| HN Mirror

Yes that was kind of vague! Zotero has an interface for taking simple text notes[1] that can either be stand-alone or attached to bibliographic entries like books or articles. In my Zotero library I have folders for different media like journal articles, conference proceedings, books, proposals, etc but don't organize them by subject. So for my literature notes I just attach them directly to the bibliographic entry. I usually try to keep these short and just write down interesting ideas or thoughts rather than summarizing the content (if they're short I'm more likely to actually write them!). As a separate folder in my Zotero library I just have one big pile of stand alone notes that I like to call my "memex" (analogous to Luhmann's Zettelkasten). By flat folder, I just meant that I don't attempt to organize the notes into a subject hierarchy (e.g., "galaxies / spiral / high-redshift"). The stand-alone notes can then be linked to each other with the "related items" feature (to other notes and relevant journal articles mostly). Luhmann's main insight I think was in not trying to impose a universal hierarchy on his writings but to organically grow a system of inter-connected thoughts through these item-to-item links. The mental act of identifying the most important links helps cultivate original thoughts. Needing to manually walk the notes puts you in a sort of conversation with yourself and means you engage with your past writings and ideas. Zotero isn't perfect for this, but the system is very simple, and can be done with paper cards, a single text file, a wiki, or special purpose software. But since my most frequent work flow is "thoughts related to journal articles", Zotero's bibliographic functions and the fact that that's where the PDF files are, make it much simpler to use for me than a stand alone tool.

[1] https://www.zotero.org/support/notes