The Zettelkasten is a method of recording thoughts or bits of information on separate slips of paper and storing them for future use. Famously, Luswig Wittgenstein organized his thoughts this way. Also famously, he never completed his 'big book' - almost all of his books (On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations, Zettel, etc.) were compiled by his students in the years after his death. So it is with some relevance that Chris Aldrich calls for "stronger examples of what these explicit creation workflows looked like," especially at the point where the individual items come together to form an essay or a book. In response, Matthias Melcher writes that he would "sift through them one branch after the other.... to see which items need to be pruned because they are tangents that are not well enough connected." I think this is hardly what Aldrich wants.
But it's not a trivial problem. I have compiled, at latest reckoning, 35,669 posts - my version of a Zettelkasten. But how to use them when writing a paper? It's not straightforward - and I find myself typically looking outside my own notes to do searches on Google and elsewhere. So how is my own Zettel useful? For me, the magic happens in the creation, not in the subsequent use. They become grist for pattern recognition. I don't find value in classifying them or categorizing them (except for historical purposes, to create a chronology of some concept over time), but by linking them intuitively to form overarching themes or concepts not actually contained in the resources themselves. But this my brain does, not my software. Then I write a paper (or an outline) based on those themes (usually at the prompt of an interview, speaking or paper invitation) and then I flesh out the paper by doing a much wider search, and not just my limited collection of resources.
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