Category: Note taking

Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet?

On a slip in his zettelkasten (a card catalog or filing cabinet of personal notes), entitled “Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet?”, Niklas Luhmann wrote a note about people who came to see his system:

“People come, they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed.”

This is a telling story about people’s perception of the simplicity of the idea of a slip box (zettelkasten, card catalog, commonplace book or whatever you want to call your note taking system).

yellowed index card with the identifier 9/8,3 with almost illegible handwriting in German Niklas Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8,3

It’s also a testament to the fact that the value of a zettelkasten is in the upfront work that is required in making valuable notes and linking them. Many people end up trying out the simple looking system and then wonder why it isn’t working for them. The answer is that they’re not working for it.

Just as sex can be fun, working with a system of notes can be fun. (“Just” can be a problematic word, n’cest pas?)  In either framing, both partners need to do some work—neither necessarily the same work. The end result can be magic.

As Potter Stewart might have said, “I may not be able to define proper note taking, but I know it when I see it.”

Acquired Winter 2021 Quarterly Field Notes Edition: Ignition (Field Notes)

With two planner books and one checklist book, our Ignition Edition 3-Pack for Winter 2021 is the perfect place to keep track of all of your things to do.

4, 3, 2, 1… IGNITION

We all need a place to jot down the first sparks of a big new idea, to record our “notes to self,” and to remind ourselves to pick up the doggo at 4 p.m. on Thursday. Our regular Field Notes Planner is great, but we’re frequently asked for a smaller edition. Our previous limited-edition pocket planners (the long-gone Ambition and Resolution editions) were also great, but we wanted to find a way to fit even more into a Memo-sized date book.

You’ll find that the new Winter 2021 “Ignition” set checks all the boxes. Each 3-Pack contains two 26-Week Planners. Splitting the year into two books gives you a full spread for each week, making more space for each day and incorporating a weekly “To do, or…” list that can be used for productivity OR inspiration. Each page also features a bit of practical advice, direct from Field Notes staff. Note that the pages are undated, allowing you to start either book anytime and fill in the dates as you go.

The third book is a “Checklist Journal” featuring the popular “Screwhead Device” that we introduced in the 2017 “Resolution” Edition. it's great for to-do lists or bullet journaling… or ignore the Screwheads, and use it like any ruled notebook.

The covers are made from water-and-tear-proof synthetic paper from Yupo that will hold up to a whole year’s worth of abuse. The book’s interior page design is subtly varnished over the cover color. The innards are our reliable 60# Finch with gray rules, bound with black staples.

POINTY. SHINY. HANDY.

Quarterly Subscribers receive a bunch of bonus items with their order this quarter! Along with your two 3-Packs of “Ignition,” we’re including a carded set of three stainless steel Book Darts. They’re perfect for marking your place as you work through the date books. An “Ignition Yellow” Clic Pen and a two-sided 2022 “One Sheet Calendar” are also included with your subscription shipment.  Subscribing is the only way to get these items, and of course you'll get the next three editions, their accompanying bonus items, and a yearlong 10% discount on most items on the website. What’s in store for subscribers for 2022? There’s only one way to find out!

By the way: If you check your planner, you’ll see there are a variety of gift-giving holidays coming up, what would make a better quarterly reminder of your generosity than a year’s worth of Field Notes?

SPECIFICATIONS:
  • 01. Proudly printed by the good people of Lake County Press, Inc., Waukegan, Ill.
  • 02. Cover: Yupo Synthetic 74#C “White,” with a brute force application of “Ignition Gray, Yellow, and Black” soy-based Toyo UV inks and a spot UV varnish.
  • 03. Innards: Finch Paper Opaque Smooth 60#T “Bright White,” with a fine, 1-color application of “Ignition Light Gray” soy-based Toyo ink.
  • 04. Cover and innards printed on a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 105 40" 6-color UV printing press.
  • 05. Bound with a Heidelberg Stitchmaster ST 270 5-pocket saddle stitcher with cover feeder/scorer and Rima RS 10S in-line stacker, with appreciation to Samuel Slocum, George W. McGill, and William J. Brown, the “Founding Fathers of the Staple.”
  • 06. Corners precisely rounded to a 3/8" (9.5mm) radius with a Challenge DCM double round-corner machine.
  • 07. Edition features two 26-Week Date Books and one 56-Page Checklist Journal.
  • 08. Memo book dimensions are 3-1/2" × 5-1/2" (89mm × 140mm).
  • 09. FIELD NOTES uses only the Futura typeface family (Paul Renner, 1927) in its materials.
  • 10. All FIELD NOTES memo books are printed and manufactured in the U.S.A.
  • 11. UPC: 850032279079

When will we have real print-on-demand?

I’ve been thinking it for a while, but have needed to write it down for ages—particularly from my experiences with older manuscripts.

In an age of print-on-demand and reflowing text, why in goodness’ name don’t we have the ability to print almost anything we buy and are going to read in any font size and format we like?

Why couldn’t I have a presentation copy sized version of The Paris Review?

Why shouldn’t I be able to have everything printed on bible-thin pages of paper for savings in thickness?

Why couldn’t my textbooks be printed with massively large margins for writing notes into more easily? Why not interleaved with blank pages? Particularly near the homework problem sections?

Why couldn’t I buy my own hardcover, custom edition of Annotation with massive five inch margins to really make having a handwritten easier? (C’mon MIT Press, I know it’s part of a pre-existing series, but editorial considerations should have necessitated leaving at least an inch!)

Why can’t I have more choice in a range of fonts, book sizes, margin sizes, and covers?

When are publishing platforms going to give us this?!? 

Some notes about the semantic change of “interlink” and “backlink”

I’m reasonably certain that he’s raised the question or issue about the definition of “interlink” or “backlink” before, but it’s come up again today with some discussion and notes which I wanted to capture permanently here with few modifications for myself:

doubleloop[m] APP 12:30 PM
I have some notes I’ve taken on interlinking wikis here – https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/interlinking-wikis

tantek 12:39 PM
doubleloop[m], what’s the difference between “just” a link and an “interlink” from a user perspective?
genuine question (feel free to also answer if you have an idea @chrisaldrich) because Wikipedia seems to consider “interlink” as a common noun to be a synonym for “hyperlink” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlink

Chris Aldrich 20:45 PM
I think that the definition for interlinking is expanding based on actual use cases. Historically Tim Berners Lee tried to create hyperlinks as bi-directional and then scrapped the idea as not easily implementable. As a result we’ve all come to expect that links are uni-directional.

In the digital gardens, wiki spaces and now, even with Webmention, there’s an expectation (I would suggest) by a growing number of people that some links in practice will be bi-directional.

If Neil puts a link to something within his own wiki/digital garden, he’s expecting that to be picked up in a space like the Agora and it will interlink his content with that of others.

Many who are practicing POSSE/PESOS are programatically (or manually) placing backlinks between their content and the copies that live on silos creating a round trip set of links that typically hasn’t been seen on the web historically.

Because we’ve mostly grown up with a grammar of single directional links and no expectation of visible reverse links (except perhaps in the spammy framing of SEO linkfarms), the word “interlink” has taken on the connotation seen in Wikipedia. I think that definition is starting to change.

Among a class of users in the note taking/personal knowledge management space (Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, TiddlyWiki, et al) most users are expecting tools to automatically interlink (in my definition with the sense of an expected bi-directional link) pages. Further, they’re expecting that if you change the word(s) that appear within a [[wikilink]] that it will globally change all instances of that word/phrase that are so linked within one’s system.

In many of those systems you can also do a manual /redirect the way we do on the IndieWeb wiki, but they expect the system to actively rename their bi-directional links without any additional manual work.

tantek 1:08 PM
ok, the bidirectionality as expectation is interesting

Chris Aldrich 1:08 PM
By analogy, many in the general public have a general sense of what /syndication is within social media, but you (Tantek) and others in the IndieWeb space have created words/phrases/acronyms that specify a “target” and “source” to indicate in which direction the syndication is being done and between sites of differing ownership (POSSE, PESOS, PASTA, PESETAS, POOSNOW,… not to mention a linear philosophical value proposition of which are more valuable to the end user). There is a group of people who are re-claiming a definition of the words “interlink” and perhaps “backlink” to a more logical position based on new capabilities in technology. Perhaps it may be better if they created neologisms for these, but linguistically that isn’t the path being taken as there are words that would seem to have an expandable meaning for what they want. I’d classify it as a semantic change/shift/drift in the words meanings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

I suspect that if Roam Research, or any of the other apps that have this bi-directionality built in, were to remove it as a feature, they’d loose all of their userbase.

tantek 1:11 PM
yes, such a semantic shift in the meaning of “interlink” seems reasonable, and a useful distinction from the now ubiquitously expected unidirectionality of “hyperlink”

Chris Aldrich 1:12 PM
I’m expecting that sometime within the next year or so that major corporate apps like Evernote and OneNote will make this bi-directional linking a default as well.

tantek 1:12 PM
in sci-fi metaphor terms, one-way vs two-way wormholes (per other uses of “hyper”)

Chris Aldrich 1:14 PM
I can only imagine what a dramatically different version of the web we’d be living in if the idea of Webmention had existed in the early 90s. Particularly as there’s the ability to notify the other end in changes/updates/deletions of a page. Would the word “linkrot” exist in that world?

Joe Crawford 1:22 PM
Or in a world with Xanaduian transclusions, for that matter.
Alas

Chris Aldrich 1:25 PM
Related to this and going into the world of the history of information is the suggestion by Markus Krajewski in “Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929” that early card catalog and index card systems are really an early paper/manual form of a Turing Machine: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.

One might imagine the extended analogy libraries:books:index cards :: Internet:websites:links with different modes and speeds of transmission.

I’ve downloaded my copy of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow for Dan Allosso’s forthcoming Obsidian-based book club. https://danallosso.substack.com/p/obsidian-book-club-the-dawn-of-everything

Curious to see how these tools can be communally used for collaborative note taking, knowledge creation, and discussion.

Bookmarked The Jonathan Edwards Miscellanies Companions (2 book series) by Robert L Boss, Sarah B. Boss, eds. (JESociety Press)

The Jonathan Edwards Miscellanies Companions are products of JESociety's "Miscellanies Project." Essays were contributed by an international body of scholars hailing from East Asia, Australia, Europe, the UK, and North America. The contributions canvas the wide range of topics contained in Edwards' "Miscellanies."

"The Miscellanies Project" and the Companions are part of the "Visual Edwards Project" created by Robert L. Boss. A unique contribution to Jonathan Edwards studies, "Visual Edwards" is a software project that maps Edwards' writings, volumes 1-26 of the Yale critical edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, and provides a new view of America's theologian. "Visual Edwards" is, as it were, an advanced computational material which can be stretched, bent, and zoomed to direct the scholar to areas of interest. As a cartographic tool, it grants the reader visual access to Edwards in his own words.

A team-oriented project to visually unlock Edwards' notebooks, and map intricate connections in his thought, "The Miscellanies Project" and the print Companions are first steps toward the Himalayan task of visualizing Jonathan Edwards -- an ongoing project seemingly without end. To echo Edwards' sentiment in "Types," "there is room for persons to be learning more and more ... to the end of the world without discovering all."

Liked a tweet by Dr. Matthew Everhard (Twitter)
Requesting my copy now…
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!)

Text card that reads "1. When reading, everything of importance and whatever appears useful should be copied onto a good sheet of paper. 2. A new line should be used for every idea. 3.“ Finally, cut out everything you have copied with a pair of scissors; arrange the slips as you desire, first into larger clusters which can then be subdivided again as often as necessary.” 4. As soon as the desired order is produced, arranged, and sorted on tablesor in small boxes, it should be fixed or copied directly. —Gessner, Konrad. Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium. 1548. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer. Fol. 19-20"

More details to come on this fun bit of history soon.

Annotated About by Mandy BrownMandy Brown (A Working Library)
books are a means of listening to the thoughts of others so that you can hear your own thoughts more clearly. ❧
to which I might add:

And annotation helps you save those thoughts, share them with others, and further refine them.

Replied to a tweet by krish (Twitter)
@krishkhubchand Why not (also) scribble them down for your future self and place them in your commonplace book/zettelkasten/notebook/other? If you want to be interactive and get feedback, post them to a website or digital garden…
Watched Field Notes: Reporter's Notebook by Coudal PartnersCoudal Partners from Vimeo

Field Notes: Reporter's Notebook from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

John Dickerson of “Face the Nation” talks about how he uses a Reporter’s Notebook and how he helped Field Notes make one. ❧

Reporter John Dickerson talking about his notebook.

While he doesn’t mention it, he’s capturing the spirit of the commonplace book and the zettelkasten.

[…] I see my job as basically helping people see and to grab ahold of what’s going on.

You can decide to do that the minute you sit down to start writing or you can just do it all the time. And by the time you get to writing you have a notebook full of stuff that can be used.

And it’s not just about the thing you’re writing about at that moment or the question you’re going to ask that has to do with that week’s event on Face the Nation on Sunday.

If you’ve been collecting all week long and wondering why a thing happens or making an observation about something and using that as a piece of color to explain the political process to somebody, then you’ve been doing your work before you ever sat down to do your work.

I’d love to interview him about his process as well as keeping track of his notes after-the-fact. Does he index them? Collate them? How does he archive them? What role do they play in his book writing processes? Is his system something that he was taught, something which he created and refined over time, or a little bit of both?

Zettelkasten History Prior to Niklas Luhmann: Antonin Sertillanges

Antonin Sertillanges’ book The Intellectual Life is published in 1921 in which he outlines in chapter 7 the broad strokes a version of the zettelkasten method, though writing in French he doesn’t use the German name or give the method a specific name.[1]

The book was published in French, Italian, and English in more than 50 editions over the span of 40 years. In it, Sertillanges recommends taking notes on slips of “strong paper of a uniform size” either self made with a paper cutter or by “special firms that will spare you the trouble, providing slips of every size and color as well as the necessary boxes and accessories.” He also recommends a “certain number of tagged slips, guide-cards, so as to number each category visibly after having numbered each slip, in the corner or in the middle.” He goes on to suggest creating a catalog or index of subjects with division and subdivisions and recommends the “very ingenious system”, the decimal system, for organizing one’s research. For the details of this refers the reader to Organization of intellectual work: practical recipes for use by students of all faculties and workers by Paul Chavigny.[2]

Sertillanges recommends against the previous patterns seen with commonplace books where one does note taking in books or on slips of paper which might be pasted into books as they don’t “easily allow classification” or “readily lend themselves to use at the moment of writing.”

[1] Antonin, Sertillanges (1960). The Intellectual Life: Its Sprit, Conditions, Methods. Translated by Ryan, Mary (fifth printing ed.). Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press. pp. 186–198.

[2] Chavigny, Paul (1918). Organisation du travail intellectuel: recettes pratiques à l’usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs (in French). Delagrave.

Featured Image: zettelkasten flickr photo by x28x28de shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license