![Zettelkasten_paper_schematic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Zettelkasten_paper_schematic.png)
A (German: "slip box", plural ) or card file consists of small items of information stored on paper slips or cards that may be linked to each other through
subject headings or other
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
such as numbers and
tags.
[ A book on the same topic published a decade earlier was: ] It has often been used as a system of
note-taking
Note-taking (sometimes written as notetaking or note taking) is the practice of recording information from different sources and platforms. By taking notes, the writer records the essence of the information, freeing their mind from having to reca ...
and
personal knowledge management
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activitie ...
for research, study, and writing.
In the 1980s, the card file began to be used as metaphor in the interface of some
hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...
ual
personal knowledge base
A personal knowledge base (PKB) is an electronic tool used to express, capture, and later retrieve the personal knowledge of an individual. It differs from a traditional database in that it contains subjective material particular to the owner, th ...
software applications such as
NoteCards
NoteCards was a hypertext-based personal knowledge base system developed at Xerox PARC by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran in 1984. NoteCards was developed after Trigg's pioneering 1983 Ph.D. thesis on hypertext while at the Universi ...
. In the 1990s, such software inspired the
invention of wikis.
Use in personal knowledge management
As used in research, study, and writing, a card file consists of many individual notes with ideas and other short pieces of information that are taken down as they occur or are acquired.
[ The notes may be numbered hierarchically so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place, and contain ]metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other.[ For example, notes may contain ]subject heading In information retrieval, an index term (also known as subject term, subject heading, descriptor, or keyword) is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic record ...
s or tags that describe key aspects of the note, and they may reference other notes. The numbering, metadata, format and structure of the notes is subject to variation depending on the specific method employed.[
The system not only allows a researcher to store and retrieve information related to their research, but has also long been used to enhance creativity.][
]
History
The paper slip or card has long been used by individual researchers and by organizations to manage information, including the specialized form of the card catalog
A library catalog (or library catalogue in British English) is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A catalog for a group of libraries is also c ...
.[
Coming from a ]commonplace book
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are simi ...
tradition, Conrad Gessner
Conrad Gessner (; la, Conradus Gesnerus 26 March 1516 – 13 December 1565) was a Swiss physician, naturalist, bibliographer, and philologist. Born into a poor family in Zürich, Switzerland, his father and teachers quickly realised his tale ...
(1516–1565) invented his own method of organization in which the individual notes could be rearranged at any time. In retrospect, his recommendation of gluing slips onto bound sheets was an innovation in moving from commonplace books to index cards as a form factor for scholarly information management.
The first early modern card cabinet was designed by 17th-century English inventor Thomas Harrison ( 1640s). Harrison's manuscript on the "ark of studies" (''Arca studiorum'') describes a small cabinet that allows users to excerpt books and file their notes in a specific order by attaching pieces of paper to metal hooks labeled by subject headings. Harrison's system was edited and improved by Vincent Placcius
Vincent Placcius (1642-1699) was a German writer, professor, jurist and polymath.
Life
He was born in 1642 and died in 1699.
He was a professor of ''morals and eloquence'' for twenty-four years.
Works
He is chiefly remembered for his work "The ...
in his well-known handbook on excerpting methods (''De arte excerpendi'', 1689).[ The German ]polymath
A polymath ( el, πολυμαθής, , "having learned much"; la, homo universalis, "universal human") is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific pro ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
(1646–1716) was known to have relied on Harrison's invention in at least one of his research projects.
In 1767, Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...
used "little paper slips of a standard size" to record information for his research. Over 1,000 of Linnaeus's precursors to the modern index card containing information collected from books and other publications and measuring five by three inches are housed at the Linnean Society of London
The Linnean Society of London is a learned society dedicated to the study and dissemination of information concerning natural history, evolution, and taxonomy. It possesses several important biological specimen, manuscript and literature colle ...
.
Later in his own commonplace, under the heading "My way of collecting materials for future writings" (translated), Johann Jacob Moser
Johann Jakob Moser (18 January 1701 – 30 September 1785) was a German jurist, publicist and researcher, whose work earned him the title "The Father of German Constitutional Law" and whose political commitment to the principles of Liberalism cau ...
(1701–1785) described the algorithms with which he filled his card boxes.
The 1796 idyll
An idyll (, ; from Greek , ''eidullion'', "short poem"; occasionally spelt ''idyl'' in American English) is a short poem, descriptive of rustic life, written in the style of Theocritus' short pastoral poems, the ''Idylls'' (Εἰδύλλια).
U ...
''Leben des Quintus Fixlein'' by German Romantic writer Jean Paul
Jean Paul (; born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 21 March 1763 – 14 November 1825) was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.
Life and work
Jean Paul was born at Wunsiedel, in the Fichtelgebirge mountain ...
is structured according to the in which the protagonist keeps his autobiography.[ Jean Paul ultimately assembled 12,000 paper scraps into his commonplace books over the course of his lifetime, but died in 1825, almost a century before the advent of standardized note cards or box systems which later made it easier to store and organize them.]
French scholars Charles-Victor Langlois
Charles-Victor Langlois (May 26, 1863, in Rouen – June 25, 1929, in Paris) was a French historian, archivist and paleographer, who specialized in the study of the Middle Ages and was a lecturer at the Sorbonne, where he taught paleography, bibli ...
and Charles Seignobos
Charles Seignobos (b. 10 September 1854 at Lamastre, d. 24 April 1942 at Ploubazlanec) was a French scholar of historiography and an historian who specialized in the history of the French Third Republic, and was a member of the Human Rights Lea ...
, in their ''Introduction to the Study of History'' (1897), recommended that historians take notes on paper slips or cards, and they commented: "Every one admits nowadays that it is advisable to collect materials on separate cards or slips of paper." However, some decades later other scholars said that in America in the 1890s the card-file note-taking system was "still something of a novelty".
20th century
Antonin Sertillanges
Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P. (; 16 November 1863 – 26 July 1948), was a French Catholic philosopher and spiritual writer.
Biography
Born Antonin-Dalmace, he took the name Antonin-Gilbert when he entered the Dominican order. In 1893 ...
' book ''The Intellectual Life'' (1921) outlines in Chapter 7 a version of the card-file method.[ Translated from the 1934 new French edition. For other editions, see: ] The book was published in French, and translated into English, in many editions over the span of 60 years.[ In it, Sertillanges recommends taking notes on slips of "strong paper of a uniform size" either self made with a paper cutter or by "special firms that will spare you the trouble, providing slips of every size and color as well as the necessary boxes and accessories". He also recommends a "certain number of tagged slips, guide-cards, so as to number each category visibly after having numbered each slip, in the corner or in the middle". He goes on to suggest creating a catalog or index of subjects with divisions and subdivisions and recommends the "very ingenious system", the decimal system, for organizing one's research. For the details of this he refers the reader to ''Organization of Intellectual Work: Practical Recipes for Use by Students of All Faculties and Workers'' (1918) by . Sertillanges recommends against the previous patterns seen with commonplace books where one does note taking in books or on slips of paper which might be pasted into books as they don't "easily allow classification" or "readily lend themselves to use at the moment of writing".][
]
Some examples of English-language research manuals with instructions for a card-file note-taking system are: Earle W. Dow's ''Principles of a Note-system for Historical Studies'' (1924), Homer C. Hockett's ''Introduction to Research in American History'' (1931), Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, (née Potter; 22 January 1858 – 30 April 1943) was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Webb who coined the term ''collective bargaining''. She ...
's ''Methods of Social Study'' (1932), Carter Alexander's ''How to Locate Educational Information and Data'' (four editions from 1935 to 1958),[ This book, which was also translated into Spanish, grew out of a pamphlet titled ''Educational Research'' first published in 1927. For other editions, see: ] Cecil B. Williams's ''A Research Manual'' (three editions from 1940 to 1963), Louis R. Gottschalk's ''Understanding History'' (1951), Chauncey Sanders's ''An Introduction to Research in English Literary History'' (1952), Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun (; November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and ...
and Henry F. Graff's ''The Modern Researcher'' (six editions from 1957 to 2004), and ''A Guide to Historical Method'' (three editions from 1969 to 1980) by Robert Jones Shafer and colleagues. A German-language manual on research methods that included instructions for a was ''Technique of Scholarly Work'' (multiple editions from the 1930s to 1970) by .[
American historian Frederic L. Paxson (1877–1948) filed notes on 3×5-inch paper slips daily throughout his career, and by the time of his death all the slips filled about 80 wooden file drawers.] The notes were ordered chronologically and topically, with cross-references on each card to related subject headings, linking each subject through various stages in time.[
German philosopher and cultural critic ]Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mys ...
(1892–1940) used a card-file note-taking system with a numbering system to create his ''Arcades Project
''Passagenwerk'' or ''Arcades Project'' was an unfinished project of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, it was ...
'' written between 1927 and 1940. Though the project was terminated by Benjamin's death, it was later edited and published in a final form.
French theorist, philosopher, and writer Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular ...
(1915–1980) kept a or index card file beginning in 1943 until his death. Curator Nathalie Léger has indicated that there are 12,250 slips in Roland Barthes' bequest at the Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC). Louis-Jean Calvet explains that in writing ''Michelet'', Barthes used his notes on index cards to try out various combinations of cards to both organize them as well as "to find correspondences between them". In addition to using his card file for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching. His final course on the topic of ''The Neutral'', which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries. In his autobiographical ''Roland Barthes'', Barthes reproduces three of his index cards in facsimile. Published posthumously in 2010, Barthes' ''Mourning Diary'' was created from a collection of 330 of his index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother. The book jacket of the book prominently features one of his index cards from the collection. In a well known photo of Barthes in his office taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson (; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004) was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as cap ...
in 1963, the author is pictured with his card files on the shelf behind him.
Starting in the 1940s, German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg Hans Blumenberg (born 13 July 1920, Lübeck – 28 March 1996, Altenberge) was a German philosopher and intellectual historian.
He studied philosophy, German studies and the classics (1939–47, interrupted by World War II) and is considered to ...
(1920–1996) compiled more than 30,000 cards into his , which now occupy 32 conservation boxes at the German Literature Archive
The Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA - German Literature Archive), established in 1955, in Marbach am Neckar
Marbach am Neckar is a town about 20 kilometres north of Stuttgart. It belongs to the district of Ludwigsburg, the Stuttgart re ...
in Marbach. Blumenberg was inspired by the previous notetaking work and output of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799) was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for ...
who used waste book
A waste book was one of the books traditionally used in bookkeeping. It comprised a daily diary of all transactions in chronological order. It differs from a daybook in that only a single waste book is kept, rather than a separate daybook for ...
s or ''sudelbücher'' as he called them.
In the creation of the ''Great Books of the Western World
''Great Books of the Western World'' is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the great books in a 54-volume set.
The original editors had three criteria for includi ...
'' (1952), which also includes '' A Syntopicon'', Mortimer J. Adler
Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for long stretches in N ...
and many collaborators created a large shared collection of tagged and indexed cards to collate the ideas and information for their series.
Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge
Mario Augusto Bunge (; ; September 21, 1919 – February 24, 2020) was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. His philosophical writings combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism, emergentism, and other principles.
He was ...
(1919–2020), who published about 70 books and 540 articles, used index cards in boxes to teach and to write publications starting in the mid-1950s.
One researcher famous for his extensive use of the method was the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann (; ; December 8, 1927 – November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory.
Biography
Luhmann was born in Lüneburg, Free State of Prussia, where his father's fa ...
(1927–1998). Starting in 1952–1953, Luhmann built up a of some 90,000 index cards for his research, and credited it for enabling his extraordinarily prolific writing (including about 50 books and 550 articles). He linked the cards together by assigning each a unique index number based on a branching hierarchy.[ These index cards were digitized and made available online in 2019. Luhmann described the as part of his research into ]systems theory
Systems theory is the interdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or human-made. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structu ...
in the essay "".
Other well known German users include Arno Schmidt
Arno Schmidt (; 18 January 1914 – 3 June 1979) was a German author and translator. He is little known outside of German-speaking areas, in part because his works present a formidable challenge to translators. Although he is not one of the p ...
(who used a large card file to write '' Zettels Traum'', published in 1970), Walter Kempowski
Walter Kempowski (; 29 April 1929 – 5 October 2007) was a German writer. Kempowski was known for his series of novels called ''German Chronicle'' ("Deutsche Chronik") and the monumental ''Echolot'' ("Sonar"), a collage of autobiographical repo ...
, Friedrich Kittler
Friedrich A. Kittler (June 12, 1943 – October 18, 2011) was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.
Biography
Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in 1943 in Rochlitz in Saxony. His fami ...
, and Aby Warburg
Aby Moritz Warburg, better known as Aby Warburg, (June 13, 1866 – October 26, 1929) was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Library for Cultural Studies), a private library, ...
, whose works along with those of Paul, Blumenberg, and Luhmann appeared in the 2013 exhibition ". Machines of Fantasy" at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar.
Australian writer Kate Grenville
Catherine Elizabeth Grenville (born 1950) is an Australian author. She has published fifteen books, including fiction, non-fiction, biography, and books about the writing process. In 2001, she won the Orange Prize for '' The Idea of Perfectio ...
, in a chapter of ''The Writing Book'' (1990) devoted to using "piles" of notes as part of the writing process, said that screenwriters are known to use index cards to help organise their scripts, and American writer Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott (born April 10, 1954) is an American novelist and non-fiction writer.
She is also a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Lamott is based in Marin County, California. Her nonfiction works are largely ...
devoted a chapter to a writer's use of index cards in her book ''Bird by Bird'' (1994).
German writer Michael Ende
Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende (12 November 1929 – 28 August 1995) was a German writer of fantasy and children's fiction. He is known for his epic fantasy ''The Neverending Story'' (with its 1980s film adaptation and a 1995 animated television ...
kept a , and in 1994, a year prior to his death, he published ''Michael Endes Zettelkasten: Skizzen und Notizen'' (translation: ''Michael Ende's File-card Box: Drafts and Notes''), an anthology of some of his writing as well as observations and aphorisms
An aphorism (from Ancient Greek, Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often hand ...
from his card file.
Twentieth-century American comedians Phyllis Diller
Phyllis Ada Diller (née Driver; July 17, 1917 – August 20, 2012) was an American stand-up comedian, actress, author, musician, and visual artist, best known for her eccentric stage persona, self-deprecating humor, wild hair and clothes, and e ...
(with 52,000 3×5-inch index cards), Joan Rivers
Joan Alexandra Molinsky (June 8, 1933 – September 4, 2014), known professionally as Joan Rivers, was an American comedian, actress, producer, writer and television host. She was noted for her blunt, often controversial comedic persona—heavi ...
(over a million 3×5-inch index cards), Bob Hope
Leslie Townes "Bob" Hope (May 29, 1903 – July 27, 2003) was a British-American comedian, vaudevillian, actor, singer and dancer. With a career that spanned nearly 80 years, Hope appeared in more than 70 short and feature films, with 5 ...
(85,000 pages in files), and George Carlin
George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) was an American comedian, actor, author, and social critic. Regarded as one of the most important and influential stand-up comedians of all time, he was dubbed "the dean of countercul ...
(paper notes in folders) were known for keeping joke or gag files throughout their careers. They often compiled their notes from scraps of paper, receipts, laundry lists, and matchbooks which served the function of waste book
A waste book was one of the books traditionally used in bookkeeping. It comprised a daily diary of all transactions in chronological order. It differs from a daybook in that only a single waste book is kept, rather than a separate daybook for ...
s. U.S. president Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan ( ; February 6, 1911June 5, 2004) was an American politician, actor, and union leader who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He also served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 ...
kept quotes and aphorisms which he frequently used for speeches in a card collection.
Literary references
* Jean Paul's idyll ''The Life of Quintus Fixlein'' (1796) has the subtitle ''as Drawn from Fifteen Boxes of Paper Slips''.
* In the preface to the novel '' Penguin Island'' (1908) by Nobel laureate
The Nobel Prizes ( sv, Nobelpriset, no, Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make out ...
Anatole France
(; born , ; 16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie França ...
, a scholar is drowned by an avalanche of multicolored index cards which formed a gigantic whirlpool streaming out of his overflowing card boxes.
* In chapter two of Robert M. Pirsig's philosophical novel '' Lila: An Inquiry into Morals'' (1991), the main character describes an index card system of notes he's keeping for a book. While the German word isn't used, the descriptor "slips" is used repeatedly (as opposed to index card which appears four times) and the system has the general form and function of a card file as commonly used by writers.
* In ''Paper Machines'' (2002), Markus Krajewski's history of card catalog
A library catalog (or library catalogue in British English) is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A catalog for a group of libraries is also c ...
s () and card files (), as both thinking devices and precursors of today's computers, Krajewski draws connections to literary authors like Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish Satire, satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whig (British political party), Whigs, then for the Tories (British political party), Tories), poe ...
, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (, ; 22 January 1729 – 15 February 1781) was a philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and a representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the developmen ...
, Heinrich Heine
Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (; born Harry Heine; 13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was a German poet, writer and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of '' Lied ...
, Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treat ...
, Jean Paul, Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Bo ...
, Arno Schmidt, and Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. His early novels such as ''The Mezzanine'' and ''Room Temperature'' we ...
.
See also
*
*
*
* ENQUIRE
ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in ...
Tim Berners-Lee's program, predecessor to the World Wide Web, that used a card file metaphor
*
*
*
*
*
** List of personal information managers
The following is a list of personal information managers ( PIMs) and online organizers.
Applications
Discontinued applications
See also Comparisons
* Comparison of email clients
* Comparison of file managers
* Comparison of note-taki ...
*
**
*
*
References
{{Authority control
Note-taking
Knowledge management