How to build Niklas Luhmann style Zettelkasten system with logseq and Curvenote
Niklas Luhmann, the prolific German sociologist and the inventor of the Zettelkasten system did not work with Obsidian or Zettler or Notion. He died even before Google was born: his system was analog and remarkably efficient because he used a filing system using (1) free note taking tools which were then processed, (2) all notes were own handwritten notes, so no 'clever app' to push other people’s ideas into his own system: rather, everything was paraphrased; (3) everything LINKED to everything else BUT linearly, so he knew where everything exactly fit and expand, (4) if he had to add stuff, he would 'fork' and then find out WHERE that knowledge bit fits, he called that pattern folgezettel; (5) he SEPARATED literature notes with permanent notes, and this was a big deal.
So if we truly want to implement Luhmann’s system, we must strip down all bells and whistles. We will need three things:
(a) A universal capture tool: I use logseq,
(b) A bibliography manager that allows for storing literature notes in it: I use Zotero or Jabref
(c) A document processor where you have blocks that can be interlinked and LINEARLY organised, and everything is in the form of blocks that can be reorganised and one that can sync with bibtex and jupyter notebooks.
There is ONLY ONE such tool available so far, and this tool is
The process is simple:
- Throw all stuff collected all day to logseq, then process them several times a day
- Throw every literature at Jabref, and process them several times a day
- Put the items one and two and paraphrase in own words in one or Curvenote blocks and link and sequence them.
