Andy, this is a subtle, but brilliant question. Fortunately I’m a guy who not only happens to have lots of hidden context, but lots of it exists online to point you to “the receipts”. Earlier this morning I commented back to Jeremy and Ton on this very topic. Ton had commented broadly that it was interesting to have been watching my note taking and annotation practice using Hypothes.is and seeing pieces of that work emerge in this piece. I know that he follows my RSS feed to do this.
I was almost tempted to link to the original notes (as many are available publicly online) instead of doing more traditional footnotes to underline the flow of this practice which is often invisible to most readers.
Centering it and making it more apparent may be a helpful example for those who don’t otherwise “see” it.
If you’d like you can look back to large portions of my research and note taking practice by searching through my Hypothes.is account. Though it is digital in form, the careful observer will recognize my notes done this way are closer to the older zettelkasten/commonplace book tradition as my notes are discrete, card-like in nature, and heavily tagged with topical keywords. Because it’s digital and searchable, I don’t need to make multiple copies to place behind each headword the way one might need to in a paper analog method. Some of these digital notes even cross the boundary into Luhmann’s method as there are oftentimes explicit links from one note/idea to another. When linked this way, it’s usually a sign that these notes will also be copied over into my physical/analog (Luhmann-esque) zettelkasten for which I primarily save for material that is entirely my own. I generally refrain from putting synopses of other’s material into my own paper ZK.
Going back and showing all the receipts here is difficult as some on the commonplace tradition were analog notes were made from analog sources not made online. However, if you search some of the keywords in my Hypothes.is repository, you’ll definitely find direct traces for much of what’s in this long piece. Just to highlight one particular example, in part because of its recent and comes more easily to mind, you’ll notice that I made a note about a zettelkasten that I saw in the Netflix series The Crown: https://hypothes.is/a/Cz7e_lHKEe2Qv79IbEgmNw. This note ended up in the final piece as an example with some additional observations about it: https://hyp.is/iIz2VFMSEe2ZQkuNSzVq6w/boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.
Of course, not all the ideas and observations in the piece were necessarily in my notes to begin with. Some of them arose as new thinking in stringing things together while composing the larger work. Sometime this week, I’ll go back to my own piece and excerpt it for inclusion back into my own corpus of notes for later potential reuse.
This may not be the mass of one-to-one correspondence evidence you were expecting, but hopefully it’s close enough. Perhaps on a future piece, I’ll do the extra work to make it all more apparent?
Syndicated copies: