• Note-Taking is Not Enough: Knowledge Management for Researchers and Writers (morganeua, Writing Cooperative, 5-10-23)
["is" should be capitalized; it's a verb.]
"It wasn’t until halfway through my PhD that I began managing my knowledge. Here’s why I wish I started sooner. It wasn’t until the fourth year of my PhD that I learned about personal knowledge management (PKM) and specifically, the “Zettelkasten” system of note-taking and knowledge management. The zettelkasten ticked all my boxes: it is a flexible, intuitive and enduring method of taking, making, storing, and thinking alongside notes.
"The zettelkasten, or “slip-box” in English, is a literal box full of slips of paper that the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann used to store his knowledge in the 1960s. Many others have used similar systems before and since Luhmann; including, notably, Umberto Eco, who outlines a similar research process in his book How to Write a Thesis. But Luhmann’s “Zettelkasten” terminology has stuck. Today, many researchers, like myself, house their Zettelkasten not on slips of paper, but digitally as files on their computer.
"This is the first article in a series of articles I will write to help you better understand the ins and outs of the Zettelkasten — AKA your second brain. However, if you want to get started right away, you can check out my YouTube videos on the topic. David B. Clear also wrote an article for The Writing Cooperative that covers Luhmann’s life and process as well as everything else to do with Zettelkasten. I also recommend refering to the “Getting Started” page on the Zettelkasten website to aid in your knowledge management journey. If books are more your speed, then Sonke Ahrens published a book called How to Take Smart Notes that covers all the basics and will motivate you to start a Zettelkasten of your own.
• Getting Started:Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method (Sascha, Zettelkasten, 10-27-20) The meat of the system.
• Field Report #1: A PhD About Writing with His Zettelkasten (@henrikenggaard, Zettelkasten, 5-27-21)
• How I use Outlines to Write Any Text (Christian, Zettelkasten, 5-24-14)
Outlines are composed of movable parts, as opposed to finished paragraphs and blocks of texts.
Hierarchy creates context. You can see the structure of the ideas you employ.
You can attach research notes as references as they are at first instead of embedding them in the text immediately.
• Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive (David B. Clear, Writing Cooperative, 12-31-19)
Luhmann wrote over 70 books and more than 400 scholarly articles using the Zettelkasten notetaking method.
'Let's begin with the word "Zettelkasten". This Teutonic word can be broken down into two components: "Zettel", which means note or slip of paper, and "Kasten", which means box. A Zettelkasten is therefore nothing more than a box of notes, properly called a slip box or card index in English.
Luhmann's Zettelkasten was in fact a piece of furniture. It comprised six stacks of four wooden drawers each, with each drawer filled to the brim with paper notes.'
• How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens. Read the comments about Ahrens' work on the Amazon page, for more insight into this way of organizing thoughts/material for a book.
• Preparing Fragments Helps You to Ease Into Writing (Christian, Zettelkasten, 11-26-13) Prepare Research First, Compile a Draft Second.
The task of writing a text can be deferred until you’re well-equipped with notes on the topic. It’s easy to connect the parts when it’s time to write the piece itself since you already prepared phrasing their relationships when you linked notes with each other. You prepare your text in manageable parts this way and afterwards get to a complete first draft in no time.
• Composing and Revising – The Two Modes of Writing
• Count Your Words to Increase Your Productivity (Sascha, 2-6-14)
• How to improve your IT support workflow (Atlassian)
"A knowledge base is the foundation of a knowledge management practice. In IT, the knowledge base is a self-serve online library of information about a product, service, department, or topic. The data in your knowledge base can be from anywhere, but usually comes from several contributors who are well versed on the relevant subject. The knowledge base can include FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and any other details you may want or need to know. (This page is worth a long look.)
"In service request management, each time an agent handles an issue, they consult the knowledge base first to see if a fix is already documented. If so, they follow the steps outlined in the article, updating it if any of the steps have changed or if the current documentation is confusing. If no such documentation exists, the agent uses the proper process to troubleshoot and resolve an issue while also documenting the issue and the fix in a new knowledge base article.
"What is knowledge-centered service (KCS)? Knowledge-centered service—also known as knowledge-centered support or KCS—is when support teams not only provide real-time customer, system, or employee support, but also create and maintain documentation as part of the same process. Simply put, KCS is about getting the in-depth knowledge of IT teams out of their heads and onto the page, creating detailed documentation that employees, system users, and new or less experienced engineers can use without constantly bombarding the service desk with the same requests. It’s about treating knowledge as a business asset and not relying entirely on memory and experience to resolve problems quickly.