#Luhmann #Zettelkasten #archiveapp-demo
Luhmann is the unquestioned godfather of the Zettelkasten Method. Yes, there are others who used Zettelkasten archives. But Luhmann is the first one who used a hypertext approach and let go of irrational urges of control. And he did all of this on paper.
He made the big change that every note had a fixed position. Other Zettelkasten users had a system of categories that allowed to shuffle the notes within the categories freely. Luhmann assinged a unique ID to every note that never changed and that expressed its placement between other notes: The first note had the ID 1, the second note hat the ID 2. If he now wrote a note that should branch off from 1 he gave it the ID 1a and put it right after 1. If he'd continue this new note on the same level, he would add with 1b and could branch off again with 1a1.
This led to the first of Luhmann's principles: A flexible branching capability. The archive grows along the train of thoughts organically and is not pre-determined by a system of fixed categories. Categories are problematic because you have to choose them before you start, but at that point you do not have a clue where the journey will be taking you. (If you knew in advance, it would not be creative knowledge work.)
The second principle is connectivity. With IDs and fixed positions, you can link from one note to another. If the position in the archive would be able to change, the link would break because you couldn't find the note again. Remember: We are talking about paper. :) Luhmann had 66.000 notes in his second archive, by the way. No chance of even finding something that got filed at the wrong position.
The third principle is to be having a register. This was the first entrance for Luhmann when he wanted to get started communicating with his archive. For our purposes, this is not important. We have full text search and also can search for tags directly in our archive.
If you want to read a translation of Luhmann's article "Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen", where he talks about his method, written by Manfred Kuehn, follow this link: http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes