Zettelkästen? - Hackdot

Re:Zettelkästen? by Cladode on Friday October 11, 2019 @10:46AM (#21224861)

That's a good question. I tried a variety of options, but it stabilised on something that could be termed "micro-summary of context as file name". Example:

   - giraffes.html
   - giraffes_in_history.html
   - natural_predators_of_giraffes.html
   - grade_inflation.html
   - graffiti.html
   - genghis_khan.html       
   - grassroots_lobbying.html

Since all my Zettel are version controlled anyway, I don't see the point of tracking dates/times in filenames (or the file itself). I've now got so many Zettel that I can no longer recall even descriptive names like the above anyway: is the Zettel called giraffes_in_history.html or history_of_giraffes.html ...? So in practise, nowadays, when I look for related Zettel I always use grep with words I expect to be in the relevant Zettel. Example:

   grep -i giraffe *.html

It works really well.

What I do recommend is writing a little tool that produces filenames in a consistent way. (E.g. stripping out 'weird' characters, removing capitalisation etc.) I found that the more uniform filenames, file structure etc, the easier searching remains. Moreover, writing tools that mine / transform Zettel is also easier when the setup is uniform.

I also tried adding structures by subdirectories

   - computer_science
   - economics
   - biology

etc, but that didn't scale, since everything is connected to everything else. Knowledge is not tree- or DAG-structured. Flat file structure + hyperlinks works for me.

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Re:Zettelkästen? by cardiffspaceman on Friday October 11, 2019 @05:07PM (#21228481)

Did you try tags? If you have I'm interested in what you might have to say about them.

I liked Gmail originally because it used tabs. I have seldom had an email that was permanently tagged with more than one tag, but I have imagined having files in a filesystem with multiple tags. Bloggers commonly use tags but I don't know if they're successful.

On a filesystem where tags were not native, you could implement tags as subdirectories, using symlinks to achieve that the same file had multiple paths giraffes/history.html and history/giraffes.html.

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Re:Zettelkästen? by Cladode on Friday October 11, 2019 @05:17PM (#21228567)

   Did you try tags?

No. I found that many of my early ideas on how to structure my notes didn't scale, made evolution of my system more difficult. So later I tried not to impose addition structure. Tagging enforces a structure, and how I classify ideas changes over time. What do tags give that grepping words doesn't?

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Re:Zettelkästen? by cardiffspaceman on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @06:55PM (#21264906)

Finally getting around to answering this:

I use a "Travel ideas" tag on emails from cruise lines if they suggest a specific place, time and cost to travel somewhere. Those words aren't in the email. The criteria that qualify the email for the tag are easy to check in a scan of the message but I don't know how I'd grep for them.

I still do searches but for other reasons.

If you wrote a note about a neutrino-hunting instrument at the South Pole, how many searches would it take you to find it later? What about a science station at McMurdo, which is in Antarctica but not at the South Pole?

You could allow yourself to have or not have a line of free association, whose only purpose was to match future searches that would otherwise miss because of how the content was phrased.

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Re:Zettelkästen? by submeta on Friday October 11, 2019 @01:23PM (#21226468)

Thanks for the detailed answer. Very helpful tips.

Regarding timestamps: I have a Python script triggered by Alfred App on my Mac. The script creates markdown files based on a template. The template has a header section with helpful infos like `Created: yyyy-mm-dd`.

Here is my template (with filled out placeholders):

```

Created: Fri, 2019-10-11 12:27:18

Title: BOOK - METAPHYSICS - ARISTOTELES

Author: Ugur

FileID: fid-20191011-122718-440741

Base Header Level: 2

Tags: #ethics #philosohy

[%Title]

# WRITEHERE

```

This is a markdown template that can be rendered by `iA Writer`.

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Re:Zettelkästen? by lolc on Friday October 11, 2019 @11:54AM (#21225554)

Thanks! That was really helpful to me in understanding how it works. That implementation shows the concept very well.

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