Loved your summary. I just finished Ahren's How to Take Smart Notes and you captured the heart of it. Thanks. I have questions regarding the "Links between notes." Your following explanation:
Give them all unique identifiers, and allow these to have a "nested" structure when one note leads to others which lead to others.
I think I am having trouble with the word "identifiers" and 'nested' structure. Perhaps these are mathematical terms and I'm not good at math. By identifiers, do you mean themes or topics or ... (read more)
The note taking book by Ahrens addresses this. Luhmann numbered the cards with 1, 2, 3, 4. These are the IDs. Each new card is sequentially added with the next number. Now if a card is closely related to card 1, then it can be given the ID 1a and added right after 1. The card following that can be 1b, 1c, 1d, etc. If you now need to add a card after 1c, that can have the ID 1c1. In this way you have a way of generating IDs for cards that are appended to the end, as well as for cards that are inserted in the middle of the pack somewhere. There references to a card is simply listing its ID. Once you have an ID you can look up the card in the slip box.
1ctietze
"Identifiers" would be more like addresses. A computer metaphor: if you have files, you can think of the path to the file as its identifier. Luhmann used an alphanumeric code (which I think is obsolete on the computer) but you can go with date-time stamps like 202002270807 for 2020-02-27 08:07 or similar. Or you use the title of the note. But then you cannot change the title anymore without breaking links, which makes it brittle.
Linking essentially works exactly as you described: leave the address in other notes in your archive.
Loved your summary. I just finished Ahren's How to Take Smart Notes and you captured the heart of it. Thanks. I have questions regarding the "Links between notes." Your following explanation:
I think I am having trouble with the word "identifiers" and 'nested' structure. Perhaps these are mathematical terms and I'm not good at math. By identifiers, do you mean themes or topics or ... (read more)