#archiveapp-demo #Luhmann #ZettelkastenMethod #written-by-sascha
Luhmann is not the first person who used a note archive called Zettelkasten. But he surely is the godfather of our method to knowledge work.
Christian and I met for the first time in university. Our connection: The search for a method to handle the knowledge we gather during our studies. While Christian leaned more to the technical side I researched more from a historical science perspective. He searched for software and other technical solutions. I researched on how others solved this problem.
But we both had on thing in common. Luhmanns approach seemed to be genious and we took it as the prototype for our own solutions. See the note on Luhmanns Zettelkasten: [[201705111034]]
In the beginning, we used quite different approaches. The biggest difference was that Christian used the plain text approach but I didn't. I was still caught up in the idea that an app will solve this problem. But nevertheless I did work on a theory of knowledge work and applied what I learned studying philosophy of knowledge.
Together this layed out the groundwork for a method. The Zettelkasten Method goes way beyond this app. It is the realization of general knowledge work principles. It is designed to work with most texteditors. Of course, this is the best one. After all, we designed it for knowledge work.
The numbers you see in double-brackets everywhere are the IDs. Don't worry, I will introduce you to the core of the method in some later notes. I started with the system Luhmann used; Christian already used time-stamps but with very much clutter.
Me: 1a23f,1 Christian: 2008-09-07_0445_T1-2
You immediatly see how clunkiness our first approaches. We boiled it down and down and down. Until we were both to the point we couldn't simplify the ID any further without loosing important functions.