On Tuesday, February 25, 2020 at 5:55:36 AM UTC-5, Marcel Franke wrote: > > > > Am Dienstag, 25. Februar 2020 02:37:13 UTC+1 schrieb Thomas Passin: > > Note: Luhmann was the inventer of the zettelkasten. >> > > Ok, just for clarification: No he was not. Zettelkasten is a german word > for a box (=kasten) of paperslips (=zettel). It's pretty common tool. > People before Luhmann used them, people after Luhmann used them. Even his > System is not really special, as most of it is just a simplified system of > how librarys are organising books, Actually, libraries are pretty guilty in > using Zettelkästen in very organised ways even today. > > Luhmann is famous because he was successful in using those in things in a > slightly different way then other people, while being famus enough to be > recognized for it, and stuborn enough to use them for a long time. >
All right; I've not seen the term "zettelkasten" applied to systems before Luhmann's got publicised. I've been under the impression that his particular way of indexing and linking is what characterizes the term. But yes, the word itself is pretty general and if we stick with a generic term we might as well just say "filing system" and be done with it. To me, I don't really care much about detailed differences in how different people may have used similar systems. I *am* interested in simplicity and usefulness, and what has worked. 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. 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. 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. -- 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 leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/d46e7cfa-a46a-470e-a58b-8f2c76b0652c%40googlegroups.com.
