One of the key problems with the Luhmann style note taking method is that it is very complicated to explain and it differs in many points from note taking in the past. The problem with manual note taking on index cards is, that it has much in common with an art project in which somebody has invented his own handwriting style and his own structure which is difficult to explain to others. In contrast, the problem with digital only note taking software is, that the programs are never working the same and endless amount of features are available. So the question is, what is Luhmann style note taking from a birds eye perspective?
A good starting point is to use an existing word processing software like Lyx and creating notes in this software. Advantage is, that not a certain note taking software is needed and the user is not asked to learn a certain software. What is working in an existing word like program can be transfered to other programs easily. In contrast to dedicated outline editors, the Lyx program has some disadvantages for example the full text search is poor, the hyperlinks are difficult to navigate and inserting images makes trouble. Nevertheless i have decided to take the software as an example to explain how to create notes.
Let us start the workflow from scratch with an empty document. The side pane in the left shows the sections of the document.
The main idea is to store the notes without folders but store the notes in a sorted list. This idea can be realized in Lyx with the paragraph style. Each paragraph name is shown in the left outline pane.
To make the note taking process more realistic, some information are added for each note which includes the creation date, keypoints and of course the sources. Until now the situation looks not very exciting, because the document contains of only some notes.
For implementing a typical luhmann style zettelkasten two additional elements are needed: a luhmann ID and a maximum length of a note.
The luhmann id defines the position of each node in the sorted list. It is defined once durcing the creation of the node and never changed. For adding a new node at a certain position the node-id is selected in a certain way. The screenshot shows an example for adding a new node between two older nodes.
The typical question of a newbie is why should somebody add new information between other nodes wouldn't it be more common to add new notes at the end? The idea of a Luhmann Zettelkasten is to group notes by it's similarity to existing nodes. It's a clustering mechanism which allows to recall the information later. This is maybe the most obvious difference to note taking in the past. In a luhmann zettelkasten it is a bit complicated to add something. Because the correct position has to identified first and then the appropriate luhmann id has to be created.
Adding more random notes to the existing structure will result into a longer outline list in the lyx editor. The idea is that each note has a maximum size of 700 Byte which is equal to write an A6 index card. The list will become longer and longer. There are no tags, groups or subsections but the node's hierarchy is defined only by the Luhmann id.
Sometimes the Luhmann Zettelkasten gets improved with further elements for example a dedicated bibliography, the ability to insert images and hyperlinks. Hyperlinks means that a link from one node is created to another node. But these improvement are only minor details which can be ignored in the first step. The basic principle is to make sure that each node has a maximum size of 700 bytes and that a Luhmann id is available.
The main strength of the method is, that it scales up to larger amount of content. The screenshot is showing only 9 nodes but technically it is possible to create 100, 200 and even 2000 nodes with the strategy easily. At the end the user has in the left outline pane a long list of nodes and will see in the main window the content for each node. Thanks to the Luhmann id, similar nodes are located nearby. The document is a linear list which can be scrolled from top to bottom. It is some sort of sorted chaos. At the one hand it looks very messy because of the huge amount of small nodes, on the other hand it is very well structured because every knowledge fits into the same sorted list.