Cultivating a Digital Garden in my Zettelkasten

“Organizing” knowledge - From operating ‘machines of imagination’ to cultivating and tending a “digital garden”

A long time ago, when I was still living in Berlin, focussing on cognitive anthropology and cognitive science more generally, taking long walks exploring the urban city-scape with my wife - who still was my girlfriend back then - we visited one of our favorite book stores where I found a fantastic coffee table book that became the starting point of a long fascination with artefacts for storing or organizing knowledge and ideas.

The book was titled: “Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie” which I would translate as “Zettelkaesten. Machines of Imagination”. Writing it down, I recognize that the German title - aside from a different conotation of “Phantasie” vs. “phantasy” - might be relatively self explanatory for English speakers.

This book had one chapter about Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten that especially peaked my interest. Not only did the photos of this analog artefact make the creative tension between chaos and order almost tangible, but the accomodating essay by Luhmann himself spoke to me. In it, he explains the meticulous system of numbering and “tagging” his individual slips of paper and how this process of ordering allows him to essentially let his Zettelkasten do the work of writing his essays and books for him.

I remember that I didn’t buy the book that day because I could not get it out of my head for weeks until I finally returned to the store to find it gone but luckily enough the bookseller was able to order it for me. But before I actually got that copy and as far as I remember already the evening we returned home from oure walk, I searched for more information and possibly more photos of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten online.

Of course even back then, I quickly found Daniel Lüdecke’s Zkn3 - a digital implementation of the Zettelkasten system following Luhmann’s approach. I started using it and I generally liked it. However, I never made it to the point where this Zettelkasten actually surprised me with new arrangements and paths through my admittedly too small collection of notes or Zettel. This is partly due to the fact that around that time I was A) already using Zotero for cataloging my books and also adding reading notes in there and B) starting to use MAXQDA as a research tool in my own studies and later as a student assistant to the company developing that software which also includes multiple options to store, retrieve and organize your notes or memos.

So, had those alternatives not existed and my note-taking efforts therfore been focused on this one application, Zkn3 might have been a great option. From what I can tell, the automatic linking nad tag suggestions etc. were (and probably still are) fantastic. But my collection never gained enough mass to generate supprising links and ideas.

Skip a few years… The topic stayed on my mind for all the time and I was even talking with friends and started learning to code in Python to implement my own note taking / annotation software. But as everybody knows, there is only so much time in a day and especially so in the final phases of writing your masters thesis and even less so when trying to do your PhD on a completely different topic - not related to active software development. And still the idea always stayed present in the back of my mind - and it will for the forseeable future.

But all of a sudden, the whole nottaking and zettelkasten topic went from something nagging me in the back of my head to public explosion of attention in my media-environment.

Metaphor: “organizing” knowledge ->

References

_{Gfrereis, Heike and Ellen Striddmatter (eds.)
2013 Zettelkästen: Maschinen der Phantasie. Marbacher Katalog 66. Deutsche Schillergesellschaft: Marbach am Neckar.}