The Zettelkasten system is a system championed by Nicklas Luhmann. It seems somewhat esoteric at times, but the main idea is quite good and should be considered. I will try my best not to burden you unneccessarily with the details but i would recommend reading the information available on Bob Dotos Blog as well as his excellent book and also the informaiton available at https://zettelkasten.de/overview/.
Here is a brief overview: When working with knowledge we are often presented with the task of combining information from sources in a way such that they become a coherent argument that leads to a conclusion (either a theoretical conclusion or a conclusion that leads to our empirical investigation).
This work often leads to a workflow where we conduct litterature reviews and plan studies and then conduct litterature reviews again to understand our findings. Each time we start a new article or a new project it is as if we are starting over. Also each new Ph.D candidate is also in a sense starting over since they must conduct these processes independently. This way of working is a top-down where we decide what our topic is and then find information about it.
This is time-consuming and, honestly, a bit frustrating. The zettelkasten takes a different approach by suggesting we work on a bottom-up way, where we let topics emerge organically. The way we do this is through the following workflow
- When reading/watching tv/scrolling/attending a meeting take notes on what is going on that you think is important
- In these Litterature notes (that need not be litterature at all) try to identify each idea/concept that can be self contained and capture these preliminary notes in “Fleeting notes”
- For each Fleeting note set aside time to consider how it fits into your existing information and write a Permanent note that describes a single idea or concept.
The most difficult part of this is the Permanent note part so i will try to go through it in a bit detail. The most important thing to remember is to try to avoid forcing a top-down approach - that is do not outline what notes you think you need - take the notes you actually take and welcome a bit of chaos.
A permanent notes has the following structure
TITLE: Alphanumeric ID + Title CONTENT: LINKS/TAGS: FURTHER QUESTIONS:
We will go through each of these elements in turn, but let us quickly consider an example as seen below
Example Permanent note
Title: 2.5 Anxiety disorders are prevalent among youth Reports on lifetime prevalence range from to 31.9% (Merikangas et al., 2010) through 37% (Mojtabi et al., 2016). With point prevelanc range from 6.5% (Polanczyk et al., 2015) to 10-15.3% of youth being diagnoses with anxiety (CDC). With essauIncidenceRecurrenceComorbidity2018 estimating 4-8%. Recent estimates suggest that the covid-19 pandemic may have exacerbated rates of anxiety (Hawes et al., 2022)
References
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022). Data and Statistics on Children’s Mental Health. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/data.html
- Mojtabai, R., Olfson, M., & Han, B. (2016). National trends in the prevalence and treatment of depression in adolescents and young adults. Pediatrics, 138(6), e20161878 https://doi.org/10.1542/ peds.2016-1878
- References contine in actual notes
Links HUB: 2 Anxiety Academic Hub Relevant tags: anxiety prevalence