loading . . . Hypertext 2: Zettelkasten A Zettelkasten is a particular sort of hypertext document as well as a technique for creating it. My aim in this post is to give you an understanding of a Zettelkasten document â its parts and its whole â and, more importantly, show something of what itâs _like_ to work with a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten will appeal to some people much more than to others, and Iâd like you to be able to predict where youâd fall on that spectrum. Presenting vignettes of my own work (lightly fictionalized) is the means Iâve chosen.
Comparisons of the Zettelkasten to what I earlier called a âwiki traditionalâ hypertext document will come in a later post.
* * *
Iâve spent less than two months in near-daily Zettelkasten use. Which is not much time, especially since Niklas Luhmann (an originator of the technique) says, âThe Zettelkasten needs a couple of years to reach critical mass.â Niklas Luhmann, âKommunikation mit ZettelkĂ€stenâ (1981), translated by Sascha Fast. So why do I feel justified in writing this post?
1. It happens that when Iâm emotionally and intellectually sympatico with a technology or work process, I have a knack for absorbing it and explaining it to outsiders, even while Iâm still a novice myself. That is, I have a track record with this sort of thing that encourages me to be immodest in this case.
2. Novices have certain advantages in explaining to other novices, most notably that they remember what itâs _like_ to be a novice. They have an advantage in knowing â viscerally â what novices need to know. For experts, the feeling fades.
3. Cunninghamâs Law: âThe best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; itâs to post the wrong answer.â With luck, Iâll learn faster as experts correct me.
If I whet your interest in Zettelcasten, let me recommend Bob Dotoâs _A System for Writing_ and Sönke Ahrenâs _How to Take Smart Notes_. Dotoâs book is more nuts-and-bolts. See also zettelkasten.de for various resources, including a forum. Those three sources by no means exhaust whatâs available to you, but theyâre what Iâve leaned on.
## Contents
* **A bit of history**
* **Who is a Zettelkasten for?**
* **The anatomy of a note**
* **Adding notes (simplified version)**
* **Adding and using notes (creative version)**
* **A peculiar summary message**
## A bit of history
A Zettelkasten is a particular kind of hypertext document. The word literally means ânote boxâ or âslip box,â because that was the physical manifestation of the original Zettelkasten: a set of some 90,000 note cards written by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann over a period of 46 years. Luhmann isnât the only person who used notecards. For example, the rough contemporary Hans Blumenberg had some 30,000 cards in _his_ physical Zettelkasten. ("Ruminant machines: a twentieth-century episode in the material history of ideas", Daniela K. Helbig, 2019) But when people use âZettelkastenâ as a jargon word, they are usually referring to techniques descended from Luhmannâs practice. His preserved Zettelkasten looks like this:
â Photo of Luhmannâs Zettelkasten is from Niklas Luhmann-Archiv and is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Sourced from Tevin Zhang.
â
The Zettelkasten was Luhmannâs tool for academic writing. He was ridiculously productive, writing over 70 books and nearly 400 articles. These were apparently not the result of a hack seeking to produce as many âleast publishable unit" âIn academic publishing, the least publishable unit [âŠ] is the minimum amount of information that can be used to generate a publication in a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or a conference. [âŠ] The term is often used as a joking, ironic, or derogatory reference to the strategy of artificially inflating quantity of publications.â â Wikipedia articles as quickly as possible: he made novel and interesting contributions to German-language sociology. He credited use of his Zettelkasten for both his productivity and originality.
I should note that the museum-preserved version of Luhmannâs Zettelkasten gives an overly sanitized picture of his physical working environment. Below, you see pictures of his office. (Click to enlarge.)
â Screen shots from Niklas Luhmann - Beobachter im KrĂ€hennest. Thanks to Christian Tietze for the pointer.
â
They show that he combined the traditional âpiles of papers everywhereâ style with his disciplined note-taking. You donât have to be a paragon of orderliness to use a Zettelkasten. In fact, I believe a fairly high tolerance for disorder (of a certain sort) is required of a Zettelkasten user. The need to combine discipline and acceptance of disorder reminds me of Agile software development in the days before the industry took a giant _Seeing Like a State_ sledgehammer to it, but thatâs a comparison for another time.
## Who is a Zettelkasten for?
A Zettelkasten is primarily a **writerâs tool.**
Its prototypical use is by someone who spends a fair amount of their life writing **nonfiction long-form narratives** (articles, blog posts, books, and so on).
The core purpose of a non-fiction narrative is to argue persuasively for one or more **claims**. The justification for a claim may be other subclaims, which must themselves be justified. This can presumably continue until it bottoms out in claims that wonât be justified (axioms, presumed axioms, and claims you want to avoid addressing because youâre not so sure of them).
You end up with something like a tree:
â For all images, including those in this sidebar, you can click to enlarge into a separate tab.
The writingâs not finished until those claims are **linearized** into a sentence-after-sentence narrative, including adding a lot of connective tissue. How you organize the explanation â bottom up, top down, some combination â is up to you.
Good narrative writers use various devices to engage and persuade the readers. Those often require breaking the linear claim-by-claim structure to include implicit and, perhaps, explicit back links. Thatâs a fascinating subject, but it has nothing (I think) to do with the Zettelkasten, so Iâll say no more.
A Zettelkasten stores **notes** that the writer creates by **reading** various documents and writing down claims they want to remember. Later, some of those notes are **reread** and a selection of claims are used in a narrative.
Notes can also contain claims sourced to no one but the writer. That is, youâre allowed to have an idea, write it down on a note, and stash it for later use.
The writer typically makes no concessions to any other reader. The intended audience has one member.
### Success criteria
An academicâs job is not to read old claims from a bunch of sources and repackage them in different combinations with a different order. Academics are supposed to invent _new_ claims and argue for them.
New claims often come from **juxtaposing claims** that havenât been so linked before. âIf (1) fast feedback is important for design, and (2) testing can be thought of as providing not just bug reports but design feedback, then⊠(_new_) I claim testing can be done in a certain way that produces a tighter feedback loop.â (Itâs both putting claims 1 and 2 together, and the devising of âthe certain wayâ that make up the intellectual contribution.)
The creative process is not understood well enough to be mechanized, but it frequently involves some thinker having one or more claims active or âready to mind,â adding a new claim to mind, and saying âEureka!â
The Zettelkasten has to store claims as notes and retrieve them, and that needs to be reasonably easy. However, Iâll be bold and say that the main goal of a Zettelkasten is to be a **serendipity machine**. That is, it should make it more likely that the writer will, at some point, mentally juxtapose two or more notes and get a new idea.
## The anatomy of a note
â
The card boxes in the first picture look bigger than they are. The actual cards are A6 size, meaning 10.5 x 14.8 centimeters or 4.1 x 5.8 inches. You canât write a whole treatise on an A6 card. Whatever you know will necessarily have to be spread over multiple cards. â Luhmann card numbered 83.2c2. It claims that âThe meaning of cooperation is to be developed from the idea of ââperformance.â Iâll talk about how such cards are organized later.
In the case of an electronic note, thereâs no such constraint, but I think people generally favor making notes terse enough to be visible all at once. â Below: two of my cards
â
â
### The title
Luhmann used unique alphanumeric labels to identify cards. (More on that later.) Modern hypertext style encourages giving notes titles. Wiki-traditional titles are words or noun phrases â names of _things_ (like Zettelkasten or Platonic Idealism or Karen Chekerdjian).
Zettelcasten titles are usually sentences, and usually what I think of as factual claims. Some of mine:
* Concepts have fuzzy boundaries.
* The brain has many action-oriented models.
* Thinking hard doesnât burn much more energy than just lazing around.
* Derrida was entranced by recursion.
Note that titles arenât necessarily passive-voice âto beâ statements (âBourbaki _was_ a French collective of mathematiciansâ). They can be rather more active: âHuman brains _love_ either-or categoriesâ or âVisual perception _fluctuates_.â
Titles (the claim the note makes) are to be **atomic** , about a single idea. There is no objective measure of a noteâs atomicity. Since the Zettelkasten is for a single person, that person will form their own subjective understanding over time. For me, at this time, I think of a claim as atomic if I can imagine using it in its entirety within a narrative. If Iâd have to leave behind part of whatâs claimed, itâs really two claims that should go on different (probably hyperlinked) notes.
### The text
At the moment you came up with the title, you have a pretty good idea of what you mean by it. But a Zettelkasten note might next be encountered a month, a year, a decade after it was written. It is very likely the title will not be enough to remind you of what you meant.
So you need to write more sentences about the claim. But itâs extremely likely you canât write enough to be _sure_ youâll remember what you meant. Alternately, you could think of reading a note as causing you to re-generate a thought youâve had before â or something close enough, anyway. If you tried, youâd spend all your time writing notes and no time using them.
So youâll settle for a few sentences. Making the claims narrow â atomic â will help make them sufficient. Including links to related claims will also help jog your memory.
### The links
Links in a note go to destination notes that make related claims. (Mostly.)
Because the titles of the destination notes are full sentences, and a link almost always shows the text of the destinationâs title claim (as shown in the sidebar images above), itâs tempting to just list them in the body of the note:
> Structuralism is a mental style
> Neural clusters are self-reinforcing
> Would you rather be correct or effective?
I have enough self-knowledge, though, to realize such sentences will not be enough when I revisit the note in a few months. Iâll need more context, more explanation of why I thought _that_ claim was relevant to _this_ one. So I add more text:
> âIf Structuralism is a mental style, does that push against understanding the sort of âorder through fluctuationâ described below?â
> âAnother is that clusters maintain state. (See Neural clusters are self-reinforcing). We know from distributed systems that maintaining replicas is expensive.â
> âItâs true that chemistry is physically determined by the laws of physics, but is it _useful_ to think of it that way? Would you rather be correct or effective?â
Note: going forward, I donât want to cause confusion about when Iâm talking about the title (text at the top of a note) and when I mean a link to a note with a particular title. So Iâll call the latter âtitle-linksâ and, when I can, Iâll show them highlighted as links, even though they arenât actual links into my Zettelkasten. (They go to example.com.)
**Important**
Even given several sentences, I may still find the relevance of a link obscure later. So, when I figure it out, I change the note. This is not dissimilar from the advice I used to give programmers during my consulting days:
> As you work on your current task, youâll be browsing through existing code. Make note of whatâs awkward about it â a function in the wrong place, a bad name, a function that does too many things, whatever bugs you. At the end of a task (twice a day, say) spend some time fixing some of those things â half an hour, say â before you move on.
Tweaking notes and adding links is the same as cleaning up code: constant modest improvement.
### Labels
In a hypertext document, you just click on a link and _poof_ youâre at a new note. Luhmann had to work with physical cards. How did he get from one card to the other?
â
(This may seem irrelevant in the digital era, but bear with me.)
An inadequate solution would be to number the cards and keep them in order. Maybe you put some cards in sideways (portrait instead of landscape) every five thousand cards or so, numbered with the next card, to make searching for card 63821 easier. It wouldnât be too hard to come close to 63821 if you know where card 65001 is, and then youâd need a few more tries to get to the target card.
The problem comes in adding new cards. What if you later have an idea very relevant to 63821? If your practice is to add cards to the end as you think of them, many cards will be far away from conceptually related cards, meaning following every link is going to be a search. Yuck.
But youâre certainly not going to add the new card as 63822, then increment the old 63822 and all cards following it.
Instead, you need a way of labeling cards that allows you to add a new one next to an old one without having to change old cards' labels. The solution is to establish a conceptual tree structure for the linear set of cards.
That is, imagine we start with a highly-interconnected graph:
â
But now, certain links are treated specially by overlaying a tree structure (a _spanning tree_, roughly) over the free-form linking structure:
â
This arrangement imposes two types of relationships on the graph. Nodes are related to their _parent_ , and also to their _siblings_ :
â
The starting graph was just a mess. The ending graph is, well⊠As Luhmann puts it: âThe entire note collection can only be described as a mess, but at least it is a mess with a non-arbitrary internal structure.â Luhmann 1981, op. cit.
Itâs easy to add new nodes to the graph (cards to the Zettelkasten) because the labels are hierarchical. When you add a new note, you conceptually add it as a new leaf to the tree:
â
Its position gives you a unique label, and the label tells you where to put the new card in the card box. If you put related notes near each other in the conceptual tree, theyâll _tend_ to be near each other in the Zettelkasten, as I demonstrate below. Technically, the tree is linearized into the card box with a pre-order depth-first search, which produces a topologically-sorted card order. Sounds way cooler than it is.
## Adding notes (simplified version)
In this section, Iâll describe creating a Zettelkasten from scratch, showing how I decided where each note goes. This is a fictionalized version of what I actually did, but the titles and notes are real. Iâll pretend I was working with a physical card box, though I actually use Obsidian.
**The first note**
My first title was âWe perceive events rather than snapshots.â Lisa Feldman Barrett, âThe theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization,â _Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience_ , 2017. (Roughly, that means that the brain doesnât constantly monitor perceptions. Rather, it treats the perceptual system as a sort of âsmart peripheralâ that it can ask to watch out for large-scale, compound perceptions â like when my hand is gripping a soda can firmly. When that happens, the Thinking part of the brain gets a notification of the event.)
Since this was the first entry, it got the label `1.1`. (Youâll see why I used two digits later.) The figure below shows how Iâll represent the growing Zettelkasten. On the left is the conceptual tree (one node) and the contents of the card box (one card).
â
**The saga of note 1.1a**
As a longtime computer programmer, there are certain distinctions Iâm attuned to. One is between systems that require _memory_ and those that donât. Early ideas of perception had all the memory in the Thinking part of the brain. Later people like Barrett have pushed memory into the perceptual system. Using my fieldâs jargon, the pre-Barrett model of perception was of a pure function, but now it requires mutable state.
That seems worth writing down, so I created a new card and called it âPerception is statefulâ (using the jargon of my field â remember, Iâm only writing this for myself).
Where should I put it? Since this observation was derived from `1.1`, it makes sense for the new note to be âbelowâ `1.1` in the tree structure. Since it _depends_ on 1.1 in a historical sense, it should _depend_ on that note in the âto hang downâ sense, har har.
Thereâs also a sort of part-whole relationship between âWe perceive events rather than snapshotsâ and âPerception is stateful.â Any feature of perception (like the importance of events) demands something of perceptionâs implementation (like state), and we usually think of implementation as lesser than (âbelowâ) features. In general, humans think higher things are better than lower things. Thereâs a reason heaven is up and hell is down, or that âthe highest praiseâ is the best kind. See _Metaphors We Live By_, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 2003 (2/e).
Whatever my reason, the new note gets label `1.1a`:
â
The alternative would have been to make the new note a sibling. Letâs see an example of that.
**1.1b vies for attention**
Barrett has more to say about the perceptual system thatâs worth recording. For example: âPerception proceeds in summarizing steps.â The visual system is a good example. Inputs from the neurons in your retina get special processing to detect lines, edges, and basic orientations. The output of such processing gets fed to other areas that make summaries like âwhat objects are there in the scene?â and âwhatâs in front and whatâs in back?â.
Summarizing is part of the mechanism for distilling perceptions into events, so it seems it should be somewhere below `1.1`. Perhaps below `1.1a`? But itâs not really a part of `1.1a`âs claim that perception is stateful. The new claim is _related_ , but not _dependent_. So I choose to make it `1.1b`:
â
The leftward arrow in the tree diagram reflects the relative positions of `1.1a` and `1.1b` in the imaginary card box. The arrows arenât really needed, but I think they make the tree structure look nicer in this explanation.
**1.1a1 joins the chat**
Consider someone âin the zoneâ on a programming project or video game, who keeps on even as their bladder or stomach (or wrists) are complaining bitterly. â Not I would know anything about that, oh no indeed.
The brain has evidently decided that coding is more important than peeing. But does that mean the bladder is constantly sending â30% full,â â40% full,â â80% fullâ events that are being ignored? Some brain scientists think not. Instead, the brain implements âcoding is more important than peeingâ by telling the perceptual system (technically, the interoceptive system) to forward no bladder events until itâs at the âDude, Iâm way overfull and about to let go!!!â level.
The brain isnât _ignoring_ that the bladder is nearly full: it literally _doesnât notice_.
So we have a perceptual setting thatâs being tuned from outside the perceptual system. The new setting persists until changed. That means memory/state, again. Which suggests a new card below `1.1a` â it elaborates on that cardâs idea of state.
What to title it? Well, the brainâs adjustment only happens in certain contexts. The one that seems most relevant is what Mihali Csikszentmihalyi called âflow.â âa state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.â â Wikipedia
That seems like a nice card title: âFlow involves tuning of perceptual levels.â Here it is:
â
**Browsing**
The tree is now complicated enough that we can pretend to use it.
Suppose youâve arrived at **`1.1b`** , âPerception proceeds in summarizing steps,â for whatever reason. You donât need an explicit link to know that its parent has label `1.1` and that thereâs a sibling labeled `1.1a` â the labeling scheme tells you that much.
You donât know thereâs a `1.1a1`. But you can just flip to the card before **`1.1b`** and look. The previous card will always be the last card in the `1.1a` subtree (which might be `1.1a` itself, but isnât in this case).
Thus far, there arenât more cards to the right of **`1.1b`**. But if there were, you wouldnât know if the first one was `1.1c` or something else: perhaps `2.1`. But all you have to do is flip the current card in the other direction and look.
In practice, when you arrive at a card in a new part of the Zettelkasten, youâre going to flip over its adjacent cards (in both directions), just to see if thereâs anything interesting there. Youâll keep flipping as long as you keep being interested. Basically, you examine nearby subtrees until you get bored.
Electronic tooling makes that somewhat easier. For example, I took a few notes on a podcast episode that claimed that the concept of freedom evolved as a reaction to a new kind of widespread slavery. If I wanted to revisit that, I could ask my tool to show me the subtree:
â
⊠and I can examine the nearby notes by clicking instead of flipping.
**1.2 butts in**
At some point, I started making other notes about the brain, starting with âThe brain is associative.â âAssociationism is a theory that connects learning to thought based on [âŠ] the organismâs causal history. [âŠ] In its most basic form, associationism has claimed that pairs of thoughts become associated based on the organismâs past experience.â â Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy. Iâm an associationist, which is why I think new ideas come from âjuxtaposingâ (or making an association between) two or more older ideas. Where should that go?
Letâs imagine weâre using a physical card box.
The new card doesnât belong to the subtree under 1.1, since those claims are all about perception. Still⊠perception is something the brain does, and Iâm claiming âmaintaining associationsâ is another thing the brain does. So it makes sense to name the new note `1.2`, thus putting it ânext toâ `1.1`.
For fun, Iâll flesh out the `1.2` subtree with some of my other notes, producing this structure:
â Remember, you can click to enlarge.
**Location markers**
It looks like the `1.X` series of notes have turned into âwhere I put a bunch of claims about the brain.â Itâs easy to remember that fact, given that so far thereâs _nothing but_ `1.X` cards, but (as I write) Iâm already up to `18.X`. So pretend my Zettelkasten is both physical and far more mature, and that the brain claims were actually found in `13.1`, `13.1a`, `13.2`, and so on. It might be handy to mark where those brain cards start:
â
Iâm not sure if Luhmann used such markers. Note that the brain note is labeled `13`. I can do that because I follow Bob Dotoâs suggestion (in _A System for Writing_) of making the topmost nodes of the form `N.n`.
I do something similar, which is a full note or long page that provides a rough grouping of all the top-level notes. Hereâs the beginning:
â
â
â
I donât want to give the impression that the full note provides a nice categorization of all my topics. Remember: a Zettelkasten is âa mess with a non-arbitrary internal structure.â So, in the sidebar, you can see that the `4.x` root notes are divided into two chunks, each labeled with a vague-ish group name. You can also see that Iâm unconvinced that there are easily-labeled themes to the `5.x` or `6.x` groups or even, really, that thereâs a distinction between them.
Thatâs OK. Iâm not trying to âcarve nature at its joints.â The term is from Platoâs Phaedrus. When dividing a carcass, itâs easier to use a cleaver at the joints than in the middle of the bone. Similarly, when dividing nature into categories, there are natural dividing lines. I join with others in thinking that idea (or the equivalent desire for categories to have clear in-or-out conditions) is attractive but bogus. See _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind_ by George Lakoff, or _The Big Book of Concepts_ by Gregory Murphy. This _list of top-level title-links_ is just a convenience I mostly use to search for where to put new notes. (There will be more about searching and browsing in the next major section.)
**22.1 upsets the apple cart**
I read Csikszentmihalyiâs _Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience_ some decades ago, and I probably still have it around somewhere in the house. Suppose I decide to reread it and take notes this time. Suppose the first resulting card is titled âFlow is complete absorption in an experience.â I would add it to the graph as follows:
â
Thereâs a problem. I already mentioned âflowâ in card `1.1a1`. It now seems as if that card would better belong in the `22.1` hierarchy.
What do I do with it?
I do _**not**_ move it. Thatâs not so much because putting a gap into the sequence of cards will be annoying and possibly confusing. Itâs more because having a card disconnected from the âflowâ tree is a benefit, not a problem. Iâll talk about that in the next major section. (Almost there!)
For the moment, I want to emphasize that adding a new card is _not_ like adding a new species to a taxonomic tree. If you want to add a new species of trilobite to the fossil record, you know it will go within class _Trilobita_. Itâs got big compound eyes, so it goes into the _Phacopida_ (âlens faceâ) order. Its rather boring body places it in genus _Flexicalymene_. Itâs different from the other known species of that genus, so you name it with a latinate version of your favorite childhood pet and call it a day. Donât @ me, scholars of cladistics and the subtleties of biological classification. I know itâs not that simple. That it is, in fact, _hard_ to impose a useful tree structure over an irredeemably messy world. Zettelkasten, in my interpretation, doesnât much try. It embraces the mess.
Adding notes to a Zettelkasten is not trying to build a conceptual hierarchy.
## Adding and using notes (creative version)
Iâm interested in a particular intellectual approach called structuralism. People explaining it, especially in the context of literary criticism, will often use an example from Russian fairy tales. So itâs unsurprising my first note on the topic had the following text: I originally read this claim in Jonathan Culler, _Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature_, 2002.
> **Russian fairy tales are constructed from linearly-organized event types**
> This is the work of Vladimir Propp. [wikipedia link] He gives an ordered list of 31 events or situations, such that:
> * In a story, event _m_ **must** occur before any event later in the list of 31. (No backtracking.)
> * Events may be skipped.
>
>
> So the process of storytelling might be selecting a sequence of plot points â 2, 4, 5, 10, 18, 30 â which are then elaborated.
(This card is perhaps too wordy, containing facts Iâd be unlikely to forget. Thatâs because I copied most of it from a draft podcast script about structuralism. Iâm hoping extracting notes from the draft script will help me over the hump of turning it into a _final_ script.)
The next step is to decide where to put it. I know structuralism is a new topic for my Zettelkasten, so it will likely be a top-level note. I could just give it an unused âmajor numberâ (`19`) and label the note `19.1`. But that would leave it disconnected from other top level notes. Maybe I can find a top-level note that would make a good sibling?
When I look through the list of top-level title-links, I see this:
* 4.1 Persuasion requires telling a persuasive _story_
* 4.2 Linear text is read as creating a graph of firm concepts
`4.1` is intriguing. Clicking on the link shows this paragraph:
> The claim here is that humans are built for listening to stories, so a persuasive narrative will have a âtimelikeâ structure in addition to a logical structure.
Comparing that to âRussian fairy tales are constructed from linearly-organized event types,â I can see a loose connection: both are about a vague concept of âstory,â and both are about sequences of events in time. So Iâll put my new note in the `4.x` hierarchy. Since thereâs already a `4.2`, the new note will be labeled `4.3`.
I could leave the link between the two implicit, but my habit is to document which sibling caused my decision, and perhaps why I thought I cared. (That latter is the same elaboration I might do for any title-link within a note.) So the top of the new note looks like this:
â Click to enlarge.
Now that thereâs a link from `4.3` to `4.1`, thereâs a question of whether itâs worth adding an explicit back link from `4.1` to `4.3`. Itâs not strictly necessary, since:
1. If Iâm doing serious work with any claim, I should scan its siblings, just as a normal practice.
2. Obsidian makes it trivial to view the titles of all the notes that link to a given note.
So I only add explicit reverse title-links if it would be useful to expand on their text. In this case I chose not to. If I ever use the connection between the two, maybe Iâll change my mind.
### But just adding a note isnât the point
The act of adding a note would ideally prompt me to include relevant title-links in its text. Maybe thereâs something useful to say about the (implicit) connection between the new `4.3` and the earlier `4.2`? As it turns out, nothing came to mind after a brief scan of `4.2`.
â
But whatâs more important is that looking at ânearbyâ notes can generate new ideas (and, thus, new notes). Because it was easy, I glanced at titles of the notes below `4.1`. I found these two interesting:
* `4.1b`: Narrative is about management of surprise
* `4.1c`: Narrative has implicit back links.
Although these notes are directed to non-fiction narratives, it occurred to me that Proppâs model of fairy tales reads like a small childâs idea of a story: âand then this happened, and this happened, and then this other thing happened.â **B-o-r-i-n-g**.
If your only guide to writing Russian fairy tales was Proppâs model, youâd very likely write a bad one, because youâd be missing so much about what makes stories engaging.
That seems worth noting, so I created a new note, âPropp only included forward links in his model,â with title-links to the `4.1b` and `4.1c` claims. That was a matter of less than a minute. The new note automatically appeared in my âto be processed laterâ Inbox, so I was finished with it for now. No stopping a task in the middle to go off and finish a subtask for me, no sir â that way lies madness. In the software business, this is called âyak shaving.â The Mind Collection gives an example: âImagine itâs your weekend and you sit at home trying to finish writing that important report for work. Your laptop battery dies so you need to fetch the charger from the office. You donât have a key, though, so you call a colleague. Heâs happy to help but heâs at his sonâs basketball game. [âŠ] This is how you end up eating burgers and fries with a visibly proud dad and his son.â
I also decided to put a link to that new card on the original Propp note:
â
What Iâd done made me think about structuralism more generally. I realized the other go-to introductory example of structuralism, LĂ©vi-Straussâs model of kinship, also has that feel of âas simple as possible and, in fact, maybe even simpler.â âIn every field of inquiry, it is true that all things should be made as simple as possible â but no simpler. (And for every problem that is muddled by over-complexity, a dozen are muddled by over-simplifying.)â â Sidney J. Harris
So I drafted a note titled âStructuralism tends toward minimalismâ to elaborate on later. Thatâs more of a hypothesis than a solid claim. If I ever decide to use it in a proper narrative piece, Iâll do some more reading.
**In sum** , when writing notes, your goal should not just be to record the new claim, but to explore for a little while to see if somehow-related claims give you new ideas.
This production of new ideas is why I call Zettelkasten a âserendipity machine.â Iâm thinking of âmachineâ in the sense of the basic machines of physics â the inclined plane, the pulley, and so on. They make tasks you could already do easier to do, and make possible tasks that would otherwise be beyond your abilities.
The task in question is being creative by bashing different ideas together. Iâm already pretty good at making connections between disparate topics, but my Zettelkasten thus far seems to be making me better.
### Other lists of title-links
It would be silly to be a stickler for a rule that every note must be a distinct claim. Early on, I felt the need to add summary notes, like this one:
> **Simmelian numbers**
>
> * 3 is the lowest number for social structures
> * ca. 7-10 â The maximum group size for a multi-sided conversation
> * 30 is a formality threshold for speakers
> * 75 is the breaking point for cult implosion
> * âŠ
>
This is a collection of numbers and ranges that keep cropping up in sociology (at least according to Randall Collins).
When a source provides me a list of claims (like Ostromâs nine principles for designing a commons) Ostromâs career demolishes Hardinâs âTragedy of the Commons.â Hardin is my go-to example of a theorist boldly asserting the flat impossibility of something people do all the time. But I digress. it would be silly not to copy it into the Zettelkasten.
These notes live in the same trees as those whose titles are claims. Ostromâs note happens to have label `8.1`, but it could also have been buried more deeply.
In addition to such notes, I also follow Luhmann in having a separate set of pointers from keywords to relevant notes. Here is a sampling of mine:
â
Note that itâs rather a hodge-podge. There are names of concepts or abstractions, like⊠Concept and Abstraction. There are whole technical fields, like Cybernetics. Thereâs technical jargon like Degeneracy (biology) or Bricolage. Thereâs even flat-out slang, like Grok (not shown).
I label the entire collection of such notes âJargonâ because I donât want to give the impression (to myself) that Iâm somehow Capturing the Platonic Essence of, say, âAesthetics.â A Jargon note is humbler: just some annotated title-links to notes that have some relevance to a word or phrase. Hereâs the Aesthetics note:
â
When I create a new note, if I think itâs especially relevant to aesthetics (and if I remember I have a Jargon note with that title), I put an Aesthetics title-link on it. (This is like adding tags in many hypertext systems, including Obsidian.) That link automagically means a title-link to the note appears in the Inbox section of the Aesthetics note. At my leisure, and if it suits my fancy, I can pluck the title out of the Inbox and add a little context.
When searching for where to put a note (and finding some notes it should link to), Iâll occasionally use the Jargon notes in addition to my list of top-level title links. I also sometimes use full-text search.
I think what Iâm calling Jargon notes have some important characteristics:
1. You create them when theyâre convenient, not according to any fixed rule. If you want to get fancy, they _emerge_ in the moment out of the complex interactions between a Zettelkasten and its human.
2. They strike a _personal_ balance between discoverability and serendipity. You want to find particular notes easily, but not _so_ easily that you donât benefit from chance juxtapositions thrown up by your search. I expect the balance will depend a lot on the quirks of each personâs memory. (Mine seems to be worse than Luhmannâs was.)
My understanding is that Luhmann would sometimes browse his Zettelkasten with no fixed goal in mind. I can imagine such browsing as both throwing up juxtapositions but also maintaining his feel for the structure of his semi-structured mess. Memories are generally strengthened when theyâre retrieved, so random browsing can avoid over-remembering frequently-accessed claims at the expense of forgetting the less-used ones.
### Trails
A narrative, I said at the start of this post, starts as a linearized sequence of claims, possibly rearranged for purposes of narrative effectiveness. That actually echoes something from the very beginning of hypertext as a concept.
Vannevar Bush administered much of the government-funded research and development for the United States during World War II. He played a significant role in establishing postwar support for basic research. And he was the first popularizer of hypertext, in a 1945 popular magazine article. âAs We May Thinkâ The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. One thing he emphasized there was _associative trails_ , echoing in metal and optics whatâs present in the brain:
> The human mind [âŠ] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
He imagined users of his hypertext device, dubbed a âmemex,â creating physical instantiations of mental trails:
> The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. [âŠ] He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. [âŠ] Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.
And people would purchase trails:
> Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. [âŠ] The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his clientâs interest. The physician, puzzled by its patientâs reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories [âŠ]
There are trails in our modern hypertext documents, but theyâre generally implicit. When reading Wikipedia, you can make your own trail, but thereâs no tradition of making such trails _permanent_ , something you could give to someone else. I think Bush vastly underestimated the importance of the âconnective tissueâ â narrative technique â that has to be added to a list of links to make it something people will _read_ and benefit from. Writing this post would have been _so_ much easier if I could have just dumped a list of claims onto you. Instead I spent a lot of time on the ordering and grouping of those claims, the tone of my exposition, and so on. That youâve read this far suggests that was time well spent. Or that youâre made of more patient stuff than most.
But, since the purpose of a Zettelkasten is to support narratives â that is, trails of claims â its owner can make notes containing trails, notes that will be fleshed out into a proper narrative. (I can make a trail thatâs meaningful to me _much_ more easily than one thatâs meaningful to some target audience.)
For example, I found it useful to preserve this trail:
> What persuades scientists persuades us
> Narrative is about management of surprise
> Persuasion requires telling a persuasive _story_
⊠which Iâve titled âWhatâs the relationship of a Lakatos-style novel confirmation to narrative surprise?â Someday I can flesh that out into an essay or part of an essay. (I should probably add some text to the bare links before I forget what I had in mind.)
Note two things:
1. A trail is another list of title-links that provides a window into the full document.
2. Harvesting title-links for a trail will very likely provoke new claims because of the juxtaposition of old ones. Or it might suggest new topics to read up on.
## A peculiar summary message
I took notes in exactly one class in college. (Abstract Algebra, I think.) I have since dabbled in note taking and note-taking tools off and on. Zettelkasten is the first one that seems at all likely to stick. Why?
A Zettelkasten document is âa mess with a non-arbitrary internal structure,â and I enjoy messing with that mess. Itâs fun making linkages and especially fun when two notes spawn a new one.
Luhmann has a metaphor for that. He refers to the Zettelkasten as a _communication partner_. His âKommunikation mit ZettelkĂ€sten,â linked above, is translated as âCommunications with Zettelkastens.â In that paper, he speaks of âweâ: â**We** (me and my Zettelkasten) obviously tend to think of systems theory [âŠ]â or âAfter 26 successful years with only occasionally difficult teamwork, **we** can report [âŠ]â.
Luhmann describes whatâs needed for his Zettelkasten partner to keep holding his interest. The two words that stand out to me are âsurpriseâ and ârandomnessâ:
1. The Zettelkasten must be able to surprise by, metaphorically, advancing an unexpected claim. You donât want a conversation where the Zettelkasten only ever repeats back to you what you told it last month.
2. Randomness is a mechanism that leads to surprise. Itâs not that you donât know what youâll get when you ask the Zettelkasten about the claim on card `17.a3b8`; itâs more that the Zettelkasten has the âyes, andâ attitude. âA rule-of-thumb in improvisational comedy that suggests that an improviser should accept what another improviser has stated (âyesâ) and then expand on that line of thinking (âandâ)â â Wikipedia As you browse around (whether with a goal in mind or randomly), the mechanism should be such that you frequently think â at least glancingly â about the implications of two notes youâve never looked at together (or havenât for a long time, but your learning since then may interact with those past claims in new ways).
But that seems uncomfortably grandiose. Less imposingly, I think that for me, possibly for Luhmann, perhaps for other users of Zettelkasten, at least some of its appeal is that _frobbing is fun_.
Huh?
âTo frobâ is computer programmer jargon from the 1970s. As described in the Jargon File: âThe original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab [âŠ]â â wikipedia. A version edited by Guy Steele was published in 1983 as _The Hackerâs Dictionary_ and was roughly this version. A later edition, _The New Hackerâs Dictionary_ , seems to be widely considered by old-timers (including me) to have gone wildly astray.
> Usage: _frob_ , _twiddle_ , and _tweak_ sometimes connote points along a continuum. âFrobâ connotes aimless manipulation; twiddle connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; tweak connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if heâs carefully adjusting it, he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it; but if heâs just doing it because turning a knob is fun, heâs frobbing it.
â
â Public Domain, 1793Iâm sensing the feeling of frobbing as I work with my Zettelkasten. Itâs _fun_ to bounce ideas around. So, as Abraham Lincoln didnât actually say: âPeople who like this sort of thing [playing with ideas in a generative way] will find this [Zettelkasten] the kind of thing they like.â
* * *
**Comments?** As part of my move to resurrect the Republic of Letters, Iâve established an email address you can use to reach me. Include a first-line salutation to me, âBrian Marickâ (honorific optional), and I will reply as soon as the packet boat brings your missive to me. https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2025/10/30/hypertext-zettelkasten.html