Keeping zetel notes: productive or counterproductive approach.

Posted by steve-rogers
Dec 4, 2018 at 01:44 PM

As an academic, I am also faced with the challenge of taking, storing, and accessing notes from literature and seminars. It’s an important skill that I am constantly trying improve. I first became aware of the Zettelkasten approach after stumbling upon Christian Tietze’s excellent website (https://zettelkasten.de/) and losing myself there for a few hours. Like many people here, I was also fascinated by Beck Tench’s recent post (as well as the rest of her site, if you haven’t had a look). I plan to think more about how Zettelkasten techniques might fit into my own work and to try the experiment. However, I do share Dellu’s skepticism about how useful these granular, single notes will be when removed from the context of the bigger picture provided by the source material.

Another approach that I like very much, that I haven’t seen mentioned here, was described by Scott Lougheed on his website:

https://scottlougheed.com/2015/07/17/summarizing-literature-with-omnioutliner/

Scott is an environmental social scientist and describes an approach to note taking in which sections of a text are highlighted and copied to the clipboard. Scot then switches to outliner software and paraphrases the concept as an outline item and pastes the verbatim copied text as a child to that item. Scott uses DevonTHINK and Omnioutliner on MacOS, but the approach is platform-independent. The advantage of using DT and OO together is he then pastes a link back to the original highlighted text in the “Notes” field of the OO item for a permanent reference pointer. The advantage of this approach is the parent-child relationship between the summary and the highlighted text is conserved and can be manipulated within the structure of the outline and the “chunk” of information may also be copied to another outline document when, for example, assembling a literature review or planning other writing projects such as manuscripts or grant applications.

I mention this here because the approach seems to share some of the strengths of Zettelkasten. The notes are taken in a granular manner - one idea per outline item note. Also, the reader restates the concept the note in their own words, thereby (hopefully) internalizing the information more effectively than if they simply highlighted sections of a text and exported annotations to a text/RTF file. However, the structure of the document preserves the context of each individual note in a way that a folder containing single ideas from multiple input documents would not (even if they are linked by links or some numerical scheme).