How I take notes for the Mycenaean Atlas

Working on the Mycenaean Atlas has been a very challenging and rewarding venture.  Naturally I have lots of thoughts about how this kind of work should be done along with what techniques were used in the creation of the Atlas.  But before getting into all that I wanted to say something about note-taking.

1. Opening tableau for the Cyclops note-taking system

An important realization is that note-taking is work. Note-taking is the foundation of your written product and so it cannot be haphazard. People often balk at the idea of using some rigorous system like the Zettelkasten[1]. ‘It’s too much work!’ But once you use this method you discover that you’ve taken a lot of the later work of drafting, writing and referencing and moved it forward in time into the note-taking process. Once the notes are ‘done’ (to your satisfaction) you’ll discover that a lot of the drafting (along with the underlying documentation) is completed as well.

And I believe that your understanding of your subject will have improved.

The Zettelkasten system works like this:

1. Take notes. Each note has a unique ID so that notes can refer/link unambiguously to other notes. (Each note should be simple; don’t reproduce a whole page from Plato to discuss the Allegory of the Cave. Explain it simply and in your own terms. ← This is you actually doing the drafting from the very beginning)

2. Actually do the work of linking these notes to previous notes on same/similar subject(s). This is crucial.

3. If you have questions make a question note. It should go in a questions folder so that they can be periodically reviewed.

4. When you have a cloud of notes reduce them to order. The first step is to create an index note that lists the similar notes by topic along with their identifiers or links.

5. When the number of notes (and your understanding) reaches a certain point then draft a statement of what has been learned so far and incorporating as many of the notes as possible. This statement will have embedded references (links) to the relevant notes.

At this stage you can clearly see what has been happening because your notes have seamlessly become part of your writing process. You have draft(s) along with the supporting documentation.

I don’t like the commercially available note taking products because they suffer from one or more of the following defects:

1. They charge a lot and they are continually trying to upsell you. I find this upselling incredibly annoying.

2. They won’t do what you want or they do lots of things that you don’t want. (what percentage of users really need team support features? Or AI support?)

3. They often use annoying brand-new formatting systems.

4. All your notes go into the cloud which seems, given the current political climate, unsafe. They also become something for the note software company to sell to AI trainers.

5. After paying for some feature these companies may just go out of business and take your money with them. Lots of these niche note-taking companies won’t be around in a year. I’m very hesitant to pay for any software online.

What I wanted in a note-taking system was:

1. Support for the Zettlekasten method; e.g. group notes by Zettlekasten type (concept, question, index, draft) as well as by subject.

2. The ability to look at several notes at the same time and move them around with respect to each other.

3. Run on my own machine only

4. Formattable in html

5. Support simple embedded images/photos/drawings

6. Tag support and search over tags as well as note contents

I realized that I could have all this because note-taking systems are incredibly simple. They don’t amount to much more than an interface to a database.  It was out of this realization that I developed Cyclops. The initial version took about a week.

Cyclops is intended to support use of the Zettelkasten system. It supports the following categories for notes:

1. Concept (general notes bearing on some concept or idea. My most-used category).
2. Biblio (bibliographic info for citations; one  per written work and linked to wherever the author is quoted in other notes)
3. Definition (like a ‘concept’ but limited to a definition of a specific thing)
4. Image (A note that contains an image. I don’t use this consistently and this category may go away)
5. Drafts (Statements, long or short, on a topic that is supported by your notes and which contains links to these supporting notes)
6. Index (This is a list of notes that bear on some topic and which contains links to all the notes listed. The topics are in alphabetical order),
7. Question (the famous Zettelkasten question),
8. Quote (This is to indulge my habit of copying down memorable quotes),
9. Other (unclassifiable somethings, usually something personal)

For example I recently was intrigued by the similarity of Plato's Allegory of the Cave to classic shaman stories.  I wrote a few notes.

One of the notes I created was N1973.  Here I shamelessly stole a picture from Wikipedia along with some basic sources for Plato's Cave:

2. A typical note.  Here I am illustrating the
basic idea of Plato's Allegory of the Cave
along with links to other notes and sources.

This is a typical note in the Cyclops system.  From top to bottom there is an edit button, the identifier (N1973), title, clickable linked tags to relevant topics, the content (Here a great picture by someone calling himself or herself '4edges').  Most of my notes have a comment section where specific sources are named.  Here you see a cite for the classic shaman story (as it appears in other notes) along with a source not for shadow puppets in ancient Greece.

In the last few days I decided that I had enough notes about this topic to create an index note card that would bring them all together.  The index note that I created is this:

3. A typical index card.  It brings together all the other note cards
that bear on the topic of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

This card is hardly finished in the sense that there will be a great deal more to say about the connection (if any) between Plato's Allegory of the Cave and classical shamanism.  But it's a start and it illustrates the idea that an index is an alphabetical ordering of references supported by other notes in the system.

And, in order to keep up with my thought, I created a simple draft of what I thought I understood 'so far'.

4. A draft card of one of the ideas behind Plato's Allegory of the Cave

I created a draft note card of the ideas as I understand them so far and expressed in my own words.  In this draft I did not embed direct links to the supporting notes - instead I used footnotes.  But embedding links to other notes is a very good idea and Cyclops makes that easy.  In order to create a link to another note in Cyclops you put the note number in brackets or braces.  To refer back to the index card above just embed this: {N2019} or [N2019].

Let's take another look at the opening tableau:

5. Cyclops opening tableau.  From L to R: List of note types,
Most Recent Notes, Folder List,  Recent Tags, Most Used Tags.

The tableau is meant to facilitate search in several ways.  To bring back all the notes in a Z. type just click one of the nine buttons on the far left.  The more recent 20 notes or so are in the display 'Recent Notes'.  The note button is on the left, then the note title and first characters of text, and then the subject folder that the note is in.  The 'folders' column comes next.  It is a list of all current subject folders.  Any button clicked on brings back all the notes in that subject folder.  The recent tags panel makes it possible to see your most recently used tags and the note it appeared in.  The 'most used tags' panel on the far right shows what tags have been used the most.  Any of those tags clicked on will bring up a display of every one of those tags.

At the top of the tableau is a 'New Note?' button which will bring up a screen for note writing.  The search box allows search by tag, by note content, or by both.  

Finally here is a picture of what a typical Cyclops session might look like:  it demonstrates that all the notes are separately displayable and can be moved around independently of each other.

6. Typical Cyclops session.

You may have noticed the Cyclops eye on the home tableau as well as each of the notes.  When you  click on the Cyclops' eye Cyclops brings up the home tableau.  A little Classics humor, there.

Footnotes

[1] The Zettelkasten system is described here.