Mystery machinery, abandoned on the Karloo Track. Is it a lawnmower? 📷
Finished reading: Unlocking Luhmann by Claudio Baraldi 📚 This is a great companion volume to the works of Niklas Luhmann. It’s a linked series of glossary articles, introducing key terms. Prior warning: some of these are as hard to understand as the OG himself!
Cherry blossom! Spring is here. 📷🏡
“RSS rules, man!” - Baldur on Martin Field’s Really Specific Stories podcast. 🎙️💬
Ted Nelson's Evolutionary List File
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
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.
See also:
- The search for interconnection
- How to be interested in everything
- Thoughts are nest-eggs
- Serious about a Zettelkasten?
- The card index has triumphed
- We can’t master knowledge
- Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004/1980). Rhizome. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, pp. 3-28.
Finished reading: Your Name is not Anxious by Stephanie Dowrick. Urgent, practical, and affirming. Both profound and profoundly helpful. 📚
Interview on ABC Radio
Live Webinar
#reading #psychology #mentalhealth
“Walking in and of itself is a way to cultivate precisely all the qualities of person-hood that seem missing from much public discourse — attention, focus, kindness, patience, persistence, tenacity, mental and physical health.” — Craig Mod💬 #Quotes
Is there a literature of teeth?
Do you find teeth comical? Do you find it hard to take them seriously? Jianan Qian, writing in The Millions, does.
“teeth make a flawed metaphor, too mundane to be tragic and too superficial to be profound. I await the the first great contribution to dental literature.” - Jianan Qian, Dentistry and Doubt: On Writing About Teeth. The Millions
Happily, there’s no need to wait for great dental literature, because we already have Lucia Berlin’s extraordinary short story ‘Dr. H. A. Moynihan’. This appears in her 2015 collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, and though wonderful, is not for the faint-hearted. To be fair, this dentistry is comical, though along the lines of a Southern Gothic Grand Guignol.
“I hated St. Joseph’s. Terrified by the nuns, I struck Sister Cecilia one hot Texas day and was expelled. As punishment, I had to work every day of summer vacation in Grandpa’s dental office.”
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin 📚
Just the first two sentences here, though. The rest you’ll need to extract yourself!
Two metaphors for #learning. Do we acquire knowledge or do we participate in it? Maybe it’s both. doi.org/10.3102/0… #PKM
Another week, another new bike path! Still partly under construction, this one’s near my house alongside the excellently named Muddy Creek. 🚲
The dream is diversity
“We co-create with one another and with nature, but by the very creativity of the Universe and us in it, we cannot know what we will co-create.
Then what can guide us? Our guide can be a new founding mythic structure that reflects our full enlivenment: humanity in a creative universe, biosphere and human individual, and social lives that are fully lived and that keep becoming. The dream is diversity, more ways of being human as our 30 or so civilisations across the globe weave together gently enough to honour their roots and allow change to unfold gracefully. Our global woven civilisation is ours to create, ever-unknowing, facing, as Immanuel Kant said, the crooked timber of our humanity."
Stuart A. Kauffman, ‘Why science needs to break the spell of reductive materialism’. Aeon 💬
See also: Stuart A. Kauffman (2016) Humanity in a Creative Universe. Oxford University Press.
Image: Chemical composition of coal.
Just want to say I’ve been using #Workflowy for 541 weeks now. It’s just fantastic. The app I’m happiest to pay my annual fee for (apart from #micro.blog, of course). #PKM 📝
Checked out this new Sydney cycling path on the weekend. It runs from Parramatta, across the Parramatta River, and nearly 5km North to Carlingford. Extended safe, off-road riding makes me happy 😁📷🚲
The mastery of knowledge is an illusion
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.
Walter Benjamin on the obsolete book
“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
See also: Researching Benjamin Researching
Hermann Burger - Serious about a Zettelkasten?
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. ↩︎
📷 Low hanging cloud over the creek on the way home.
