Taking ‘smart’ notes: warnings from history

Ryan Kemp

Since the COVID pandemic, new note-taking applications have emerged inspired by the Zettelkasten system of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. This post juxtaposes the promise of such applications with the lessons academics should draw from the more complex history concerning how scholars have mastered and exploited the information at their disposal.

A note-taking app would seem an unlikely focus for a cult. Yet for #RoamCult, academics among them, Roam Research, a ‘note-taking tool for networked thought’ is worthy of veneration. Offering a ‘structure that fits everyone’s brain better than files and folders’, Roam encourages users to link together their notes using ‘bi-directional linking’. Information is connected in a web of associations, visualised through an attractive graph view, rather than filed away in files and folders (the digital equivalent of a filing cabinet). The app is part of a growing industry of productivity tools known as PKMs (personal knowledge management software) which promise nothing less than a transformation in our ability to think. As Roam’s developers argue, ‘if we can build a tool for helping people write and organise their ideas more effectively, we can help them have better thoughts and solve otherwise intractable problems’. We are offered software which not only ‘adapts to the way you think’, but will offer ‘the calm of being more organised’ and ‘clarity in your life’ for those ‘drowning in an abyss of info’. Better thinking and productivity, but also control, confidence, and simplification will replace task-switching, ‘scattered thinking’, ‘constant frustration’, and the struggle of explaining ‘complex thoughts to others’. As with all good cults, we are rewarded with purpose and identity: we will create a ‘second brain’ perhaps because the first has been rendered obsolete by the digital distractions of the post-COVID age of remote work (both Roam and its free competitor Obsidian were created during the pandemic).

With such promises, comes the price-tag. Roam users pay $15 a month, with the five-year subscription, the ‘Believer’ tier, costing $500. The company, which recently raised $9 million from seed investors, has been valued at $200 million.[1] A growing industry of courses, seminars, and tutorials teach users how to realise the potential of ever greater number of apps (including free alternatives). Content creators, noticeably reluctant to stick for long to a single option, receive hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and millions of views (with the advertising revenue to follow), as they teach the art of constructing of digital mind palaces.

The surge in enthusiasm for these applications owes much to the publication, in 2017, of Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes (since translated into 12 languages).[2] Ahrens’s book offered a solution to the writing woes of students, academics, and knowledge workers alike in the shape of the Zettelkasten system, most associated with the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Having published some 50 books, and over 600 articles, Luhmann credited his remarkable productivity to his ‘conversation partner’ and ‘second memory’: a collection of some 90,000 paper slips (Zettel) sorted into boxes (Kästen). Cross referenced to one another, Luhmann’s notes in effect created a surfable hypertext before the internet, one now itself the subject of a research project at the University of Bielefeld.[3] It is no accident that searches for Zettelkasten on YouTube exploded after Ahrens’ book appeared, with both Roam Research and Obsidian (its main free competitor) taking Luhmann’s Zettelkasten as their inspiration.

Yet neither Luhmann’s system of note-taking nor his productivity were unique. The idea of bi-directional linking itself is often traced back to the engineer Vannevar Bush who, in an essay in the Atlantic in 1945, dreamt of creating a memex:a mechanised library, mimicking the brain, which would index information through association not hierarchy.[4] But the debate as to how one should take and organise notes to generate knowledge has a far richer, more complex, and also more contradictory history than Zettelkasten advocates have often suggested, one with timely lessons for any researcher tempted by the promise of this new digital panacea.

Extracting information has always been an academic artform. Prior to the age of the Xerox machine, the photocopier and – now – Kindle highlights and the ‘copy and paste’, medieval and early modern readers underlined key passages or marked them out in the margins. Scholars like Erasmus created ‘commonplace books’, with ‘flowers’ plucked from individual books arranged together by topic and theme.[5] As the Roman philosopher Seneca had put it, from such readings one could ‘mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance’.[6] The limitation of such commonplace books was their inflexibility: an extract, once entered under a single heading, was there to stay. In 1638, one clergyman spent two hours instructing the Stuart King Charles I in how to instead write notes on small pieces of paper and attach them on hooks to metal plates representing individual subjects.[7] More creative reordering of knowledge was thus possible.

From such idiosyncratic beginnings eventually arose the index card system of note-taking, whose popularity peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century prior to its recent digital resurrection. The genesis of history as an academic subject, for example, was accompanied by research guides, among them the highly influential 1898 Introduction to the Study of History by the French historians Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos, which instructed the growing ranks of professional historians in how to reorder, interweave, and master the voluminous details at their fingertips.[8] Thousands of cards lay behind the composition, for example, of Fernand Braudel’s masterpiece on the Mediterranean world.[9] The medievalist Georges Duby remarked that his tools of the trade – the pen, the magnifying class, and the index card – were no different from those of an eighteenth-century Benedictine monk.[10] A historian was only as good as his index cards it began to be said; Victor Bérard made the same comment of archaeologists.[11]  Despite his recent online fame, Luhmann was far from the only academic to deploy an index card system. The historian and ethnographer S. D. Goitein similarly used 27,000+ cards, arranged by topic, to write over 800 publications. Hans Blumenberg wrote with 30,000 cards, Gotthard Deutsch 70,000+, Roland Barthes 12,500, and Mortimer J. Adler with his Syntopicon (a two-volume index to his Great Books of the Western World project).[12]

‘Everyone admits nowadays’, as Langlois and Seignobos wrote, ‘that it is advisable to collect materials on separate cards or slips of paper’.[13] This was, quite simply, the modern method. The index card, for the social reformer Beatrice Webb, was the sociological equivalent of the chemist’s blowtorch or the physicist’s electroscope.[14] Webb herself was an early advocate of the ‘one fact per one piece of paper’ doctrine, re-christianised since for the age of ‘atomic habits’ as ‘atomic notes’. Card by card, our understanding of society, of the past, and even of the origin of our species could be elucidated: Charles Darwin had deployed such a system and has inspired digital Zettelkasten practitioners as a result.[15]

Walter Benjamin indeed questioned whether the book itself would soon be obsolete, a now defunct intermediary between the card indexes of the author and the reader.[16] He spoke in jest, of course, but index cards have found a home among comedians too: Phyllis Diller, Bob Hope, and Joan Rivers (the latter with over a million cards) built their careers on organised witticisms.[17] Even the rapper Eminem has described how he places slips in a box he nicknames ‘stacking ammo’, a name all academics should now adopt for their own research materials.[18]

Any researcher tempted to follow in the footsteps of these illustrious predecessors, and adopt a similar note-taking system via digital means, must however take heed of a side to this story which is less well-known or convenient for its advocates. Jean-François Bert has explored in detail how the index card method became the subject of fierce criticism in France.[19] The instructions by Langlois and Seignobos mentioned above were, for Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, ‘one of the most monumental pieces of nonsense’ bequeathed by the nineteenth century, ‘the death warrant for history itself’.[20] Works of imaginative or eloquent scholarship had been substituted for trails of index cards, strung together from end to end. Real life, Charles Péguy argued, had been smothered in the boxes of such cards, with no room left for intuition, judgement, or synthesis.[21] Works such as Otto Behaghel’s Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1869) were, for example, ‘comparable to that of the naturalist who arranges beetles in a box or plants in a herbarium’ (Darwin, at least, might have been pleased).[22] Historical scholarship, critics lamented, now ‘smelled’ of index card work or could be castigated as ‘episodic… Bones, anatomical parts, arranged, classified, labelled, put in order, whereas we expected a living, organic body’.[23] Associated in France with the Sorbonne, the sin was attributed in Britain to an ‘Oxford school’. Kinder critics might say the arguments of Christopher Hill and Keith Thomas were ‘contained and artfully concealed in a great many references’, but others complained that their index cards had merely been dumped on the table.[24] The writing of Niklas Luhmann himself has often been criticised as convoluted, repetitive, and poorly structured; the charge of a failure to select and prioritise was also made of his fellow enthusiast Hans Blumenberg. The art historian Aby Warburg spoke of his own Verknüpfungszwang, a perfectionistic ‘compulsion to interconnect’ which in fact impeded, rather than enhanced, a rather thin publication record.[25] Such authors became increasingly easy to satirize.  The ethnologist Arnold van Gennep poked fun by imagining a young researcher who, keen to explore the evil eye in French literature, spent twelve years annotating some 12 million notes.[26] The image of the scholar suffocated by an avalanche of his own index cards – described by Anatole France in Penguin Island – became a familiar one;[27] no less eminent a sociologist as Émile Durkheim warned his own nephew, Marcel Mauss, ‘not to drown’ or ‘fall overboard’ into his own notes.[28]  

Drowning in information, lacking in originality, a failure to prioritise or select… the charges laid at the door of the users of even a physical Zettelkasten are, if anything, all the more applicable to their digital successors. And this even without taking into account the further pitfalls such technology brings. The much-vaunted graph view is often eventually dismissed by experienced users as a visually appealing gimmick. Those who advocate such systems, keen to maximise their viewer numbers, are frequently found switching to new software or obsessing over new templates, workflows, and plugins. How should academic researchers who still, after all, need to master vast swathes of detailed material navigate such perils?

Here, the lessons offered to notetakers back in the 1920s will strike a chord with their digital descendants a century later.  As Antonin Sertillanges wrote in his wonderful The Intellectual Life (1921), a researcher must ‘provide oneself with armour suited to one’s own person, and to the requirements of the battle to be fought’.[29] Coats should not be purchased simply because they are handsome nor furniture if it won’t fit in your house. While scholars   have always feared the perennial issue of generating a blackhole of too much information, the ease with which text can now be extracted, captured, copied, and accumulated makes the necessity to select now all the more acute. As Andrew Abbot reminds his readers in his superb Digital Paper, the very art of research lies in ‘figuring out which of the many things that are staring you in the face is the important one’.[30]

An equally pressing danger, inherent in the index card system, is that referred to by the concept of Fetzenwissen or ‘the illusion that disjointed fragments can produce integrated thought’ as Richard Owen has highlighted.[31] A stack of index cards, in other words, does not an argument make. ‘Atomic notes’ cannot become new ‘knowledge’ without intense effort. There is nothing ‘effortless’ about the process, an adjective pinned to Luhmann’s system.[32] There is nothing easy about asking how a new piece of raw information ‘changes the story’ of our research. The image of the craftsman enjoys such resonance among authors and academics alike because they must join together their materials with the care and skill shown by, for example, a good carpenter. The historian Antony Crafton has compared his own writing to the production of theatre sets he undertook during the vacation as a student: ‘Make it neat, make it solid, don’t use more or less wood than you need’.[33] Like any craft or art form, such a skill requires practice as well as, once again, knowing what to leave out.

That the aforementioned Richard Owen called his website ‘writingslowly.com’ points to a final lesson. Notetaking apps promise their users greater efficiency. But, as Cal Newport in his recent book Slow Productivity has argued, our research process might benefit from greater friction rather than greater ease (Newport’s title itself reflects a growing fashion for slowness in other areas of life, such as cooking).[34] A pioneer of creative nonfiction, John McPhee, used a laboriously slow and methodical system of sorting material via index cards, not to speed up his work, but to force himself to think.[35] His fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, the historian Robert Caro, also writes his drafts by long-hand to ‘slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through’.[36] Such methods helped them avoid the danger, highlighted by Sertillanges, of ‘insulting knowledge through ill-judged hurry’.[37] Or, as Abbots warns for the digital age:  

‘More is not better; better is better. Faster is not better; better is better. Quantity and speed are not the criteria of your research nor should they be the criteria for your tools’.[38]

One might add, by way of conclusion, that, just occasionally, researchers might consider at which moment they themselves find the joy in their own process. Beatrice Webb and C. Wright Mills both spoke of how index cards loosened their imagination.[39] Their words are reminiscent of the pleasure described by the historian Peter Ackroyd when annotating his notes:

‘It’s the point where you amass all the references to one specific thing […]. It’s the point where it all comes alive.’

Speaking faster, and even licking his lips according to the interviewer, the moment of joy was, for Ackroyd, synthesis: ‘a new creation, a rabbit out of a hat’.[40] Developing new knowledge, as the history of notetaking teaches us, is very much not, however, like an instantaneous magic trick: it is difficult, challenging, painful, and occasionally infuriatingly slow work. Digital notetaking apps offer us a magic trick but, as with even those staged illusions, the patience, skill, and experience of the practitioner behind the scenes is what really counts.

Ryan Kemp is a historian of high medieval Europe. His current project is a history of political criticism in the High Middle Ages which explores how gender and social status influenced the practice and portrayal of how advisors offered counsel to kings.

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[1] Kate Clark, A $200 Million Seed Valuation for Roam Shows Investor Frenzy for Note-Taking Apps, in: The Information, 11/9/2020, URL: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-200-million-seed-valuation-for-roam-shows-investor-frenzy-for-note-taking-apps (all URLs were last visited on 7/10/2024).

[2] Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking (2017).

[3] Forschungsprojekt „Niklas Luhmann – Theorie als Passion. Wissenschaftliche Erschließung und Edition des Nachlasses“, URL: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/soziologie/forschung/luhmann-archiv/.

[4] Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, in: The Atlantic, July 1945, URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/.

[5] Quoted in Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996), 102–4.

[6] Quoted in Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 12.

[7] See Keith Thomas, Working Methods, in: London Review of Books, vol. 32, no. 11, 10/06/2010, URL: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary, for the story and on this topic in general.

[8] Charles-Victor Langlois, Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris, 1898). For an English translation, see Charles-Victor Langlois, Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, trans. G. G. Berry(New York, 1904).

[9]  Jean-François Bert, Une histoire de la fiche erudite (Villeurbanne, 2017), 76.

[10] Georges Duby, L’histoire continue (Paris, 1991), ­68.

[11] Victor Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, vol. 1 (Paris, 1902), 21.

[12] See for these and further examples, the blog post by Chris Aldrich, S.D. Goitein’s Card Index (or Zettelkasten), in: Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist, 14/01/2023, URL: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten.

[13] Charles-Victor Langlois, Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, 103.

[14] Beatrice Potter Webb, My Apprenticeship (London, 1926), p. 412.

[15] Richard Carter, Charles Darwin’s note-making system,12/10/2022, URL:http://friendsofdarwin.com/articles/charles-darwins-note-making-system/.

[16] Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: 2016), 43.

[17] As discussed by Chris Aldrich, The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten, in: Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist, 22/10/2022, URL: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.

[18] Eminem shows off his notes in an interview here: https://youtu.be/pPXBwy3JgVo?feature=shared&t=74.

[19] Jean-François Bert, Une histoire de la fiche erudite (Villeurbanne, 2017).

[20] Quoted by Jean-François Bert, Une histoire de la fiche erudite (Villeurbanne, 2017), 82.

[21] Charles Péguy cited in Jean-François Bert, Une histoire de la fiche erudite (Villeurbanne, 2017), 67.

[22] Joseph Vendryes, ‘Otto Behaghel, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache’, Bulletin de la Société

de linguistique de Paris (1912-1913), xciv.

[23] See Jean-François Bert, Une histoire de la fiche erudite, 85-86.

[24] Keith Thomas, Working Methods, URL: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.

[25] Richard Owen, Aby Warburg’s Zettelkasten and the search for interconnection, in: Writing Slowly, 09/05/2023, URL: https://writingslowly.com/2023/05/09/aby-warburgs-three.html.

[26] Arnold van Gennep, Les demi-savants (Paris, 1911).

[27] Anatole France, L’Île des Pingouins (Paris, 1908).

[28] Émile Durkheim, Lettres à Marcel Mauss ed. Philippe Besnard, Marcel Fournier (Paris, 1998), 135.

[29] A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. Mary Ryan (Westminster, Maryland:1960), 189.

[30] Andrew Abbott, Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials (Chicago, 2014), 24.

[31] Richard Owen, How to overcome Fetzenwissen: the illusion of integrated thought, in: Writing Slowly, 12/02/2024, URL: https://writingslowly.com/2024/02/12/how-to-overcome.html.

[32] See various points in Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes.

[33] Rachel Toor, Scholars Talk Writing: Anthony Grafton, in: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15/06/2015, URL: https://www.chronicle.com/article/scholars-talk-writing-anthony-grafton/.

[34] Cal Newport, Slow Productivity (New York, 2024)

[35] John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (New York, 2017).

[36] Robert A. Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing (New York, 2019).

[37] Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, 224.

[38] Abbott, Digital Paper, 246.

[39] C. Wright Mills, ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, appendix to his The Sociological Imagination (Oxford, 1959); Webb, My Apprenticeship (London, 1926), 418.

[40] Simon Hattenstone, Tales of the city, in: The Guardian, 11/08/2003, URL:  https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/aug/11/highereducation.fiction.

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