Personal Syntopicon
As I contemplate moving to an apartment in St. Paul (I'll be working at St. Paul College in person from Monday through Thursday, so I'll be in the city at least four days a week), I've been thinking about my note-cards. I have a very nice card catalog for them to live in, but it's not super portable. This is an issue that occurred to me in a sort-of theoretical sense when I first "switched" to the physical card system. At the time, a couple of years ago, I was flirting with "antinet" ideas and dissatisfied with my ability to get info out of Obsidian when I needed it. In the long run I think this was due to me not really having a complete understanding of all the tools available in the app. I think it is possible to use Obsidian as a note-making tool. A lot depends on my own peculiarities. I still like the experience of making notes on cards and then physically manipulating them as well as linking them and watching the graph change on a screen.
The problem, which I recognized but didn't worry about before, was that a big card catalog is difficult to carry around with you. I didn't imagine, of course, that I wouldn't be living here for the rest of my life, with access to my office in the garage with its bookshelves and cards. Now that I'll be away from "home" for more than half the week (and for the majority of my working hours), a physical, card-based solution wouldn't work as well, without a digital companion that I could take with me. This thinking is leading me more directly to exploring how to make my Obsidian instance and my card-files if not identical, at least complementary. My goal, as always, isn't so much to achieve some type of ideological purity but rather to make something that is as useful to me in gathering and processing information and turning it into output as possible.
A couple of things occur to me, as I start this process. I have already been working in my Obsidian vault, reviewing notes (especially Daily Notes) and adding links. As I've been doing this, one of the differences I noticed between the notes in Obsidian and other notes I've made on cards is the way I've tried to organize them. Typically I give my notes in Obsidian a name, while I tend to number the cards I put in the file. This relates to the whole logic of zettelkasten I suppose, and the way Niklas Luhmann arranged his 90,000-or-so notes in his slipbox. When I used physical cards to write my revised version of the Short Handbook, which I called How to Make Notes and Write, I had some difficulty explaining the numbering scheme. I think this is the weakest part of the book, which I'll amend in the next revision. I'm not convinced, anymore, that a numbering scheme is entirely necessary.
"Wait, what?!", say the antinetters. "How can you expect to organize a zettelkasten without a coherent numbering scheme?" And that's a fair question, but I'm not sure it's the most useful question. I'm thinking about the steps involved in the process, and they seem unnecessarily elaborate. The way it's typically imagined, we write a note about an idea and then we assign it a number. This could be a random number. Or it could be the next number in a sequence related to a topic (based on the rule that every note should be appended to another note that it's somehow related to in a train of thought). Or it could be a number derived from an external list of numbers related to families of ideas (some people have used the Library of Congress; some have used other systems). In each of these cases, the note goes into a different but particular spot in the "box". But how does it link to other ideas and how do you ever return to it when you need it?
The answer to this question is one of the areas I don't think anyone has adequately described. Most of the time, people do a bit if handwaving and assure us that it can be done. Just look at Luhmann's publishing results! What nearly everyone agrees upon is that the key feature in making physical notes really useful is the Card Index. This is described as another set of cards that function as a finding aid for the cards in the "box". An index is slightly different from a concordance because it focuses not on all the words that appear in a text, but on the keywords.
Hang on! When I make a note in Obsidian I give it a title that is nearly always a keyword encapsulating the idea (sometimes it's a short phrase). This "works" in Obsidian because of bi-directional linking. We imagine it wouldn't work in a physical system, but why? A book's index is an alphabetical listing of keywords and the pages on which the ideas relating to them appear. If I named my note-cards with a keyword that described their contents, I could then file them alphabetically. For example, if I was writing a note about "Anchoring" based on Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, I could use the word "Anchoring" as its title. If I stuck it in the box in the "A" section, I would easily be able to find it in a search. If I was doing a more generalized search looking for all the instances of heuristics Kahneman described in that book, I wouldn't necessarily find it unless I had a note called "Heuristics" that listed all the examples I had made notes about. Then it would be easy enough to collect them all.
The question, I think, is whether I imagine myself building a set of notes that will be useful to me in my research and thinking, or whether I think I'm creating some sort of Leibnizian universal library containing all the knowledge of the world. In that case, it would be important, I suppose, to make sure carts followed horses and ideas were properly nested in their categories and lineages. But even that type of organization ultimately proves to be arbitrary and subjective; just look at Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon. Useful, but very particular and arbitrary! If my goal is to provide myself a useful thinking tool (or conversation partner, as Luhmann called it), then I should probably focus my attention on the things I'm really interested in rather than trying to locate them in the great chain of being.
So I think an index will still be necessary in a physical note system, but the cards can have names rather than numbers. I'm going to try this out and see how it works. It may help me finally, once and for all, figure out the difference between notes and hashtags. My guess is that hashtags may become organizing ideas that don't actually require their own note. I'm not sure if these will really turn out to be a permanent thing, though. They may be useful as I organize ideas for specific projects. Time will tell. Again, I'm looking for something that works for me and not something that's ideologically pure. One final thought, for today: I don't think the purpose of any of these note-making schemes is that they should function as a labor-saving device. That's one of the reasons I've resisted adding automation (aside from a very controlled Readwise import) to my Obsidian setup. I don't want to pretend the system is "thinking" for me; I want it to help me organize my own thinking. So my goal isn't to maximize time-saving or convenience. Maybe even the opposite: the idea of "desirable difficulty" is something I picked up when I was studying "retrieval practice". I think it's a useful way of thinking about my note-making system. It should help me focus and provide me an opportunity to do the work that will result in insights.
More on this as I play around with it.