Ok zettelkasten fans. Unless someone can come up with an earlier source, the inventor of the zettelkasten method for excerpting and note taking is Konrad Gessner in 1548. (Again it’s not Niklas Luhmann!)
More details to come on this fun bit of history soon.
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Ok zettelkasten fans. Unless someone can come up with an earlier source, the inventor of the zettelkasten method for excerpting and note taking is Konrad Gessner in 1548. (Again it’s not Niklas Luhmann!)
More details to come on this fun bit of history soon.
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We’ve been yak-shaving for centuries.
But Luhmann’s method did much more. youtube.com/watch?v=_igOoF…
Did more how?
There’s not much difference between his system or many others over the past several hundred years. Compare Ross Ashby’s journals & indices http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html or Jonathan Edwards’ Miscellanies https://twitter.com/matt_everhard/status/1466483468494323718.
Luhmann used his more aggressively or efficiently perhaps, but we really need to stop idolizing only him because of our availability heuristic bias. Why not lionize Isaac Newton for his use (he called his a waste book), or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who used a wooden cabinet to create his system? And these are just a subset of examples of prominent mathematicians related to calculus.
The note taking traditions everyone is writing about and re-discovering go back further than most are aware. As Dave Rogers indicates “We’ve been yak-shaving for centuries.”
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Luhmann used his more aggressively or efficiently perhaps, but we really need to stop idolizing only him because of our availability heuristic bias.
The note taking traditions everyone is writing about and re-discovering go back further than most are aware. As Dave Rogers indicates
Did more how? What I understood is that, besides a dense network of cross references, the distinctive feature is the following: He allowed for arbitrary branching at every point in his hierarchical numbering scheme, in other words, 1/
a child note did not have to belong to the same topic category as its original ancestor notes. It was sufficient that its content was somehow connected to its immediate parent. 2/
Why did this have such a powerful effect? Luhmann just recorded “which thoughts come to my mind and in what context”. So, the wider context enabled serendipitous inspirations. 3/3
Did more how?
There’s not much difference between his system or many others over the past several hundred years. Compare Ross Ashby’s journals & indices rossashby.info/journal/index.… or Jonathan Edwards’ Miscellanies .
(https://t.co/m5ZLjp8Qgx)
boffosocko.com/2021/12/02/557…
Luhmann used his more aggressively or efficiently perhaps, but we really need to stop idolizing only him because of our availability heuristic bias.
The note taking traditions everyone is writing about and re-discovering go back further than most are aware. As Dave Rogers indicates
Gessner here seems to have the “notes so atomic they’re physically disconnected” aspect of zettelkasten, but not the pointers mechanism. Ashby’s example does seem to have the whole spirit, though I could see someone more persnickety than me objecting to how a lot of the notes with properly distributed pointers aren’t in the physically disconnected mode (instead in notebooks), and the physically disconnected part (from what I’m reading? The index cards?) is more like the Syntopicon / index part than independent observations.
But!
It seems unnecessarily hostile to me to claim that people are “idolizing only [Luhmann] because of our availability heuristic bias” when there are real aspects that excite people about the system Luhmann used that just aren’t present in Newton’s indexing. You don’t have to be making an idol out of Luhmann to find it cool!
I can’t speak to Leibniz because I can’t actually get the researchgate stuff to come up on my computer, which seems like less of an availability bias problem than an actual availability problem.
The essence you think is important about zettelkasten may be present in some of these, but people who find different aspects to be the compelling part aren’t necessarily ignorant or to be condescended to. And outside of claims of innovation, when it comes to the attention various note-takers get, are we blaming folks for not finding “write out your notes and then cut them up” as inspiring as someone with an accessible real-world history of use in a setting closer to our own?
Did more how? What I understood is that, besides a dense network of cross references, the distinctive feature is the following: He allowed for arbitrary branching at every point in his hierarchical numbering scheme, in other words, 1/
a child note did not have to belong to the same topic category as its original ancestor notes. It was sufficient that its content was somehow connected to its immediate parent. 2/
Why did this have such a powerful effect? Luhmann just recorded “which thoughts come to my mind and in what context”. So, the wider context enabled serendipitous inspirations. 3/3
Yes, this Zettelkasten-Luhmanniasking is historically annoying. I hoped this niche hype would lead to more reading of Luhmann, the sociologist, but…
Or at least Luhmann, the systems thinker… #AmIRight?
Yes, please. AFAIK, the Zettelkasten’s strength lies not in the pieces of paper, but in their interconnected referencing. Does the same apply for Mr. Gessner’s Zettelkasten?
If I said that Gessner’s system was applied to index information printed in books up to his day what would you suspect?! Gessner manually compiled an early version of Google’s Search Index in the 1500s, the Bibliotheca Universalis & later the Pandectae
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliothe…
Are there differences in Gessner’s system from #Zettelkasten that you think would be instructive and that we could learn from today?
My German is miserable and I’d need access to some heavy archival material to have more authority, but his system has the underlying structure of a commonplace book with strong indices and a HUGE amount of elbow grease (it’s all manual).
Nothing new we don’t have. Mostly it’s surprising what we’ve forgotten. It’s not surprising at all to discover that he is considered the father of the modern bibliography.
Thanks for the pointer, Chris. I’ll do my homework then.
Just FYI: What I found intriguing in Luhmann’s zettels was his way of continuing a throught and branching it. He did it though his way of assinging IDs to the zettels. Not sure how helpful it was to Luhmann himself. This visualisation lookes promising: niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettel…
It’s only homework if it’s something you’re interested in pursuing. Otherwise, I’m likely to get there (eventually) and write up something more in-depth about what’s happening here.
Good find. I’ve been interested to learn of earlier practitioners of the method. I had understood that Luhmann wasn’t the inventor (didn’t Ahrens mention that?), but rather its most famous proponent. Keep us posted on what else you learn.
Luhmann was essentially the pioneer for today’s generation, but not the creator. Some influencers new to zettelkasten in the latest wave over the past 2 years got that bit mistaken thinking he kicked off the system.
I’d submit that there’s almost nothing pioneering about his effort; he’s following a long tradition. He is one of the most famous & influential contemporary examples. Sadly I don’t think many are really looking that closely at his system or the history of the techniques.
A lonely crow disturbs the otherwise peaceful silence of an ancient Corsican night. A Spanish born Roman citizen passes the evening with his two best friends: pen and ink. After being exiled from Rome by dictator Claudius, Seneca the Younger spent eight highly productive years on Corsica, publishing various consolations on anger and death. Writing, as Seneca proclaimed, is how one should exercise oneself. Not a single night would pass without writing in his journal. As he explained to a friend, “I scan the whole of my day and retrace all my deeds and words. I conceal nothing from myself, I omit nothing. For why should I shrink from any of my mistakes, when I may commune thus with myself?” The sleep that would follow his self-examination felt particularly satisfying.
Although at times feeling very lonely, Seneca was used to being isolated. Before fleeing to Corsica, his struggle with tuberculosis forced him to take an extended leave from Rome to distant Alexandria for almost ten years. There, in convalescence, he did what any Stoic philosopher would do: study and write, building up both mental and physical strength. He looked into combining Stoicism with Pythagoreanism. He read and debated the works of Epicurus, who ended up being the most cited writer in Seneca’s works. Seneca said we should read like spies in the enemy’s camp, always looking to learn from our intellectual and philosophical opponents.
Fortune knocked at his door when Agrippina’s grand plans for her son Nero were set into motion by marrying Claudius and convincing him to adopt Nero and recall Seneca to serve as her son’s tutor. By then, Seneca was fifty-three and both amassed and generated a plethora of Stoic knowledge. It turned out to be not nearly enough: slowly but surely, Seneca’s scholastic influence on Nero diminished, and Nero’s depraved character started shining through. Unintentionally involved in a plot to kill the emperor, Seneca saw no other option but to commit suicide. Socrates would have been proud.
Nineteen centuries later, a German academic rummages through paperwork in a set of small drawers of a heavy apothecary cabinet. A small piece of paper in hand, speedily scanning the contents of certain drawers, until a Jawohl mumble announces the arrival at the right drawer. The paper disappears into the cabinet and the academic sinks back into his office chair, returning his attention to that huge stack of papers in dire need of grading.
That person is Niklas Luhmann, one of the most productive and renowned social scientists of the twentieth century. During is academic career, he published 50 books and over 600 articles. When asked how he managed such a feat, his answer was humbling: his productivity stems from a “conversation” with his notes. His famous systems theory—an integrated take on communication, societal, and evolution theory—was the product of conversations with his Zettelkasten (filing cabinet).
Thanks to his ingenious knowledge storage and generation system, Luhmann managed to connect seemingly unrelated domains and produce novel insights. These new insights would in turn be stored into the Zettelkasten, steadily growing his external body of knowledge. Although Luhmann wasn’t the first to use an interlinked index card system to organize intellectual work, his now fully digitized Zettelkasten archive provided more insight into the prolific brilliance of it, inspiring many contemporary note-takers and digital note-taking apps.
<a href="https://brainbaking.com/post/2021/12/technical-knowledge-brews-creativity/../luhmann.jpg"></a>
Niklas Luhmann in his home office, consulting his notes. Photo © Michael Wiegert-Wegener, Akademienunion.
Another century passed. In 2010, Russian software engineer Andrey Breslav and the JetBrains R&D team discussed development and production issues in large-scale back-end codebases. Whiteboard sketches would later become the groundwork for a new programming language known as Kotlin. However, Breslav and his language design team had little intention to create yet another shiny new toy for fashion conscious developers to play around with—Kotlin was designed to be pragmatic, concise, safe, and interoperable.
Those four corner stones caused the team to thoroughly inspect existing programming langues and steal ideas that work, but more importantly, leave out the fancy fluff. As Breslav said in his GeekOUT 2018 talk Languages Kotlin learned from, being shy of using existing ideas is counterproductive. Instead, they turned towards Java, Scala, C#, and Groovy, and implemented what worked. “Thanks a lot authors of Groovy, it’s been a pleasure borrowing features from you” concludes Breslav.
Clearly, their design philosophy paid off. Next to Java, Kotlin is now the most popular language on the Java Virtual Machine (
18%, according to Snyk’s 2020 JVM Ecosystem report), and yearly Stack Overflow insights report a steady increase in overall popularity, surpassing Ruby, and closely following Go.What is the greatest common divisor between Seneca’s knowledgeable and still popular Stoic writings, Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten apothecary cabinet that is fed index cards, and the birth of the Kotlin programming language? All three examples showcase that creativity begets creativity. Every intention is based on a previous one. Seneca closely followed rival schools and internalized that knowledge to produce something new. Luhmann conversed with his notes that told him to connect information he otherwise would have forgotten. Andrey Breslav first turned to other programming languages, inspecting what worked there, before recklessly creating something original but unsuitable.
All creative work starts with input. No input, no output. When we asked software developers for requirements to be creative, technical knowledge was consistently mentioned first. A painter can’t produce creative work without extensive knowledge of drawing techniques. Although we might get fooled by the misleading simplicity contemporary art pieces seem to emit, it requires technical knowledge and years of experience to deconstruct colors and compositions to its essence.
The same is true for us programmers: we can’t be creative with Java code without extensive knowledge of the Java Virtual Machine and its ecosystem. In his GeekOUT talk, Breslav admitted to having overlooked Swift as a potential influence. At that time, it was also very new and nobody on the team knew about it. Without Groovy’s influence,
withanditwould not exist in the Kotlin world.But what exactly is extensive knowledge? What is the best way to gain, retain, and create new knowledge? And are we really only talking about technical knowledge in context of creativity?
Welcome to the wonderful world of cognitive psychology.
This is part six of my creativity story. Be sure to also read part 1: collective creativity, part 2: constraint-based creativity, part 3: creative critical thinking, part 4: from curiosity to creativity, part 5: a creative state of mind, and part 7: the creative techniques toolbox.
tags icon<a href="https://brainbaking.com/tags/creativity" title="Tag: creativity">creativity</a>&lt;a href="https://brainbaking.com/tags/phd" title="Tag: phd"&gt;phd&lt;/a&gt;&amp;lt;a href="https://brainbaking.com/tags/history" title="Tag: history"&amp;gt;history&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;
The zettelkasten is just that, it isn’t a calendar, a rolodex, a to do list or a hammer, saw, or even a jackhammer.
The basic zettelkasten note taking method is very simple and clear cut as originally described by Konrad Gessner in Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium (Zurich: Christoph Froschauer. Fol. 19-20, 1548) to Sönke Ahrens’s book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Just a handful of bullet points can outline the elegance and simplicity of the system. This dramatic simplicity leads to some tremendous value and complexity.
However, in modern use as seen online since roughly 2018 on, the idea and the digital tools surrounding it, has seen some severe mission creep. Zettlekasten has moved to the fad stage and we’re “zettlecasting” everything under the sun. While it can be used as a productivity tool specifically for writing, some are adapting and using it (and tools built for it) for productivity use writ-large. This includes project management or GTD (Getting Things Done) functions. Some are using it as a wiki, digital garden, or personal knowledge management system for aggregating ideas and cross linking them over time. Others are using it as a journal or diary with scheduling and calendaring functions tacked on. Still others are using it to collect facts and force the system to do spaced repetition. These additional functionalities can be great and even incredibly useful, but they’re going far beyond the purpose-fit functionality of what a zettelkasten system was originally designed to do.
Ahrens highlights the zettelkasten method as being simply and specifically designed to do its particular workflow well—no more, no less. He cleverly analogizes slip boxes to their larger box cousins, the shipping container, and the way that that they revolutionized the shipping industry.
Following this analogy, many people are currently trying to not only revolutionize shipping, but sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing as well. While this may be interesting and the digital tools might accommodate some of these functions, are they really custom built from start to finish to really excel at these functionalities? Can they really do all of them at once? While some may come close and do well enough, the added complexity and overreach of all these functionalities may be diluting the base power of what the zettelkasten is capable.
People conflate the idea of note taking and the zettelkasten with tools like Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam Research. This is not necessarily a good thing. If they expect it to do everything and it’s not capable of that or well designed to do what they expect, they’re more likely to get confused, frustrated, and eventually give up. I’ve seen it happening more and more.
As an example, in a book club related to Ahrens’ text in which many highly educated and talented people have been using these tools and have even previously read the book, many are still far too confused about what these tools are and the value that can come from them.
For those who are just coming to the idea of a zettelkasten, I recommend you limit yourselves to just that basic functionality. Don’t muddy the waters with other productivity functions, to do lists, journals, diaries, kitchen sinks, or the latest wiz-bang plugin. Don’t throw in buzz words like GTD and MOC. Stick to the simplest script for a few months and focus on finely honing a small handful of questions and ideas each day from your reading to see what happens. Write, link, repeat. Don’t get caught up in the collector’s fallacy by keeping and saving every single fleeting note (thought) you’ve got (or if you must, put them into a folder off to the side). Focus on the core idea.
Once you’ve got that part down and it’s working for you, then consider adding on those other functionalities. Experiment with them; see what works. But don’t be surprised if those other portions aren’t the magic bullet that is going to revolutionize your life. We’re likely to need new tools, functionality, and a system built from start to finish, to make those other things a useful reality.
Featured image: zettelkasten flickr photo by x28x28de shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
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Perhaps too much of the resurgence of the zettelkasten idea and the online space about it is focused on what a zettelkasten is or how it should be done. After this, descriptions of the process of collecting material for one’s zettelkasten is followed by using it to generate new ideas and thought, though this last part is relatively sparce in comparison. Very little of the discussion or examples I’ve seen in online fora, social media, websites, and the blogosphere is focused on actively using them for creating actual long form output.
As Luhmann’s (all-too-frequently used) example is so powerful, I think it would be massively helpful if users had stronger examples of what these explicit creation workflows looked like, particularly at the longer end of creation of chapters or even book length spaces. Are there any detailed posts, videos, other media about how one approached this problem? What worked well? What didn’t? What would you do differently next time? Have you done this multiple times and now settled into something you feel is most efficient? Is your process manual/digital? What tools helped along the way for laying out and doing the actual stitching together and editing? Would you use them again or try something else? Have you experimented with different methods or practices?
Here, I’m looking for direct and actual experience; I’m explicitly not looking for “this is how I would do it” responses.
Because it’s much easier and far more successful for humans to imitate the practice of others than to innovate it for themselves, I’m ultimately looking not for outlines of what people recommend, but public examples of the practices in progress. Who can show their actual “receipts” and in a reasonably linear and practical way for others to follow? We suffer from a lack of these practices being visible online as most aren’t. Further even the digital ones aren’t public, or if they are, they aren’t well known.
As an example of the broader problem, I’ve yet to see a week go by that someone doesn’t read Ahrens’ generally excellent book, but in posting online they still seem lost in attempting to put the lowest level ideas into active practice.
Personally, I use Hypothes.is as a digital tool for the majority of my note taking. One could follow my feed and see it in real time if they choose. There are benefits for this public practice and I’m aware that many people follow this feed of notes out of curiosity. I’ve even gotten emails from folks indicating that they’ve learned some interesting things for use in their own practices. Sadly, the follow up of revision, cross linking, active indexing, and subsequent growth isn’t public (yet), though the platform I’m using is open to active public conversation and commentary, which is a useful side benefit. I have seen a few other public examples of others’ practices, some in video form, though this can be dull as the time and effort is work and doesn’t make for powerful entertainment because it isn’t. Still these public examples can be far more powerful than some of the explanations I’ve seen, especially for beginners who don’t comprehend the long term benefits (surprise, serendipity, insight, emergent creativity) and who generally focus on the minutiae for lack of direct experience.
On the creation portion, I’m currently experimenting with carrying out the original instructions of Konrad Gessner, an early zettelmacher, as laid out in his book Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium. (1548. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer) and hope to report back shortly about the experience.
Call for explicit examples
So where are the examples? Show us your receipts. Who’s doing this in public that people can follow? Who can be imitated until people have the experience(s) to do this more easily on their own? Let’s collect some of the best (or at least extant) examples for sharing with others.
Once we’ve got some concrete examples then we can study them and iterate on them.
Too many people seem intent on potentially wasting their time by innovating on a practice they haven’t even tried because someone in the productivity space (who usually hasn’t tried it either) wrote a page long post saying it would be a good idea. I know we can do far better.
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If I understood your post correctly, you are looking for legitimate examples of people working with a Zettelkasten to produce output? And, that show their process online?
Here’s a list of people that I’ve bumped into while looking for paper Zettelkasten users.
Scott Scheper (you already know him)
Brain-Friendly Thinking (originally started digital, I believe swapped to paper recently, but the Zettelkasten is not the main focus of his channel)
Dave Hayes (released 3 videos a few years back, hasn’t uploaded since)
Man… There’s really not that many, and even less active ones. I think the Antinet is getting a resurgence, we can see that as this community is growing – I am hoping more people start posting about their knowledge development methods.
I guess a question for you now is: What’s the intention behind finding these people? Because if for you, it’s just to talk with them, I think this reddit community is probably the best place to do that. For newcomers to learn more and imitate others as they develop their own, then I think we just need more people posting publicly online about what they are doing.
Have you found any more people who work with an Antinet? Because I’d be curious to learn more about them.
I see your point, there are not many people going “oh hey! look at all my output, btw I use a zettlekasten” and I think its for a few reasons:
People haven’t been on this bandwagon for long enough to make that direct statement.
There is so much structure behind the definition of a “zettlekasten” or antinet that it might seem like someone who is following core principles feels that they aren’t allowed to say they are using this method. Scott I think said that he just wrote on cards before but never used the system like antinet the way he does now.
People into knowledge management are always evolving their way of thinking (at least I am) because they want to find something that works for their specific output. Right now, my output is academic work, but I graduate in October and my antinet will shift in output needs and im not sure what that will mean for my knowledge workflow. But I think thats an important distinction.
I do think output is important, but I also think that the zettle world is really new. But I think a lot of us picked it up becasue it was like a feature to something we were already doing. For me, I mean Ive been taking written notes since 5th grade, but I didnt come up with something as sophisticated as what Luhmen did.
Your method is also growing, and you have some great evidence of that, and that should be enough for your own personal growth. I picked up antinet because it felt good, and I see the benefits.
Also, comparing productivity tools feels very much like a “see who’s better” game. I think the better thing is to find people who you aspire to and see what they do and try it!
Ramble over
Very close by, my post and my comments on it Knowledge Workers Are Changed by the Information They Process.
The post itself is the output of my notes on productivity, work, and writing. The trigger for me to write the post was reading the paper linked there.
An excerpt from one of my notes on the paper:
A linked note “Busyness Is Not Productivity”, observes, “Knowledge work, deep work, doesn’t look busy and can’t be measured quantitatively. Knowledge work isn’t in the tasks performed.”
I drew from a few other notes related knowledge work, including:
“Knowledge Isn’t Rote Memorization”, which is mostly about pedagogy but includes this quote from Plutarch:
“The Writing is Not the Outcome of Learning”, commenting on Ahrens How to Take Smart Notes chapter 5, “Writing Is the Only Thing That Matters”, led me to “The Writing is the Point”, again referencing Ahrens, “Writing is Remembering”, where I wrote, “for important things we experience and wish to understand, learn, and work with, writing them down is the key action that enables, and in a real sense is our memory and learning”.
I have a few other notes related to writing and productivity, but those were the main ones. From there I was able to construct my post.
I hope this is useful.
For etymology and usage of “inform” I consulted the Webster’s 1913 dictionary entry. Why? James Somer’s 2014 blog post, You’re probably using the wrong dictionary reminded me how a good dictionary is an essential writing tool. I highly recommend, if you write a lot, giving the old dictionary a shot. Of course there are many modern words it won’t have, but it has all the words you use most.
I’ve always written a lot of notes, but apart from the notes themselves, I rarely have any tangible output to speak of. I might share some of my insights with friends, or in a comment on reddit, but I never seem to get around to writing the blog posts I always plan on, and now I know why…
I recently read the paper The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker (1994) via a reddit discussion, and it totally blew my mind. It argues that the “defining characteristic [of knowledge workers] is that they are changed by the information they process.” “Humans are informed (ie. given form) by perceiving their environment and act more effectively in relation to the environment as a result.”
So a knowledge worker is changed by the information they process, and it’s this change that’s important/valuable compared to any material output they might produce. Put another way, the result of working with my ZK is myself! I grapple with content in order to shape myself and engage with the world from a new/better/more informed perspective.
u/taurusnoises has recently posted an intriguing example of his workflow on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc
It’s a digital example using Obsidian, but the graph view beginning would seem to closely mirror some of the analog sort of thinking.
Other examples still welcome…
Many people mistakenly credit Niklas Luhmann with the invention of the zettelkasten method, so I’ve been delving into historical note taking practices. I’ve recently come across a well known and influential book on historical method from the late 1800s that has well described version of the slip (box) method.
Originally published in French in 1897 as Introduction aux études historiques and then translated into English by George Godfrey Berry, Henry Holt and Company published Introduction to the Study of History in 1898 by authors Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos. Along with Ernst Bernheim’s popular Lehrbuch der historischen Methode mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hülfsmittelzum Studium der Geschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1889), Langlois and Seignobos’ text is one of the first comprehensive manuals discussing the use of scientific techniques in historical research.
Primarily written by Seignobos, Book II, Chapter IV “Critical Classification of Sources” has several sections on the zettelkasten method under the section headings:
This section describes a slip method for taking notes which is ostensibly a commonplace book method done using slips of paper (fiches in the original French) instead of notebooks. Their method undergirds portions of the historical method they lay out in the remainder of the book. Seignobos calls the notebook method “utterly wrong” and indicates that similar methods have been “universally condemned” by librarians as a means of storing and maintaining knowledge. Entertainingly he calls the idea of attempting to remember one’s knowledge using pure memory a “barbarous method”.
The slip method is so ubiquitous by the time of his writing in 1897 that he says “Every one admits nowadays that it is advisable to collect materials on separate cards or slips of paper.”
The Slip Method
The book broadly outlines the note taking process:
Seignobos further advises, as was generally common, “to use slips of uniform size and tough material” though he subtly added the management and productivity advice “to arrange them at the earliest opportunity in covers or drawers or otherwise.”
In terms of the form of notes, he says
Where the Luhmann fans will see a major diversion for the system compared to his internal branching system is in its organization. They describe a handful of potential organizations based on the types of notes and their potential uses, though many of these use cases specific to historical research are now better effected by databases and spreadsheets. As for the broader classes of more traditional literature-based textual notes, they recommend grouping the slips in alphabetical order of the words chosen as subject headings. Here, even in a French text translated to English, the German word Schlagwörter is used. It can be translated as “headwords”, “catchwords” or “topical headings” though modern note takers, particularly in digital contexts, may be more comfortable with the translation “tags”.
While there are descriptions of cross-linking or cross-referencing cards from one to another, there is no use of alpha-numeric identifiers or direct juxtaposition of ideas on cards as was practiced by Luhmann.
The authors specifically credit Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der historischen Methode several times in the book. While a lot of the credit is geared toward their broader topic of historical method, Bernheim provides a description of note taking very similar to their method. I’ve found several copies of Bernheim’s text in German, but have yet to find any English translations.
Both Bernheim and Langlois/Seignobos’ work were influential enough in the areas of history specifically and the humanities in general that Beatrice Webb (an influential English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian, and social reformer who was a co-founder of the London School of Economics, the Fabian Society, and The New Statesman) cites their work in Appendix C “The Art of Note-Taking” in her 1926 autobiographical work My Apprenticeship, which was incredibly popular and went through multiple reprintings in the nearly full century since its issue. Her personal use of this note taking method would appear to pre-date both books (certainly the Langlois/Seignobos text), however, attesting to its ubiquity in the late 1800s.
What is the “true” zettelkasten method?
Scott Scheper has recently written that personal communication with Luhmann’s youngest son Clemmens Luhmann indicated that Luhmann learned his method in 1951 from the Johannes Erich Heyde text Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens (with several German editions from 1931 onward). This book’s note taking method is broadly similar to that of the long held commonplace book maintained on index cards as seen in both Langlois/Seignobos (1897) and Webb (1926). One of the few major differences in Heyde was the suggestion to actively make and file multiple copies of the same card under different topical headings potentially using carbon copy paper to speed up the process. While it’s possible that Luhmann may have either learned the modifications of his particular system from someone or modified it himself, it is reasonably obvious that there is a much longer standing tradition as early as Konrad Gessner in 1548 to the middle of the 20th century of a zettelkasten tradition that is more similar to the commonplace book tradition effectuated with index cards (or slips “of a similar size”). Luhmann’s system, while seemingly more popular and talked about since roughly 2013, is by far the exception rather than the rule within the broader history of the “zettelkasten method”. With these facts in mind, we should be talking about a simpler, historical zettelkasten method and a separate, more complex/emergent Luhmann method.