Niklas Luhmann talked about his box full of notes as if it was a flesh and blood research partner. He could question his notes and they would give him insightful, sometimes surprising answers.
Not only did Luhmann talk about the notes as if they were a partner, sometimes he talked about them having a quality of life or being “alive.”
In his article Communicating with Slip Boxes he directly connects this sense of life to the structure of his notes. Specifically he notes that his refusal to categorize his notes, but rather to file them sequentially, is what makes the notes come alive.
But of course sometimes he would come across a bit of research that pertained to something much earlier in his slip box. These notes he would interleave behind the relevant notes in a branching structure that he called folgelzettel.
Links or Branches?
When people talk about the Zettelkasten note taking method they tend to focus on Luhmann’s hypertext-like way of linking distant ideas. Other note taking gurus favor keywords instead of links.
The danger with either approach is that you can inadvertently split ideas from their context, breaking down the coherence of the thought process.
For example let’s take a little poem and consider each line to be an “atomic” note:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Honey is sweet
And so are you
Look what happens when we break these notes into categories:
With the notes grouped this way we have split apart the ideas of flowers and honey. Years later we might come upon these notes and ask “are all roses red?” Or we might ask “are violets really blue? Aren’t they more of a purple color?” And our discourse will end there.
Now look what happens if we use a branching structure:
When we chain the notes sequentially we see that each note is talking about a specific property. We can put the entire chain under a note about “defining properties.”
As we think about these chained notes in their sequence we see that there is a connection between honey and the flowers that we didn’t see when we split the notes into categories of “color” and “taste.” We see that honey is derived from the flowers. And now we see that the “you” being addressed in the poem, shares the essence not just of sweet honey, but also of beautiful and colorful flowers.
The branching sequence tends to produce a more coherent, richer, and more “alive” result.
Does it Have to Be Branches?
Outline-based note taking systems lend themselves to branching. Other tools, like Obsidian, not so much. Luhmann’s branching structure probably had a lot to do with the fact that he was making notes on paper and he had to file them somehow.
I think the bigger factor is that each note adds something to the previous note. It can be an elaboration of the idea. It can be a contradiction of that idea. But it must somehow strengthen and enrich the previous idea as a whole. You can do this using proximity in an outline, but you can also do this with a hyperlink…just so long as you’re careful to constrain your links to other ideas that help generate greater coherence.
Violets are blue —> Violets are actually a shade of purple —> To say something is blue when it is actually purple is a form of poetic license—>poetic license is a form of Romanticism
Using hyperlinks this way, to build and expand thoughts, does indeed support the whole of the original idea and adds life to the notes.
But with hyperlinks there is also the danger of jumping to an analogy that doesn’t build coherence.
Honey is sweet—>aspartame is sweet
This connection, while it is true, doesn’t strengthen the understanding of the whole. This isn’t to say you should never make a wild leap with a hyperlink. Simply use those sparingly. Or you could find yourself building a Library of Babel, where the Truth is hidden somewhere among the millions of volumes, but it could take that many lifetimes to decode the index that will help you find it.
Also on Wild Rye
By creating a bridge between two ideas, links between notes create a sense of “place” in your information network. Links create topology or sense of space in posts
