A Zettelkasten Adventure

A major part of my eighth grade English class was being taught how to write a research paper. In my recollection, there were two big elements to what we were taught: the first element was developing a formal outline for the content, with topic sentences for each major and minor point, and the second element was a system of notetaking using notecards, where we would write out individual ideas and quotes from our sources on separate notecards and later be able to sort them into an order that made sense for writing out the paper. In retrospect, I don’t think this notetaking system differs much from what nowadays goes by the name of the Zettelkasten method.

(I was quite happy with how my research paper turned out, by the way. I was very interested in World War One aviation then, having spent a lot of time playing the boardgame Richthofen’s War, so my paper was on fighter tactics in World War One. I was pleased because I knew enough to be looking at original sources, especially pilots’ memoirs.)

There are lots of variations on the Zettelkasten method, but a couple points seem key. First, each notecard contains a single atomic concept. Second, there is an indexing system in place to allow individual notecards to link to other notecards; that is, it’s a hypertext system.

Some of the practitioners of the Zettelkasten method in the analog era would accumulate massive collections of notecards, for instance the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann created a Zettelkasten of about 90,000 notecards which he used in writing 50 books and over 600 articles. The digital era makes the process much easier, with a number of different software systems available for creating Zettelkasten, and if nothing else one doesn’t end up needing to get cabinetry to store all the notecards.

I have just started a new Zettelkasten since I have many research ideas but am a long way from turning these into essays and the like and need to be taking a lot of notes. (A current research project is learning about empires and the rise and fall of the nation-state.) For now I am using a software package called Zettlr, though there others I might explore as well. I’ve used Zettlr previously to help me write my last paper when I was working at the university. One thing that is nice about Zettlr is that it integrates well with citation management systems such as Zotero, which I have been using for many years.

With this Zettelkasten I am beginning a new practice: make sure to write a couple notes into it every day. This could be taking notes on an essay or paper, interesting quotes, or just general thoughts. We’ll see where this all goes in a little while.