On Cohesion and Coherence of the Zettelkasten: Where Does the Work Reside?

While discussing Chris Rock’s zettelkasten and the related version of Eminem‘s, Sascha Fast argues against them being zettelkasten:

To assume, that Eminem had a Zettelkasten because he had slips and a box is the same assuming that people are just sacks full of meat. The mere presence of parts is not enough to assume that there is a whole.
You can borrow the terms from linguistics: You need cohesion for the formal wholeness of your Zettelkasten (links, separate notes, etc.) and to have a good Zettelkasten, you need coherence (the actual connections between ideas). Eminem’s box has neither cohesion nor coherence. It is almost the perfect example of what a Zettelkasten is not in the presence of its parts. 

The key questions at play here are where is the work of a keeping a zettelkasten done and how is represented? Where is the coherence held? Is the coherence even represented physically? Does it cohere in the box or elsewhere?

The desk in my office (and that of countless others’) can appear to be a hodgepodge of stacks of paper and utter mess. Some might describe it as a disaster area and wonder how I manage to get any work done. However, if asked, I can pull out the exact book, article, paper, or other item required from any of the given piles. This is because internally, I can remember what all the piles represent and, within a reasonable margin of error, what is in each and almost exactly where it is at, or even if it’s filed away in another room. Others, who have no experience with my internal system would be terrifyingly lost in a morass of paper. The system represented by my desk is an extension of my mind, but one which doesn’t need to be directly labeled, classified, or indexed for it to operate properly in my life and various workflows. One could say that the loose categorization of piles is the lowest level of work I could put into the system for it to still be useful for me. However, to those on the outside, this work appears to be wholly missing as they don’t have access to the information and experiences with it that are held only in my brain.

By direct analogy, I suspect that Eminem’s zettelkasten, and that of many others, follows this same pattern. They neither require internal “cohesion nor coherence” in their systems which are direct extensions of their minds where that cohesion and coherence are stored. As far back as Andreas Stübel (1684), many (including Niklas Luhmann) have used variations of the idea “secondary memory” to describe their excerpting and note taking practices. [1][2]  Many in the long tradition of ars excerpendi have created piles of slips which held immense value for them. So much so that they would account for them in their wills to give to others following their deaths. In many cases, these piles were wholly useless to their recipients because they were missing all of the context in which they were made and why. Lacking this context, they literally considered them scrap heaps and often unceremoniously disposed of them.

In the case of Niklas Luhmann’s zettelkasten, he spent the additional time and work to index and file his notes thereby making them more comprehensible and possibly of more direct use to people following his death. For his working style and needs, he surely benefited from this additional work, particularly when taken over the longer horizon of his zettelkasten’s “life” compared to others’.  However, it’s not always the case that others will have those same needs. Some may only want or need to keep theirs for the length of their undergraduate or graduate school careers. Others may use them for short projects like articles or a single book. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t coherence, it may just be held in their memories for the length of time for which they need it. Those who have problems with longer term memory for things like this may be well-advised to follow Luhmann’s example, particularly when they’re working at problems for career-long spans.

In Eminem’s case, given the shape and size of his collection, which includes various sizes, types, and colors of paper and even different pen colors, it may actually be easier for him to have a closer visual relationship with his notes in terms of finding and using them. (“Yes, that’s the scrap I wrote for 8 Mile while I was at that hotel in Paris. Where is the blue envelope with the doggerel I wrote for my daughter?”) It’s also possible that for his creative needs, sifting through bits and pieces may spark additional creative work in addition to the slips of work he’s already created. Cohesion and coherence may not exist in his notes for us as distant viewers of them, but this doesn’t mean that they do not exist for him while using his box of notes.

As an even more complex example, we might look at the zettelkasten of S.D. Goitein. His has a form closer to that of the better known commonplacing practices of Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday. While Goitein had a collection of only 27,000 notes (roughly a third of Luhmann’s), he had a significantly larger written output of books and articles than Luhmann. Additionally, Goitein’s card index has been scanned and continues to circulate amongst scholars in his areas of expertise by means of physical copies rather than a digitized repository the way that Luhmann’s has over the past decade. Despite Goitein’s notes not having the same level of direct cohesion or coherence as Luhmann’s, I suspect that far more researchers are actively and profitably using Goitein’s collection today than are using Luhmann’s.

For those who are more visually inclined, an additional example of the hidden work of cohesion and coherence can be seen in the example of Victor Margolin.

In this case, Margolin is certainly actively creating both cohesion and coherence. The question is where does it reside? Certainly, like many of us, some of it resides internally in his mind and in coordination with the extension of it represented in his note cards, but as he progresses in his work, much of it goes into his larger outlines drawn out on A2 paper, and ultimately accretes into the writing that appears in the final version of his book World History of Design.

As described in his video, Margolin doesn’t appear to be utilizing his slips as lifelong tools for other potential projects, nor is he heavily indexing or categorizing them the way Luhmann and others have done. This doesn’t make his zettelkasten any less valuable to him, it only changes where the representation of the work is located.

Naturally, for those with lifelong uses of and needs for a zettelkasten, it may make more sense for them to put the work into it in such a way that it appears more cohesive and coherent to external viewers as well as for their future selves, but the variety of methods in the broader tradition, make it fairly simple for individual users to pick and choose where they’d personally like to store representations of their work. If you’re like philosopher Gilles Deleuze[3] who said in L’Abécédaire 

And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it’s done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to–and this gives me great joy—if I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, except in certain very rare cases… 

then perhaps you may wish to have better notes with the work cohered directly to, in, and between your cards? Surely Deleuze didn’t start completely from scratch each time because in reality, he had a lifetime’s worth of experience and study to draw from, but he still had to start from what he could remember and begin writing, arguing, and working from there.

This is why having a lifelong zettelkasten practice is more productive for most: it acts as a knowledge ratchet to prevent having to start from scratch by staring at a blank piece of paper. The benefit is that—based on your personal abilities and preferences—you can start somewhere simple and build from there.

Finally, I’ll mention that in Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski calls Joachim Jungius’ the “first practitioner of nonhierarchical indexing”. In talking about the idiosyncratic nature of Jungius’ zettelkasten for which “There are no aids for access, no apparatus; neither signatures nor a numbering of the cards, neither registers nor indexes, let alone referential systems that guide one to the building blocks of knowledge.” he says[4]:

The architecture of the idiosyncratic scholar’s machine requires no mediation for, or access by, others. In dialog with the machine, an intimate communication is permitted. Only the close and confidential dialog results in the connections that lead an author to new texts. When queried by the uninitiated, the box of paper slips remains silent. It is literally a discreet/discrete machine. 

If this is the case, then Marshall Mathers is surely channeling Jungius’ practices, as I suspect that many are. 

Perhaps in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare may have just as profitably written: 

Tell me where is knowledge bred?
Or in the box or in the head?

Photo still from Willy Wonka (Warner Bros.,, 1971) with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the center looking away wistfully and Grandpa Joe and Mike TV's mom flanking him with quizzical looks. Underneath is the meme quote: "Where is knowledge bred? In the box or in the head?"
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Warner Bros., 1971) a zettelkasten meme.

References

[1] Cevolini, Alberto. “Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 3, no. 4 (October 24, 2018): 390–420 (401). https://doi.org/10.1163/24055069-00304002.
 
[2] Andreas M. Stübel, Exercitatio academica de excerptis adornandis (Leipzig, 1684), 33.
 
[3] Incidentally, Deleuze has written quite a bit about the concept of a body without organs, which is also relevant to the broader thinking and knowledge space.
 
[4] Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines. pp. 50-51.
Replied to IndieWeb Camp San Diego Day 2 by Joe CrawfordJoe Crawford (artlung.com)

IndieWeb Camp San Diego [1] [2] has been a blast. Great bunch of people and great ideas in a terrific outdoor context.

A group of IndieWebCampers sitting around a low table at an outdoor coffee shop working on laptops.
Yes, that was me, the weirdo on the right at IndiWebCamp working on a nested platform of typewriter, laptop, and cell phone. It was totally worth it to see Tantek’s expression when he realized I had actually typed one of my earlier responses.
Replied to Reading by Tracy DurnellTracy Durnell (tracydurnell.com)

Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Kimmerer
(non-fiction, philosophy)
Started July 2022
32% – stuck on a boring chapter

Seeing that you’ve stalled on Braiding Sweetgrass (one of my favorites), if you’ll allow me, I’ll make a recommendation that worked out incredibly well for me when I read it.

I came to it at a time when I was doing a lot of reading on Indigenous ways of knowing and the idea of orality. As a result, in addition to buying a physical copy, I got an audiobook version from the library. My first reading was actually a listening. There was something more intriguing, poetic, and authentic about hearing it. Listening also give more power to her voice as a storyteller. Once I’d finished, I revisited some of my favorite parts to re-read and make some notes.

The book also has some benefit in that while it is somewhat linear, the chapters could be read out of order or even skipped without destroying the whole. 

I hope you ultimately find it as beautiful as I did. 

 

Replied to A good reason not to write in books by Richard Carter (Richard Carter)
I spend a lot of time making notes from my reading. I’ve even made notes from my reading of books about making notes from one’s reading. Have I lost you yet? Many people who write or otherwise opine about making notes from your reading say you should underline or highlight favourite or key passa...
That book annotating monster Adler indicated that if he read books second and subsequent times that he would generally purchase a new copy and mark it up afresh. Doublemonster!

See: How to Read a Book. Los Angeles: KCET Los Angeles, 1975. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c. It was one of the later episodes as I recall.

Replied to a thread by Donna Yates and Shawn Graham (archaeo.social)
For the past few weeks I've been working hard to bring a modified #Zettelkasten system into my academic life via #Obsidian. Obsidian (or knowledge management) tips, tricks, plugins, etc very welcome.
@Drdonnayates I'd say, ignore the temptation to install all the plugins, until you get the feel of things. And even then, keep it minimal. Otherwise I at least get distracted in pursuit of The One True System instead of just using the damned thing. You might find some use in the materials re Obsidian I use with my students, https://shawngraham.github.io/hist1900
@electricarchaeo OH do I so want the one true system...I want it.
@Drdonnayates @electricarchaeo
Shawn’s admonition to keep things simple is valuable. I’m hoping to go through his excellent looking class materials shortly.

I rely heavily on Hypothes.is for digital annotation and transport it all into Obsidian using https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/08/hypothes-is-obsidian-hypothesidian-for-easier-note-taking-and-formatting/

@natalie recently wrote up an excellent overview for dovetailing with Zotero, which I’d done previously and love: https://nataliekraneiss.com/your-academic-reading-list-in-obsidian/

If you really want to go down the rabbit hole: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

If it provides some reassurance, though I’ve not gotten into the specifics I’m reasonably certain that Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among many others, had significant practices.

If you go beyond basic notes, I’ll have something on to do list functionality shortly, but our friend @kfitz had something here recently: https://kfitz.info/tasks-matter/

If you’ve not found it yet, Obsidian has a Discord with a specific channel for academia.

Replied to a post by Romain LarueRomain Larue (Piaille)
Nous avons tous pris des notes durant nos cours, nos réunions ou pendant la lecture d’un livre. Mais que deviennent ces notes ? Est-ce qu’il n’existe pas un moyen de les rendre durable dans le temps et surtout de les utiliser de façon efficace? Cette méthode c’est le ZETTELKASTEN, une technique inventée par NIKLAS LUHMANN pour organiser ses notes et ses observations pour en faire des livres et des articles denses et riches. https://youtu.be/1ycG6ojNPq8 #zettelkasten #efficacité #organisation #ecrire
@ctietze @romainlarue
Pourquoi ne pas utiliser la méthode des fiches de Roland Barthes? 😁 #FichierBoîte
https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27fichier+bo%C3%AEte%27
Replied to a post by Natalie (hcommons.social)
I started the second week of "Programming 101: An Introduction to #Python for Educators" on #FutureLearn and wrote a small quiz about Arabic verbs: https://github.com/kranatalie/Introduction-to-Python/blob/main/arabic-quiz-bot.py It was fun again and I'm actually a little proud! Would really like to recommend the course again. It's the perfect gentle introduction for me that doesn't overwhelm but still teaches enough to get an idea of what's possible. Looking forward to the final challenge this week: Building commands into your bot. Let's try this! https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/programming-101
@natalie, Thanks for the recommendation, this looks great! It looks like it may be a good companion to the Santa Fe Institute’s (free) Foundations & Applications of Humanities Analytics https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics which starts on Jan 17. #DigitalHumanities 

 

Replied to Return to Blogging by Christopher Long (cplong.org)
A new year brings new calls for a return to personal blogging as an antidote to the toxic and extractive systems of social media.
@cplong @sramsay
IndieWeb, blogging, fountain pens?!? I almost hate to mention it for the rabbit hole it may become, but you’ll get a bit of all three here: https://micro.blog/discover/pens. Happy New Year!
Replied to How to Set up and Maintain Your Academic Reading List in Obsidian by Natalie Kraneiss (Field Notes)
The combination of Zotero (with the Better BibTeX plugin) and Obsidian with the Citation and Projects plugins are the perfect way for me as a PhD student to keep track of the literature to be read and already read.
This is excellent! I’d already had the majority of it set up and I was going to spend some time this week to write some custom code with Dataview to do this, but apparently there’s a reasonably flexible plugin that will get me 95% of what I’m sure to want without any work! Thanks Natalie.

Incidentally, I spent a chunk of yesterday looking at S.D. Goitein’s note taking process (zettelkasten) in his work on the Cairo Geniza, specifically with respect to:

Zinger, Oded. “Finding a Fragment in a Pile of Geniza: A Practical Guide to Collections, Editions, and Resources.” Jewish History 32, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 279–309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-019-09314-6.
 
Princeton Geniza Lab. “Goitein’s Index Cards,” 2022. https://genizalab.princeton.edu/resources/goiteins-index-cards.
Replied to a post by Buster Benson (@buster@medium.social)Buster Benson (@buster@medium.social) (Mastodon)
@tchambers @coachtony @jeffjarvis @mathowie Thanks for these links! Definitely exciting to see how this is being approached from different angles. I’m excited for this next chapter.
@buster@medium.social @tchambers @coachtony@medium.social @jeffjarvis @mathowie
Another example of longer posts which are folded under a “read more” type link within the Fediverse itself can be seen in the Hometown fork of Mastodon (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown), which is running the hcommons.social platform. The admins have upped the character limit to 1000 instead of the usual 500. Ideally those reading in other parts of the network would see the beginning of a post and a “Read more” link to read the remainder of the piece.

I often post to my own WordPress website which has a plugin to make it appear as if it were ActivityPub compatible. If I follow it via a Hometown-based (Mastodon) server, like my hcommons.social account, I see all the full short notes/replies content which are usually 1000 characters or less. For posts over that limit, there’s a “Read More >” which opens up the entirety of the article within the hcommons.social interface where I can read it in its entirety. Naturally there’s a link to the original, so I can also go back to read that if I chose.

I’ve just gone over the 1000 character limit, so I’ll post this on my own site, syndicate a copy to my hcommons.social account, and with any luck it will serve as an example of how all this might work between WordPress, a forked version of Mastodon, and Mastodon itself, as well as for testing it for reading in other parts of the Fediverse if one wished.

Screencapture of post stream seen from within hcommons.social. It features a post with over 1000 characters and displays a Read more > link at the bottom of the post to see the entire article.

Beyond this reading experience, one should also be aware of a separate user interface/interaction problem inherent in how Mastodon and potentially other parts of the Fediverse handle replies and who can see them. I’ll leave this link to explain that issue separately: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109559268498004036. (Hopefully your instance will let you see a subsection of some of the replies to it…)

An additional benefit that one gets in bolting on ActivityPub the way it works for my WordPress site is that folks who subscribe to @chrisaldrich can see linked text natively from within Mastodon despite the fact that Mastodon doesn’t allow one to wrap text with URLs to link out.

Replied to a post by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (hcommons.social)
Apropos of my last boost (https://post.lurk.org/@liza/109621185749177937), as well as Chris Long's recent suggestion (https://hcommons.social/@cplong/109604628817946536), I've just logged into Feedly for the first time in eons. 19 of the feeds I had been following are now not-found, and another 18 have been inactive for a period of a year or longer. I'm doing some significant pruning, but also looking for new feeds to add. If the move out of Twitter has got you contemplating blogging again, send me a link!
A group of people have been posting with the tag with some people and resources for just this sort of effort. 

Given limited instance search, this link may be better: https://mastodon.social/tags/FeedReaderFriday

I’ve also recently run across: https://bringback.blog/

If you’re repopulating a feed reader, I’ve got a long list in which folks may find some interesting tidbits hiding: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/. Potentially easier if your reader supports OPML.

Replied to a post by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (hcommons.social)
Also apropos of feed readers, I've just rediscovered [NetNewsWire](https://netnewswire.com). How awesome that @brentsimmons has kept it alive (and still free!) after all this time.
@KFitz NetNewsWire may be one of the rarest beasts of all in that it’s an old web project, like Upcoming.org, which was sold off to one or more companies, but later repurchase and revitalized by its original creator. I hope we see more of this in the coming years.
Replied to a post by Aram Zucker-ScharffAram Zucker-Scharff (Indieweb.Social)
I've seen a bunch of people sharing this and repeating the conclusion: that the success is because the CEO loves books t/f you need passionate leaders and... while I think that's true, I don't think that's the conclusion to draw here. The winning strategy wasn't love, it was delegation and local, on the ground, knowledge. This win comes from a leader who acknowledges people in the stores know their communities and can see and react faster to sales trends in store... https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and
@Chronotope Also heavily at play here in their decentralization of control is regression toward the mean (Galton, 1886) by spreading out buying decisions over a more diverse group which is more likely to reflect the buying population than one or two corporate buyers whose individual bad decisions can destroy a company.
Replied to a post by Ben AdidaBen Adida (Adida.net Mastodon)
I'm pessimistic about the chances of a federated Twitter gaining and sustaining wide adoption. But I could be wrong, and I'd love to be wrong. So in the spirit of contributing rather than just whining, I wrote up a few thoughts. Don't let federation make the experience suck. cc @blaine http://benlog.com/2022/12/28/dont-let-federation-make-the-experience-suck/ #federation #web #mastodon
@blaine@mastodon.social I can’t find the quote from earlier in the week for proper attribution, but someone essentially said “Mastodon brought a spec (ActivityPub, etc.) to a user experience fight.” This is too true, but we also need to be careful of all this not devolving into the RSS Atom Wars which sidetracked developers and allowed corporations to win on the usability front. Conversation on this post already shows heavy evidence of this devolution into architecture astronomy instead of usability. 😔