Tag: Manfred Kuehn

First Use of Zettelkasten in an English Language Setting?

The idea of having and maintaining a Zettelkasten has become increasingly popular since the »Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie« exhibition at Marbach in March 2013 and the appearance of the website zettelkasten.de in late 2013 and has grown significantly with the Cambrian explosion of a variety of digital note taking tools since 2018.

But here’s a fun little historical linguistic puzzle:

What was the first use of the word Zettelkasten in a predominantly English language setting?

In my own notes/research the first occurrence I’ve been able to identify in an English language setting is on Manfred Kuehn’s blog in Taking note: Luhmann’s Zettelkasten on 2007-12-16. He’d just started his blog earlier that month.

Has anyone seen an earlier usage? Can you find one? Can you beat this December 2007 date or something close by a different author?

Google’s nGram Viewer doesn’t indicate any instances of it from 1800-2019 in its English search, though does provide a graph for German with peaks in the 1850s, 1892 (just after Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode in 1889), 1912, 1925, and again in 1991.

Twitter search from 2006-2007 finds nothing and there are only two results in German both mentioning Luhmann.

My best guess for earlier versions of the appearance zettelkasten in English might stem from the work/publications of S. D. Goitein or Gotthard Deutsch, but I’ve yet to see anything there. 

For those who speak German, what might you posit as a motivating source for the rise of the word in the 1850s or any of the other later peaks?

Replied to a post by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
Is it possible to annotate links in Hypothes.is that are in the Internet Archive? My browser bookmarklet for it doesn’t work on such archived pages. I can imagine that there are several javascript or iframe related technical reasons for it. An information related reason may be that bringing togeth...
The ability to annotate archived material on the Internet Archive with Hypothes.is is definitely possible, and I do it from time to time. I’m not sure which browser or annotation tool (via, browser extensions, other) you’re using, but it’s possible that one or more combinations may have issues allowing you to do it or not. The standard browser extension on Chrome has worked well for me in the past.

Hypothes.is has methods for establishing document equivalency which archive.org apparently conforms. I did an academic experiment a few years back with an NYT article about books where you’ll see equivalent annotations on the original, the archived version, and a copy on my own site that has a rel="canonical" link back to the original as well: 

  • https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books.html
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20170119220705/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books.html
  • https://boffosocko.com/2017/01/19/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books-the-new-york-times/

I don’t recommend doing the rel-canonical trick on your own site frequently as I have noticed a bug, which I don’t think has been fixed.

The careful technologist with one tool or another, will see that I and a couple others have been occasionally delving into the archive and annotating Manfred Kuehn’s work. (I see at least one annotation from 2016, which was probably native on his original site before it was shut down in 2018.) I’ve found some great gems and leads into some historical work from his old site. In particular, he’s got some translations from German texts that I haven’t seen in other places.