That’d be an interesting structure for sure. Some kind of spaced repetition, presenting you with two (or three? or more?) prior thoughts to read simultaneously, to reinforce not just the information, but the relationship between the different ideas; not just in isolation, but reinforcing the network itself… maybe with some kind of highlight markup to indicate where the parallel is strongest.
With regards to the Zettelkasten containing too many cards to keep up with, I think card agglomeration above a certain threshold might be useful. Rather than hyperlinking between 500 cards with one sentence each on them, it may be preferable to link to particular sentences or sections within 50 different cards. The hyper-deconstruction of the original index card system was I think more a limitation of index card size, and how you might best utilize a physical system. Hypertext and NLP could identify links, and keeping a human in the loop ensures they’re the kind of parallels you actually want to be forming… to some degree. Being presented with particular links still might still have some subtle undesirable biases. But the prospect of “combine these cards?” might make things more manageable.
I think a manual consolidation step would at least prompt for better structure for future consumption. If you know the order you’ll always want to view the notes in, turn them into the one note with headings. That could keep the knowledge bank a bit more manageable and navigable. I don’t think the current graph view in systems like Roam or Obsidian is enough—you need a text preview of those notes. Maybe for each new note, checking the graph structure remains planar, avoiding messy crossovers in visualisations of it. Or maybe that’s a terrible idea, I have no idea! There’s lots of low hanging fruit in the space, and whoever makes the biggest fruit basket’s going to win here.
Yeah, I had some ideas concerning how to keep track of Zettlekasten as well as the right way to display graphs. Reinforcing the network is definetely a worthwhile idea. The entire point is to suggest good links, but also give you the freedom to traverse your graph. RE the hyperlinks: I agree about the worry of biases. But more than that, it seems the network should not automate link suggestion without leaving the option to create links yourself. As you say, the worth of the Zettlekasten method is largely in instilling virtuous mental hanits. What you suggested seems like it could instil laziness in the user.
That’d be an interesting structure for sure. Some kind of spaced repetition, presenting you with two (or three? or more?) prior thoughts to read simultaneously, to reinforce not just the information, but the relationship between the different ideas; not just in isolation, but reinforcing the network itself… maybe with some kind of highlight markup to indicate where the parallel is strongest.
With regards to the Zettelkasten containing too many cards to keep up with, I think card agglomeration above a certain threshold might be useful. Rather than hyperlinking between 500 cards with one sentence each on them, it may be preferable to link to particular sentences or sections within 50 different cards. The hyper-deconstruction of the original index card system was I think more a limitation of index card size, and how you might best utilize a physical system. Hypertext and NLP could identify links, and keeping a human in the loop ensures they’re the kind of parallels you actually want to be forming… to some degree. Being presented with particular links still might still have some subtle undesirable biases. But the prospect of “combine these cards?” might make things more manageable.
I think a manual consolidation step would at least prompt for better structure for future consumption. If you know the order you’ll always want to view the notes in, turn them into the one note with headings. That could keep the knowledge bank a bit more manageable and navigable. I don’t think the current graph view in systems like Roam or Obsidian is enough—you need a text preview of those notes. Maybe for each new note, checking the graph structure remains planar, avoiding messy crossovers in visualisations of it. Or maybe that’s a terrible idea, I have no idea! There’s lots of low hanging fruit in the space, and whoever makes the biggest fruit basket’s going to win here.
Yeah, I had some ideas concerning how to keep track of Zettlekasten as well as the right way to display graphs. Reinforcing the network is definetely a worthwhile idea. The entire point is to suggest good links, but also give you the freedom to traverse your graph. RE the hyperlinks: I agree about the worry of biases. But more than that, it seems the network should not automate link suggestion without leaving the option to create links yourself. As you say, the worth of the Zettlekasten method is largely in instilling virtuous mental hanits. What you suggested seems like it could instil laziness in the user.