Setting up an online zettelkasten with Are.na/Staykeen and reading.supply

Theory of zettelkasten as personal knowledge management system

Zettelkasten is a slip box containing real or virtual slips. Slips are single item thoughts or atomic notes that together make up a large interconnected system of knowledge. Niklas Luhmann used it to good effects to organise his writings. We can too. My point here is to see if we can use the Internet's hive mind to set up something similar.

So, here is how a zettelkasten system looks like:







As you can see, notes such as 1, 2, 3, are the units in this knowledge management system. These notes, based on their contents, can be vertically connected to each other, or they can be siblings and children of other notes. Then, each note has an address or ID by which they can be connected. You can connect notes using IDs as direct links which are also referred to as strong networked nodes; so 1, 2, and 3 would be strong networked notes.



Besides, each note also has tags or categories that help them to find each other. In other words, notes can be connected in two ways to aid discovery and linking of knowledge contents:



• Strong network links that directly link and backlink each other

• Each note contains specific information in the form of #hashtags that make them discoverable.

Apps

Several desktop apps are available for zettelkasten method:

• Obsidian is a first class zettelkasten app that allows to see relationships among notes

• Zettlr is an editor that lets you organise the notes

• Thearchive is based on nvAlt and allows cross linking of notes

• Roamresearch is a first class zettelkasten app

• ... and so on



The basic idea of all these is that, you can create a stash of notes, the notes are written in markdown (it does not matter, you can write in plaintext org-mode if you care), but the notes must be interlinked to make sense and the notes must be discoverable in some way to be connected and grouped similarly. Which is why they have this strong links and weak links and tags system.



These apps are desktop apps. How might we take full advantage of the Internet connected notes that live on WWW as zettelkasten but create a system where you can find what you are trying to find and link what you are trying to link in one go.



Structure of the zettelkasten and the notebox

• The notebox can be paper pencil based

• The notes, each of which should have:

  • An ID

  • Some content but that content must be atomic

  • Backlinks

  • Source links

  • Tags

  • Some form of indexing

• Indexing is the key here as indexing provides an entry point of everything that get connected to each other.



Moving online: Are.na and staykeen as stash of notes

Use are.na as a placeholder of notes. Then we can use reading.supply as an index of the notes to find them and link them up here; more along those lines further down this document.



Are.na works on the basis of creating channels and within channels there are blocks. In Are.na I have created a channel Notes and within that Notes channel, create several blocks, for example, block number 7761587 . The point is each block will have exactly an atomic information set. Some text, ideally a paragraph length, one link, etc. Then the blocks are linked with each other.



Another notebox might be Staykeen, where you can similarly enter notes or any piece of information and retrieve them. Staykeen is organised around sections and within sections you have gems that are very similar to the channels and blocks within Are.na. So for example, I have a “Notes” keen and within the notes keen I have a section titled “Notes within Notes” and within a section a gem on Zettelkasten manifesto



So, because these things live on the web, we see that it is possible to interconnect these note-boxes or zettelkasten. But the problem here is that, if we are not mindful, these stash of notes soon gets locked in the individual services and websites and we do not have a way of retrieving what we want at the point of demand. For example, if I am writing a note on something and I needed to look up information or if I am thinking of a new idea, can I dive in the stash of zettels and do something? Unless these ideas are somehow connected and those connections are made patent, it is impossible to make sense of this. We can do this in obsidian for instance, running a search and retrieving a tree like structure to see what is linked to what, but that'd also mean we are confined to what we have collected and treasured. How about if we could tap the WWW as the storehouse so everyone who thought of similar ideas can now be at the pint of call.



For that to happen, we need some kind of a parallel indexing system where we store ideas and thoughts and interconnect them, connected and separated from our stash of notes everywhere that are atomic notes. Here, the notes are atomic as well but they connect. Then we run the same search and retrieve the same set of networked notes and we profit from the system. This is where reading.supply system kicks in.



Reading.supply allows both long form writing, and linking elsewhere, and it has its own ecosystem that can be linked and it has a network structure that is made patent to see your train of thoughts. So create an index notes on topics you are exploring, perhaps an atomic note, but heavily tag with words (although reading.supply does not work on the basis of tags), connect within and without the reading.supply system, and you can search on the posts and notes you keep. The power becomes apparent when we have a sizeable set of notes on various topics that we can dive in.