(2022-05-20) Aldrich Creating A Commonplace Book Or Zettelkasten Index From Hypothesis Tags

Chris Aldrich: Creating a commonplace book or zettelkasten index from Hypothes.is tags. I thought it might be useful to have a relatively complete list of cross linked topical headings in my digital notebook (currently Obsidian) which is a mélange of wiki, zettelkasten, journal, project management tool, notebook, and productivity tool

My version is structured to have very clear delineations between these forms even though I’m using the same tool for various functions.

it can be useful to cross reference subject headings from one zettel to see what those link to and use those as a way to potential create links to other zettels

For those enamored of Niklas Luhmann, we should mention that having and maintaining a subject index was a powerful portion of his system, even if the digitized version of his zettelkasten hasn’t yet been fully digitized

Having a general key word/subject heading/topic heading index of all the material in one’s system can be very useful for general search and discovery as well. This is one of the reasons that John Locke wrote about a system for indexing one’s commonplace book in 1685.

Since such a large swath of my note taking practice starts by using Hypothes.is as my tool of choice, I’m able to leverage several years of using it to my benefit. Within it I’ve got 9,314 annotations, highlights, and bookmarks tagged with over 3,326 subject headings as of this writing.