A green colored metal index card file from Acrimet that serves as a small zettelkasten

A Zettelkasten, Commonplace Books, and Note Taking Collection

Below I’ve aggregated a list of some of the longer articles and material I’ve written about these topics. The completist can find and search my site for even more specific material with these tags: zettelkasten, commonplace books, and note taking. I’ve also contributed a fair amount to the Wikipedia pages for zettelkasten and commonplace books. 

General

History

Productivity

Hypothes.is

Miscellaneous Topics

Practical Examples

Texts

Boxes

Boxes I personally own and use

Wooden table with a Shaw-Walker card index on it surrounded by a copy of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics book, a pile of index cards, a black fountain pen, and some chrysanthemums in a vase.

Accessories

Index card supplies on the floor in front of two metal card index drawers. Supplies include a 500 pack of Oxford 4x6" cards, 300 colored cards, 2 packs of tabbed cards, and a package of highlight flags

Other formats

Portions of this collection can be downloaded and read in the following formats:

.epub (last updated 2022-12-27)

25 thoughts on “A Zettelkasten, Commonplace Books, and Note Taking Collection”

  3. @emkmiller@sciences.social, @josh@sciences.social, @arinbasu1@social.arinbasu.online Here’s a collection of material I’ve written relating to Zettelkasten which some may find useful: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/
    In this area, I prefer using Zotero for collecting, ResearchRabbit for expanding scope, Hypothes.is for note taking/annotations which I then pipe into Obsidian for revising, cross linking, and further writing/revisions. Depending on the project, some of it may be more analog with index cards similar to Victor Margolin’s process.
    To show the general benefits, I’m copying and pasting from my own prior notes and writing:

    ZK is an excellent tool for literature reviews! It is a relative neologism (with a slightly shifted meaning in English over the past decade with respect to its prior historical use in German) for a specific form of note taking or commonplacing that has generally existed in academia for centuries. Excellent descriptions of it can be found littered around, though not under a specific easily searchable key word or phrase, though perhaps phrases like “historical method” or “wissenschaftlichen arbeitens” may come closest.
    Some of the more interesting examples of it being spelled out in academe include:

    Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
    Webb, Sidney. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.
    Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.
    Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Particularly ch 7 if I recall correctly)
    Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/. (The first half of the book on notes is most useful in this context; see also https://boffosocko.com/2022/08/02/how-to-make-notes-and-write-a-handbook-by-dan-allosso-and-s-f-allosso/)

    Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017.

    For academic use, anecdotally I’ve seen very strong recent use of the general methods most compellingly demonstrated in Obsidian (they’ve also got a Discord server with an academic-focused channel) though many have profitably used DevonThink and Tinderbox (which has a strong, well-established community of academics around it) as much more established products with dovetails into a variety of other academic tools. Obviously there are several dozens of newer tools for doing this since about 2018, though for a lifetime’s work, one might worry about their longevity as products.

    I study many of these methods from the viewpoint of intellectual history (and not just for my own use), so I’m happy to discuss them and their variations ad nauseam.

    Reply

  4. @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.

    Reply

  14. On a quick front-of-the-index card calculation, I realize that with the recent Steelcase cabinet acquisition, I now have 8 boxes comprising 61 drawers and 103.25 feet of storage space for approximately 172,296 index cards. Having spent a total of $786.52 on them over the past year this comes out at about $12.89 per drawer, which is fantastically under the $14-25 ubiquitous 11″ cardboard boxes for such a massive step up in quality and longevity.

    Reply

  17. I just have a note on my phone with this for each one.

    Brand Model:
    – Color:
    – Serial:
    – Made:
    – Typeface:
    – CPI:

    Could be better but easy to edit and modify, and in a central place I can access anywhere.
    But seeing those tags makes me kinda want them for no good reason lol. Though an “Acquired” date might be a nice touch.

    Reply

  19. Honestly? I don’t… 🙂

    I’m not tripping over them, but they are spilling out of my typewiter-bookcase and all over the floor… I still have less than 100 machines (not by much) and I do remeembe. what they are and how and where I bought them. But I will say looking at some of my cases it will take a minute before I know what’s actually in them… I was looking for my Erika 8 the other day and those Erika cases all look pretty much the same. Often the answer comes to me by process of elimination.

    Do I need to do something?? Yes.

    Is i a priority? No. 😀

    Reply

  20. We have tags for the cases with some basic info.

    We keep the Typewriter Databasethe Typewriter Database current.

    And we have a spreadsheet that tracks details:
    Link to TWDB
    Ultra/Standard/Electric Portable/Manual Portable
    Good or Needs Work
    Similar to another model or Unique
    Brand + Model + Nickname
    Decade + Year made + SN + Country Made In
    Body Color + Body detail
    Key Color + Key detail + Key Layout
    CPI + Typeface + Ribbon/Spool notes
    Case + User Guide
    Cost + Shipping + Purchased from details (where, who)
    Repair dates and cost
    2 potential Values – low and high
    Given/Sold to + Date + Cost

    We had the spreadsheet and the tags early in our collecting, we just tracked more info as the numbers got higher. The TWDB project we did in stages, getting the machine data in first then uploading basic pics, going back to update typeface samples, more pics then links and updated descriptions. I still have galleries that need updating…

    Very few can I tell from their case what’s inside.

    I love looking at the galleries in TWDB and reading descriptions about original owners and how machines were found etc.

    Reply

  22. Trust me, once you reach 10 or so, you better have a spread sheet or index cards. You want to know the Make, model, SN, year and TF. Where you got it, how much, issues, what you did to it. Any glitches when you are done? Tag the case on protables.

    Reply

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