Note taking and discovery
I’ve been taking notes consistently, probably starting in university. The challenge for me was never capture but retrieval. I suspect that’s true for most people.
The interesting thing about zettelcasten is how Luhramn optimized his sytem for retrieval. Related subjects were proximate, he used a linking system of sorts that allowed his cards to be filed under number of different topics.
In digital note taking, proximity is difficult to simulate. Hyperlinking is the first step of course. My problem with hyperlinks is that they become lost in the content of the note. The only way to discover them is by scanning the text. This is very slow.
A fairly recent development within note taking application is the “graph view”.
I can’t recall where I saw this first; it’s not really that important. The fact is more and more note taking tools support this functionality. It’s an improvement on “simple” hyperlinking, because it arranges concepts within a virtual space. In a way, very similar to how Luhrman did it originally with his zettels. This enhances retrievability and discoverability in a huge way.
I’m reading a book, “The Jakarta Method” about the US approach to the communist thread after World War 2. At the top of my notes file, I have meta link to:
- books
- current year
and other relevant metadata.
Then within the notes themselves I may have links to my other notes:
- a link to Indonesia, since this is primarily the book about this country.
- a link to Communism
- a link to United States
and many more links to all the relevant topics.
So the concept map may looks like this:
All the nodes are clickable. If I click on Indonesia, I then get an expanded view of how Indonesia fits into my knowledge base:
I see that I have a “travel destination” node linked to Indonesia so I likely found somewhere interesting to visit there. It’s also linked to Buddhism and World indicating further relationships.
This is a big deal for data discoverability. Now instead of getting bogged down in details, I can get a high level overview of my concepts. Just as important I can find related concepts and link them.