Thread by @boisjere

What @BeauHaan 's approach to #Zettelkasten has in common with the TV series Severance - a thread for the #Roamcult, and anyone else exploring #PKM and #TfT

A common theme among proponents of the new #ToolsForThought is that linked notes are more useful (accessable, re-mixable) than foldered notes. However, Beau emphasizes neither links nor folders, but conversation among selves separated in time

Some say we have three selves in time: past, now, future. Jerry Seinfeld has a famous joke about it - He never sleeps enough because at night he's "night guy". If he wakes up tired, that's "morning guy's" problem. Who cares about that guy?

Beau's Zettels can be seen as threaded conversations between past Beaus, morning Beaus, and future Beaus. No afternoon Beaus, because clearly, in the afternoons, Beau goes the gym

The conversational structure of #Beaukasten is explicit in Beau's discussion of his method, but that isn't immediately obvious when people first encounter it, given the content-centric nature of PKM culture

My point of reference for discussing this further will be @RobertHaisfield 's Roam Research Tour with Beau Haan on YouTube

In first 23m of the video, Beau describes his way of recording Fleeting Notes, Literature Notes, and Reference Notes. He calls these the "3 legs of the tripod" on which the Permanent Note will sit

You'd be forgiven for thinking these notes are akin to progressive summarization, because there is bottom-up refinement going, but what's happening is not summarization. It's a conversation between a present self and the research material, for future selves

At the 23m mark, Beau snickers a bit and says, "this is where it gets really interesting". He continues to talk in terms of bottom-up clarification for a few minutes, but in the 25th minute he changes tracks, saying Permanent Notes are not really bottom-up summaries

Instead, he leaves the Permanent Note for the Zettel he's working on unfinished. Then he opens up the Permanent Notes page. This page is best understood as a Discussion Forum. It's a Discussion Forum for the community of past Beaus, already having threaded conversations

Beau himself, in the 26th min, reviews parent-level blocks in his Zettelkasten & calls them "conversations I have going on". In the 34th min too. His new Permanent Note is written as a "post" in that Forum, not at the head of the Zettel. It is block-referenced there instead

The bottom-up work of crafting the note is like an "attachment" almost, to the Forum Post (Permanent Note) referenced as its parent. So first you work bottom-up, and just when it feels like you have one more bottom-up step to take, you pause & work-back from a Forum conversation

So as a principle of placement, or connection, I think we need to add a new concept to the PKM vernacular: threads. Beaukasten elevates the thread as an organizational principle in PKM, right up there with folders (old and busted) and topical bi-di links (new hotness)

There's another sense of the "Conversations" digital construct that applies to Beau's Zettelkasten - the sense of "Conversations" used when discussing how emails can be gathered together in an inbox. I almost don't want to discuss this now, because it's a distinct idea

However, I'll risk it. The Fleeting, Literature and Reference Notes are like the history of messages in the conversation. Whenever you click on a Permanent Note, you essentally have "Show Message History" options from past selves to refer to for context

What we have are conversational bundles, similar to email conversations. They are placed in threads that are like discussion forum conversations. This is a very organic way of interacting as a community of selves across time, but unfamiliar if a unified self is assumed

It amounts to taking seriously the idea that selves in time, or moments of concentration in time, are really distinct. That makes the digital affordances of an online community, or of electronic communications between separate people, more relevant for PKM than commonly thought

tl;dr - Beau Haan's approach to Zettelkasten shows that PKM systems can be based on personal conversation threads, not just foldering systems or link-laden networked notes. This threaded approach contributes something relatively new and distinct to PKM

The highest level of Beau's Zettelkasten system ("Relevant Notes") escapes this conversational logic. It spans or mutually encloses threaded conversations. It has a structure I'd call "monadological", but I will upack that later perhaps

Beau uses that special kind of "networked bi-directional enclosure to make connections, not page links. As Robert says in his recap in the video, from around 46-48m, Beau uses Roam to create more of a navigational structure than a semantic network

It's interesting that Roam is a platform based on Clojure - a Lisp dialect. Metaphorically, at least to me as a non-programmer (with an interest in programming), this seems a bit like the interchangability of code and data that Lisp allows, but Dunning-Kruger owns me on this one

So that's that. My night guy has been awake so long writing this thread that morning guy is actually about to start his day! Boy am I going to be mad at me in a few minutes!