Am Dienstag, 25. Februar 2020 17:33:10 UTC+1 schrieb Thomas Passin: All right; I've not seen the term "zettelkasten" applied to systems before > Luhmann's got publicised. >
Well, I can't speak for the etymology of the word. It's even in germany not the most popular usage for this word (today) and not the usual way to adress those paperslip-boxes. But the usage seems to predate the recent Luhmann-hype by several decades. So I guess he did not coin the word. I've been under the impression that his particular way of indexing and > linking is what characterizes the term. > Yes, for some reasons there is a cargo-cult growing around Luhmann and his knowledge-system. Which is kinda strange, as it's really not that special and we today have many better systems in use. The only significant strength is the reference-system, and that only really works well with paperslips. Maybe it's fueled from the ongoing active research regarding his work or because internet just works that way. Before internet, people just used their tools in natural ways and didn't talk about the details much. But today people share everything and talk about anything make a cult out of any little detail and trick&twist. Details are important, they drive understanding, communication and research. But details you don't understand only lead down the wrong roads. And even if I tried to do things exactly as Luhmann seems to have done > them, my own note collection would turn out to be very different because - > I'm sure - I conceptualize and link things differently from the way he did. > Indeed. The worth of any knowledge is not in the system generating it, but the work invested into building it, and the mind who did it. People all use the same tools, yet they all produce different results, because the mindsa re different, not the tools. In a sense, Luhmann's zettelkasten was nearly the same as the World Wide > Web. He had "resources" - his cards, and "links" - his index strings. He > also used backlinks, which can be added to a web page but it's not so easy > to know how it could be done automatically, since you wouldn't want to add > the URL of just any page that had a hyperlink to your target. > Yeah, no, partly. WWW is a hypertext-system and decentraliced. The notable trait of a hypertext-system are hidden references, meaning you have meaningful text with embedded references. Luhmann is also using references in text, but the references have no meaning for the text. And using references in text is quite common in science. The notable difference by Luhmann made is his reference-system. But his general concept is akin to hypertext in the sense that it's also a graph-system. But then I would compare it more to a Wiki. And classical wiki also lack embedded references, using direct in-text-references instead. WWW is not a knowledgebase, nor a limited system. But Wikis, and also Luhmanns Zettelkasten are limited sytems and that makes them useful for this usecase. In this case, though, I'm interested in having a system that doesn't need > to use someone else's web server. I wouldn't mind using my own server on > my own machine, but if it isn't necessary, so much the better. > A server is just a technical detail. You can run it locally, in your own cloud, or generate the HTML in-app without a server. But from a practical view, a server as a centralized single point of access has several advantages for tooling and handling of your data. For my own system I also move to a server-solution as a managed layer around my data. Compromising with poor solutions is so painful on the long way. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/88568a1f-dfa6-4372-9d05-b63d3a46c345%40googlegroups.com.
