In light of mounting demands by users to incorporate more note taking and connection functionality into the app, I have begun reviewing scientific literature, because I want to do it right the first time, not wiggling to success. Actually, there are a lot of questions.
In fact, I personally still don’t have something closely resembling a Zettelkasten, and that is because I somehow manage to find all I need rather quickly in my written excerpts. Despite many different opinions, this therefore seems one viable approach.
Furthermore, it raises the question if the “note vomiting” that Roam or Obsidian, or Athens, for that matter, encourage users to do, is actually helpful or more harmful. The central question therefore is twofold: 1) how to get maximum efficiency and 2) how to produce text from it
I do not believe that simply writing down everything and cleaning up later is a viable solution, first and foremost because this introduces noise into your notes and produces a lot of garbage. Researchers have spent 300 years reducing noise, so how is producing it going to help?
The real question therefore is: In what way can we couple strategically taking notes with automation in order to have a BETTER knowledge management, with us producing the knowledge and the computer only aiding us? To this, three hypotheses:
One: The idea of a second brain is wrong and needs to be refuted. What we can achieve is only the impression, just as the term “artificial intelligence” commonly implies. Hence, we need to put actual effort in taking notes — from the beginning.
Two: also the general linking needs to be done by us. We have to aid the computer by providing structure — tags, IDs and hard links are necessary, as no computer is able to determine this for us.
Three: The Computer can use the structural information in our files in order to tell us which notes might fit into a given paragraph, thereby reducing the search necessity.
In closing, I think that there is a lot of work still left to do, and poking around in the dark won’t help us fix our problems in note taking. I hope, the literature will help and I’ll keep you posted on my progress!
