Zettelkasten Numbering the Easy Way
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- Опубликовано: 8 июн 2024
- My new book is out: www.kathleenspracklen.com/book
Join me for a brief, daily chat, talking about creating believable character portrayals by understanding why people do what they do, and the forces that drive them. I've been on a long diversion driven by your requests and questions into how a Zettelkasten works. Since you need real sources to illustrate a Zettelkasten in action, I am employing my new book as an anchor book and adding other, related, sources to illustration ideas interacting.
If you've ever wanted to start a Zettelkasten or you are wondering what all the excitement is about, this is the series to catch. If you want to follow along and get your Zettelkasten off the ground, you might want to pick up my book.
You're a great teacher. Thank you for these videos!
Thank you for the words of encouragement. Please let me know if you have any questions I can answer for you.
4:13 "A Zettelkasten is like a mindmap." This one sentence brought instant clarity for me. Not sure why I didn't see it before, but now the whole thing seems so obvious. Thank you!
I'm glad that was helpful for you, Rachel. Let me know if I can answer any questions for you.
cool animation - next level!
Thanks for the encouragement. I'm trying.
Excellent, Kathleen. Thank you. Question - You presented the numbering system for main cards. Does only one thought, idea, quote go on each card? All I have at this moment are unnumbered Bib cards. Where does the content come from that goes on a main card?
What a perfect question, Pam. You set me up so nicely for today's video.
Thank you for all your videos! I came across the zettlekasten idea years ago but have only now just begun my own. I’m using your effortless numbering system, and I have a question: when do you decide to use a new number at the front (1,2,3,4, etc)?
Pretty quickly in starting my ZK I have 1-8 and there’s part of me that feels like I’m doing something wrong. As I’m just starting I don’t have a ton of depth within the numbers though some go into number-letter-number already.
I know you say the new card chooses its place/parent card, so when a new card just doesn’t seem to fit in any previous number section, I made a new one. Am I making my categories too narrow? I should add that my cards are not currently from one book or one area of study/interest; they are a bit all over because my brain just wants to write down all the things!
I hope this question makes sense. Thanks for all you do! (Side note: I am a mom of a toddler and I have a background in writing so I just love your story of wanting to help writer moms! We need it!)
How delightful to hear from you, Erin. You are on the right track with your numbering. If the new card has no other that it wants to go with, then it is perfectly appropriate to give it a new number, 8, 9, 10 ... as high as it goes.
Categories make themselves, you don't have to make them. This happens in two ways. One of them you have already seen, since you say some of your cards already have number-letter. The most direct type of category just grows up under one of the cards and keeps growing.
Another type of category forms when a new card has two different cards that it could go with. The new card will pick one as it's parent and the other as sort of a step-parent will link to the new card.
I'll explain this more in the video I record tonight. I will give me joy to make a video to answer your question.
@@KathleenSpracklen thank you so much!
Thanks for the video and bringing clarity to the concept. I have one quick question; would the initial top level numbers signify the title of say the "fuzzy" categories? And would those start as "1, 2, 3 etc." as opposed to "1000" as in your example?
This is a wonderful question, Joe, because it gets to the very heart of what we are doing when we place a new card into our Zettelkasten. We are always going to be placing our new card right after the existing card most closely associated with it. This splits in two right away: Do we have an existing card or not?
1) In a new Zettelkasten we might find that there is no existing card that associates with our new card. That's where having categories might help. (I'm still testing this out to see if they are actually needed.) So we have another split, do we set up categories or don't we?
A) If we set up categories to help our Zettelkasten get off the ground, traditionally they have been numbered 1000, 2000, etc. But that's just tradition. You can name them anything you like and you can give the numbers any meaning you like.
B) If we don't set up categories and our new card has no existing card it is associated with, then it just gets the next free number in the range 1, 2, 3 and so on. "A" is more organized, "B" is simpler. I'm actively debating this issue. Do you have an opinion you'd like to share?
So now we have to take our alternate branch where:
2) We DO have an existing card that most closely associates with our new card.
Now we are thinking of association and not categorization. We must push all thoughts of categories out of our minds, because, if we are faithful in placing our new card by association, we will soon discover that we have cards that do not "belong" to the category name that we used to help us get started.
When that starts happening, congratulations! You are beginning to have a mature Zettelkasten. Throw that category card away. You no longer need it. One day our Zettelkastens may grow to the point where all category cards can be thrown away.
It is for this reason, that I wonder if it is worthwhile to make them in the first place. I would love to hear what you think.
With your permission, I would like to post your question over in LiLLiPub.org so that I can also get the opinion of the members of the Circle for Zettelkasten.
@@KathleenSpracklen Thanks for your throrough and thoughtful reply, and of course you can share it with the community. So this is my personal version/vision for the numbering based on your numeric/alpha/numeric system. I have identified five "Fuzzy" categories and they are; SEEK, PHILO, MACHINE, Scribe and Socio. I won't go into what eeach means because they make sense to me and are deliberately "fuzzy' in trying to keep in the spirit of the original zettelkasten while broad enough for my purposes. But they can be anything including the Academic topics you pointed out. So I would then create the first (out of 5 total) Category Cards - "1 SEEK" then sequentially NOTE NAME 1a, NOTE NAME 1a1, 1a2...then 1b, 1b1, 1b2 etc. I'm using the fuzzy categories as a map to my system so I can quickly file AND retrieve notes form those specific 5 categories. I also plan on color coding the categories for easy reference.
@@joeinfantryman Thanks for the permission. It sounds like you have a terrific system. I enjoyed hearing your approach.
When I attended the Yale's Writers Summer session a few years ago I had hoped for a zettelkasten lecture. It's my humblest of opinions this should be an undergrad level mandatory course for all disciplines. In any case, I just read this is a channel to support writing moms and don't want to intrude. Best-Joe
@@joeinfantryman You are most welcome to be here. Even my course for writer moms was 50/50 men and women. Lately, I've been on a side-bent teaching about the Zettelkasten because I am getting so many people asking questions about it. You are not intruding in any way.