“When the townsfolk refuse to pay the mysterious rat-catcher for his services, he punishes them by making all their children disappear”.

Instead, my attempt at a summary was practically as long as the original story. Perhaps you too recall the details of this story: the town, the rats, the piper, his clothes, the music, the fee, the refusal, the second playing of the pipe, the procession of children, the opening in the mountain, the crippled child who arrived too late and was dismayed. Everything seemed important.

I tried to put it all in

This took longer than the time allotted, so that when the school bell rang I was the only one who hadn’t finished. The teacher kept me in at playtime and I still hadn’t finished, so I had to stay in at lunchtime too. It was a traumatic experience because I just couldn’t see what I was doing wrong. In my memory the teacher never modeled the brevity I was meant to be aiming for, so it felt like I had no idea what to leave out and what to keep in.

Perhaps this memory says something about my particular mindset. Clearly not everyone had trouble summarizing the story. I was the only one who couldn’t bring myself to do it. I suppose I was a bit like Funes the Memorious, the eponymous character in that short story by Borges, who found himself cursed to forget nothing.

Setting memories down

Fortunately I have changed a bit since then, and have long been able to forget plenty without even trying¹. But this feeling has stayed with me for forty-five years - of loving the details far too much to cast them out. I’m fortunate in that, conversely, there is little in my life that I have loathed so much that I couldn’t forget it.

This anecdote brings to mind a poem by Ann Carson:

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

So how can you put your memories down safely, so that you’ll be able to pick up in the future where you left off? I’ve written previously about the way re-reading your old notes can surprise you. That’s one of the great things about making notes now. You’re communicating with your future self, making the most of the likelihood that your future self may indeed have forgotten what you have to say and so will find it novel and unexpected.

“Reading through old notes, you may be surprised that you ever wrote this. And re-reading your work in the light of new information, you may have new flashes of inspiration or see new connections that weren’t previously visible. Or perhaps the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated notes will prompt you to create a third, which contains an entirely new idea. In this sense, your notes become a kind of conversation partner, reminding you of what you once thought, and even challenging you to go further.” ― writingslowly.com

Thanks for reading. Why not check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters?

And to keep up to date, subscribe to the weekly email digest.

References

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. ‘Funes the Memorious’ in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions.

Carson, Anne. 1995. Glass, Irony, and God. New York: New Directions.

Foer, Joshua. 2011. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin.

Hyde, Lewis. 2019. A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. Edinburgh: Canongate.

James, William. 1890. The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Holt.

Nørby, Simon. 2015. ‘Why Forget? On the Adaptive Value of Memory Loss’: Perspectives on Psychological Science, September. doi.org/10.1177/1…

Schooler, Lael J., and Ralph Hertwig. 2005. ‘How Forgetting Aids Heuristic Inference.’ Psychological Review 112 (3): 610–28. doi.org/10.1037/0…

Image credit: Photo by Karolina Kołodziejczak on Unsplash

This is my attempt at irony. ↩︎

Making notes will aid your short-term memory, even when you haven't got one

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 13:50:05 +1100

This week I was making notes about a presentation when my colleague looked over and offered to just give me the slides. I said thanks, of course. But really I was making my notes to help me remember the key information. If I just referred to the slides, I’d never assimilate the presentation - I’d just listen then forget. Conversely, while I might never look at the notes again, since it was me that made them, some of it has now sunk in.

Many people make notes to help them remember things, but how do you do it?

This question matters to Kat Moody. She writes about learning to live with a nonexistent working memory (Archived version).

Presumably she doesn’t really have absolutely no short-term memory, but she does have ADHD, or as she likes to call it, CRSS (Can’t Remember Sh*t Syndrome).

That really resonated with me. And the horrible feeling of forgetting everything might seem familiar to you as well, even if you’re not diagnosed with either of these.

Inspired by author Ryan Holiday’s notecard system Kat Moody uses an app, readwise.io to make notes while she reads.

Bob Doto, author of the excellent new note-making manual A System for Writing, also does this. He says:

“I tend to read articles on a tablet or phone, using a read-later app with note-taking capabilities to capture my thoughts. When I’m done, I bring these thought-captures into my writing platform, usually as main notes.” (Bob Doto, A System for Writing, p.50)

There’s an informative Hacker News discussion, which extends to memory hacks more generally. One commenter laments that school rewards memorization more than understanding. That can be hard for people whose memory isn’t their strong point.

Perhaps ironically, I see note making as a useful means of forgetting, not just remembering. I don’t want to forget everything, but then I certainly wouldn’t like to remember everything either.

It’s a double act. My brain, when combined with my notes, helps me find the right balance between remembering and forgetting.

I have more to say about this subject, so please stay tuned¹. Update: Notemaking helps you remember - and forget.

Some other salient pieces about making notes:

On Keeping an Everyday Notebook (Instead of a Bullet Journal) archived version

Audio transcription workflow: How to Take Perfect Notes with Your Voice Using ChatGPT and Notion

Big, beautiful goals – but can’t be bothered? 11 great productivity tips for lazy people (includes tips such as ‘Write everything down’ and ‘Ditch the to-do list for a ‘first things’ list’.

How to actually use what you read with Readwise

Ryan Holiday’s notecard system

Image credit: Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash

Does anyone ever say this any more!? I’m showing my age! ↩︎

A System for Writing by Bob Doto

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 18:05:00 +1100

“The note you just took has yet to realize its potential.” - Bob Doto.

Another ‘Zettelkasten primer’ won’t be needed for some time, since this one is direct, concise, thorough and strongly practical. A System for Writing by Bob Doto is out!

📖 Paperback

💻 Ebook

If you’ve become confused or cynical watching those endless videos in which an influencer who discovered the Zettelkasten five minutes ago is suddenly the expert; or if you’ve read Sönke Ahrens' book, How to Take Smart Notes and thought “now I know why I should make notes but I still don’t really know how”, well here’s the antidote: the only Zettelkasten book you’ll ever need.

My paperback copy of A System for Writing arrived just in time for weekend reading. It’s a deliberately useful book, with a clear three-part structure. It gets to the point quickly and stays there: how to write notes, how to connect them and how to use this system to produce finished written work.

Things I especially appreciate in A System for Writing:

Plenty of clear and specific examples of notes of all sorts. People often ask ‘but what should a note look like?’ Here’s the answer, visually.* Many helpful workflow diagrams. People also ask ‘how does the system operate as a whole?’ This book shows exactly how the Zettelkasten process works, and in what order.
Clear references both to Niklas Luhmann’s process and to other relevant predecessors. If you want to refer back to the sources, there is a wealth of pointers here.
At the end of each chapter, a checklist of specific activities to try, to implement the ideas just covered: what to do, what to remember and what to watch out for. If you’re wondering exactly what to do next with your notes, this book shows you (also, what not to do, especially in ch. 7).
Helpful writing advice, which shows how to use your Zettelkasten to produce four different kinds of material: short-short items (i.e. social media posts), blog posts, articles and books.
Overall, a clear, step-by-step, repeatable writing process to follow, from capturing your thoughts (ch. 1) right through to managing your writing workflow (ch. 9).

Will anyone be disappointed? Well, if you’re only looking for a manual on a particular piece of software, this book won’t satisfy you. It tells almost nothing about whatever the popular app-of-the-day is. You are not going to be told here whether Obsidian is better than Obshmidian. Software comes and goes, while the underlying principles of the Zettelkasten approach, as presented here, can be applied in many different contexts.

What about those who aren’t all that interested in actually publishing anything, who instead just want their notes to help them remember stuff, perhaps for tests? Well, although this book focuses without apology on writing, it will still be really useful for anyone making notes as a ‘second memory’ (Niklas Luhmann’s term) because by reading this (especially the first two parts) they’ll soon be making clearer, more concise and more accessible notes, whatever they intend to use them for.

And what of those who have absolutely no interest in obscure terms like ‘Zettelkasten’, who recoil from any kind of dubious productivity fetish, and just want to get things written? This is where the book excels and where it really comes good on the promise of its title. Yes, this is a system for writing. The author, who has himself written several books, shows from his direct experience how an effective note-making practice can lead to a more natural, unforced, effective and consistent writing practice. The Zettelkasten as presented here is an approach to note-making that will simply aid writing, without wasting time or effort.

This has certainly been my experience. Before I implemented my own Zettelkasten approach I was struggling both with organising my notes and with producing coherent writing. Since then, it’s been a different story. But until now there hasn’t been a Zettelkasten guidebook I’d wholeheartedly recommend to others. Now there certainly is.

So, if you want to learn quickly how to capture your ideas effectively and write productively, stress-free, then get hold of A System for Writing right now, in paperback or ebook.

More about Bob Doto.

Read about the illusion of integrated thought, which is cited in chapter 7 of the book.

My take on starting a Zettelkasten: How to make a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience.

My take on how to write an article from your notes.

Why not also check out my own book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters? And if you like this website, you can always sign up to the weekly email digest.

A System for Writing by Bob Doto

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 16:05:15 +1100

“The note you just took has yet to realize its potential.” - Bob Doto

Another ‘Zettelkasten primer’ won’t be needed for some time, since this one is direct, concise, thorough and strongly practical.

📚A System for Writing by Bob Doto is out!

Things I especially appreciate in A System for Writing:

Plenty of clear and specific examples of notes of all sorts. People often ask ‘but what should a note look like?’ Here’s the answer, visually.
Many helpful workflow diagrams. People also ask ‘how does the system operate as a whole?’ This book shows exactly how the Zettelkasten process works, and in what order.
Clear references both to Niklas Luhmann’s process and to other relevant predecessors. If you want to refer back to the sources, there is a wealth of pointers here.
At the end of each chapter, a checklist of specific activities to try, to implement the ideas just covered: what to do, what to remember and what to watch out for. If you’re wondering exactly what to do next with your notes, this book shows you (also, what not to do, especially in ch. 7).
Helpful writing advice, which shows how to use your Zettelkasten to produce four different kinds of material: short-short items (i.e. social media posts), blog posts, articles and books.
Overall, a clear, step-by-step, repeatable writing process to follow, from capturing your thoughts (ch. 1) right through to managing your writing workflow (ch. 9).

What about those who aren’t all that interested in actually publishing anything, who instead just want their notes to help them remember stuff, perhaps for tests? Well, although this book focuses without apology on writing, it will still be really useful for anyone making notes as a ‘second memory’ (Luhmann’s term) because by reading this (especially the first two parts) they’ll soon be making clearer, more concise and more accessible notes, whatever they intend to use them for.

So if you want to learn quickly how to capture your ideas effectively and write productively, stress-free, then get hold of A System for Writing right now.

More about Bob Doto.

Read about the illusion of integrated thought, which is cited in chapter 7 of the book.

My take on starting a Zettelkasten: How to make a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience.

My take on how to write an article from your notes.

Why not also check out my own book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters? And if you like this website, you can always sign up to the weekly email digest.

Something from nothing is no fairy tale

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 18:46:18 +1100

As an adult, one of my favourite fairy tales is Puss in Boots.

I have immense respect for this talking cat. He has nothing going for him - not even a decent pair of shoes. And to make matters worse he finds himself lumbered with a pretty mediocre human owner.

Folklore academics have a way of classifying the tales they study. It’s called the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU). And in this index, Puss in Boots is Type 545: the cat as helper.

That’s completely wrong.

Read it for yourself. This story is not about the frankly lacklustre youngest son of the mill. No, it’s about the cat, a cat who has almost no help, who has to do practically everything himself, and who never gives up until finally he gets what he needs.

The great writer Angela Carter would have agreed with this. She observed the cat was “the servant so much the master already“¹. But this is hardly controversial. Perrault’s version of the story actually has the title “The Master Cat“.

So as you probably remember, the tale begins when the cat experiences an unexpected disaster. The old miller dies, leaving the mill to his eldest son.

But the mill’s cat he leaves to the youngest son.

Not only is the cat suddenly homeless, but to make things even worse his fate is now shackled to a penniless human without prospects.

So what’s a homeless cat to do?

He has no choice. If he’s going to survive, he’s going to have to create something from nothing.

It’s one of the most famous stories of all time. All the great fairy tale compilers included it in their collections: Straparola, Basile, Perrault. When you started reading, did you think, “Puss in Boots? Who’s that? No. Almost everyone knows this story.

Puss in Boots made it into the Shrek movies and then headlined two spin-off films himself. He’s a star. He started with nothing, a homeless outcast, and ended up making a fortune for everyone who’s willing to respect him.

But he never actually sought fortune or fame.

Remember I said he never gives up till he gets what he wants?

And what does a cat want, really?

That’s what this whole story was always leading up to (skipping all the bits in the middle, that is). In the ogre’s castle the cat tricks the ogre into turning himself into a mouse. Well, with the cat turfed out of the mill, where else is he going to get a feed?

The ogre, enjoying the flattery cried, “I will show you just how powerful I am!” Instantly he transformed into a tiny mouse scampering around the floor.
In a flash the crafty cat jumped upon the mouse and ate it up.

Here’s why I like Puss in Boots so much: the story enacts what it tells. Like its feline hero, the story itself started from nothing and became a huge success, making multiple fortunes along the way ².

What do I mean by saying the story itself started from nothing? I mean there’s hardly any story there. Think about it. The cat simply takes the longest route imaginable to his next meal. Just think about the very first draft:

“One day a cat caught a mouse”.

Almost nothing. Just enough from which to create one of the most popular stories ever.

So tell your story, even if it doesn’t yet seem like much of a story.

Like the cat, make yourself up.

Create something from (almost) nothing.

The world waits with baited breath to hear all about it.

This is part of the June 2024 IndieWeb Carnival: DIY - Something from (almost) nothing, hosted by Andrei. There’s a great roundup of all the submissions. (Edited on 3/7/24).

Image by Gustave Doré - Les Contes de Perrault, Public Domain, Link

Now read:

My range is me

From fragments you can build a greater whole

Work as if writing is the only thing that matters

You can get a lot done by writing slowly

Choose your own race and finish it

Five useful articles about writing

Thoreau on writing

Since you’ve made it this far, why not subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email digest?

Angela Carter (22 July 1976). “The Better to Eat You With”. New Society. ↩︎
The two Puss in Boots movies in the Shrek series have made more than a billion dollars at the box office. ↩︎

Why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 01:16:39 +1100

Yes indeed, why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?

Here’s Anna Funder, author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, on working at the University of Melbourne English Department library as a student:

“It sounds prehistoric now, but I sat at the front desk, typing out index cards for new acquisitions or requests from staff for books or journals — anything from the latest novel, to psychoanalysis, poetry or medieval studies. I read things that had nothing to do with my studies: a smorgasbord of serendipity. Despite my time there, I have never understood the Dewey decimal system: how can numbers tell you what a book is, to a decimal point?” - Every book you could want and many more

My take on this?

HEAJ:Mundaneum by Marc Wathieu is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A minimal approach to making notes

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 02:24:36 +1100

I want a minimal approach to making notes.

I don’t want anything fancy, just enough structure to be useful.

When I see people’s souped-up Obsidian note-taking vaults my head spins (OK, I’m jealous). I also wonder, though, what extra result is achieved with a fantastically complex system. Having said that, I’m keen on people creating a working environment that works for them, and I do admire people’s creativity in this area.

I just can’t be bothered to do it myself.

When discussing the Zettelkasten approach to making notes, it seems there are a lot of different note types to consider, which confuses people. The extensive discussion about different types of notes caused by reading Sonke Ahrens’s book How to Take Smart Notes makes me think this multiple-note-types approach is just too complicated for me. So what do I do instead?

I prefer to look directly at what sociologist Niklas Luhmann did with his Zettelkasten (and the associated research project on it.

I’ve also found inspiration in Dan Alloso’s book, How to Make Notes and Write. This is what Anna Havron said about it at Analogue Office

“I found Dan Allosso’s zettelkasten system to be cleaner and simpler than anything else I’ve read. He does not parse out four or five fine-grained types of notes (fleeting, literature, evergreen, sprout, etc). He uses two: source notes, and point notes. “Source Notes” are notes he makes mostly from the source but with some initial thoughts and questions. “Point Notes” are his own thoughts: “Others have called these “Main Notes” or “Permanent Notes” or “Evergreen Notes”. I called them Point Notes to remind myself that when I write them I should be making a point.” (Allosso 2022, p 66)”

Allosso, Dan; Allosso, S.F.(2022) How to Make Notes and Write. Kindle Edition.

He’s not the only person claiming there’s only two kinds of notes. Bob Doto says of Sonke Ahrens’s book (p.23-24):

“the author refers to two categories of notes¹ permanently stored in the slip-box: “the main notes” and “literature notes.””

What I get from all this is that there are really only two kinds of note worth thinking about and putting in your Zettelkasten, at least when you start out. Yes, only two, and here they are:

The note you write to make sure you record the source of information. This is a source note (also known as a literature note or a reference note or a bibliographic note). As Bob Doto says: it’s “a single note containing references to all the interesting passages in a book (or other piece of media) that you encounter.”
The note you write to make some kind of point, whatever it is. Ideally, this will be either a concept or a proposition, but… you do you. This is a point note (but you can call it a permanaent note, a main note, a Zettel, an evergreen note, or even, confusingly, a literature note, and that’s fine too.)

Now I’m going to show you what these two notes look like. They are quite straightforward.

What does a source note look like?

A source note looks like this (lifted from the excellent article What is a literature note?:

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

13 reference to speed writing (effort)

14 trying to squeeze too much (squeeze)

15 no effort (effort)

18 ref to bibliography (lit note)

20 index ref (index)

21 need only make a few changes (effort)

24 discrepancies btw lit/perm (perm)

You record the bibliographic details of something you’re reading (or viewing or listening to), and you briefly note interesting ideas, with their page number.

When you want to expand one of these ideas, you link the line on the source note to a point note that takes the idea further in some way.

What does a point note look like?

A note looks like this (from the indispensable article Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method, which you should definitely read):

Sure, a note like this has plenty of metadata such as an ID, a title, some links and maybe some references, but in the body of the note, the author is just making a single point.

So, to recap: you only need two kinds of notes: source notes and point notes (or reference notes and main notes, or literature notes and… look, just call them what you want, OK?).

Bonus tip: There is actually one other type of note that you might want to use once you’ve got your system going, but it’s optional, especially when starting out.

The one further useful kind of note is the hub note (or structure note, or map of content²). You use it to create a bit of structure in your collection of notes. But remember, a network of notes is a rhizome not a tree. You don’t need to impose the structure prematurely - it arises organically from your notes as you write them, not from top-down categories.

What does a hub note look like? It looks like a note title followed by a simple list of other linked note titles and note IDs. It’s almost like a mini- table of contents or an outline for an article. But really, it’s just a point note where the point of the note is: “here’s a list of linked notes that are all related to the title of this note”. What’s helpful about this is that the hubs emerge gradually from your notes as they accumulate, from the bottom up.

That’s it really. Source notes, point notes and hub notes.

That’s all you need to get going (and then to continue). After that you can invent all the note types you like, as and when they suit your particular uses. For example, in the novel Lila, Robert Pirsig’s protagonist Phaedrus writes about ‘program slips’, which describe how his note system works.

“PROGRAM slips were instructions for what to do with the rest of the slips. They kept track of the forest while he was busy thinking about individual trees. With more than ten thousand trees that kept wanting to expand to one hundred thousand, the PROGRAM slips were absolutely necessary to keep from getting lost.”

Well, maybe. Pirsig just made that note type up, as well as a few others, and so can you if you want.

Why not check out my own book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters? And you can sign up to the weekly email news. There won’t be much, because I’m still writing slowly, but at least you’ll know you didn’t miss it.

Now read:

How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience

Even the index is just another note

Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?

Three worthwhile modes of notetaking

How to connect your notes to make them more effective

When it comes to writing notes how much mess is just enough?

My emphasis ↩︎
See Nick Milo’s Linking your Thinking for detailed information about maps of content ↩︎

Five useful articles about writing

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:41:28 +1100

Here are five links with worthwhile writing advice. 🖋️

How to think in writing, part 1: The thought behind the thought by Henrik Karlsson.
Chase your reading by Robin Hanson.
Learning by writing by Holden Karnovsky.
How to make writing less hard by Oliver Burkeman.
When to begin writing by Sheldon Richmond (it’s an old one but a good one).

A forest of evergreen notes

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 19:35:36 +1100

Jon M Sterling, a computer scientist at Cambridge University, has created his own ‘mathematical Zettelkasten’, which he also calls ‘a forest of evergreen notes’.

He maintains a very interesting website, built using a tool he created, named, appropriately enough, Forester.

The implementation of his ideas raises all sorts of ideas and questions for me, almost all enthusiastic. Here are a few in no order at all:

Andy Matuschak coined the term ‘evergreen notes’, which Jon Sterling has further developed with great elegance. The original concept, I think, comes from journalism’s ‘evergreen content’, an item that’s endlessly relevant, which can be created in advance and only used on a slow-news day. It has been adopted by content marketers as a kind of holy grail of online writing. Why write about yesterday’s sports results (ephemeral) when you can write about how to cook a meatloaf (evergreen) and get better SEO? This is a quite a bit different from Jon Sterling’s apparent intention, where the academic workflow involves producing papers, lectures, presentations and so on,from the same or similar units of information, and the interchangeability of the publishing format matters. I wonder whether there’s a tension between the ‘evergreen’ quality of the contents of the note (i.e. an idea that can be applied in several different contexts) and the format of the note (i.e. a textual artefact that can be re-mixed and re-published). In any case, Prof. Sterling seems to be on the way to resolving it.
Forester uses a unique ID for each note, which is an author’s three-letter initials followed by a unique four digit base 36 number (i.e. a number where the permitted numerals are 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ). I like this, a lot. With just four digits you can identify 1,679,616 unique notes - far more than you’re likely to be generating.
There are some stimulating thoughts on the role of hierarchy in notes, which I’ve also been thinking about.
Sterling is keen on atomicity. Me too. Very keen, because from fragments you can build a greater whole.
Is this a Zettelkasten or a public Wiki? Hmm, not sure. Arguably, a Wiki needs to be using wiki software, whereas a Zettelkasten is rather a method or process, which numerous tools could create. But whatever it is, it does make me think there’s a clear fourfold typology here: single-author or multi-author? Public or private?
- Andy Matuschak’s site is a public, single-author creation
- Jon Sterling’s site is public but multi-author
- Niklas Luhmann’s original Zettelkasten was private and single-author, and though it has since opened to the public, that wasn’t its function during the author’s lifetime. Most, if not all, 20th Century Zettelkästen were private and single-author
- Is there a private, multi-author example? If so, I’m not aware of it, perhaps because, you know, it’s private. But such a thing might well exist.
Before seeing Jon Sterling’s site, I had held a simple distinction between the Zettlekasten and the Wiki. I don’t really wish to re-open an old argument, but just want to make a small observation. For me, a Wiki is a public- or semi-public facing product in its own right, a kind of publication, whereas a Zettelkasten is a method or process to produce public-facing artifacts, but it isn’t one of these artifacts itself. But now I wonder whether you can’t do both back-stage and front-stage at the same time. In other words, it looks to me like Jon Sterling is creating a Zettelkasten by my definition (it’s a process to produce public-facing artifacts such as articles and presentations), but he’s working with the garage door open (it’s a kind-of product in its own right). This is an interesting thing to watch, and it’s always fun to experience the mystique of the studio.

Make your notes a creative working environment

Mon, 27 May 2024 18:00:00 +1100

“Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?”

This is a question Manuel Moreale regularly asks his guests on the People and Blogs newsletter. The answers are always fascinating and well worth a read.
This got me thinking about my own working environment and maybe I overthought it. It looks like I’ve totally ignored Barry Hess’s reminder that you’re a blogger not an essayist.¹ Anyway, here goes.

Note: This post is part of the Indieweb Carnival on creative environments.

My notes are a miniature working environment

I’ve long seen my collection of notes as a miniature working environment, where I can create and develop my thoughts into finished pieces of writing. But what does it mean to view your notes as a place for thinking, a creative environment?
To start, it really matters what kind of writing tools you use.
It matters because an assemblage of such tools is more than just a particular software application or service - it’s an entire space to work in. And when I say ‘space’, I mean the whole environment your entire body is in as you work. This space includes the room, the desk, the light source, the ambient temperature, the background noise, the computer screen and the computer powering it, the writing software, the keyboard and mouse, or mobile phone microphone; or alternatively, the card index, the individual card, the pen or pencil, the writing surface, and so on. These factors taken together all add up to a carefully constructed space in which thinking, and writing, and writing-as-thinking can take place.
If you have a bad space, there’s probably quite a lot you can do to fix it. A few small tweeks could make a big difference. There’s plenty to learn about improving your workspace to optimise creativity from Donald Rattner’s book, My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation.
But the space inside your notes also really matters. According to media theorist Walter Ong,

“technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness”. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Routledge, London, 1995, p. 82.²

You may be writing in Microsoft Word, or in a cheap notebook, or on scraps of reused paper, or in a code editor, or on WhatsApp on your phone standing on the train. However you write, that’s part of your creative environment. And there’s a connection between what surrounds you and what’s happening within you.

Writing is an aesthetic experience

The writing environment makes itself known first and foremost as a collection of sense impressions of various kinds. So the process of writing concerns aesthetics, which literally means ‘to take in the world through the senses’ (Reid, 2019:35), or ‘of or pertaining to things perceptible by the senses’ (Boal, 1995: 18).

Writing is about the senses

I don’t mean this in the usual way, that you should write about the senses to make your sentences more vivid. I mean that the physical experience of writing really matters. Aesthetics is about the senses - what you feel, perceive, sense in your surroundings and in your body. Note, as well, the converse: that the word anaesthesia refers to a state of being rendered insensitive - numb or even unconscious. So to the extent that you are unaware of your sense impressions, or otherwise numb to them, then your cognition is accordingly impaired. And therefore, cognition is fundamentally aesthetic.

It’s been argued that “to know intellectually is to discover what one already knows unconsciously and tacitly at the perception of the body” (Gagliardi 1996, p. 574)

Nathalie Tasler’s blog post about time-management introduced me to the German philosopher of aesthetics, Wolfgang Wesch. She writes:

“Welsch (1995) even states: there is no cognition without aesthetic—I refer to the origins of aesthetic here: aisthēsis, which is visceral experiences, it is the collaboration of cognition, senses, emotion.”

So it’s worth paying attention to the way writing your notes makes you feel, physically.

Writing is also a kind of theatre

The activist theatre director Augusto Boal has a deep history of exploring the spaces in which theatre takes place. His book The Rainbow of Desire devotes its second chapter to the concept of the aesthetic space.
He takes as a starting point Lope de Vega’s wonderfully minimalist definition of theatre:

“two human beings, a passion and a platform” (1996: 16).

But Boal makes it clear that for him, a physical platform is not in itself necessary.

“All that is required is that, within the bounds of a certain space, spectators and actors designate a more restricted space as ‘stage’: and aesthetic space… The interpenetration of these two spaces is the aesthetic space.” (1996: 18)

Although for Boal the theatre is the aesthetic space par excellence, he is clear that he takes a broad view of what the theatre can be:

“With the actor is born the theatre. The actor is theatre. We are all actors: we are theatre!” (1996:19)

“Anyone can designate and thereby create such a space, in their own front room, a space which occupies part or all of the room and immediately becomes, ‘aesthetically’, a stage: the ‘platform’. The creator of such a space can then play for herself, without an audience - or with an imaginary audience - like an actor rehearsing alone in an empty theatre: in front of the future audience, absent at that moment, but present in the imagination.” (1996: 19)

“The aesthetic space possesses gnoseological properties, that is, properties which stimulate knowledge and discovery, cognition and recognition: properties which stimulate the process of learning by experience. Theatre is a form of knowledge.” (1996: 20)

Pay attention to arrangements

It doesn’t always go well. The author Virginia Woolf famously claimed that in order to write, a woman needs money and a room of one’s own. Yet scholar Evija Trofimova found that the room in itself wasn’t enough. It mattered how it was arranged:

“Look at my surroundings. My office is crammed with stuff. So many thoughts buried under piles of paper, insisting on their place in the work in which they so obviously do not belong. I also can’t help but feel the magnetic pull of others’ ideas from all the books around me. Each thought, each reference, fights for its place in my work. What an unbearable intertextual mess…” Trofimova, Evija, and Sophie Nicholls. 2018. “On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks across the Page”. M/C Journal 21 (4). doi.org/10.5204/m…

The exterior arrangements of your writing practice really matter, but so do the interior arrangements of your computer. They too are part of the environment in which your notes take shape. We can rearrange the room in which we sit, sometimes. We can make it tidier or messier. We can close the curtains at the window, or open them. We can repaint, or just put up a poster. We can play music of many different kinds. But it’s harder to re-design the writing tools we use. Dark theme or light theme? This ‘wallpaper’ or that ‘background’? But is that really our only choice? Our digital writing tools allow some customisation, but not much.

Don’t let your technology dictate your aesthetic experience

Why does any of this matter to me as I sit writing my notes?

It matters because I’ve spent a long time, too long, having my precious aesthetic space more or less dictated to me by a series of technological decisions that were made without my input or approval. If you use any of the standard apps and operating systems, perhaps you have too.
Take the personal computer. It was a revolution, to be sure, but the aesthetic space it circumscribes - keyboard, mouse and small screen on a desktop - was never designed for me to be creative in. PCs took off from the late 1980s onwards because middle managers in large organisations could purchase one with the small budget under their own control ($1,000, always $1,000!) thereby getting around the domination then imposed by the company’s IT department.
Or think of the smartphone. It took over the world from 2007 onwards not because it was easier for me to work creatively with (ha ha) but because it could deliver ads more effectively, and especially games and video. The smartphone, for all its technical wizardry, was always a consumption-delivery vehicle before ever it was a creative production tool. In fact, creating things is anathema to the dominant business models because the attention economy requires us to be forever paying attention to someone else’s creation, which exists to sell us stuff. I can create sentences using my phone, sure, but in doing so I always feel as though I’m fighting the interface. That’s the aesthetic space I now find myself living in.
So it’s time to take back my aesthetic space. Time to stop passively accepting what I’m given and to make active decisions about the kind of technological environments that are conducive to my own creative focus.

You can make choices!

“The only hat worth wearing was the one you made for yourself, not one you bought, not one you were given. Your own hat, for your own head. Your own future, not someone else’s.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky (2004)³

You can’t change the whole world, but you can change your little piece of it, and that has a ripple effect throughout the universe.⁴ Everyone’s decisions about their aesthetic space will be different. Here’s what I need, and what you might consider:

A desk with a window in front of me, opening out onto some kind of view and some kind of green life. Currently, I’m looking out of a side window onto the jasmine hedge between us and the neighbours. Just enough view to be useful. At work, I can look out over the street through the treetop foliage. If I couldn’t see outside I think I’d probably go mad. Writing on the train works well. There’s a good view and it’s always changing.
A keyboard and mouse that work for me, that don’t get in my way. I have a Logitech MX Vertical ergonomic mouse, which lets me rest my hand vertically , with my thumb at the top, to avoid repetitive strain injury. I also have a Keychron K3 mechanical keyboard, which I really love - unreasonably so, since it’s just a keyboard. But the feel of the keys really makes a difference to my overall sense of how it feels to write.
A writing app that lets me customise it as much as possible. I prefer to write in plain text Markdown syntax, and I really dislike apps that stand in the way of this. Sublime Text works well for me and Notepad++ is acceptable. I’ve tried others. VSCode just didn’t do it for me. This aesthetic space matter is subtle.
I really like the way one of my favourite apps TiddlyWiki allows me to slice up and recombine small pieces of writing. But TiddlyWiki has limitations I’m not really keen on. I’ve customised my version quite radically.
Sometimes, writing by hand feels better and other times writing by keyboard feels better - and occasionally, voice dictation feels better. I haven’t resolved this, but try to stay flexible. Sometimes when I’m stuck I switch modes. This often gets me unstuck.
Two human beings, a passion and a platform. You the reader and me the writer. Perhaps we could swap places. I’d like to know how you feel about your writing space. Reply on micro.blog, or Mastodon, or best of all, write your own blog post and let me know.

References

⁵

Boal, A. (1995). The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy. Abingdon, UK and New York, NY: Routledge.

Dědinová, T. (2022). Embodying the Permaculture Story: Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching Series. In M. Oziewicz, B. Attebery, & T. Dědinová (Eds.), Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media (pp. 74–87). London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Gagliardi, P. (1996). Exploring the aesthetic side of organisational life. In S. R. H. C. Clegg, C. Hardy, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organization studies (pp. 565-580). London: Sage. Cited in Keenan, T. M. (2016). The use of aesthetic knowledge in decision making processes in mega projects (PhD thesis). Queensland University of Technology. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/97979/1/Thomas_Keenan_Thesis.pdf

Popen, S. (2006). AESTHETIC SPACE Aesthetic spaces/imaginative geographies. In A Boal Companion (pp. 135-142). Routledge. https://smartmove.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/A-Boal-Companion.pdf#page=136

Rattner, D. M. (2019). My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation. United States: Skyhorse.

Reid, J. (2019). Towards an Aesthetic Space: A Comparative Study. Journal of Deafblind Studies on Communication, 5(1). https://jdbsc.rug.nl/article/download/32573/29968

Trofimova, E., & Nicholls, S. (2018). On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks across the Page. M/C Journal, 21(4). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1450

Wilken, R. (2014). Peter Carey’s Laptop. Cultural Studies Review, 20(1), 100-120.

He’s the creator of the [Pika]blogging platform](https://pika.page/) by the way. Actually, an essay is just an attempt and so is a blog post. ↩︎
Quoted in Wilken, Rowan. “Peter Carey’s Laptop.” Cultural Studies Review 20, no. 1 (03, 2014): 100-120. ↩︎
I found this quotation via Tereza Dědinová’s excellent chapter about embodying the permaculture story in Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. DOI: 10.5040/9781350203372 ↩︎
OK, this might not be real physics, but I still like it. ↩︎
I know, you’re a blog-reader not an essay-reader, but whatever. ↩︎

When it comes to writing notes, how much mess is just enough?

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:19:58 +1100

Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, likes to keep his notes messy¹:

“‘Messiness’, in this context at least, is just the state of not being so hubristic as to imagine that you know, in advance, precisely what’s required in order to do or to create something worthwhile. Which, of course, nobody does.” - The life-changing magic of not tidying up

I really appreciate the benefits of serendipity, but I also need some structure, which is why I’m happy with making atomic notes, densely linked. You might call it a Zettelkasten. Burkeman says he tried a Zettelkasten approach to his notes, but found it too organised.

That’s not at all how I’ve experienced it.

The image that for me best sums up this process of making short notes to create longer pieces of writing is that of my little worm farm. All sorts of scraps get dumped in at the top. And mostly unseen, the worms turn everything into nourishing compost.

It’s almost magical.

So instead of being obsessive, I just have a few simple rules that I mostly stick to.

Plain text (Markdown) notes.
Each note is a single idea with a unique ID.
Each note deserves a clear title.
Notes link meaningfully to other notes.

And while this little system might not result in much tidiness, it’s still really neat.

HT: Frank ↩︎

Don't make a Zitatsalat out of your writing

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 22:32:41 +1100

Zitatsalat? What does that even mean?

Yes, Zitatsalat. I found this lovely but rarely used German term in the title of a book by the journalist Stephan Maus. The book’s name is Zitatsalat von Hinz & Kunz.¹

I love the rhyming rhythm of this compound term, but what does Zitatsalat actually mean?

Well, Zitatsalat translates as Quote Salad. It’s not a compliment.

Zitatsalat, by Stephan Maus (2002).

But what’s wrong with quoting other writers?

What’s wrong with quoting other writers?

There’s a temptation for those writing by means of a Zettelkasten, or card index, to use too many quotes in their writing - to collect a whole garden of notes, then serve them all up on a large plate of mixed leaves. Perhaps this is because the Zettelkasten approach to making notes makes it almost too easy to dish up a pretty indigestible salad of citations.

The subtitle of Maus’s book is: ‘Handpicked from the Zettelkasten’, and it’s true, the Zettelkasten makes it easy to gather and rearrange the pithy quotations of other writers.

But that doesn’t mean you have to use them all in your own writing. It’s fine to collect interesting quotations and excerpts from books and videos and articles and podcasts. But on their own they don’t belong to you, and you can’t just string together a pile of quotes and call it an article. It’s important to reflect on your reading and make it your own. That means writing about what the wise words of others mean to you, because:

Nothing says “I didn’t think this through for myself” like a direct quote. writingslowly.com

Sure, it’s a salad, but is it your salad?

Write memos about the quotes you collect

One way of treating the process of gathering quotes from your reading is to see it as being a bit like the grounded theory process of gathering and reflecting on interviews. In this process the researcher records an interview, using direct transcription, but also reflects on the interviewee’s words by means of writing memos.

You don’t just write down the words of others. As you progress, you also write your own reflections on what the others have said. Then, when it comes to writing a longer article or book, the memos serve as important raw material.

The Wikipedia entry on grounded theory says:

“Memoing is the process by which a researcher writes running notes bearing on each of the concepts being identified… Memos are field notes about the concepts and insights that emerge from the observations.”

But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s really not cool to quote, and especially not Wikipedia.

And you’re right.

Chili, Tropea, Calabria, Italy. Norbert Nagel / Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 3.0.

Don’t plate up a meal that can’t be eaten

I’m as guilty as anyone of trying to pack in as many quotes as possible in my writing.

The APA Style Guidelines say it’s usually better to paraphrase rather than to quote directly², but did I listen? No!

When I studied psychology I found it almost impossible to follow the very clear assignment instructions not to include any direct quotes at all.

Because I love quotes!

And, truth be told, I love quote salad, it’s delicious.

But even I have to admit it can get pretty indigestible really quickly.

Years ago, when we lived in the West of Scotland we enjoyed the Calabrian chili pasta served by our local Italian restaurant, and as we began making it at home, we grew accustomed to the tremendously hot chilies we were using. Then one evening we served our favourite dish to some unsuspecting visitors. Too late we realised our mistake. They were completely unused to this kind of heat. I remember watching in dismay as they sat quietly but in obvious distress, as though expecting smoke and flame to erupt from the top of their heads like a volcano. We were so apologetic, but it was too late.

Zitatsalat is a strong dish. So by all means, offer your guests some quotes.

Just not too many.

Very few, even.

So for now, here are as few quotes as I can manage:

Christian Tietze: You need to stop relying on a source and have faith in your own thoughts.
Bob Doto: Your zettelkasten should be made up of your ideas about the author’s ideas.
Andy Matuschak: Collecting material feels more useful than it usually is.
and a reference, just because I can’t help myself: Chametzky, Barry. 2023. “Writing Memos: A Vital Classic Grounded Theory Task”. European Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 3 (1):39-43. https://doi.org/10.24018/ejsocial.2023.3.1.377.

DuMont Buchverlag, Köln 2002. ↩︎
see what I just did there? ↩︎

Work as if writing is the only thing that matters

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:24:35 +1100

“Work as if writing is the only thing that matters. Having a clear, tangible purpose when you consume information completely changes the way you engage with it. You’ll be more focused, more curious, more rigorous, and more demanding. You won’t waste time writing down every detail, trying to make a perfect record of everything that was said. Instead, you’ll try to learn the basics as efficiently as possible so you can get to the point where open questions arise, as these are the only questions worth writing about. Almost every aspect of your life will change when you live as if you are working toward publication. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to present your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately, thinking several steps beyond what you’re reading to consider its implications and potential.”

Tiago Forte’s summary of How to Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens

The card index system is ‘a thing alive’ - or is it?

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 23:14:32 +1100

Niklas Luhmann, the famed sociologist of Bielefeld, Germany, wrote of how he saw his voluminous working notes (his ‘Zettelkasten’) as a kind of conversation partner, which surprised him from time to time. But he wasn’t the first to suggest that a person’s notes might be in some sense alive.

At the end of the Nineteenth century there was a massive explosion of technological change which affected almost every aspect of society. People marveled at new invention after new invention and there was a tendency to see mechanical and especially electrical advances as somehow endowed with life. The phonograph, for example, was held to be alive and print adverts even claimed it had a soul.

Huge industrial transformation led to fundamental changes in business administration. Yet again, information threatened to overwhelm with its sheer quantity. The index card system was adapted for new circumstances, and it too was seen as somehow alive. Manuals, sometimes sponsored by office furniture manufacturers, explained how to operate this new system.

One such manual, Julius Kaiser’s The Card System at the Office (1908) emphasised the central role the humble index card now took:

“The set of cards can fairly be regarded as the basis of the entire system, hence it is properly called the card system.” (para 59 Definition)

Another example of these ‘card system’ manuals is R.B. Byles’s The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts (1911).

This short volume begins memorably:

”Roughly speaking, the world is divided into two classes : those who use the Card Index System and those who do not.” (p.v)

The first chapter introduces the metaphor of the card system as a living entity:

“an alphabetic file is a dead, inanimate thing, giving forth only such information as it is compelled… A file based on the card index system is, on the other hand, a satisfactory and economical system of dealing with every sort of material, and is moreover a thing alive, ready at all times to place at the disposal of those who consult it all that information which in the past was regarded as the special attribute of the man [sic] of long experience.” (p.8)

As we approach the second quarter of the Twenty-first Century, the tendency to believe our new technology is somehow alive re-appears. Large language models talk back to us with eery proficiency. But just as the phonograph and the card index obviously aren’t alive, we’ll look back on this period and recognise quite clearly that our latest AI tools aren’t actually alive either. Metaphors can be useful, provided we don’t forget that they’re just figures of speech.

This being the case, it’s time to celebrate those who are really living: us, the people who animate the otherwise inanimate technologies of every era.

Three ways my notes might be ‘alive’

Nevertheless, there are at least three directions in which it might still be reasonable to think of your collection of notes as being alive.

The first direction is towards the idea of the ‘extended mind’, which I wrote about in How to make the most of surprising yourself.

You could view your collection of linked notes as part of your extended mind, which your brain creates constantly by co-opting its wider environment into its own processing activity. Brain and environment together create mind. On this account I might view ‘aliveness’ as a quality that arises at the intersection of myself and my world, and therefore out of the interaction between myself and my notes.

In her book, The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul says:

“We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle — but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.”

The second way of thinking about this is a kind of formalisation of the idea that aliveness happens between people and their world. One such formalisation is known as Actor Network Theory. This concept claims that everything that exists, happens in complex networks of relationships.

Perhaps these early encounters with ‘living’ technology that I described earlier were grasping after a perception only later addressed systematically by intellectual developments such as Actor Network Theory, which proposes that non-human entities do have agency in the ‘parliament of things’.

Bruno Latour, the sociologist most strongly associated with ANT, said he’d have preferred to call it ‘actant-rhizome ontology’ if that had sounded better (sorry Bruno, it really didn’t). I wrote a little about this when I claimed a network of notes is a rhizome not a tree.

The third way of thinking of my notes as being alive in some sense relates to Lynne Kelly’s work on memory. I referred to this in The mastery of knowledge is an illusion. My thinking here was strongly influenced by the wonderful book Kelly co-wrote with Margo Neale: Songlines: the power and the promise.

Non-literate, oral cultures live in an enchanted world, not necessarily in a magical sense, but in the sense that the whole environment ‘speaks’, as part of a wider extended mind. Geographical features are not merely ‘dead matter’. They’re alive to tell stories which recount histories and genealogies, to give blessings and warnings. Plants and animals are similarly endowed with a depth of meaning. This is the world that literate culture has exiled itself from, but could perhaps regain.

So, are my notes ‘a thing alive’? Well, not exactly - but then not exactly not, either. Perhaps in time this is how we’ll come to see AI too, as existing in a kind of liminal space somewhere between living and non-living.

Whatever the conclusion, I’ve found this a useful question to think with.

References

Byles, R. B., 1911. The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons) view online.

Kaiser, Julius, 1908. The Card System at the Office (London: Vacher and Sons) view online

Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, 2020. Songlines: The Power and Promise. Thames and Hudson.

Annie Murphy Paul, 2021. The Extended Mind. The power of thinking outside the brain. HarperCollins.

Sayes, Edwin, 2014. “Actor–Network Theory and methodology: Just what does it mean to say that nonhumans have agency?.” Social studies of science 44, no. 1:134-149.

How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 23:24:53 +1100

An organized collection of notes (a Zettelkasten) can help you make sense of your existing knowledge, and then make better use of it. Make your notes personal and make them relevant. Resist the urge to make them exhaustive.

Don’t build a magnificent but useless encyclopaedia
Document your journey through the deep forest
Avoid inert ideas
Converse about what really matters to you
Imagine, then build, new knowledge products
Where (and how) you go is more important than where you start from
An example

Don’t build a magnificent but useless encyclopaedia

I guess we all start from our existing knowledge, since none of us is a blank slate. You could just start with what most matters to you right now, and work from there. That’s because it’s more useful and feasible for your system of notes to be personally relevant than to be generally encyclopaedic.

There’s a big difference between an encyclopaedia and a human brain.

The encyclopaedia has the information but no effective way of showing what actually matters at the moment.
The brain is the opposite: it knows what matters right now but can’t remember all the details.

Document your journey through the deep forest

The Zettelkasten is a useful middle way between these two extremes. It’s a tool to help you make and maintain personally useful trails through the deep forest of accumulated knowledge. Because these trails are useful to you, the expert, they are very likely to be helpful to someone coming up behind you.

On this basis I think there’s no point in trying to recreate, say, ‘20 years of project experience’ in a Zettelkasten. That would be like building your own Wikipedia. It would be a beautiful construction but how would you use it, and would you really be creating knowledge you couldn’t find elsewhere? (Maybe this really is what you’d like, though, I don’t know).

Avoid inert ideas

On Reddit u/cratermoon pointed me to Alfred North Whitehead’s classic essay about “inert ideas” PDF. According to the philosopher and educationalist, there is a great difference between what you remember and can repeat, and what you can actually apply.

“ ‘inert ideas’ – that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.”

The Zettelkasten method is at the very least a means of throwing your ideas into fresh combinations, to see what’s useful and what’s merely received knowledge.

Converse about what really matters to you

What the Zettelkasten excels at is systematising information that matters to you right now and that might matter in the future for a specific purpose. You have a bright idea in the present moment but your brain forgets it. Take a note, link it, and your Zettelkasten will resurface it for you. Your brain can probably remember this idea, given the right prompts, but the Zettelkasten is useful because it remembers the idea slight differently from how you do. Each idea in the Zettelkasten leads from and to different, and sometimes surprising places. In this sense your Zettelkasten is not so much a tool for remembering as a creative conversation partner about shared memories.

Imagine, then build, new knowledge products

Having said that, the Zettelkasten is also best when it’s aimed at the creation of products beyond itself. In other words, it’s primarily a working tool for creating new knowledge products. It’s really not just a reference catalogue or archive.

You might intend to create a book, or article series, or a course on project management, say, distilling your experience and passing it forwards. With that in mind, the Zettelkasten really is useful.

Where (and how) you go is more important than where you start from

The first note: the single most important thing. Here’s an example: “20 years of Project Management experience in two paragraphs”. Everything then follows as an extended commentary on that single idea. However, because it’s all connected, you don’t even need to start with the most important idea. You can just start with the first idea you think of right now. Where does it lead? The Zettelkasten process will take you there.

This unfolding process is the opposite of the standard practice. In the case of 20 years of PM experience the standard practice might be to take a conventional set of PM categories as your table of contents and then to write the same thing everyone else already wrote. The Zettelkasten method is specifically to deny the established categories and to allow the process to uncover new, better ones - new and unique trails through the forest of knowledge.

An example

This, for example, is how Niklas Luhmann worked. He was an experienced senior public administrator, with years of professional work behind him, before he became an academic, a professor of sociology at Bielefeld University. He used his Zettelkasten to break free of the established ways of understanding organisations, and to create an innovative theory of social systems, the subject of his many publications. Though he died in 1998, he was so prolific that there’s a backlog of books he authored. Two new volumes were published in 2021 ¹ and a collection of his lectures in 2022! The single idea that powered his Zettelkasten was: “Theory of society; duration: 30 years; costs: none.”

This article is adapted from a comment I originally posted on Reddit. There’s plenty more on this subject at Atomic Notes

And if you don’t want to miss any of it, sign up to the weekly email digest:

Die Grenzen der Verwaltung (you can read a German article about it), and Differenz – Kopplung – Reflexion. Beiträge zur Gesellschaftstheorie ↩︎

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 14:23:54 +1100

💬"At what point does something become part of your mind, instead of just a convenient note taking device?"

A question discussed with philosopher David Chalmers, on the Philosophy Bites podcast.

🎙️Technophilosophy and the extended mind

So much of this depends on what ‘the mind’ means. Meanwhile, we do seamlessly interact with our note-making tools, to achieve more than we could without them.

Give it, give it all, give it now

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 20:05:16 +1100

Annie Dillard on the writing life 💬

See also:

Image made with the Shift Happens typewriter

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 08:21:33 +1100

Mark Luetke shows how he uses a Zettelkasten for creative work (‘zines!)

“The goal here is to create an apophenic mindset - one where the mind becomes open to the random connections between objects and ideas. Those connections are the spark we’re after. That spark is inspiration.”

dophs.substack.com/p/how-its…

Atomic notes - all in one place

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:25:00 +1100

From today there’s a new category in the navigation bar of Writing Slowly.

‘Atomic Notes’ now shows all posts about making notes.

How to make effective notes is a long-standing obsession of mine, but this new category was inspired by Bob Doto, who has his own fantastic resource page: All things Zettelkasten.

The Atomic Notes category is now highlighted on the site navigation bar.

And if you’d like to follow along with your favourite feed reader,there’s also a dedicated RSS feed (in addition to the more general whole-site feed).¹

But if there’s a particular key-word you’re looking for here at Writing Slowly, you can use the built-in search.

And if you prefer completely random discovery, the site’s lucky dip feature has you covered.

Connect with me on micro.blog or on Mastodon. And on Reddit, I’m - you guessed it - @atomicnotes.

If you’re not sure what website feeds are, see IndieWeb: feed reader and how to use RSS feeds. ↩︎

How to overcome Fetzenwissen: the illusion of integrated thought

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 13:00:00 +1100

It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge.

One potential problem associated with making notes according to the Zettelkasten approach is Verknüpfungszwang: the compulsion to find connections. It may be true philosophically that everything’s connected, but in the end what matters is useful or meaningful connections. With your notes, then, you need to make worthwhile, not indiscriminate links.

Another potential problem is Fetzenwissen: fragmentary knowledge, along with the illusion that disjointed fragments can produce integrated thought.

Almost by definition, notes are brief, and I’m an enthusiast of making short, modular, atomic notes. Yes, this results in knowledge presented in fragments. And in their raw form these fragmentary notes are quite different from the kind of coherent prose and well-developed arguments readers usually expect. You can’t just jam together a set of notes and expect them to make an instant essay. So is this fragmentary knowledge really a problem for note-making? If so, how can determined note-makers overcome it?

Does the index box distort the facts?
Can you create coherent writing just from a pile of notes?
Perhaps you should keep your notes private
Make it flow
To create coherent writing, make coherent notes

Does the index box distort the facts?

Near the start of the Twentieth Century Karl Kraus, the Austrian¹ writer and editor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch), opposed the use of the Zettelkasten (English:index box) because he believed it produced inadequate thought, memory and writing.

He particularly disliked the way the technique created what he saw as the illusion of integrated thought out of nothing more than disjointed fragments.

Kraus was well-known for his acerbic aphorisms, and he had one specially for Zettelkasten users:

“Anyone who writes in order to display education must have memory; and then he is merely an ass. If he also uses the scientific disciplines or the card index (Zettelkasten), he is also a fraud” (Die Fackel, Heft 279-80 (1909)).

Kraus ridiculed his literary and political enemy Maximilian Harden, a rival journalist who was the editor of Die Zukunft (“The Future”), He claimed Harden either owned a Zettelkasten or just had a mind built like one. Either or both of these, Kraus claimed, had ruined Harden’s writing style. If Hardin did use a Zettelkasten, said Kraus, it really showed. And if he didn’t use one, then he must have internalised the constraints of the Zettelkasten. Either way, according to Kraus, the result was poor writing.

More generally, and rather snobbishly, Kraus lamented the kind of memory possessed by the “day clerk”, which he held to be a mish-mash of “names and sayings one has heard, of mis-heard judgments and badly-read reports, of concepts and histories without context, of facts seen distortedly, of fifty fashionable expressions, and of the additional feature of one’s own fragmentary knowledge (Fetzenwissen)” (Die Fackel, Heft 230-31 (July 15, 1907)).

To be sure, Kraus was making at least half a fair point. Such connectivity is indeed an illusion, in the sense that it is fabricated. But as with all illusions, the trick is to do it seamlessly well. From fragments you can build a greater whole, if you do it carefully enough. Knowledge is necessarily fragmentary, in the sense that everything big is made of smaller parts. But that is no reason to present it in a clumsy manner. Just because you start with fragments, that doesn’t mean you should end there.

Can you create coherent writing just from a pile of notes?

Despite the sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s apparent canonization as the patron saint of the Zettelkasten, I’m not convinced his writing always achieved the kind of coherence that Karl Kraus would have appreciated. Here is the writer Robert Minto, lamenting his own use of the Zettelkasten approach, which he found let him down when it came to actually writing a doctoral thesis. He turned to Luhmann’s writing to review how the master had done it:

“I decided to read one of Luhmann’s books to see what a zettelkasten-generated text ought to look like. To my horror, it turned out to be a chaotic mess that would never have passed muster under my own dissertation director. It read, in my opinion, like something written by a sentient library catalog, full of disordered and tangential insights, loosely related to one another — very interesting, but hardly a model for my own academic work.” – Robert Minto , Rank and File — Real Life

This reader is far from alone in finding Luhmann’s prose style off-putting. In a section entitled “Why he wrote such bad books”, a scholar of Luhmann’s work wrote that Luhmann’s texts were:

“extremely dry, unnecessarily convoluted, poorly structured, highly repetitive, overly long, and aesthetically unpleasing” – Moeller,The Radical Luhmann, 2012, p. 10.

Another example of the kind of digressive writing style of which Karl Kraus might have disapproved is that of the philosopher and historian Hans Blumenberg. According to one Blumenberg scholar:

“His writings can be disorienting in their digressiveness, at times seemingly impelled only by the desire to exhaustively transmit his enormously wide reading. The fragmented and anecdotal nature of some of his later books, composed of sometimes tenuous thematic groupings of short pieces (often originally published in the feuilleton pages of newspapers such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) seems fitting for a thinker who is said to have prepared for writing by collecting quotations on index cards. These cards were then worked through one by one and marked as ‘used’ when they had been integrated into the finished text.” – Plagne, 2017:9. See also Nicholls, 2015.²

Perhaps you should keep your notes private

The opposite extreme of this kind of writing-as-bricolage is that of the German philosopher G.W.F Hegel, who went to great lengths to hide the sources from which he assembled his own work. Hegel’s approach to writing is an excellent example of what might be termed the distinction between frontstage and backstage in knowledge work. This is a concept developed by the sociologist Erving Goffmann, but its quite familiar. In the theatre, the audience only sees part of what the actors and stage crew are up to. In the restaurant too, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes that the diners never see. For many of us, the background work is often quite different from the finished work we show to the world. Unlike Luhmann and Blumenberg, whose often clumsy final prose style was apparently conditioned by the process of its assemblage, Hegel drafted and edited his work in such a way as to deliberately obscure his production methods. His own voluminous Zettelkasten, on which he utterly depended, was kept strictly backstage. He rarely even cited his sources.

I am arguing that this practice of editing fragments to make them appear seamlessly part of whole paragraphs, sections and chapters, is precisely what’s required of those who choose to work using initially fragmentary methods. It could be argued that a sophisticated thinker such as Niklas Luhmann probably had good reasons for his opaque prose style, quite other than literary ineptitude. Indeed, in The Radical Luhmann, Moeller suggests three such reasons; and Luhmann himself wrote a quite sceptical conference paper on whether academics should try to make themselves understood! However, for most writers and surely most readers, coherence remains a key literary virtue.

Make it flow

Hegel’s rigorous concealment of sources prompted Friedrich Kittler to suggest: “Hegel’s absolute Spirit is a hidden index box” “Hegels absoluter Geist ist ein versteckter Zettelkasten." – Friedrich Kittler, quoted in Krajewski, Kommunikation mit Papiermaschinen

To my mind Kittler’s criticism of Hegel makes a good, if rather arch joke, but it isn’t much of a criticism of Hegel’s writing style. Indeed, for completed writing to seem to the reader to be coherent, the index box should be hidden. This is the well-known skill of editing your writing to make it flow, and it’s hardly too much for readers to expect this of a writer.

True, there are a few writers who seem to have been more at home in their notes than in the finished work. Walter Benjamin, author of the unfinished Arcades Project was perhaps one of them. But fragmentary writing is rarely so influential as Benjamin’s.

My own aspiration is to produce coherent writing, but a glimpse backstage would reveal that this very article is cobbled together from four separate fragments, which I added directly to the whole by means of Transclusion. My conclusion from this little exercise is that you can create coherent writing just from a pile of notes. In fact, I’d go further and claim that this is a very helpful way of writing.

To create coherent writing, make coherent notes

Although final editing is always required, it may also be possible to craft the individual notes themselves in such a way that they really do lend themselves to seamless incorporation into a larger work. If you write disjointed, incoherent notes, you’re going to find it hard to use them to write a strong piece of finished writing. But conversely, if you write clear, concise and modular notes, densely linked, you’ll find it much easier to complete readable and persuasive work. Having said that, I would never censor myself by writing nothing, just because my idea isn’t concise enough. Writing itself is thinking, and there’s always a second draft!

Obviously, this is a skill that I’m still learning. The learning never ends. Writing useful notes is a skill you can always get better at. And I’m convinced this goal, of producing seamless writing from fragmentary origins, may well be achievable. It’s already quite enjoyable and that’s not a terrible thing.

Aby Warburg and the search for interconnection

More on the Zettelkasten approach to writing notes

References

Krajewski, Markus. Kommunikation mit Papiermaschinen. Über Niklas Luhmanns Zettelkasten, in Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Wladimir Velminski (Editors) Maschinentheorien/Theoriemaschinen. Bern: Peter Lang. p.283-305

Kraus, Karl, Die Fackel. An online facsimile of Kraus’s journal, Die Fackel, can be found at AAC Fackel

Kuhn, Manfred. Critique of Zettelkästen Taking Note Now. 2007.

Moeller, Hans-Georg. 2012. The Radical Luhmann. New York: Columbia University Press.

Nicholls, Angus. Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (New York: Routledge, 2015), 8.

Partington, Gill. “Friedrich Kittler’s” Aufschreibsystem”." Science Fiction Studies (2006): 53-67. PDF

Plagne, Francis Dominique 2017. “Hans Blumenberg’s anthropology of instrumental reason: culture, modernity, and self-preservation.” Thesis: School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne.

An earlier version of this article mistakenly said he was German. ↩︎
An earlier version got these references the wrong way round. ↩︎

From fragments you can build a greater whole

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 23:00:00 +1100

Everything large and significant began as small and insignificant

This is my working philosophy of creativity and I’m trying to follow it through as best I can. Starting with simple parts is how you go about constructing complex systems.

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system”. — John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, p. 71.

Bits and pieces put together to create a semblance of a whole, by Lawrence Weiner

Begin with fragments
From smaller parts build a greater whole
Join your work together
Do it seamlessly well

Begin with fragments

In October 1837 the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson prompted the twenty-year-old Henry David Thoreau to start writing a journal. Thoreau took this advice very seriously. He finished up with 14 notebooks, 7,000 pages, and 2 million words. Small fragments can add up to an awful lot. From these bits and pieces he constructed pretty much all of his completed works. What began as jottings ended up as mature reflections.

He claimed his disconnected thoughts provoked others, so that “thought begat thought”. Thoreau wrote in his journal:

“To set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me – and at least I may make wholes of parts.” - Thoreau, Henry David. 2009. The Journal, 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. New York: New York Review Books.

The nest-eggs are what you start off with, without worrying how many you will finish with or what they might later hatch into.

From smaller parts build a greater whole

In a sense, the greater whole is an illusion. Really it’s nothing other than a collection of smaller pieces, joined together in such a way as to encourage the human tendency to see wholes even before it sees parts. As with the artwork of Lawrence Weiner, it’s all Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole.

These bits and pieces may seem insignificant. Perhaps you really are just another brick in the wall, as Pink Floyd once sang. But without bricks the wall is nothing. That’s pretty much all a wall is. Together the fragments add up to a greater whole, which may well be more than merely a semblance or an illusion. Sometimes the whole really matters. The author David Mitchell concludes his novel, Cloud Atlas with this reflection:

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

A wall or an ocean is a large or even enormous reality, and without its many small components it would be nothing.

Join your work together

Image Source: TheJoinery_jp

To make a complete work you need to join the parts together with great care. Think of the work of the skilled joiner, who meticulously and ingeniously connects pieces of timber to make a sturdy and beautiful product - whether it be a piece of furniture or an architectural element such as a staircase or a ceiling vault.

Such an effect cannot be created without skill and effort. You can’t just nail two planks of wood together and hope for the best. In the same way you can’t place your notes side-by-side and expect to read a finished piece of writing.

To make your writing coherent you need to become a joiner.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this part of the writing process in his popular book on Taking Smart Notes. Sadly, his advice in this important area remains quite limited.

“Turn your notes into a rough draft. Don’t simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time. Detect holes in your argument, fill them or change your argument.” – 📚Ahrens, Sönke. 2017. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace.

For those who can already write well, the point may be obvious, but for those of us for whom well-made prose doesn’t come easily, it needs to be stressed: the connecting together of thoughts and ideas is almost as important as the thoughts and ideas themselves. The writing must flow.

It is well worth reflecting on Thoreau’s writing practice.

“The thoughtfulness and quality of his journal writings enabled him to reuse entire passages from it in his lectures and published writings. In his early years, Thoreau would literally cut out pages or excerpts from the journal and paste them onto another page as he created his essays.” – Thoreau’s Writing - The Walden Woods Project

But he didn’t just cut and paste. His writing progressed through drafting and re-drafting, from the original raw field notes, to the journal, to his lectures, to essays, and from there to published books. Each of these shifts fine-tuned his writing until ultimately he had a very well-crafted outcome.

So even though Thoreau cut and pasted snippets of his work, joining small pieces together to make finished pieces of writing, this was very far from a lazy process. Walden, for example, was published after seven drafts, which took the author nine years to complete. I see Thoreau’s justly celebrated work as a prime example of the value of writing slowly.

Do it seamlessly well

If, like Thoreau, you put the bits and pieces together well enough, the readers won’t see the joins.

Or even better, as with the brick courses of the wall on which Weiner’s artwork is mounted, viewers do see the joins but this doesn’t detract in any way from the experience of the whole. You just need to avoid displaying what the German writer and editor Karl Kraus called fragmentary knowledge (Fetzenwissen) - the curse of the Zettelkasten, or card index.

It may be simple, but it’s not easy.

See also:

How to decide what to include in your notes

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 15:53:43 +1100

Before the days of computers, people used to collect all sorts of useful information in a commonplace book.

The ancient idea of commonplaces was that you’d have a set of subjects you were interested in. These were the loci - the places - where you’d put your findings. They were called loci communis - common places, in Latin, because it was assumed everyone knew what the right list of subjects was.

But in practice, everyone had their own set of categories and no one really agreed. It was personal.

Since the digital revolution, things have become trickier still. There’s no real storage limit so you could in principle make notes about everything you encounter. But no matter what software you use, your time on this earth is limited, so you need to narrow the field down somehow¹.

But how, exactly?

You might consider just letting rip and collecting everything that interests you, as though you’re literally collecting everything.

Lion Kimbro tried to make a map of every thought he had.

As time passes, you’ll notice that you haven’t actually collected everything because that’s completely impossible. Even Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor, wasn’t interested in absolutely everything, although he tried hard to be. If you do a bit of a stock-take of your own notes, you’ll see that, really, you gravitate towards only a few subjects.

These are your very own ‘commonplaces’.

From then on you have two choices.

If you’ve enjoyed it so far, you can just keep doing what you’ve been doing, collecting all the things. Why not?
But if you like, you could start doing it more deliberately. For example, at the start of a new year, you could say to yourself: In 2023 I seem to have been interested in a,b, and c. Now in 2024 I want to explore more about b, drop a, and learn about d and e.

You could create an index, with a set of keywords, and add page number references to show what subject each entry is about, and how they relate. Or not. Of course, it’s your collection of notes and you can do whatever pleases you. That’s the point.

Bower birds collect everything, but with one crucial principle.

Where I live we have satin bower birds.

The male creates a bower out of twigs and strews the ground with the beautiful things he’s found. Apparently this impresses the females. The bower can contain practically anything, and it really is beautiful. Clothes pegs, pieces of broken pottery, plastic fragments, bread bag ties, lilli pilli fruit, Lego, electrical wiring, string - even drinking straws, as in the photo above. The male bower bird really does collect everything. But what every human notices immediately is that every single item, however unique, is blue.

I enjoy collecting stuff in my Zettelkasten, my collection of notes, but like the bower bird I have a simple filter. I always try to write: “this interests me because…” and if there’s nothing to say, there’s no point in collecting the item. It’s just not blue enough.

See also:

How to be interested in everything
Don’t you need to start with categories?
It’s tempting to place your notes in fixed categories
To build something big start with small fragments
Thoughts are nest-eggs: Thoreau on writing
This article is adapted from a comment on Reddit

Images:
Sacha Chua Book Summary CC-by-4.0.
Peter Ostergaard, Flickr, CC NC-by 2.0 Deed

There are exceptions. A few people have tried to video their whole lives. And at least one person, Lion Kimbro, has tried to write down all their thoughts. But its not sustainable. ↩︎

Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 16:43:48 +1100

What does it mean to write notes ‘from the bottom up’, instead of ‘from the top down’?

It’s one of the biggest questions people have about getting started with making notes the Zettelkasten way. Don’t you need to start with categories? If not, how will you ever know where to look for stuff? Won’t it all end up in chaos?

Bob Doto answers this question very helpfully, with some clear examples, in What do we mean when we say bottom up?. I especially like this claim:

“The structure of the archive is emergent, building up from the ideas that have been incorporated. It is an anarchic distribution allowing ideas to retain their polysemantic qualities, making them highly connective.”

Which way is up?
Try seeing the trees and the forest too
Hierarchy, heterarchy, homoarchy… am I just making these words up?
Get linking to get thinking
The key questions
What if I really just want a fixed structure?

Which way is up?

My own preferred Zettelkasten metaphor is the rhizome, the mass of rooty material with no obvious centre or trunk and no definite top or bottom. Imagine a fungus as it spreads underground or in a rotten log. There’s no telling where it will pop up next.

It’s quite difficult to think with this image, though, because there’s plenty of conditioning to say everything around us is hierarchical, with a clear upside and downside. Families, schools, businesses, governments, nationalities, genders, races, footwear, even accents. Everyone always wants to know who’s up and who’s down. It’s nuts! As I write, the media is full of news about the Oscars - who’s been nominated, and why, and why not. The dominant organising image all around me isn’t the rhizome at all, it’s the tree.

Try seeing the trees and the forest too

But if you think about it for a moment it’s obvious there isn’t just one tree, one hierarchy with a single top tier. No, there are many. To stick with my example here, China and India have their own ‘versions’ of the Oscars with completely different winners and losers, and so does every country that makes movies (even Wales, population 3 million). Maybe I believe the Oscars are the most important movie prize-giving event of the year, but clearly not everyone does. You can ignore all the others if you like, but a tree only really makes sense in relation to the forest it’s an integral part of.

Hierarchy, heterarchy, homoarchy… am I just making these words up?

Real life is more like a forest than a single tree. It’s structured around multiple overlapping, competing hierarchical (as well as non-hierarchical) systems. Even those who have completely bought into the idea of hierarchy can acknowledge this much.

So we live in a heterarchical world, in which any item could potentially be part of more than one organising structure. The opposite of this isn’t hierarchy, as it happens, it’s homoarchy. That’s a little-used word to describe a situation where all the elements are fixed in their location within a fixed organisational structure.

The principle of organization a society embodies depends on the way its institutions are arranged with respect to one another. Two basic principles can be distinguished: heterarchy—the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or can be ranked in different ways (as coined by Crumley), and its opposite, homoarchy,—a condition in society in which relationships in most contexts are ordered mainly according to one principal hierarchical relationship. Homoarchy and heterarchy represent the most universal “ideal” (generalized) principles and basic trajectories of socio-cultural organization. - Bondarenko, 2020.

The Zettelkasten enables us to visualise and manipulate the heterarchical reality we live in, by creating a variety of provisional structures. You want a tree? You want top down? Sure, go ahead, but you can also have a non-hierarchical bottom-up network at the same time and even using the same notes if you like. Networks absorb hierarchies. They subvert them without destroying them. How so? The secret is simply: links.

Get linking to get thinking

Bi-directional links, especially, subvert the homoarchy, because they make it harder to say for sure what comes first. If the second note links back to the first note, you could quite easily see the second note as coming first, if you really want to, especially if you actually began from the second note.

Every Page is Page One summed up a web design philosophy which pointed out that you can’t control where your readers arrive. Sure, you can construct a ‘landing page’, but that doesn’t mean they won’t enter your web site from another direction. If every page is page one, then every page also needs some kind of index, or table of contents, or at least some way into the rest of the material. This is quite normal on the Web, and I regard it as equally normal in my collection of notes.

I find it helpful to think of each note as being located both top-down and bottom-up at the same time. In Indra’s Net each point, however lowly, reflects every other point, however exulted - but that’s another story.

The key questions

Having written a note, I ask “what’s a part of this?” That’s the top-down question. What are the sub-components of this idea? Then I ask “what’s this a part of?” That’s the bottom-up question. What bigger concept is this note just a part of? But there are other, more rhizomatic questions. “What is this similar to or different from?” “What compliments or competes with this?” and so on.

My mantra is that of historian (and Zettelkasten supremo) Hans Blumenberg:

“Every note a thought that immediately makes sense as a thought, every thought a little theory.” “Jeder Zettel ein Gedanke, der sofort als nachdenkenswert einleuchtet, jeder Gedanke eine kleine Theorie.” (Ragutt and Zumhof 2016, 5)

Image: Hans Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten

In other words, each of my notes is as unitary, modular and clear as I can make it, so I can construct with it larger concepts (every note is a single thought).

At the same time, each note is highly generative. Each contains the seeds of a whole new set of notes, if I choose to take that route (each thought is a little theory).

This way, every note, at least implicitly, is at the top of a hierarchy yet to be dived into, and equally, at the bottom of a hierarchy yet to be climbed.

And if I want to subvert the structure completely, all I need to do is to make a different kind of link, just because I can.

What if I really just want a fixed structure?

It’s tempting to imagine that there really is a ‘top’ note, or a ‘top’ idea that all the other notes relate to. In some sense that might be true. For example, Niklas Luhmann’s celebrated Zettelkasten revolved entirely around his notes on “a theory of society, duration: 30 years, costs: none” (Luhmann 1997:11; quoted in Albert, 2016). But even if you do decide to write a note containing your lifetime’s single focus, within your collection of notes, it’s still just another note.

When you create a product - a book, an article, a blog post, a video etc. - you do fix the structure. A book has a clear table of contents. An academic article usually has a rigorous structure determined by the particular discipline or even the particular journal requirements. With these kinds of products a free-form structure is rare. So yes, you can and will have a fixed structure, when you eventually produce something creative from all of your note-making. But until then, you’ll benefit from letting the structure of your notes emerge and change as your thought progresses.

— Now read:

—

References

Albert, Mathias. “Luhmann and Systems Theory.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. 5 Aug. 2016; Accessed 29 Jan. 2024. oxfordre.com/politics/…

Bondarenko, D.M. (2020). Social Institutions and Basic Principles of Societal Organization. In: Bondarenko, D.M., Kowalewski, S.A., Small, D.B. (eds) The Evolution of Social Institutions. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. doi.org/10.1007/9…

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004/1980). Rhizome. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, pp. 3-28.

Helbig, Daniela K. “Life without Toothache: Hans Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten and History of Science as Theoretical Attitude.” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 (2019): 91-112. doi.org/10.1353/j…

Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (2 vols.). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Published in translation as Theory of society (2 vols.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012–2013.

Ragutt, Frank, and Tim Zumhof, eds. 2016. Hans Blumenberg: Pädagogische Lektüren. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

Ross Ashby's other card index

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 13:27:42 +1100

During the Twentieth Century many thinkers used index cards to help them both think and write.

British cyberneticist Ross Ashby kept his notes in 25 journals (a total of 7,189 pages) for which he devised an extensive card index of more than 1,600 cards.

At first it looks as though Ashby used these notebooks to aid the development of his thought, and the card index merely catalogued the contents. But it turns out he used his card index not only to catalogue but also to develop the ideas for a book he was writing.

In a journal entry of 20 October 1943 he explained his decision to switch from an alphabetical key-word index to ‘an index depending on meaning’.

He describes his method as follows:

“20 Oct ‘43 - Having seen how well the index of p.1448 works, & how well everything drops into its natural place, I am no longer keeping the card index which I have kept almost since the beginning. The index was most useful in the days when I was just amassing scraps & when nothing fitted or joined on to anything else; but now that all the points form a closely knit & jointed structure, an index depending on meaning is more natural than one depending on the alphabet. So I have changed to a (card) index with the points of p.1448 in order. Thus it can grow, & be rearranged, on the basis of meaning. Summary: Reasons for changing the form of the index.” - Ross Ashby, Journal, Vol. 7

What was he up to? Thanks to Ashby’s meticulous note-taking, and the fact that it has all been saved and digitized, you can trace his working methods. It also helps that his handwriting is very clear!

First Ashby made almost random notes in his notebooks, which he indexed alphabetically by key-word, using a card index. To aid referencing, he gave the notebooks a continuous page numbering across all 25 volumes.
Next, in April 1943 and based on his notes, he created an outline for a book manuscript p.1234, then revised it six months later, on October 4th p.1447.
Satisfied with the revised outline p.1497, he created a completely new card index (the ‘Other’ index), arranged by subject, based on the outline headings, rather than key-words. This new index is what he describes in his note of October 20th 1943, which is reproduced above.
He deliberately kept this second index flexible, so that his notes could be re-arranged for as long as possible prior to the drafting of the actual manuscript.

This workflow is quite different from that of sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who unlike Ashby, didn’t use notebooks to any great extent. In fact it highlights a particularly striking aspect of Luhmann’s approach: for Luhmann the card index is its own contents; they are one and the same. Put another way, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten is largely self-indexing.

Ashby didn’t do this. Instead he followed the more standard card index system, elaborated, for example, by R.B. Byles, in 1911. In this system, originally designed for business, all documents are filed away, typically in order of receipt or creation, and then accessed by means of a separate card index, which provides the key to the entire collection. Ashby’s innovation was to adapt the card index system to refer to key-words in his notebooks, referenced by page number. Luhmann, certainly, also used key-words. His first Zettelkasten had “a keyword index with roughly 1,250 entries”, while his second, larger Zettelkasten had “a keyword index with 3,200 entries, as well as a short (and incomplete) index of persons containing 300 names” (Schmidt, 2016: 292).

However, due to Luhmann’s meticulous cross-referencing of individual cards, the key-word index isn’t strictly essential to connect the ideas in the Zettelkasten in a meaningful way; Luhmann’s cards link directly to other cards.

Fast-forward two generations and it seems that in the Internet age it is Luhmann’s method that has won out. The online version of Ross Ashby’s journal includes both the notebooks and the index as a single hyperlinked body of work. This represents a tremendous effort on the part of those who have painstakingly digitized the collection. Today, like Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, Ashby’s notebooks, at least in their Web-based incarnation, are finally self-indexing.

And there’s another sense in which Luhmann’s method won out. While Luhmann published scores of books, Ashby published plenty of academic articles, but only two full-length books. And neither of these books, as far as is evident, bear much relation to the manuscript outlines in his ‘other’ index. We can only speculate on whether Ashby might have produced more books had he used a system more like Luhmann’s.

Yet despite their differences, Ashby’s approach in creating his ‘other’ index is very consistent with Luhmann’s concern to keep the order of notes as flexible as possible for as long as possible.

ashby.info/journal/i…

References

The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive

Jill Ashby (2009) W. Ross Ashby: a biographical essay, International Journal of General Systems, 38:2, 103-110, DOI: 10.1080/03081070802643402 (This is the source of the photo, above, of Ashby at his desk).

Byles, R.B. 1911. The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts. London, Sir I. Pitman & Sons, Ltd.

F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn and V. Turchin (editors): Principia Cybernetica Web (Principia Cybernetica, Brussels), URL: cleamc11.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK….

Schmidt, J. (2016). Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine. pdfs.semanticscholar.org/88f8/fa9d…)

*Read more *:

The Hashtags of a cyberneticist

Even the index is just another note

To illustrate that claim, here’s a dynamic index of my Zettelkasten articles

Even the index is just another note

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 17:07:36 +1100

It’s tempting to place your notes in fixed categories

At some point in your note-making journey you’ll notice that quite a few people like to place their notes in fixed categories according to some scheme or other. The ancient method of commonplaces held that knowledge was naturally organised according to loci communis (common places). Ironically, no one from Aristotle onwards could ever agree on what the commonly-agreed categories were. Assigning your notes to categories is consistent with the ‘commonplace’ tradition, but that’s not what the prolific sociologist Niklas Luhmann did with his Zettelkasten, and furthermore it runs exactly counter to Luhmann’s claim in ‘Communicating with Slipboxes’, where he said:

“it is most important that we decide against the systematic ordering in accordance with topics and sub-topics and choose instead a firm fixed place (Stellordnung).”

But there’s no need to despair, there is a way through the impasse! After all, what exactly is a subject or category? The subject or category index itself, it turns out, is nothing other than just another note. Here’s a real-life example:

“i have this note that basically functions as an general index and entry point for my ZK: it has every index card plus a People index and every main card.” - u/Efficient_Earth_8773

When everything’s a note, even the categories are just notes

Why does this matter? If even the index is just a note, then you haven’t constrained yourself with pre-determined categories. Instead, you can have different and possibly contradictory index systems within a single Zettelkasten, and further, a note can belong not only to more than one category, but also to more than one categorization scheme. Luhmann says:

“If there are several possibilities, we can solve the problem as we wish and just record the connection by a link [or reference].”

When even the index is just a note, a reference to a ‘category’ takes no greater (or lesser) priority than any other kind of link. This is liberating. Where a piece of information ‘really’ belongs shouldn’t be determined in advance, but by means of the process itself.

The Dewey Decimal System pigeonholes all knowledge, like cells in a prison.

Some people want an index, like folders in a filing cabinet, or subject shelves in the library. Well they can have it: just write a note with the subjects listed and make them linkable. Some people don’t want this, and they can ignore it. I personally don’t understand why you’d want to set up a subject index that mimics Wikipedia or the Dewey Decimal system, or even the ‘common places’ of old. I’m neither an encyclopedist, a librarian, nor an archivist. What I’m trying to do is to create new work. I want to demonstrate my own irreducible subjectivity by documenting my own unique journey through the great forest of thought. My journey is subjective, because it’s my journey. I’m pioneering a particular route, and laying down breadcrumbs for others to follow should they so choose. It’s unique, not because it’s original but because the small catalogue of items that attract me is wholly original. As film-maker Jim Jarmusch said:

“Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.” (I stole that from Austin Kleon).

But that’s just me (and Luhmann).

Make just enough hierarchy to be useful

Having thought a bit about this I’m inspired now to sketch my own workflow, to see how it… flows. In general, I favour just enough data hierarchy to be viable - which really isn’t very much at all. I’m inspired by Ward Cunningham’s claim that the first wiki was ‘the simplest online database that could possibly work’. Come to think of it, this may be one of the disadvantages of the way the Zettelkasten process is presented: perhaps it comes across as more complex than it really needs to be. As the computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra lamented,

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” - On the nature of Computing Science (1984).

If you must have hierarchies like lists and trees, remember that they’re both just subsets of a network.

Source: I don’t know. If you do, please tell me ;)

See also:

A network of notes is a rhizome not a tree.
Manuel Lima on The power of networks (it’s a cool video!)
Top image source: The Card System at the Office by J. Kaiser, 1908.

Three worthwhile modes of note-making (and one not-so-worthwhile)

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 14:41:00 +1100

I finished reading Alex Kerr’s Finding the Heart Sutra on New Year’s Eve, so it just scraped into my reading for 2023. And while reading I made notes by hand, as I’ve done before. Although there aren’t very many notes (just eleven, plus a literature note that acts as a mini-index), they’re high quality, since I found the book very interesting.

I don’t mean I’ve written objectively ‘good’ notes. Rather, I mean the notes are high quality for my purposes. Everyone who reads with a pen in hand is an active reader, so the notes one person makes will be different - perhaps completely different- from the notes another person makes. In any case, no two readers read a book the same way.

Reflecting on this it seems to me there are at least three fruitful ways, or modes, of making notes while reading, as follows: Free-form, directed, and purposeful note-making.

Free-form note-making. In this mode, you start with no expectations and just make notes whenever something grabs you. This is great when you don’t yet know what you want to focus on. The risk is you try to read everything, only to discover it’s like drinking the ocean. Ars longa, vita brevis, so you’ll ultimately need to narrow down your field somehow.
Directed note-making. In this mode, you already know, broadly, what interests you, for example, Richard Hamming’s 10-20 problems. So you make notes whenever something you read resonates with one of your predetermined interests. I used to think I was interested in everything, like Thomas Edison. But after writing notes on whatever took my fancy for a while, I observed that really, I kept revolving around a fairly limited set of concerns. So mostly these days I make directed notes, or else engage in the closely related purposeful note-making.
Purposeful note-making. This mode is more focused still than directed note-making. Here you have a specific project in mind, such as a particular book or article you want to write, and so you make notes whenever your reading material chimes with what you want to write about. If there’s a risk to this kind of note-making, it’s that in your focused state, you’ll miss ideas that you might otherwise have found worth making notes about.

Each of these note-making modes has its place, but in this particular case I was reading Finding the Heart Sutra with a very specific project in mind. So the notes I made were also quite specific. I imagine that someone else would be surprised by the notes I made, since they don’t really reflect the contents of the book. For instance, my notes are definitely not a summary of the book’s contents. Nor do they even follow the main contours of the book’s themes. Instead, I was making connections while reading with the main concerns of my own project. Each of my notes stands in its own right and could potentially be used in a variety of different contexts, but collectively, they make sense in relation to my own preoccupations. They fit into my own Zettelkasten, and no one else’s.

“Most great people also have 10 to 20 problems they regard as basic and of great importance, and which they currently do not know how to solve. They keep them in their mind, hoping to get a clue as to how to solve them. When a clue does appear they generally drop other things and get to work immediately on the important problem. Therefore they tend to come in first, and the others who come in later are soon forgotten. I must warn you, however, that the importance of the result is not the measure of the importance of the problem. The three problems in physics—anti-gravity, teleportation, and time travel—are seldom worked on because we have so few clues as to how to start. A problem is important partly because there is a possible attack on it and not just because of its inherent importance.” - Richard Hamming, You and Your Research. Sources: pdf; YouTube; Gwern.net.

If you want to know more about how to read a book, you could do worse than read How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler. It’s not the last word on the subject, but it’s a good starting point.

And it’s a warning against a fourth mode of note-making that I don’t advise: encyclopedic note-making. This is where you read a book and try to write a summary that will work for everyone. First, it’s hard work, and secondly, it’s probably already been done. If you open the link above you’ll see that the Wikipedia entry for How to Read a Book already includes a summary of the book’s contents. There are circumstances where the careful and complete summary is worthwhile, but I suggest you only start this task with the end - your own end - in mind.

If you have thoughts about making notes while reading, I’d be very interested to hear about it.

See also:

A note on the craft of note-writing

Learning to make notes like Leonardo

How to make the most of surprising yourself

How to be interested in everything

Thanks for reading. Why not check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters?

And to keep up to date, you can subscribe to the weekly email digest.

Publish first, write later

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 21:01:00 +1100

Even a flightless bird may contemplate the constant flight forward

“Literature is perhaps nothing more complicated and glorious than the act of writing and publishing, and publishing again and again."
- Marcelo Ballvé, on the curious writing career of César Aira

César Aira on the constant flight forward

Argentinian author César Aira’s writing process is more about action than reflection. In a moment I’m going to share with you an extract from The Literary Alchemy of César Aira, an essay by Marcelo Ballvé, originally published in The Quarterly Conversation in 2008.

But before coming to the extract, I’ll just comment on David Kurnick’s claim in Public Books that Aira’s work is primarily about process:

“It is not in the least original to begin talking about César Aira’s work by recounting the technique that produces it. But it can’t be helped: Aira has made a discussion of his practice obligatory. To read him is less to evaluate a freestanding book, or a series of them, than to encounter one of the most extraordinary ongoing projects in contemporary literature.”

True, I’m not being at all original here, just cutting and pasting. Still…

Aira’s own Aleph

It’s as though through his writing Aira has found the basement in Buenos Aires that contains the entire universe in condensed form, the basement that features in Borges’s 1945 story “The Aleph”.

And having found that fabled basement, it’s as though Aira has taken on the persona of Carlos Argentino Daneri, the character in Borges' story whose life’s obsessive goal is to write a poetic epic describing each and every location on Earth in perfect detail.

But instead of taking the find seriously, Aira parodies it. Everything is here: and what do you know? None of it makes sense! Or, perhaps instead of parodying “The Aleph”, he takes it completely seriously: Why not write about it, about all of it? What then? In an interview in 2017 for the New Yorker, Aira said: “I am thinking now that maybe . . . maybe all my work is a footnote to Borges.”

Of course I’m not just cutting and pasting. I’m writing too. Aira also inspires my own writing process. His example inspires me to choose my own race - and finish it.

One of my role models is the Argentinian author César Aira. He’s written a very large number of novels and novellas (at least 80 - around two to five per year since 1993), published by a variety of presses. That’s a lot of races and a lot of finish lines crossed.
Choose your own race

Now here’s Marcelo Ballvé on Aira’s unique writing process.

According to Aira, he never edits his own work, nor does he plan ahead of time how his novels will end, or even what twists and turns they will take in the next writing session. He is loyal to his idea that making art is above all a question of procedure. The artist’s role, Aira says, is to invent procedures (experiments) by which art can be made. Whether he executes these or not is secondary; Aira’s business is the plan, not necessarily the result. Why is procedure all-important? Because it is relevant beyond the individual creator. Anyone can use it.

Aira’s procedure, which he has elucidated in essays and interviews, is what he calls el continuo, or la huida hacia adelante. These concepts might be translated into English as “the continuum,” and a “constant flight forward.” Editing is an abhorrent idea in the context of Aira’s continuum. To edit oneself would be to retrace one’s steps, go backwards, when the idea is to always move forward. To judge yesterday’s writing session, to censor a lapse into the absurd or the irrational, to revive a character your work-in-progress sent tumbling over a cliff—all of these actions go against Aira’s procedure. Instead, the system prioritizes an ethic of creative self-affirmation and, I would say, optimism. To labor to justify previous work with more strange creations that in turn establish the need for ever more artistic high-wire acts in the future—this is the continuum, the high-wire act the artist must perform when he refuses to submit to any rule that is not his autonomously chosen procedure. It is an act performed with deep abysses yawning to each side of him—conformity, market pressures, conventionality, self-repression of all kinds . . . In other words, Aira’s literary career, embodied in each of his 63 novels, is a reckless pursuit of artistic freedom.

Aira says that when he sits down to write his daily page or two, he writes pretty much whatever comes into his head, with no strictures except that of continuing the previous day’s work. (The spontaneous feel of his stories would seem to back up this claim, but I’ve always asked, can anyone write as well as Aira does while simply letting the pen ramble?)

True, his books are very short. Aira says in interviews that he’s often tried to make his novels longer, but they seem to come to a natural rest at around the 100-page mark. Technically, much of what Aira has written would have to be classified in the novella category, but it’s hard to classify Aira’s work within any genre, be it story, novel, or novella. In my mind, Aira’s creations are something different altogether. They are stories, pure and simple, which Aira has managed to ennoble by seeing them into publication in the form of a single book. What he has done is put stories into circulation as objects, which is a defiant feat when seen in the context of a global literary market that demands hefty, sprawling, “big” novels.

The key to Aira’s curious career, I think, is to be found in his conception of literature as something with more affinities to the realm of action than the inner world of reflection. Literature is perhaps nothing more complicated and glorious than the act of writing and publishing, and publishing again and again. Editing is dispensable, so is the search for the “right” publisher. (Aira publishes seemingly with whomever shows any interest in his manuscripts; at least a dozen publishers, most of them small independents, in Argentina alone.) The idea seems to be: publish first and ask questions later…In fact Aira’s mentor, the deceased Argentine poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini had a saying: “Publish first, write later.”

Extracted from The Literary Alchemy of César Aira, by Marcelo Ballvé. The Quarterly Conversation

César Aira’s main publisher in English is New Directions. They’ve published about 21 of Aira’s works in translation, while And Other Stories has published another half-dozen.

Now read: Choose your own race

How to make the most of surprising yourself

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 08:28:39 +1100

Your collection of linked notes, your Zettelkasten, isn’t a ‘second brain’, as though it were separate from your first, actual brain. Rather it is part of your extended mind, which your brain creates constantly by co-opting its wider environment into its own processing activity. Brain and environment together create mind. In the case of the Zettelkasten it’s a very deliberate extension of the brain, with a few simple but powerful generative rules.

One of the interesting features of this deliberately extended cognitive tool is its ability to present you with surprises. Reading through old notes, for example, you may be surprised that you ever wrote this. And re-reading your work in the light of new information, you may have new flashes of inspiration or see new connections that weren’t previously visible. Or perhaps the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated notes will prompt you to create a third, which contains an entirely new idea.

In this sense, your notes become a kind of conversation partner, reminding you of what you once thought, and even challenging you to go further. It’s a living thinking environment, an ever-evolving ‘connectome’, which sometimes appears to have a life of its own.

Why not surprise yourself?

Philosopher Andy Clark is quite well known for claiming that the human mind extends beyond the brain, and that “human brains spawn and maintain extended human minds”.

In a podcast interview with Sean Carroll, he recommends artificially curating environments in which we can surprise ourselves. This temporary increase in uncertainty, he claims, reduces prediction error in the long term.

“it looks as if very often, the correct move for a prediction-driven system is to temporarily increase its own uncertainty so as to do a better job over the long time scale of minimizing prediction errors, and that looks like the value of surprise, actually, and that we will… I think we artificially curate environments in which we can surprise ourselves. I think, actually, this is maybe what art and science is to some extent, at least, we’re curating environments in which we can harvest the kind of surprises that improve our generative models, our understandings of the world in ways that enable us to be less surprised about certain things in future.”

Clark refers to the work of Karin Kukkonen, a literary scholar who has applied the idea of predictive processing to literature. This reminded me of Steven Johnson’s suggestion in his book, Farsighted that a good novel is a decision-making simulation. He extolls the sophisticated decision-making conundrums of the characters in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, over the simpler black-and-white decisions of Charles Dickens' characters.

So perhaps the surprise function of the Zettelkasten is more useful than at first appears. It isn’t merely an aid to memory, or a handy conversation partner, or a writing prompt. On Clark’s account, it may also enable precisely the kind of surprises we need and can learn from in order to understand the world better.

Of course, we constantly encounter surprises in everyday life, and sometimes learn from them too. But viewed through the ‘predictive, extended mind’ lens, the Zettelkasten presents a precise, controlled and deliberate laboratory for cultivating such a learning process.

I wonder how your notes have surprised you. Please let me know.

Some resources

Andy Clark on the Extended and Predictive Mind - [Sean Carroll’s Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas] (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/04/27/235-andy-clark-on-the-extended-and-predictive-mind/)

Clark, Andy. 2022. Extending the Predictive Mind, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2022.2122523

Johnson, Steven. 2018. Farsighted : How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. New York: Riverhead Books an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Kukkonen, Karin. 2020. Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190050962

Learning to make notes like Leonardo

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 19:40:46 +1100

Leonardo wrote on loose sheets of paper

The Codex Arundel, a notebook of Leonardo Da Vinci, is not what it first appears. It isn’t a notebook that Leonardo used. For the man himself it wasn’t a notebook at all. It’s a collection of individual notes, bound for convenience only after his death. The British Library webpage observes:

“The structure of the notebook reveals that it was not originally a bound volume. It was put together after Leonardo’s death from loose papers of various types and sizes, some indicating Leonardo’s habit of carrying smaller bundles of notes to document observations outdoors.”

He wasn’t the first to adopt this habit. Beginning in the Fourteenth century it had become something of a fashion for Italians to create their own ’zibaldone’, a hodgepodge of notes on diverse subjects. Leonardo wrote of his notes:

“This is to be a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat.”

The same is true of the Forster Codices, in the care of the Victoria and Albert Museum: they weren’t originally codices (books), but unbound notes.

“Leonardo probably worked on loose sheets of paper (bought at one of Milan’s many stationers' shops), which he carried about with him to record his observations. His papers were at some stage folded into booklets and later bound, possibly under the ownership of the Spanish sculptor Pompeo Leoni (1533 – 1608).” (https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/leonardo-da-vincis-notebooks)

Many of the notes in the Codex Arundel were written in 1508, but they span most of Leonardo’s career.

The notes cover a very wide range as well as references to many different subjects. They include sketches of a mechanical organ and of an underwater breathing apparatus, There are notes and diagrams on mechanics, lists of proverbs and riddles, sketches on bird-flight, a household inventory, notes on optics and mirrors for producing heat, calculations on balances and weights, a plan for an urban quarter, and for a complete city, notes on the acoustics of drums and wind instruments, notes on river dynamics and on geometry, and a sketch of a cockleshell.

Leonardo Da Vinci - master of making notes

Here’s the German scholar Hektor Haarkötter, writing about the note-making expertise of Leonardo Da Vinci:

“Leonardo is the early master of the note [Nottizettel]. Today da Vinci is famous as an artist and painter, inventor and designer. However, he was not very productive as a public artist. Only about fifteen paintings that can be proven to have been created by him have survived, some of them in very poor condition or never completed. Leonardo da Vinci was really productive, however, in the privacy of his writing. He left behind over 10,000 sheets, drafts, scraps, snippets, sketches, papers, pages and slips of paper. (Many have been transcribed in Theodor Lücke, Leonardo da Vinci. Tagebücher und Aufzeichnungen. Leipzig, Paul List Verlag, 1953)

And this is only the part of his many records that have come down to us. Through his papers we know of other ledgers, notebooks, and codices, but they have disappeared, been scattered, torn apart, sold off, or in one way or another through the course of time, simply destroyed. How large the number of those records is of which we have no, well, note, is incalculable.

Already in Leonardo’s work all the characteristics of the note [Nottizettel] as a private medium are visible. He wrote in a code so that unauthorized eyes could not have read his notes. The universality of writing materials and forms of writing corresponded the universality of the subjects. From word lists and shopping wishes to technical drawings and philosophical notes to obscene and pornographic sketches. None of them was intended for the public, and the Renaissance master never published a book. He would hardly have been able to do so, he admitted to himself in his notebooks, which today are traded at astronomical prices at auctions, but which themselves lost an overview of his records.

What remains?

The amazing thing about the inconspicuous medium of notes is that from a hodgepodge of notes in the writing practice of writers and scientists, a completed book can emerge in the end. However we must not forget that, as a rule, only a small part of the notes, as a preliminary stage, finally ends up in the work. The larger part of such paralipomena [supplementary material, literally ‘things omitted’] remains, is never used, is hardly ever read again, and is often discarded and thrown away. Or the notes end up in the archives, where they are preserved as cryptic manuscripts, in worm-eaten folders or as messy single sheets, where they can enjoy the security of all basement magazines, never again to be viewed by human eyes. Notes are communicants after all without communicating. The path to the finished book is paved with media corpses.”

Source: Hektor Haarkötter, «Ich notiere, also bin ich» Notizen als Medien des Denkens Passim 28 (2021) Bulletin des Schweizerischen Literaturarchivs, p.4-5. Available at: <www.nb.admin.ch/snl/de/ho…> Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator and a bit of imagination.

What can we learn from Leonardo’s approach to making notes?

Write everything down

Make notes. you never know when you’ll invent a diving mechanism, or a flying machine, or who knows what else? Toby Lester, author of Da Vinci’s Ghost, claims, “Whenever something caught his eye he would compulsively open a small notebook that he wore hanging from his belt and begin sketching furiously, with almost mind-boggling virtuosity. He loved his tiny sketchbook and recommended that all serious artists carry one.” “These things should not be rubbed out,” wrote Leonardo, “but preserved with great care, for the forms and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them”. Leonardo plainly wrote (and drew) in order to think - and you can too.

Use your memory too

Don’t expect your note system to remember things for you. There is a view that writing helps you to remember. But Hektor Haarkötter calls this ‘a myth of the media’. “In fact,” he says, “there is hardly a more effective way to erase a thought from memory than to write it down. The problem of remembering is not solved by taking notes, but only delegated, namely from “What did I want to remember?” to “Where did I write it down?” And the larger the volume of notes, the smaller the probability of finding a specific note again.” So making a note is primarily the act of thinking itself, not a primarily a way to remember what you thought.

Do what works for you

Loose leaf pages worked for Leonardo, and he wrote thousands of them. He had a system that enabled him both to think and to capture his thoughts. Don’t wait for the ideal system to appear, when an OK one will do. And don’t over-complicate things. He didn’t have a Moleskine notebook, or Obsidian software. He just wrote.

Don’t put off the organisation for another time

Don’t put it off, because that day may never come.

Leonardo intended “to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat”, but as far as we can tell, he never did. This is possibly a reference to the then popular practice of arranging notes in ‘loci communis’, or commonplaces - so called because there were several different standard systems of thematic arrangement by category. He didn’t get round to it. And later editors didn’t have much idea of what order to put his notes after he was gone. Who knows what he might have finished if he’d been a bit more organised at the outset. Don’t put off the organisation of your notes, because it will probably never happen.

Publish, by any means necessary

Notoriously, Leonardo hardly finished anything. Some of this, such as the unfinished painting now known as Mona Lisa, may have been deliberate. But on his death, Leonardo left his notes to his faithful pupil Francesco Melzi, who then left them to his son. The son didn’t value them at all and abandoned them to molder in an attic, so it’s amazing any of these now priceless notes survived at all. In fact the reason Leonardo is best known as an artist, which was not his main occupation (in 1482 he put at the very bottom of his resume for the Duke of Milan, “also I can do in painting whatever may be done”), is that the notes were effectively lost for generations and only really came to attention in later centuries. Don’t put off the publishing of your knowledge. Your pupils' children might not follow your instructions any more than Leonardo’s did. Share what you know with others. Don’t expect it to outlive you. Seize the day. You might think you’re no Leonardo. That’s right. You’re not. You are you, and that’s exactly what the world needs.

Furthermore, it’s so much easier to publish these days than it was at the time of Leonardo. There’s hardly any excuse not to press ‘send’.

There might just be a better system

I hesitate to try to improve on arguably the greatest genius of all time, but with the greatest presumption, here goes. Leonardo himself called his notes ‘a collection without order’, and perhaps a modicum of order might heave helped him. The system he never got around to using was that of ‘commonplaces’, extremely widely used during the Renaissance and for centuries after. The idea was that you’d catalogue your notes according to a more-or-less standard set of locations (i.e. common places). There are a few problems here.

First, it’s hard and uninteresting work to catalogue all your thoughts into predetermined folders like this. Perhaps that’s why Leonardo didn’t do it. Maybe it was just not important enough.

Second, even if you do want to file your notes, it’s not universally agreed what the folder names should be. Through the ages there have been numerous attempts to design a standard set of commonplaces, and none of them have stuck. One such is the Dewey Decimal System, often used for cataloguing library subjects. Not even all the libraries follow this particular system. Wikipedia has a list of ‘main topic classifications’, too. Though you might not know this, you probably haven’t suffered from your ignorance on this matter. To the ordinary Wikipedia user, it doesn’t really seem to make much difference.

Third, keeping your ideas in the categories within which they were formed tends to limit innovation and re-combination. For example, a folder of notes labelled ‘psychology’ doesn’t really tell you much and it keeps your psychology ideas artificially separated from your thoughts on art, or sport, or jokes. In fact, any categories tend to damp down the creative spark. Perhaps that’s why Leonardo’s ‘collection without order’ worked for him.

More resources

The Codex Arundel is at the British Library and online.

David Kadavy has a great podcast episode about Leonardo: Leonardo Mind, Raphael World – Love Your Work, Episode 290 Ironically, Kadavy sees Leonardo as ‘the greatest procrastinator who ever lived’. It’s ironic because, well, it’s Leonardo.

Hektor Haarkötter’s book on notemaking includes more on Leonardo as well as a host of other characters, but Notizzettel is currently only published in German.

And if you’ve read this far, you’ll love Gillian Hess’s Substack blog, Noted. She has already written plenty about Leonardo, which you can read by subscribing.

Meanwhile, on this site, I’ve also written about Aby Warburg’s compulsion to make notes, and about Ted Nelson’s evolutionary file list, and about the writing process of Henry Thoreau - and probably lots more about Zettelkasten I’ve forgotten about.

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 23:12:46 +1100

Finished reading: Farsighted by Steven Johnson 📚
Wrote 17 notes in 2 hours, and enjoyed doing it by hand. Realised this book is as much about novels - especially Middlemarch - as it is about making decisions. And that a good novel is a decision-making simulator. #Zettelkasten #Notemaking

A note on the craft of note-writing

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +1100

An fairly new article from Brazil caught my eye, on note-writing as an intellectual craft. It highlights the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s note-making process (he put his many linked notes in a Zettelkasten - an index box).

Cruz, Robson Nascimento da Cruz, and Junio Rezende. “Note-writing as an intellectual craft: Niklas Luhmann and academic writing as a process.” Pro-Posições 34 (2023).
<doi.org/10.1590/1…>
https://www.scielo.br/j/pp/a/L7gmq6W7bvzgn984hSJ94

Abstract: "Despite numerous indications that academic writing is a means toward intellectual discovery and not just a representation of thought, in Brazil, it is seen more as a product of studies and subjects than an integral part of university education. This article presents note-taking, an apparently simple and supposedly archaic activity, as a way through which academic writing is eminently oriented towards constructing an authorial thought. To this end, we discuss recent findings in the historiography of writing that show note-taking as an essential practice in the development of modern intellectuality. We also present an emblematic case, in the 20th century, of the fruitful use of a note-taking system created by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Finally, we point out that the value of note-taking goes beyond mere historical curiosity, constituting an additional tool for a daily life in which satisfaction and a sense of intellectual development are at the center of academic life."
https://www.scielo.br/j/pp/a/L7gmq6W7bvzgn984hSJ94qz/?lang=en

If you live your life in chunks, what size should they be?

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +1100

Life tends to be lived in chunks. Hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years - these are familiar if slightly artificial concepts. But what’s the best-sized chunk of life to focus on? Some would advise living in the moment, by which they don’t really mean the 86,400 seconds that are available in a single day. They effectively mean no chunks at all (or infinite chunks, perhaps).

Reading an article on why you should divide your life into semesters reminded me that I’ve already come across this idea in the shape of the book The Twelve Week Year. I actually bought The Twelve Week Year for Writers, which I’ve skimmed but haven’t read properly yet. I’d like to have a structure to my year that’s more than just “get through it”. But I’m daunted by the thought of needing something concrete to show for my time spent on earth. What did you achieve in your chosen chunk of life? This question won’t be answered by heartbeats or breaths, by sunsets or swims. It would be OK maybe if it could be answered with dollars, but that’s not really acceptable either. It’s too soulless. The question, what did you achieve? needs actual achievements. It needs productivity of the sort I’m not very available for.

@visakanv says “the meandering mind is a feature not a bug”. Why can’t I accept this? Perhaps because I keep putting myself in situations where the meandering mind is a bug not a feature?

I can just about manage to write a short note like this. And then another one… and so on. Austin Kleon calls this “Sisyphus mowing the lawn”. And indeed, I’m happy writing my short notes. If I can’t manage to organise my life into semesters, perhaps I can organise it into atomic notes - the shortest possible viable writing session.

I saw on the zettelkasten.de forum that some members log their note-making productivity on a 10-day rolling tally. One person has written 16 notes in ten days, another has written 33.

They are inspired, as am I, by Sonke Ahrens' exhortation to work as is nothing counts other than writing (well, some of them are).

"If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.
Focusing on writing as if nothing else counts does not necessarily mean you should do everything else less well, but it certainly makes you do everything else differently.
Even if you decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you will improve your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than writing."
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2657/share-with-us-what-is-happening-in-your-zk-this-week-august-29-2023

I’d like to know what kinds of time you find yourself dividing your life into. Do you mainly live in days, or mainly in hours, or perhaps weeks? Do you instead devote yourself to living in the moment? If so, which moment?

#reading

How to connect your notes to make them more effective

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 15:36:38 +1100

A linked note is a happy note

A great strength of the Zettelkasten approach to writing is that it promotes atomic notes, densely linked. The links are almost as valuable as the notes themselves, and sometimes more valuable.

But once you’ve had an idea and written it down, what is it supposed to link to? Is there a rule or a convention, or do you just wing it?

How are you supposed to make connections between your notes when you can’t think of any?

When I started creating my system of notes I didn’t know how to make these links between my atomic ideas, and this relational way of working didn’t come naturally to me. I would just sit there and think, “what does this remind me of?” Sometimes I’d come up with a new link, but more often than not, I didn’t. The problem is, the Zettelkasten pretty much relies on links between notes. An un-linked note is a kind of orphan. It risks getting lost in the pile. You wrote it, but how will you ever find it again? And if you do somehow stumble upon it again, it won’t really lead anywhere, because you haven’t related it to anything else.

Fortunately, there are some helpful ways of coming up with linking ideas that can really aid creative thinking and unlock the power of connected note-making.

Make a path through your notes with the idea compass

Niklas Luhmann, the sociologist who famously (to nerds) kept a Zettelkasten, didn’t exactly say this, but each atomic note already implies its own series of relations. Each note can be extended by means of the idea compass - a wonderful idea of Fei-Ling Tseng, as follows:

N - what larger pattern does this concept belong to?
S - what more basic components is this concept made of?
E - what is this concept similar to?
W - what is this concept different from?

Notice how the first two questions promote a tree-like hierarchical structure, with everything nested in everything else, while the second two questions promote a fungus-like anti-hierarchical structure, with links that form a rhizome or lattice. Alone, the former structure is too rigid and the latter is too fluid. But put them together and they can be very powerful. The genius of the Zettelkasten system is that it absorbs hierarchical knowledge networks into its overall rhizomatic structure, without dissolving them, and allows new structures to form (Nick Milo helpfully calls these ‘maps of content’).

Find the larger pattern

Each atomic idea might be thought of as part of a larger pattern. In a sense, every note title is just an item in a list that forms a structure note at a level above it. Say I write a note on ‘functional differentiation’. I realise that this is just one component of a structure note that also includes ‘social systems’, ‘communication’, ‘autopoeisis’ and so on. I write this list, call it ‘Niklas Luhmann - key ideas’, and link it to my existing note. Now I have some ideas for some more notes to write. But will I write them all? No - I’ll only pursue the thoughts that actually interest me, or seem essential. The rest can wait for another day. Actually, I’m suddenly intrigued by what you could possibly have instead of functional differentiation (i.e. what is this note different from?), so I write a new note called ‘pre-modern forms of social structure’ - and link it back to my ‘functional differentiation’ note.

Look for the basic components

Going even further, the atoms, which seemed to be the smallest unit, turn out to be made of sub-atomic particles and so on, all the way down to who knows what (well, particle physicists might know, but I don’t). That means each atomic idea is really just the title of a structure note that hasn’t been written yet. So I take a new note and write: ‘Functional differentiation - the key points’. I imagine this new structure note to be like a top-ten list of important factors, each one ultimately with its own new note - but I’m not going to force myself to write about ten things that don’t matter, just what I find interesting.

When making links, trust and follow your own interest

It’s really important that you don’t try to answer all four questions with a new link. You’re not creating an encyclopedia. Instead, you should only make the connections that actually matter to you. The trace of your own inquisitiveness through the material is, in itself, important information. If it doesn’t matter to you, don’t write about it! Since the notes are atomic, and the possible links increase exponentially (?) the possibility space you are opening up is almost infinite and it can feel overwhelming. So just go with the flow. The key is to find your own curiosity and run with it. That way (as I’ve said before):

you’ll write worthwhile notes that address your own questions and
this hook of curiosity will help you remember as you learn.

That’s what I’ve been doing this morning. At no point have I stopped to think “what shall I write next?” In this sense, the Zettelkasten is a kind of conversation partner. Niklas Luhmann said he only ever wrote about things that interested him. This seems unlikely until you try it for yourself.

And if you keep asking yourself these questions, you’ll find that over time the linking starts to come naturally. It will be increasingly obvious to you what relationships matter. The questions in the idea compass will become intuitive and fade into the background. Well, that’s my experience, but YMMV.

Apply a framework that intrigues you

Another way of making connections, besides the idea compass, is to apply a conceptual framework (or mental model) that interests you - and see where it leads. Here’s an example: Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects.

The idea here is that any new technology changes the whole landscape or ecology, by bringing some features into the foreground and pushing others into the background. It’s called a tetrad because there are four questions to ask of a new technology:

What does the medium enhance?
What does the medium make obsolete?
What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

(This really clicked for me when I puzzled over why my kids don’t use smart phones for talking to people. It seemed crazy to me, but then I looked at question 3 and realised the new technology had retrieved asynchronous communication, which the telephone had previously made obsolete. But I digress.)

Anyway, I’m suggesting you might be able to take these four questions and ask them of the ideas in your notes. For each atomic note: what does this idea enhance, make obsolete, retrieve, or reverse?

Another simple but powerful example is Tobler’s law: “I invoke the first law of geography: everything is connected to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”. What would it be like if you made everything about physical location?

It’s important to say these are just examples, and they may not work for you. Nevertheless, you may be able to think of frameworks from within your own line of work that allow you to ask a similar set of questions about your ideas. In my experience these frameworks are everywhere and yet are quite under-used.

This article is a lightly edited version of a Reddit comment.

TiddlyWiki is a really useful writing tool

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 20:53:16 +1100

I use Tiddlywiki as a writing tool, and as a heavily customised Zettelkasten (an ‘index box’ of notes). I love how readily this toolkit can be tailored to suit my workflow and requirements. That means there isn’t really a best version, since it can become what you make of it. I was slightly confused when I started, since it’s different from other writing tools. But you can just start simple and slowly add the functionality that you like to use. Reminding myself to document all my changes and experiments, inside my TW, really helps. Superficially, it’s just a wiki app, but there’s so much more to it than that.

I find Soren Bjornstad’s online version,Tzk, very inspiring. It really shows some amazing possibilities for a personal Zettelkasten-style notebook. His GrokTiddlyWiki tutorial is fabulous too, but it’s a bit of a rabbit hole. Maybe better to just get started and then do the tutorials.

I love the look of Projectify and have used the notebook palettes that it comes with.

To enable backlinks I have found a couple of basic plug-ins really useful and would strongly recommend:

TWCrossLinks

This adds a footer to your notes to show backlinks and freelinks.

Relink

This enables automatic renaming of titles and other items across links.

For a to-do list, I greatly admire Projectify, but what I actually use is the simple but effective Chandler, written by the late Joe Armstrong. He talks you through how he wrote it, which in itself is a masterclass in how to customise TiddlyWiki.

Finally I’ll mention the active and very helpful user forum.

If you’d like to discuss any aspect of TiddlyWiki or note-making generally, I’m all ears.

Ted Nelson's Evolutionary List File

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 18:42:59 +1100

Rick Wysocki has a great post introducing Ted Nelson’s innovative idea for a new kind of file system. New, at least, in 1965.

Ted Nelson’s Evolutionary List File and Information Management

In many ways though, we’re still waiting for this kind of approach to become available.

The 1965 paper begins with a programmatic statement that has still not been fulfilled:

“The kinds of file structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation.”

Ted Nelson, in case you don’t know, was the first person to coin the term ‘hypertext’, and this is the first published reference to hypertext. In his post, Wysocki reflects on the connections across decades between Nelson’s ideas and the contemporary interest in ‘personal knowledge management’ and Niklas Luhmann’s non-hierarchical Zettelkasten system of notes. He sees the Zettelkasten as potentially more creative than many contemporary systems because it doesn’t impose a fixed system of categories from the top down.

“Creating hierarchies and outlines of information can be useful, but many don’t realize that outlines have to work on existing material; they are not creative practices themselves (Nelson 135b). This is why the common myth we tell ourselves and our students that an outline should be worked on before writing at best makes little sense and at worst is cruel; how can we outline ideas we haven’t created yet?”

He praises Nelson’s list file approach, where everything is provisional, and can be changed. Fixed categories are out; lists are in. Nelson saw his hypothetical system as a kind of ‘glorified index file’, which is where the connection with Niklas Luhmann’s (quite different) approach comes in. Sadly, most attempts at providing computerised tools for writers have thrown out the affordances that previous analogue systems offered, almost without noticing their loss. Nelson’s ‘Project Xanadu’, notoriously, was never completed. But there are some gains. I’m reminded of TiddlyWiki, in which nearly everything is a list, even the application itself.

The original paper , ‘Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate’, can be found online as a PDF.

A Network of notes is a rhizome not a tree

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 17:16:38 +1100

The Zettelkasten is not just an outline

The Zettelkasten approach to making notes and writing is not the same as creating a standard outline. An outline is basically linear and hierarchical. It’s a tree-like structure. It’s ‘arborescent’. The Zettelkasten on the other hand is a non-linear, non-hierarchical network, that includes hierarchical and linear structures, but is not bound by them. The Zettelkasten is more like a ‘rhizomatic’ structure. It has many connections, but no obvious central trunk. It’s like ginger.

The Zettelkasten can include outlines

The process of writing an article or book might well involve preparing an outline (e.g. a table of contents), but this is done from the contents of the Zettelkasten, not directly by the Zettelkasten itself. The idea is for the Zettelkasten to maintain a more fluid structure than a hierarchical outline, to allow idea formation, prior to the composition of a tightly-structured argument. I do have tables of contents, structure notes, ‘maps of content’, hubs, indices, etc. within my Zettelkasten, but ultimately each of these is just another note in the wider network.

Notes connect in several different ways

Links can connect notes in all kinds of directions. Niklas Luhmann emphasised this possibility of referral [Verweisungsmöglichkeiten]:

“When there are multiple options you can solve the problem by placing the note wherever you want and create references to capture other possible contexts.” - Luhmann, Communication with Zettelkasten

Consider too Daniel Lüdecke’s presentation on Zettelkasten structure PDF. This clearly shows what Luhmann did and didn’t do (according to Lüdecke at least - see especially slide 31 or thereabouts).

Avoid premature closure

A finished piece of work such as a book or article is fixed. Its structure is basically final. This is not true of your notes. They are still fluid, still open to shuffling and re-shuffling. The Zettelkasten’s adaptive structure is confirmed by Schmidt’s summary:

“At first glance, Luhmann’s organization of his collection appears to lack any clear order; it even seems chaotic. However, this was a deliberate choice. It was Luhmann’s intention to “avoid premature systematization and closure and maintain openness toward the future”. A prerequisite for a creative filing system, Luhmann noted, is “avoiding a fixed system of order”. He pinpoints the disadvantages that come with one of the common systems of organizing content in the following words: “Defining a system of contents (resembling a book’s table of contents) would imply committing to a specific sequence once and for all (for decades to come!)”. His way of organizing the collection, by contrast, allows for it to continuously adapt to the evolution of his thinking.” - Johannes F.K. Schmidt. ‘Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine’, in Cevolini, Alberto.; Forgetting Machines : Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe. Brill, 2016. Ch. 12, p. 300. PDF

A disclaimer

Your mileage may vary. When turning your note-work into a network, do what works for you, not what worked for a dead German sociologist.

The mastery of knowledge is an illusion

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 23:37:31 +1100

The writing task always eludes us.

CJChilvers sees in the slow but inevitable demise of the Evernote app a deeper critique of the concept of the ‘external brain’. Indeed, this term is rather clumsy marketing-speak, hardly improved by Tiago Forte’s version: ‘Building a Second Brain’.

I only have one brain, and it’s internal, thankfully. But I’m still very happy with the idea of the ‘extended mind’. My brain remains firmly in my skull, but it nevertheless uses the environment in many different ways to extend its capabilities.

Even though it seems like computing has been with us forever, it’s still really very early days. This technology is still quite new. We’re only just beginning to understand how to use it. I see the Evernote saga, and the concept of an external brain as part of that ongoing learning process.

It might be helpful to set the whole matter of external brains and extended minds in a wider context of literate and non-literate cultures.

Literate cultures tend to absorb many extended mind capabilities, such as memory, into writing. For example, How many poems or songs do you know by heart? Probably not many. What’s the point these days of learning things by heart? Why remember poems when you can just read them from a book? Literacy appears obviously superior to memory, even though something is lost along the way. What gets lost is the older, mnemonic culture of pre-literate societies. This loss in the transition from speaking to writing is what Plato’s Socrates warned of. Most literate people, though, neither mourn the loss nor even really notice it. The promise of writing is that if you could just get it all down you’ll have captured it, tamed it and mastered it. This is a familiar quest, from Adler’s Syntopicon¹ to Otlet’s Mundaneum², even to Allen’s “Getting Things Done”³. But somehow, the completion of the Writing Task, always eludes us. It’s too big. There’s simply too much to know and there has been for some time.

But oral cultures live in an enchanted world, not necessarily in a magical sense, but in the sense that the whole environment ‘speaks’, as part of a wider extended mind. Geographical features are not merely ‘dead matter’. They’re alive to tell stories which recount histories and genealogies, to give blessings and warnings. Plants and animals are similarly endowed with a depth of meaning.

This is the world that literate culture has exiled itself from, so that it barely comprehends its existence, much less its significance.

But this living world remains available to us. The exile is self-imposed. In her book, The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul says:

“We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle — but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.”

We can’t master knowledge. It’s what we live in. This requires a radical shift of worldview from colonialist to ecological. The colonial approach to knowledge is to capture it in order to profit from it. The ecological approach is to live within it as within a garden to be tended. The two worldviews may well be mutually incompatible, though this matter is hardly resolved yet.

This saga isn’t over.

Further reading:

Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind. The power of thinking outside the brain.

Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, Songlines: The Power and Promise.Thames and Hudson.

Why not subscribe to the weekly email digest? All the posts, but only once a week.

Mortimer Adler wanted to summarise the ideas of Western literature under 102 headings. ↩︎
Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine wanted to gather and index all world knowledge. ↩︎
In 2001, David Allen encouraged knowledge workers to get their thoughts out of their heads and to capture them externally. ↩︎

Walter Benjamin on the obsolete book

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 15:59:18 +1100

“Already today, as the current scientific mode of production teaches, the book is already an obsolete mediation between two different card file systems. For everything essential is found in the index box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar who studies it assimilates it in his own card file.”

“Und heute schon ist das Buch, wie die aktuelle wissenschaftliche Produktionsweise lehrt, eine veraltete Vermittlung zwischen zwei verschiedenen Kartotheksystemen. Denn alles Wesentliche findet sich im Zettelkasten des Forschers, der’s verfaßte, und der Gelehrte, der darin studiert, assimiliert es seiner eigenen Kartothek."

Walter Benjamin - Attested Auditor of Books, in One Way Street (1928) 💬

Comment

Was the book really already obsolete in 1928, as the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin claimed?

If so, it has nevertheless enjoyed a long and distinguished afterlife. And Benjamin’s sly reference to what ‘the current scientific mode of production’ teaches, may suggest a certain irony in his claim.

But the real irony is that the card index was sooner for obsolescence than the book. During the 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s millions of index cards were thrown out, to be replaced with computer databases. Despite a very niche resurgence of interest in the quaint technologies of the ‘Zettelkasten’ (German for ‘index card box’, there’s no real sign of a come-back. The book, meanwhile, has been assailed mightily by the e-book, but as Monty Python fans would say: “It’s just a flesh wound”.

However, another way of viewing this technological transition would be to say that the card index, in the new form of the electronic database, has utterly triumphed. Now everything is just the front-end of a database, including books.

References

Benjamin, W. (2016[1986]) One Way Street, Trans. E. Jephcott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. P. 43.

Source: www.heise.de/tp/featur…

Cited in Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead - Hacker News

Hermann Burger - Serious about a Zettelkasten?

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 23:06:33 +1100

The Swiss writer Hermann Burger (1942–1989) wrote the draft of a novel in 1970 called Lokalbericht (1970) [Local Report].

“‘Local Report’ – I already have the title, the hardest part of a book. Now, I’m just missing the novel.” [“Lokalbericht – den Titel, das Schwierigste an einem Buch, habe ich schon. Fehlt mir nur noch der Roman."]

The story’s narrator was right. Burger was a poet and novelist but he never finished this early novel. He died in 1989 and it wasn’t published until October 2016. I found a single English-language review.

The protagonist of Lokalbericht, the young teacher Günter Frischknecht¹ is in the canton of Ticino trying to write two pieces of work at the same time, a dissertation and a novel, writing on two different typewriters and using two different Zettelkästen. These two card indices get mixed up and the slips intermingle. What to do in this situation? Reality and fiction apparently can no longer be distinguished.

This farcical Zettelkasten confusion is foreshadowed early on in the novel by Frishknecht’s academic supervisor Professor Kleinert, of whom he says:

“He didn’t believe I could actually be serious about a Zettelkasten.” [“Dass ich tatsächlich Ernst machen könnte mit einem Zettelkasten, hat er mir wohl kaum zugetraut."]

This story-line seems to be consistent with a long-standing trope among scholars that the loose slips of paper with which they ordered their work could at any moment get mixed up, or even worse, blow away, resulting in chaotic disorder.

Well, now it’s all been put back together. There’s a very impressive interactive online version of the novel, and in 2017 there was an exhibition centred upon it at the Aarau Museum.

It was Manfred Kuhn’s wonderful, though sadly defunct, blog Taking Note Now that originally alerted me to this novel and the Zettelkasten mix-up, but I had completely forgotten.

a composite name made up of Günter Grass and Max Frisch, with more than a nod to the old Knecht, the Magister Ludi of The Glass Bead Game. ↩︎

Thoughts are nest-eggs - Thoreau on writing

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 23:10:52 +1100

In October 1837 the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson prompted the twenty-year-old Henry David Thoreau to start writing a journal.

“‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”

Thoreau finished up with fourteen full notebooks: seven thousand pages, and two million words. Small fragments can add up to an awful lot. From these fragments he constructed pretty much all of his completed works. What began as jottings ended up as mature reflections.

He claimed his disconnected thoughts provoked others, so that ‘thought begat thought’.

Thoreau wrote in his journal:

“To set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me – and at least I may make wholes of parts.

Certainly it is a distinct profession to rescue from oblivion and to fix the sentiments and thoughts which visit all men more or less generally. That the contemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmonious completion. Associate reverently, and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts. Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg – by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame – in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing – of keeping a journal. That so we remember our best hours – and stimulate ourselves. My thoughts are my company – They have a certain individuality and separate existence – aye personality. Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition – they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought.” – Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, January 22, 1852.

The writer, according to Thoreau, doesn’t have a privileged position in relation to ideas or experiences. Everyone has the same access to their “sentiments and thoughts.” But the writer’s special task is to record them.

Thoreau’s meticulous editing process moved from raw field notes, to his journal, to lectures, to essays, and from there to published books. Walden, for example, was published after seven drafts, which took the author nine years to complete.

“The thoughtfulness and quality of his journal writings enabled him to reuse entire passages from it in his lectures and published writings. In his early years, Thoreau would literally cut out pages or excerpts from the journal and paste them onto another page as he created his essays.” - Thoreau’s Writing - The Walden Woods Project

This pretty much sums up the Zettelkasten approach to note-making for me. Thoreau lays out a simple process for “fixing” one’s thoughts in writing and for making something of them.

Record your thoughts, one by one.
- “Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg…”
Build up a collection of notes, without worrying about whether they are coherent.
- “…by the side of which more will be laid.”
Connect your notes, creating a dense network of association.
- “Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited
Construct meaning from your previously disconnected thoughts
- “Thought begat thought.”

Note that the thoughts don’t necessarily follow on from one another. The very next idea Thoreau noted in his journal is on a completely different subject: the colour of the winter sun not long before dusk.

Someone who has found their own distinctive approach to writing that seems to echo that of Thoreau is Visakan Veerasamy. He lives in the 21st Century, not the Nineteenth, and instead of a cabin in the woods he probably has a laptop in a cafe. Instead of field notes he writes using tweets and threads, which he then links together in a dense network of thought.

“I’ve basically taught myself to manage my ADHD with notes and threads."- Visakan Veerasamy

What calls Visakan to mind as I reflect on Thoreau’s writing practice is the sense they both seem to share of the seriousness of the practice of making something from nothing by writing short notes in a journal. Visakan says something of which I’m sure both Thoreau and Emerson would have approved:

in a way journaling for yourself is a radical act! It’s an act of self-ownership, self-education. It’s about setting your own curriculum, defining your own worldview, deciding for yourself what is important. I don’t think this should be outsourced to others.
Visakan Veerasamy https://www.visakanv.com/blog/take-notes/

People tend to think of writers like Thoreau as immensely successful. True he became a popular speaker, but Thoreau was not a successful writer, at least not in his lifetime.

“A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [1849] was initially an abysmal failure. Henry was forced to take back the books that were not sold, totalling 706 out of the 1,000 originally printed. Writing humorously of the event in his journal, he quipped, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself” (Thoreau 459). Walden [1854], in contrast, was a relatively successful book, though it took most of the rest of Thoreau’s life to sell the 2,000 books of the first edition.” – Thoreau’s Writing - The Walden Woods Project

This knowledge inspires me to write without too much concern for the outcome, and to focus instead on those aspects of the process that lie within my control - recording my thoughts and like Thoreau turning them into nest eggs.

References:

The Journal

Thoreau, Henry David. 2009. The Journal, 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. New York: New York Review Books.

Thoughts as nest eggs

Thoreau SubReddit

Image of Thoreau suitable for use on currency

How to be interested in everything

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 23:15:02 +1100

Thomas Edison claimed he was interested in everything

“One day while Mr. Edison and I were calling on Luther Burbank in California, he asked us to register in his guest book. The book had a column for signature, another for home address, another for occupation and a final one entitled ‘Interested in’. Mr. Edison signed in a few quick but unhurried motions… In the final column he wrote without an instant’s hesitation: ‘Everything'”. - Henry Ford on Thomas Edison. Quoted by John Naughton

It’s all very well to believe that everything interests you, but what does that mean in practice?

If you really were interested in everything, how would you get anything done? Each new thing you encountered would surely distract you from your previous interest, and you’d end up surrounded by a heap of unfinished projects. But Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor, had a heap of finished projects - innovative products ready for the market and ready to transform society. More than 1000 US patents were filed under his name, including some of the greatest inventions of all time.

But when nothing prevents you from chasing a new interest, how do you stay focused for long enough to complete the work in front of you?

You need a system

What was Thomas Edison’s system for staying on track? He was clearly very effective, so he must have been able to harness his many diverse interests to produce outcomes. How did he do it? How did he avoid ‘shiny object syndrome’?

Edison recorded everything meticulously. He used notebooks and legers extensively and he encouraged his laboratory workers to do the same. The resulting mountain of notes is a treasure trove for understanding where Edison’s ideas came from and how they developed over time. In their day, these records were mainly used to ensure patents could be registered and defended. Now though, up to five million pages of Edison’s massive work can be studied online through the Edison Project at Rutgers University.

For individuals today, without a team of engineers behind them, but with the amazing advantage of Twenty-first century technology, being interested in everything is a great opportunity, if only we can harness it. Then like Edison, we can happily admit that we’re interested in everything, and put our diverse interests to work.

Publish small fragments to create a larger whole

According to Cory Doctorow, the prolific author and tech activist, blogging (or whatever you want to call it this week) allows you to write simple fragments each day about what interests you today, and to publish it, quite without friction. Over time, Doctorow attests, these small fragments coalesce, and begin to add up to something more substantial.

the traditional relationship between research and writing is reversed. Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.
Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

Cory Doctorow https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

Mattias Ott has more to say about this process, and if you read German, there’s even more.

It’s still just up to you

You might well be interested in everything, but the bottleneck all your interests must pass through is you. The measure of your note-taking and writing system is the extent to which it helps you make sense of your diverse interests in a way that communicates meaningfully to yourself and/or to others. Publishing small fragments as you go, which then add up to larger pieces is a way forward that just wasn’t possible in Edison’s day, but is easily available online now to anyone who wants to pursue it.

The lost index cards of Harold Innis

Sat, 27 May 2023 00:10:46 +1100

Chris Aldridge has discovered yet another writer who used index cards to construct an extensive body of work from smaller pieces. This practice is often referred to as keeping a Zettelkasten, whether or not the owner was actually German.

The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis (University of Toronto Press, 1980) reproduces an edited version of the typescript Innis, an economic historian, made of his original index cards.

Chris wonders if the index cards themselves might be re-issued for interested readers.

While I appreciate the published book nature of the work, it would be quite something to have it excerpted back down to index card form as a piece of material culture to purchase and play around with. Perhaps something in honor of the coming 75th anniversary of his passing?
[@chrisaldrich](https://micro.blog/chrisaldrich) https://boffosocko.com/2023/05/25/harold-innis-the-idea-file/

I guess such a work might look something like the 138-index-card edition of Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, which Chip Kidd designed; or his dream diary, constructed from 118 index cards and published with some images of the original notes as Insomniac Dreams.

Sadly, a new edition such as this seems unlikely. That’s because according to the Introduction of the Idea File, Innis himself had around 1,500 of his index cards transcribed to 339 typed and numbered sheets of paper. And the cards themselves were lost, it seems, so I’m not holding my breath. However, it’s always possible that some interpid researcher might investigate the archives¹ and discover them hidden away there one day. Stranger things have happened.

“The early history of the material that came to be called the Idea File is obscure. Innis’s son, Donald, recalls that his father used to keep notes on card files, and that there were, at one point, about eighteen inches of white cards, with another five or so inches of white cards containing an index. This index, according to Donald Innis constituted ‘a cross referencing system so that one idea might be referred to under several headings and vice-versa’. These cards appear to have been in manuscript. However, at some point or points, Innis had these notes typed on sheets of paper, and near the end of his life collected the typed notes into one collation which he numbered consequently from 1 to 339.

The cards themselves appear to be lost. It is possible that they still existed at Innis’s death, for there is a second typed version of part of the Idea File. What might have happened is that in the process of preparing Innis’s posthumous material for limited circulation, a typist began working from the cards; then, during the typing, the family discovered the typed version and stopped the retyping.”

I’ve gleaned a few ideas from all this.

First, cross-referencing matters. Innes kept a very extensive index to his cards: 5 inches of index to 18 inches of actual notes. This means his ideas were probably extensively cross-referenced. Makes me think no amount of cross-referencing is too much, if you feel like doing it. But also: don’t get obsessive. Life’s too short to cross-reference everything.

Second, I’m wondering about longevity of work. It really seems like the original notes on index cards were lost. This is such an interesting feature of the resurgence of interest in the working methods of writers and scholars. Is the ‘finished product’ - book or article - really more important and permanent than the supposedly transient and disposable noted from which it was created? And what happens to the ‘Nachlass’ in the age of digitization? Is it both eternal and wipeable at the same time?

Third, the meaning is in the links, but the links are fragile. Given the interlinking of the original notes and their subsequent disappearance, it’s fairly clear that the published ‘idea file’ has lost a significant part of its meaning, since that meaning resides in the links between ideas, not just in the ideas themselves.

Fourth, I noticed that Innis’s notes were often very short. Sometimes just a sentence or two, with compressed, abbreviated syntax. It reminds me of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, many of which fall slightly flat as prose. Here’s an example. I just wonder what it used to link to:

“University presidents giving each other degrees. A university not an institution designed to that end, or to give members of boards of governers degrees.”

I really appreciate looking into the working practices of writers like this. No doubt there are many more such examples to be found and explored.

Manuscript Collection #845, Innis Papers, Archives of the University of Toronto, Thomas Fisher Library, Box 8 ↩︎

I read the top ten Zettelkasten posts on Hacker News so you can do something more wholesome with your day

Sun, 21 May 2023 18:19:33 +1100

Every so often someone on Hacker News mentions Zettelkasten, a method of making longer work from simple, connected notes. An interesting conversation usually follows. Several of these posts have reached the front page of the Hacker News site, making their authors ‘HN famous’, which is the geek’s version of blowing up on TikTok. The top Zettelkasten post there has around 300 comments, while the 10th has 31.

It’s worth staying a little sceptical about whether visibility on Hacker News is a good proxy for competence. But the comments are usually interesting and often helpful. So here’s a countdown of the top Zettelkasten posts, from 10 to 1. And here, top simply means ‘most commented upon’. For your reference, I’ve noted whether each article is introductory/basic, intermediate/involved, or advanced/complex.

And I’d be interested to know what your favourite Zettelkasten article or resource is - there are a lot to choose from. Or else feel free to tell me exactly why you think this is all a daft waste of time.

So now…

The Zettelkasten article top ten countdown

10. Zettelkasten, linking your thinking, and Nick Milo’s search for ground

link

Bob Doto, presents a constructive comparison of two different approaches to note-making. The Zettelkasten method, and Nick Milo’s ‘Linking Your Thinking’ (LYT) may appear similar, but as this article points out, they’re really quite different:

“The things that differentiate zettelkasten from LYT are the very things that make each system truly work.”

Bob has some additional articles about the Zettelkasten approach, which are highly recommend.

Complex

Principles

Comparison

9. Org-roam-UI – graphical front end for exploring your org-roam Zettelkasten

link

Org-Roam is a plain text knowledge management system based on Emacs Org-mode. This post provides an add-on visual interface that shows a map of your notes, similar to other tools such as Roam, Obsidian and Logseq. The tool is “a frontend for exploring and interacting with your org-roam notes.” If you use Org-mode and think you might need this, read on.

Complex

Tools

Github Repo

8. The Zettelkasten Method (2019)

link

Abram Demski of lesswrong.com goes to town on explaining the evolution of his paper-based Zettelkasten system. He uses 3x5 inch index cards, but he also tried Workflowy and has nice things to say about it. There’s a follow-up at the end, in which the author says he now uses notebooks, but still finds the Zettelkasten referencing system very useful. Along the way he offers one of my favourite principles: “small pieces of paper are just modular large pieces of paper”. This particular article also one of Abram’s top posts on lesswrong.com

Complex

Manual

Principles

Tools

Examples

(Yes, this article covers a lot)

7. My Second Brain – Zettelkasten

link

Web developer Scott Spence writes about the tools he has been using for notetaking: GitHub, Notion, RoamResearch, Obsidian, Foam. There’s a helpful warning at the top of the article that since it’s three years old the technical details may be out of date. This post is for lovers of digital tools!

Involved

Tools

6. Luhmann’s Zettelkasten

link

An article from a small German software company about Niklas Luhmann and the structure of his notes. Warning: the description here of how Luhmann connected notes through consecutive numbering (Folgezettel) seems a little simplistic. And TBH I’m not sure how useful this article really is, but the authors do seem to have succeeded with the HN popularity contest.

Basic

Article

5. Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method

link

A very full introduction to the Zettelkasten method, by Sascha Fast of zettelkasten.de. It’s a great introduction, which also goes into useful depth. If you’ve already been building your Zettelkasten for a while, it’s worth coming back to this to see what you can pick up now you’ve got a real example to play with. These guys also have an app (the Archive) and a great forum, but if you’re reading this you probably already know that.

Involved

Manual

Examples

4. Zettelkästen?

link

Brian Kam (of Interintellect) writes a simple summary of the Zettelkasten approach, with a follow-up post two years later, by which time he was no longer a beginner since he’d written (drum roll…) 6,837 notes. He implements his Zettelkasten with a Git-based wiki.

Basic

Principles

3. A tour to my Zettelkasten note clusters

link

Involved

Example

Tech writer Mingyang Li describes his Zettelkasten categories in Obsidian. There are categories like ‘Journal’, ‘chat with people’ and ‘distinguishing-between’. It’s quite useful to see how one person benefits from specific clusters of notes.

2. Zettelkasten note-taking in 10 minutes

link

Basic

How-to

GitLab software engineer Tomas Vik runs through the slip-box method, based on Sönke Ahrens’s book, How to Take Smart Notes. He recommends creating individual plain text (markdown) files and gives clear examples of how this is structured. He used Zettlr as his markdown-enabled text editor of choice, but mentions alternative apps that do similar things. As a bonus, there’s a follow-up post a year later, in which the author describes how his process has changed (not much) and why he now uses Logseq instead of Zettlr.

1. Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead

link

Basic

How-to

Amazon data scientist Eugene Yan wins the HN Zettelkasten popularity prize with his post on how he implements the system in Roam. Well, it has attracted the most comments anyway. It’s a useful introduction, and commenters mention other apps such as TiddlyWiki, Obsidian and Workflowy. The author seems to have moved on, and started using Obsidian in 2023.

Reflections

Well done If you’ve read this far you are clearly my kind of person. Though you’ve probably noticed that these aren’t necessarily the very best articles about the Zettelkasten method. In any case, everyone differs on what that would even mean. But if you want to gain an understanding of this particular approach to note-making and writing, most of these articles are well worth reading. And if this was all you had available you’d certainly be able to make a good start.

I was interested to discover that quite a few technically-competent people are interested in the Zettelkasten, and are even using one, and was mildly amused to see how keen some seem to be on their many and various digital tools.

I found the follow-up posts, where they existed, the most useful, because they showed how the authors' methods had evolved over time, with actual Zettelkasten use. This is much better than the kind of breathless article that says, basically: “I heard about this Zettelkasten word two days ago and now I’m up against a deadline to post something, anything.” The HN comments are worth skimming too, not least because there are a some sensible criticisms of this system and plenty of alternative suggestions.

To be honest, though, I’ve found the commentary on Reddit and at the zettelkasten.de forum to be generally of a higher quality. This is probably because the participants there are all already Zettelkasten-curious.

Aby Warburg's Zettelkasten and the search for interconnection

Wed, 10 May 2023 01:02:00 +1100

Aby Warburg and the compulsion to interconnect

Aby Warburg was a German art historian obsessed with the connections he saw across European and Mediterranean culture in the afterlife of Antiquity. He even coined a phrase: Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections.

“Coining a word that is as fitting as it is symptomatic of the urge it describes, [Aby] Warburg spoke of his Verknüpfungszwang. This ‘compulsion to interconnect’ lies not only at the root of his research and working methods. It is also manifested in regular references within his work to events in his private life, his family and collaborators.” - The Warburg Institute

Three projects in particular display Warburg’s extraordinary scholarly methods.

“The library, panels and boxes formed the ensemble of supports on which Aby Warburg’s spiritual work and intellectual creativity were based.” - Benjamin Steiner, Aby Warburgs Zettelkasten Nr. 2 “Geschichtsauffassung”, In: Heike Gfrereis / Ellen Strittmatter (Hrsg.): Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie (Marbacher Kataloge, 66). Marbach 2013, S. 154-161.

Taken together, these three amount to a technology for exploring Warburg’s obsession with interconnection.

Image source: Helix Center Warburg Symposium

The Zettelkasten as a thread through the labyrinth of thought

The first technology of note is Warburg’s Zettelkasten, his collection of index boxes, containing notes on many subjects.

“Aby Warburg’s collection of index cards (III.2.1.ZK), containing notes, bibliographical references, printed material and letters, was compiled throughout the scholar’s life. Ninety-six boxes survive, each containing between 200 and 800 individually numbered index cards. Cardboard dividers and envelopes group these index cards into thematic sections. The online catalogue reproduces the structure of the dividers and sub-dividers with their original titles in German and consists of about 3,200 items.” - Warburg Institute Archive

“…Warburg apparently worked constantly with these boxes, and, as his first biographer Carl Georg Heise has reported, he often stood with a strained facial expression bent over the mass of papers and arranged and shifted the individual cards in a long-lasting and never-ending process of order. “Those who follow Warburg’s note box follow his train of thought; from the banking system in Florence, the medieval trading company, the development of individuality, the restless professional work of the Calvinists and the Reformed form of asceticism, to Warburg’s own origin from the old Jewish banking family. The slip box is Warburg’s Ariadne’s thread through his labyrinthine library like his labyrinthine thinking: from the werewolf to the historical concept. A thought, an idea or a new concept does not emerge in a linear progression, but in a process of reciprocating units of ideas and cross-references, which continues until new intersections and nodes have formed.” - Benjamin Steiner, Aby Warburgs Zettelkasten Nr. 2 “Geschichtsauffassung”, In: Heike Gfrereis / Ellen Strittmatter (Hrsg.): Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie (Marbacher Kataloge, 66). Marbach 2013, S. 154-161.

According to Fritz Saxl, Warburg’s assistant and collaborator, “this vast card-index had a special quality… they had become part of his system and scholarly existence”.

“Often one saw Warburg standing tired and distressed bent over his boxes with a packet of index cards, trying to ﬁnd for each one the best place within the system; it looked like a waste of energy. […] It took some time to realise that his aim was not bibliographical. This was his method of deﬁning the limits and contents of his scholarly world and the experience gained here became decisive in selecting books for the Library.” - Fritz Saxl, The History of Warburg’s Library (1943-44, p. 329), quoted in Mnemonics, Mneme And Mnemosyne. Aby Warburg’s Theory Of Memory, Claudia Wedepohl (p.389).

A library of good neighbours

Second of note, and much larger than the card-index, is Warburg’s library. As the oldest son, Aby Warburg was in line to inherit his family’s seriously wealthy banking business. But his lack of interest in finance led him to offer the business to his younger brother Max, on the condition he could purchase any books he needed for his research into his true interest, art history. It may have seemed like a modest request, but Warburg’s book collection grew ever larger and eventually expanded into a significant research library. This library was organised like no other. The shelves, and eventually whole rooms were arranged to enable serendipitous connections across and between categories.

“the book you need might not necessarily be the one you were looking for. It might, in fact, be the one next to it. The books are shelved around the law of the good neighbour, meaning that the library’s collection is organised thematically instead of by author, title, or publication date. Gertrud Bing, an architect of the classification system and director of the Institute when it moved to London, said that ‘the manner of shelving the books is meant to impact certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sections above and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend additional interest to the one he was pursuing’. Although the Warburg’s serendipitous system may initially seem unconventional and somewhat esoteric, the structuring of the library’s collection around the law of the good neighbour means that it is much easier for readers to discover and find texts they didn’t even know they needed within the interconnected, interdisciplinary classmarks. For Warburg, every book was useful in the context of the whole collection.”

…“the arrangement of the books at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the first Warburg library in Hamburg, was intended to encourage rather than obstruct discoveries. Whenever Warburg, an avid book collector, took receipt of one of his many deliveries of new acquisitions, he would rearrange the shelves to accommodate each new book into the collection. In this way, his theories on the interrelation of various images, literary motifs and disciplines found physical form in the arrangement of the books on the shelves. Bing remarked that ‘Warburg had chosen and arranged the books like stones from a mosaic of which he had the pattern in his mind’. They were collected for research into specific areas, under a general theme of the afterlife of antiquity.” Source: The Warburg Institute

An Atlas of Images

The third technology for making connections was Warburg’s visual Memosyne Atlas, intended to demonstrate in a series of large panels the lines of connection between artistic motifs in varying periods and locations.

“Warburg believed that these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster immediate, synoptic insights into the afterlife of pathos-charged images depicting what he dubbed “bewegtes Leben” (life in motion or animated life).” - ZKM Center for Art and Media

Warburg’s institutional legacy

These three enterprises, card index, library and atlas, are today combined into the Warburg Institute, which began life in Hamburg and since 1944 has been in London.

Above the front door of the Institute is inscribed the Greek word MEMOSYNE. Warburg saw this not straightforwardly as the name of the goddess of memory, but as a sphynx presenting a great riddle. The Institute revolves around memory as a problem. What is memory? How does it persist in culture and individuals, and especially through art?

“In the first public occurrence of the word “Mnemosyne” I am aware of in his writings, found in the annual report on the Library for the year 1925, Warburg identifies Mnemosyne not as the goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses but rather as “the great Sphynx,” out of whom he hopes “to unlock, if not her secret, at least the formulation of her riddle [der grossen Sphynx Mnemosyne, wenn auch nicht ihr Geheimnis, so doch die Formulierung ihrer Rätselfrage zu entlocken]”” – Davide Stimilli, «Aby Warburg’s Impresa», Images Re-vues (En ligne), Hors-série 4, 2013.

Arguably, Warburg’s self-diagnosed Verknüpfungszwang, his ‘compulsion to interconnect’ hindered the completion and publication of his work. Perhaps his constant sorting and re-sorting represented a kind of perfectionism, or even a form of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Indeed, he spent several years battling significant mental health problems and the end published comparatively little.

However, in another sense, through his Zettelkasten, his library and his atlas of images, the compulsion to interconnect became Warburg’s life’s work. It is telling that though Warburg left relatively few completed texts, his institutional legacy, especially through London’s Warburg Institute and Hamburg’s Warburg-Haus, has proved extremely influential and highly intellectually fertile over many decades - and continues strongly into the Twenty-first Century.

In his novel The White Castle (1998), Orhan Pamuk’s narrator says: “I suppose that to see everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time.” The life and legacy of Aby Warburg, shows that this doesn’t have to be a pointless pursuit of arbitrary links but can generate lasting knowledge and meaning with wide implications.

Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory - and Chris Aldridge’s online notes on this documentary (which is how I discovered it).

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now in paperback and ebook.

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:12:14 +1100

Thanks to a post by @chrisaldrich I was finally prompted to write about Aby Warburg’s Zettelkasten and library.

Aby Warburg's Zettelkasten and the search for interconnection writingslowly.com
Writing Slowly https://writingslowly.com/2023/05/09/aby-warburgs-three.html

Aby Warburg's Zettelkasten and the search for interconnection

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:02:49 +1100

Aby Warburg and the compulsion to interconnect

“Coining a word that is as fitting as it is symptomatic of the urge it describes, [Aby] Warburg spoke of his Verknüpfungszwang. This ‘compulsion to interconnect’ lies not only at the root of his research and working methods. It is also manifested in regular references within his work to events in his private life, his family and collaborators.” - The Warburg Institute

Three projects in particular display Warburg’s extraordinary scholarly methods.

“The library, panels and boxes formed the ensemble of supports on which Aby Warburg’s spiritual work and intellectual creativity were based.” - Benjamin Steiner, Aby Warburgs Zettelkasten Nr. 2 “Geschichtsauffassung”, In: Heike Gfrereis / Ellen Strittmatter (Hrsg.): Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie (Marbacher Kataloge, 66). Marbach 2013, S. 154-161.

Taken together, these three amount to a technology for exploring Warburg’s obsession with interconnection.

Image source: Helix Center Warburg Symposium

The Zettelkasten as a thread through the labyrinth of thought

The first technology of note is Warburg’s Zettelkasten, his collection of index boxes, containing notes on many subjects.

“Aby Warburg’s collection of index cards (III.2.1.ZK), containing notes, bibliographical references, printed material and letters, was compiled throughout the scholar’s life. Ninety-six boxes survive, each containing between 200 and 800 individually numbered index cards. Cardboard dividers and envelopes group these index cards into thematic sections. The online catalogue reproduces the structure of the dividers and sub-dividers with their original titles in German and consists of about 3,200 items.” - Warburg Institute Archive

“…Warburg apparently worked constantly with these boxes, and, as his first biographer Carl Georg Heise has reported, he often stood with a strained facial expression bent over the mass of papers and arranged and shifted the individual cards in a long-lasting and never-ending process of order. “Those who follow Warburg’s note box follow his train of thought; from the banking system in Florence, the medieval trading company, the development of individuality, the restless professional work of the Calvinists and the Reformed form of asceticism, to Warburg’s own origin from the old Jewish banking family. The slip box is Warburg’s Ariadne’s thread through his labyrinthine library like his labyrinthine thinking: from the werewolf to the historical concept. A thought, an idea or a new concept does not emerge in a linear progression, but in a process of reciprocating units of ideas and cross-references, which continues until new intersections and nodes have formed.” - Benjamin Steiner, Aby Warburgs Zettelkasten Nr. 2 “Geschichtsauffassung”, In: Heike Gfrereis / Ellen Strittmatter (Hrsg.): Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie (Marbacher Kataloge, 66). Marbach 2013, S. 154-161.

According to Fritz Saxl, Warburg’s assistant and collaborator, “this vast card-index had a special quality… they had become part of his system and scholarly existence”.

“Often one saw Warburg standing tired and distressed bent over his boxes with a packet of index cards, trying to ﬁnd for each one the best place within the system; it looked like a waste of energy. […] It took some time to realise that his aim was not bibliographical. This was his method of deﬁning the limits and contents of his scholarly world and the experience gained here became decisive in selecting books for the Library.” - Fritz Saxl, The History of Warburg’s Library (1943-44, p. 329), quoted in Mnemonics, Mneme And Mnemosyne. Aby Warburg’s Theory Of Memory, Claudia Wedepohl (p.389).

A library of good neighbours

“the book you need might not necessarily be the one you were looking for. It might, in fact, be the one next to it. The books are shelved around the law of the good neighbour, meaning that the library’s collection is organised thematically instead of by author, title, or publication date. Gertrud Bing, an architect of the classification system and director of the Institute when it moved to London, said that ‘the manner of shelving the books is meant to impact certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sections above and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend additional interest to the one he was pursuing’. Although the Warburg’s serendipitous system may initially seem unconventional and somewhat esoteric, the structuring of the library’s collection around the law of the good neighbour means that it is much easier for readers to discover and find texts they didn’t even know they needed within the interconnected, interdisciplinary classmarks. For Warburg, every book was useful in the context of the whole collection.”

…“the arrangement of the books at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the first Warburg library in Hamburg, was intended to encourage rather than obstruct discoveries. Whenever Warburg, an avid book collector, took receipt of one of his many deliveries of new acquisitions, he would rearrange the shelves to accommodate each new book into the collection. In this way, his theories on the interrelation of various images, literary motifs and disciplines found physical form in the arrangement of the books on the shelves. Bing remarked that ‘Warburg had chosen and arranged the books like stones from a mosaic of which he had the pattern in his mind’. They were collected for research into specific areas, under a general theme of the afterlife of antiquity.” Source: The Warburg Institute

An Atlas of Images

“Warburg believed that these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster immediate, synoptic insights into the afterlife of pathos-charged images depicting what he dubbed “bewegtes Leben” (life in motion or animated life).” - ZKM Center for Art and Media

Warburg’s institutional legacy

These three enterprises, card index, library and atlas, are today combined into the Warburg Institute, which began life in Hamburg and since 1944 has been in London.

“In the first public occurrence of the word “Mnemosyne” I am aware of in his writings, found in the annual report on the Library for the year 1925, Warburg identifies Mnemosyne not as the goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses but rather as “the great Sphynx,” out of whom he hopes “to unlock, if not her secret, at least the formulation of her riddle [der grossen Sphynx Mnemosyne, wenn auch nicht ihr Geheimnis, so doch die Formulierung ihrer Rätselfrage zu entlocken]”” – Davide Stimilli, «Aby Warburg’s Impresa», Images Re-vues (En ligne), Hors-série 4, 2013.

Big changes at writingslowly.com

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 19:10:13 +1100

New year, new website (backend)

It’s a new year, so it must be time for new web connections! Well, I finally decided to shift from a hosted Wordpress site to go all in on micro.blog.

It was fairly easy to migrate, just following the instructions. Things already feel easier and less complicated.

Why did I decide to make this change?

I need a simpler system for online writing. It’s been clear for some time that Wordpress was holding me back. I know: “poor workers blame their tools”, and obviously there’s something wrong with me if I can’t just log in to Wordpress and write a line or two from time to time. But really, it felt as though the user interface was presenting a psychological barrier. Every time I logged in it seemed the WordPress UX had got more complex. Anyway, that’s my excuse. I’m hoping that a switch entirely to micro.blog hosting will help the writing to flow a bit better.
I like the IndieWeb. Although I had some Indieweb plug-ins set up on my Wordpress site, it didn’t feel as though they were getting much use. The Musky shenanigans at Twitter have made it even clearer that independence on the web is essential and that the true social network is the web itself. Switching to micro.blog will hopefully connect me better, and if I ever change my mind, there’s no lock-in.
Updating the app feels like a chore. When I checked my hosting dashboard it was clear that there were several insecurities caused by a lack of updating. I just hadn’t gotten around to it for ages. But really, I don’t have much interest in which version of PHP I’m supposed to be using, or what version the plug-ins are - so I’d rather not think about this side of things. If micro.blog can do this for me, I’m not complaining.
I also quite like Mastodon. Micro.blog has a certain amount of compatability with Mastodon, through the activitypub protocol. So I plan to try that out.
Writing in Markdown syntax has become more and more intuitive to me, despite its limitations, and I like the relative simplicity of static sites. Micro.blog uses Hugo as its site generator, so now I’m now using Markdown to create static pages.

Look, I’m not really complaining about WordPress. I like it, and Automattic isn’t Apple/Facebook/Google/Twitter/Amazon, so there’s that. If I had to choose a dictator to rule the world, Matt Mullenweg would be on my shortlist. It’s not Wordpress, it’s me. I’m ready for a change.

Writing about reading

Also, I’m making a commitment to writing about my reading in 2023.

I love reading. Each year I read about 30-40 books and this year I’ll be writing about it here. There’ll soon be a ‘reading’ category at the top of the webpage. Why am I doing this?

for motivation, and
to leave a record, sharing what I know and
to encourage you, dear reader, to stop scrolling and go read a good book.

Micro.blog has a series of companion apps, one of which is Epilogue. You can set an annual reading goal and every time you blog about a title you’ve finished, your goal moves one step closer to completion.

Micro.blog also has some other great book-related features, including a handly bookshelf, and this is one of the things that made me want to switch.

I keep a private TiddlyWiki Zettelkasten in which I already reflect on my reading, so the only real change is in making it public.

Don’t panic

So that’s what’s new. But don’t worry, whatever happens I’ll still be writing slowly.