(2011-10-18) Kuehn Connectedtext The Personal Wiki System

Manfred Kuehn: ConnectedText - The Personal Wiki System. I am a 60 years old academic teacher and I have been using ConnectedText exclusively since August 2005

In writing my dissertation and working on my first book, I used an index card system, characterized by the "one fact, one card" maxim, made popular by Beatrice Webb. [4] This was not at all unusual during the 1970s.

It was my discovery of wiki technology some time in 2002 that ended this undirected search and constituted the other fundamental change in the way I dealt with information. What I liked about it from the beginning was that it allows of easily linking bits of information and favors the braking down of large chunks of information into smaller bits. This emphasis on the granularity of information reminded me not only of the old index card method, but it also convinced me almost immediately that it was a significant improvement over the paper-based system. I adopted this technology and I have never looked back.

Wikis are indeed very much like collections of electronic note cards.

A wiki allows one to build increasingly more complex relationships between what might appear to be at first unrelated bits and pieces of information

Another theoretician of the index card system, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose so-called "Zettelkasten" (slip-box) has achieved independent fame in Germany, used to talk about this first analytic step as "reduction for the sake of [building] complexity."

A program like ConnectedText, improves significantly on Luhmann's paper-based system

Just as any other good system of notes, ConnectedText will lead to what Luhmann called a "Zweitgedächtnis" or a secondary memory (outboard brain) that might be described with Luhmann as a "chaos (Unordnung) of non-arbitrary internal structure."[14] When we consult this external or artificial memory, we will often be surprised by what we find. In fact, the more information we have fed into the system, the more we will be surprised. Luhmann, who had an interesting concept of "communication," had no problem to call this serendipitous interaction with his notes, communication. In fact, and perhaps somewhat sadly, this seems to have been the main form of communication that interested him, late in his life.

This can be put differently, systems like Luhmann's card index and electronic versions of them, like ConnectedText, augment human memory and thus also intelligence, which is precisely the phrase Douglas Engelbart used for a computer-based and hyperlinked database.

It has become a "thinking environment" (Thinking Space) for me; and it is in this way that it shines the most. To say again, it does not think for me, but it allows me to think about matters in a way that would be impossible without this tool.

I should perhaps also note that I try, whenever possible, not to collect raw quotes or information simply copied from the Internet or from books, but to write excerpts or summaries in my own words on the basis of my reading

I will close by calling attention to the advice of another great sociologist, namely, C. Wright Mills' profound "Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship

It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other

Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether he knows it or not, the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his craft

you must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal; many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist's need for systematic reflection demands it.

By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake

But how is this file-which so far must seem to you more like a curious sort of "literary" journal-used in intellectual production? The maintenance of such a file is intellectual production. It is a continually growing store of facts and ideas, from the most vague to the most finished.

I have talked a great deal about reading and note-taking, but reading and note-taking are only the beginning. At some time, you have to begin to think for yourself. One might think that there is a deep divide between the two. I think the experience of many of the thinkers I have referred to shows that this is so. Note-taking, if one right, shades imperceptibly into original thought–especially if you take care to appropriate the the thoughts of others by thinking them through and by formulating them in your own words.

2014: Note Connections

The decision to link should be manual, based on the best judgment of the person who maintains the note base.

2015: My Zettelkasten

I have never explicitly made clear how the approach I take in ConnectedText is related to that of Luhmann's. Here it is.

I have decided for a database or a personal wiki.

I would not want to have to have to rely on search alone to navigate a system of 10,000 notes, or more

In any case, as I have said many times before, I believe a personal wiki, or, more generally, a personal hypertext system best captures the spirit of Luhmann's system.