Unearthing My Library

Image © Vistorian

 

 

I started tentatively using the Zettelkasten I mentioned in Monday's post; what exact methodology I'll eventually adopt to make it work for me I can't say, but I think the process of adapting the idea to suit my needs will be a hugely productive process in itself. The whole point of the Zettelkasten is that there is no single approved or prescribed way of building one; the underlying principle of linking thoughts and ideas in a non-linear way is the whole point: how that's achieved is almost irrelevant.

What I've discovered though, in a brief foray this afternoon, is that it does help unearth those thoughts and references that are lurking beneath the surface of conscious memory. It strikes me as being rather like human conversation, as opposed to formal dialogue or debate, which are structured according to scripts or rules and follow a narrative arc from one end to the other, linearly (usually). With natural human conversation, one idea becomes many over the course of time, each participant's contributions sparking new directions to take in the other's. Exactly replicated in the Zettelkasten. The narrative is both generated and perceived at the same time. Which makes sense of how so many writers and academics have found that using one has increased their flow of ideas and literary output by a factor of two or more.

Note-taking has always been the basic way of fixing ideas in the mind - cram notes for exams are a good example - but the beauty of a Zettelkasten  is exactly that conversational aspect: you find yourself actively engaged with the material in a way that straight note-taking or cataloguing don't facilitate.

One thing I did decide to add into the method whilst I was adding entries and disappearing down the rabbit-hole of possibilities, seems at first counter to the fundamental idea of a Zettelkasten - an alphabetical index of the principal ideas and topics that arise through its construction and use, along the lines of a traditional card index; referencing the main ideas for quick retrieval by linking a word, phrase, topic or idea to a specific node in the main body of the Zettelkasten, referenced to its node ID. A bit counterintuitive at first sight, but it might work for me; we'll see.

While working up a thread that started with libraries, collecting, the meta-level of books and libraries in literature, software libraries, etc., I started a sub-thread on photographic collections; specifically archival collections rather than art photography collections; for instance the kind of archive you might find referencing your area or district at the local library: these are always fascinating and I would encourage anyone to get access to theirs, it's so much more rewarding than Googling for images. You get to see 'real' photographs, actual physical artefacts from our recent and not-so-recent past that make the past much more immediate and real.

It was exactly that visceral sense of place and time I was thinking about when I wrote about that glass plate negative I discovered the other day, it was the physical presence of that image that gave such a palpable sense of the time and context in which it was taken, sharpened and made all the more poignant by the certain knowledge that the subjects themselves were physically long gone, lives lived out. The photograph itself had probably already been discarded after it had been developed and had possibly not seen the light of day until I discovered it. A romantic notion; an assumed narrative created from an unknown past; time embodied in one finite slice of itself.

What followed from adding photo-archives to the Zettelkasten thread on libraries, etc., was a sub-list of linear dramas about photography, in particular Stephen Poliakoff's superb TV drama originally broadcast on the BBC in January 1999. As a piece of storytelling within storytelling it is absolutely superb and I urge anyone to get hold of a copy. It's beautifully made and wonderfully acted: it's available on DVD from the Beeb, but I would guess that it's also out there online. I was going to revisit it tonight, but when I looked, one of the discs was missing from my copy. So I'll check it out online, as I think I want to expand on the meta-libraries idea for a future post.

All in all, not a bad start to the whole Zettelkasten thing. I'll keep you posted.