macdonaldster.ca

Thoughts and musings for general consumption

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The concept of a Zettelkasten (ZK) is fairly well know among personal knowledge managment (PKM) enthusiasts. I tend to subscribe to Bob Doto’s approach and am reading his book on the subject as I develop my own ZK. I am builing mine in Obsidian, after trying the analog method for a very long time.

I really like index cards and working on paper but it is inconvenient to manage when on the go (I actually travelled with a shoebox size analog ZK last summer for a few weeks and tried to continue using it) and can make simple things more difficult. Proponents of analog ZK tend to promote this as a feature, not a bug, but it wasn’t for me.

My goal with this blog is to actually use the ZK to build articles. It’s a bit of an experiment currently, as follows:

• I am collecting ideas and building my ZK
• Every so often, I will use an Obsidian search to build a list of all the ZK files and paste the search result into a file
• This then allows the Gemini Scribe plugin to analyze my ZK and suggest blog articles using the connections found in the ZK
• I am going to try to write these articles here as blog posts (this will take time, I don’t have a lot free time to do this sort of things so this is a longer term project and no one reads this blog, anyway)

This is automating the “ghost in the machine” aspect of maintaining and working with a ZK as described here: Philosophy of Zettelkasten: What is the Ghost in the Box?.

I will likely continue to add notes here as my use of my ZK develops.

My current efforts are:

• importing my analog ZK:
  • I scan a card with my phone, which can extract text
  • Then I paste that text into a daily note in Obsidian and get Gemini Scribe to clean it up
  • I then manually convert it into a fleeting note for later consideration (or tag it with “#zk”) or directly into a main note in the ZK.
  • I am considering asking Gemini Scribe where it would fit in my ZK as well (just to see if it can figure this out)

• adding new main notes to my ZK from my existing fleeting notes in Obisidian (some of these are older notes, some are new ones I make as time goes on)

• eventually composing blog articles here

For the sake of interest, this is a structure note for the very top level of organization in my ZK (note: this is a little different from one focused purely on academic pursuits or just writing):