Anyone using Zettelkasten?

Posted by Christian Tietze
Apr 24, 2019 at 07:58 AM

Simon wrote:
> I was not really gripped by linking in the Zetelkasten method. I
>appreciate that Luhmann didn’t really have any option when working on
>card, but with advanced searches these are a moot point for me. I much
>prefer tags as I can tag everything with multiple tags and narrow down
>what I’m looking for.

That’s a fair complaint at first, but tags can only create assorted clusters of notes. (Any computer program displaying the results in a list will have to apply some kind of sort function, but that’s rather accidental.)

Luhmann was creating an interwoven web of notes, not just clumps of cards. The physical nature of his note cards resulted in him exploiting the juxtaposition of cards as another signifier of relevance: what’s close together belongs together, if you will.

I wrote about the different kinds of ties between notes on the Zettelkasten blog once: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/kinds-of-ties/

I think Luhmann would’ve settled for a Wiki of sorts because of its capability for organic growth. Do not underestimate the value of manually placing links between notes. That’s a key point. Otherwise, you only have grouped notes without any structure. You will want to reduce entropy and impose structures to improve access to information and strengthen associations.

—if you are into creative knowledge work, that is. If you only want to file stuff, well, file away and tag and use semantic searches. That should do the trick.