Atomic Notes
Eleven urgent note-making questions are now finding answers
The strange return of the continuous need to make sense of things
The idea of reading continuous narrative may be relatively recent. For example, the Bible is arranged in many places with a long sequential narrative, and some have seen it as ‘the greatest story ever told’. But liturgical practice, both Jewish and Christian, is to split this extended narrative up into excerpted readings (’the reading’ or ’the lesson’; ’the portion’ or parashah).
The novel, meanwhile, encourages readers to assume continuous reading is the natural way of things, even though many novels even into the 20th century were actually serialised on first publication. Here’s Robert Darnton on the significance of fragmentary reading.
“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your own personality. . . By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selection into patterns reveal an epistemology — a process of knowing — at work below the surface”
— (Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” New York Review of Books 47 (20)[December 21, 2000] 82, 86).
I note this because these days it feels like the age of fragmentary reading has well and truly returned. Every medium has cracked into splinters. Along with this fragmentation comes a revival of the need for a continuous effort to make sense of an increasingly disordered experience. As a result there’s a great need to work out new ways of knowing.
Currently reading: Wise Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚
I’m delighted to be featured in Hyde’s intriguing series Under/Over, where bloggers are asked for their thoughts on what they find under-rated and over-rated. I have opinions on Zettelkasten, POSSE, solitude, journalling, pavlova(!) and more. Read on at lazybea.rs.
#indieweb
Currently reading: Wise. Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚
One reason I write:
“We remember only a tiny fraction of existence. We have forgotten most of what it is like to be alive, long before we die. Oblivion starts seeping into our heads as soon as we are self-aware.” (p.44)
💬 ”Roughly speaking, the world is divided into two classes: those who use the Card Index System and those who do not.”
Byles, R. B, 1911. The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons), page v.
Still true after more than a century!
#Zettelkasten
#NoteTaking
#PKM
Atomic notes have a long history
Did previous generations ever think much about atomicity of ideas in their notes? After all, if most people were using notebooks, surely they didn’t need to consider how long their notes should be – they could just keep writing till they were done.
It seems thinking about atomicity was a major element (pun intended) of mathematics and philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Bertrand Russell’s ’logical atomism’ was very influential. Russell said:
“you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else” (‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ 1918: 270).
A similar positivism (where the universe is made of discrete entities rather than one great holism) was a major feature of the efforts to catalogue the world’s knowledge centered on Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ into the 1930s.
Otlet inspired the ‘documentalists’ to reformulate information science in the post-war period, including Vannevar Bush, the originator of the ‘Memex’, which was a precursor to the desktop computer.
Douglas Engelbart further pioneered the way we now use computers. In his paper on augmenting human intellect (1962) he referred to his notes on edge-notched cards as ’thought kernels’, ‘concept packets’ and ‘kernel statements (cards)’ but the established concept behind this was the ‘unit record system’. This had originated in 1888 when H.E. Davidson of Melvil Dewey’s Library Bureau realised he could sell catalogue cards and shelving to commercial businesses to improve their record keeping, previously constrained in ledger books. Engelbart said:
“Mainly what is new is the use of the smaller units of information in restricted-subject sets (notedecks) so that I gain considerable flexibility in the manipulations of my thought products at the level at which I actually work in my minute-by-minute struggle with analytical and formulative thought. Not only do my own thoughts produce results in this fashion but when I digest the writings of another person I find generally anyway that I have extracted from his structure and integrated into my own a specific selection of facts, considerations, ideas etc. Often these different extracted items fit into different places in my structure or become encased in special substructures as I modify or expand his concepts. Extracting such items or kernels and putting each on its own notecard helps this process considerably–the role or position of each such item in the growth of the note structure is independent, and yet if desired all can quickly be isolated and extracted…” (Engelbart, 1962: 57)
The features Engelbart found he couldn’t get from his use of cards – that was precisely what he set out to obtain by means of the digital computer.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying earlier generations thought a lot about atomicity – more even than I had realised!
Now read: The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Note: This post started life on Reddit
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 a handy email format which masks how they were all created one by one like little atoms.
💬 “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” — Marshall McLuhan
Whether you’re interested in making your own containers for ‘content’ or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human.
Read more: What’s the future of creative work without human intent?
#AmWriting #Creativity #Fediblog #MediaTheory
Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.
“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”
So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.
Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory
Is note-making an “aide memoire” or a replacement for the source? To distill a book into notes on it, is to change our relationship with the original text. Beyond just storing facts we are building a library of our own interpretations. There’s a friction between preservation and occlusion in our digital workflows.
“When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it.”
Read more: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#Zettelkasten #PKM #NoteMaking