Re: [emacs-humanities] Paper Zettelkasten safety [was: Why Emacs-humanities?]

[Göktuğ Kayaalp]

On 2020-12-23 19:01 +01, M. ‘quintus’ Gülker <post+emacs-humanities@guelker.eu> 
wrote:
> Am Dienstag, dem 22. Dezember 2020 schrieb Ihor Radchenko:
>> I also recommend trying actual paper-based Zettelkasten. It feels
>> completely different from software solutions.
> I am currently experimenting with the Zettelkasten concept, but only
> digitally. What prevents me from trying an analogue, paper-based
> Zettelkasten is the fear of loss. I mean, how do you make a backup of
> this thing? What if there is a fire and your invaluable notes are all
> burnt to ashes? Do you keep your notes in a fire-proof safe?

Scanning and/or transcribing to digital text could be one way to keep
everything safe and backed-up.  I didn’t try Zettelkasten yet (and I
doubt I will), but that’s what I did with my notes for a long time: take
notes on paper or on the book itself, scan, transcribe later.  I still
do lecture notes the same way (did, before the rona), tho I skip
scanning.

Tangentially, I’m curious about this Zettelkasten thing.  I’ve looked
into it, quite a bit, but I don’t get the hype.  Isn’t it pretty much
hypertext with some organisation and automated backlinks?  Does it
really achieve e.g. anything plain Org + Deft/occur/isearch can’t?  In
general it feels like a somewhat rigid system with some serious
technical debt.  Lots of little files, a server, non-Org tags, etc.
What exactly makes it superior to just putting notes in a couple files,
and using search and manually linking to stuff?  Backlinks look cool,
but IDK if they are really that useful as to dictate a whole new note
taking system and file layout around it.



-- 
İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp / @cadadr / <https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
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