Zettelkasten and Evergreen MOC
Luhmann’s zettelkasten
Limitations The image illustrates one of the biggest limitations of a physical ZK, working with lots of information in the real world is impractical (using thinner paper because it gets too big!).
Luhmann’s system was well-thought out system of notes. It was like a mini library, containing both a collection of original source, and a collection of his own thoughts and ideas.
Especially the latter was interesting, stored as they were in what we would now call a web of notes, with an index as a first entry into the system. His zettelkasten was an exceptional version of a commonplace book, the linking made it so much more powerful then previous systems.
More modern implementations add further refinements:
- backlinks
- spaced repetition spaced repetition enables a workflow of incrementally improving notes
- easy search
- graph view
Literature notes
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–This is Sönke Ahrens interpretation of Niklas Luhmann system
Notes
3 cards + links = zettelkasten Zettelkasten overview
- Card 1:
- Bibliography
- brief notes about content
- Card 2:
- NL’s ideas and thoughts on the subject
- Short and brief, but full sentences
- Note written in context of other notes, linking ideas
- No quoting, strive original meaning
- Links:
- Linked note to more than one other note
- gave it several contexts
- Index cards
- Index as entry point to one or two notes
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Luhmann’s notes were sometimes incredibly terse, probably a habit out of space contraints (also notes are simply components, stripped of external context, collected for future use):
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Fleeting notes
It served Luhmann well
- The modern perspective is that it’s a bit convoluted
- but it did work
- Physical limitation, card has only two sides