The questions I had when making a zettelkasten system for myself

What were the components of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten System?

• A Reference System to collect various references
  • Reference Notes
    • Contains bibliographical details of a book
    • It can also contain a brief summary of what the book is all about
  • Literature Notes
    • Notes written in response to the things you read
    • Written as phrases, taking it away from the context of the book
• A Thinking system
  • Fleeting Notes
    • A place to capture ideas that fly by through your head
    • A place to capture highlights from books and articles and other sources
  • Permanent Notes
    • Ideas that needs to be further explored
    • This can come either from literature notes or fleeting notes
• A Creation system
  • Project Notes
    • This is where you create your outlines
    • Perform the assembly of various permanent notes
    • Comparing and contrasting existing notes to develop your argument

Questions

• What exactly is a fleeting note? How and when do you process a fleeting note?
• How does Sonke manages his bibliography? or reference notes/literature notes? How can it be implemented in roam and obsidian
• How to go about atomising the literature notes? Should the literature notes also exist as an atomic notes or the literature notes from a book goes to single larger file.
• When is a permanent note born?

  Current Assumptions

• Fleeting Notes are the ideas and bits that comes to you randomly and out of context and might have some potential solution to a question that you are seeking or perhaps start a new line of thought all together. It can be a question, a statement, a revelation or a piece of information
• Sonke uses Zotero. I haven’t explored that option. For now I add the meta data for a book or others resources manually into the literature notes that I create. Luhmann’s reference system does not seem to be atomic in nature. I think logically it is much easier to put all your literature notes from one source to a single page. I am yet to make that a habit as I pull from various sources at the same time. ( Incremental Reading). Roam, Obsidian and Logseq do give us the option to make it templates (for inserting meta data). I believe there are ways to integrate zotero into these apps. Will have to find out later.
• A permanent note is born when a literature note or a fleeting note has enough potential for you to explore and make a thread of sensible or reliable chain of thought/arguments.

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