Luedecke's Zettlekaten

Posted by Christian Tietze
Mar 14, 2014 at 04:34 PM

>In other words, Luhmann’s “choices” often simply were triggered by the
>inherent limitations of a physical index card system - he probably would
>have been so happy to overcome them and replace them with something more
>adequate both to IMS, and to
>thinking-about-what-you’ve-got-within-your-IMS-of-then.

That’s exactly how I feel when it comes to Daniel Lüdecke’s Zkn³ software, although my concerns are only miniscule. Zkn³ mimics paper-based Zettelkästen too much for my taste.

I consider the concept of “Folgezettel” (note sequences) one of Luhmann’s most important developments. Zkn³ supports this as well. Basically, you start with one note and put it in the archive. You add more notes, numbering them accordingly. Now you discover something new and want to add this to note #23. Because a note with the no. 24 exists already, there’s no room it seems. But instead of putting the new note at the end of the archive, you branch off where it makes sense: you label it no. 23a and put it after no. 23. A tree-like structure emerges with time.

This way, at least theoretically, you could put whole texts into the archive, spread across lots of notes and sub-branches. Just grab everything between #23 and #24 and the pile is guaranteed to be of related content.

This was necessary because paper offers limited space only. Text files don’t. You can put whole book manuscripts in one single text document.

I don’t encourage doing so, though. Large files are harder to handle mentally, I suppose. I like to make notes atomic: short, concise, self-contained. I can deal better with that. Could be just me.

If the order of notes doesn’t matter because you could (a) either put everything related into one single document, or (b) use convenient hyperlinks (like WikiLinks[1]) to create traversable connections, then you wouldn’t need to enumerate notes like Luhmann did.

Instead, I found the date way more valuable. So I put a date-time stamp like “201403141728” in front of my notes, which stands for the current moment of time at UTC+1: “2014-03-14 17:28”. Notes which are related thematically aren’t put together this way, but I don’t need this feature anyhow since I neither have to overcome paper-based limitations, nor do I want to store book manuscripts in my Zettelkasten note archive. There are project folders and text outlines for this stuff.

When note identifiers are this arbitrary, you can just as well put them at the beginning of each paragraph you write. Your whole Zettelkasten can be in one single file and it wouldn’t matter since you have full-text search capabilities built into every text editor available. Thinking in files in convenient, but it isn’t necessary. (There’s a post on my website on this.[2])

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[1]: Most wiki software create links if you write words in CamelCase or surround them with [[double brackets]]. That equals zero cost to create links between notes.
[2]: The post on identity is at: http://christiantietze.de/posts/2014/02/add-identity/