(2023-11-04) Brologue Zettelkasten An Antidote For Boring Notes

Brologue on Zettelkasten: An Antidote for Boring Notes. I wasn’t a prolific note taker in Uni. Don’t get me wrong, I took notes

But when it came to coursework, I never used them. They were more like memos, or a bookmark you save to your browser toolbar and then leave for six months

taking notes, for me, was a miserable task, with seemingly little or no reward. See, the illusion of competence accounts for thinking we know what’s in front of us. If we cannot directly engage with our writings, then no matter how much labour we put into our notes, they become yet another thing that’s in front of us.

I could analyse the ideas I thought were important, but there was no way to synthesise, or take two idea from separate lectures and see how they link up.

we can turn a critical eye to what we consume, and come to understand how fragments of ideas connect and coalesce into the bigger picture. Cory Doctorow describes pithily the evolution of the solution to this problem – writers have us digital iPad babbies beat to the punch since time immemorial with their analog commonplace books.

if we have a tool that allows us to centralise the sources of information that grab our attention, we can explore that nagging feeling that “this is a piece of something bigger, and maybe something important.” That’s a great maxim for describing the nature of research.

I can keep track of everything I find in the one place thanks to two things: one, Obsidian, an amazing Markdown editor (other such applications are available); and two, Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten.

A quick web search yields hundreds of links to people promoting their methods of establishing a Zettelkasten. One of its core principles, however, is that it’s a bottom-up structure: you are building the yellow brick road, brick and mortar, so beyond connecting ideas through indexing and tagging, how you organise the Zettelkasten is up to you.

Before making my Zettelkasten, I didn’t explore the questions that came into my head as much. It’s not that I was incurious – there was just too much stuff to look at.

There’s only one problem with my yellow brick road, however. Roads are infrastructure. They are a form of mutual aid that we build and maintain to help each other move around. My Zettel solved the problem of individual notes siloed off from each other, but introduced me to another problem – that it being for your eyes only is itself a kind of silo. What I put into the Zettel must produce an output of some sort.

Hosting my Zettelkasten online would be like hosting any other website

The way I’ve set mine up, that’s not really an option for me. On the other hand, the beauty of the blog is how one’s posts – a coalescence of ideas – interacts with an audience. A blog allows me to write about a run-on set of interlinking ideas in one place – something that short-and-sweet atomic notes can’t do.