The summary is an arbitrarily deep tree/list of nodes. The notation for index card headings is similar to the way we typically do outlines (1, 1/1, 1/1a, corresponding to the typical 1, 1.1, 1.1.a, etc.). Searching was easy as you could find cards grouped by the first index, then the second, then the third (so 1/1a is next to 1/1b, and anything that might sit between them is a child of 1/1a). So for a physical system, despite its size, it remained manageable. References to cards located in other branches allowed for an effective-cross referencing system, and could be paired with things like index (no pun intended) or topic cards which might list a bunch of related indices.
I suspect the physical limitations may have made it more manageable than an equivalent set of mind map nodes or a wiki, and the simple indexing (and consistent, never changing, once a number was assigned it was assigned) means everything is "static" once in place, but can have an arbitrary number of children to expand on it. This means no rewriting cross-references and/or indexes.
With a wiki you might be tempted to retitle (or find the perfect title) for a page, with this it's simply done. If you think of a better descriptor you can put it on a new card and include the index as the reference.
Egged on by Luhmann, whom I read obsessively in my youth, I started a Luhmann-like hyper-text.
Been doing it for a long time now.
There are several implementations based on Luhmann's Zettelkasten, e.g.
[1, 2, 3], but I've not used those myself, so can't comment on their usefulness. My own system is just HTML, grep and a few handwritten scripts. It's extremely lightweight.
It's been spectacularly useful for me. In my experience such a system becomes more useful with time, and with effort put in for curating.
I spend maybe 2-3 hours every day with my private 'index cards'.
I guess most prolific writers in human history have been following a "write down every idea and refine it later" type system.
But it must be so much easier now, with smartphones, computers, internet etc.
Thank you for your interest. I'm afraid I have nothing in public.
The technology is near trivial, mostly scripts to generate HTML5/CSS on demand, and grep for searching. The magic comes from how I use it. Short summary.
- Write down every idea, and every insight. Write down half-baked ideas. You can later refine it.
- Don't censor yourself. (That's why I don't write a public blog.)
- When writing about some subject X, think carefully about how to link X to other pages. When making a link to another entry, read/browse the entry and let what you read give you inspiration about looking at X from another angle. This can be rather inspirational.
- Curate carefully, I spend maybe 3-4 hours every day on your ZK. Have a long-term view: this is to be used your whole life. To longer you do it, the more useful it will become.
- Be clear what you want from this system.
- The whole system wasn't useful for the first couple years. Why? Because I could still remember what I had written. That changed after about a decade.
That's very interesting. Do you use it for ideas exclusively, or "personal logging"/journaling too?. I've found a program called Connected Text[0], which bills itself as a "personal wiki", and. I'm also looking at refining my use of OneNote Desktop which I've been using for years, and it has a [[link]] feature.
That's just two cards, one with an apple pie recipe and one with a tiny javascript snippet but you get the idea.
3-x-5 ended up being a bit of a limitation so I made the cards auto-size as you put more text on them. I thought it would be a funny interface to a hypercard like stack with javascript as the language but I didn't pursue the idea any further.
What I did end up doing was butcher it and turn it into a tool that I use daily to do my work, but it lost the index card looks.
