Scott P Scheper, page 41
After some time employing the CVP marginalia scheme, I began using something I call the dot marginalia scheme. In this method you simply read a book, and whenever there’s an irresistible idea, you place a simple dot (·) next to it. When you go back to read through your selections, you can usually tell why you selected that material (i.e., whether it’s a concept, vocab term, or prose). Therefore, in theory, it saves time.
Again, like the CVP method, it results in an overabundance of selections. You create a ton of homework for yourself. The material you select tends to include many good ideas and excellent ideas instead of exclusively containing irresistible ideas.
Here’s an example of the dot marginalia scheme. I used this while reading the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Like the CVP marginalia scheme, this one resulted in too many selections.
The Note Marginalia Scheme
One of the more popular marginalia schemes involves writing brief notes in the margins. These notes are typically your own thoughts and observations that relate directly to the passage you’ve read.
I used this scheme when reading a book on memory science. Here’s a picture from a section of the book:
There are several problems with this scheme. You end up selecting too much material and you end up leaving less time for the irresistible ideas. Furthermore you experience a tendency wherein you write too much, with the result being that you end up wasting time. What you’ve written down in the book must then be duplicated and written down on a note. This is fine when using a very limited space (such as a single line on a bibcard); however, the space in marginalia often can stretch vertically. This leaves you more space to expand your writing. Often, what you end up writing down in the margin is something you shouldn’t have even wasted energy writing down in the first place.
Your Own Marginalia Scheme
As noted, I contend that the marginalia method is inferior to the Luhmannian bibcard method. If you still insist on marking up book margins, though, then chances are you’ll use your own marginalia scheme. I’ve observed that a lot of people like placing little sticky notes or post-it tabs in their books. While I don’t recommend any of this, I won’t slam you for adding your own flavor to your knowledge extraction process. Each person is different.
Since I do not recommend marginalia notes and I opt for the ultimate strategy that Luhmann used, I’ll introduce it to you shortly.
But first, let me cover a few other extraction methods very quickly.
Other Extraction Methods
Cognitive scientist, Fiona McPherson, outlines three other extraction methods: (1) highlighting, (2) headings, and (3) summaries.661 I’ll cover them now.
Highlighting and headings aren’t really pure, stand-alone, extraction methods. They’re more like pre-extraction methods. They’re essentially selection methods for noting which items you intend to extract. They’re used primarily to help you comprehend information and then convert such information into deeper knowledge. You convert the information into deeper knowledge by creating a note for it and elaborating on the material.
Let’s talk about highlighting first.
Highlighting
Highlighting is not a good method for dense, complex, and challenging information. For that type of material it’s best to employ the 1-step book-to-maincard method.
While highlighting does not possess the cognitive development power, it is not “completely pointless,” as it does help you actually pay attention to the words on the page.662 Generally, I’d advise you to stay away from highlighting. If the material is familiar to you, or even if it’s complicated, highlighting won’t help much. There’s even research indicating highlighting may harm one’s ability to learn and recall information.663 Highlighting steals time and energy away from more effective learning practices.
As one cognitive scientist observes, the main value of highlighting does not intrinsically add much value to your understanding of the material; its benefit (if any) stems from its ability to motivate you to spend more time with the material. Yet as we’ve found, writing by hand and spending the time elaborating on material by writing reflection notes is even more motivating and fun—especially if you’re only elaborating on the material you find irresistible.
In brief, I’d recommend you stop the practice of highlighting.
Headings
Headings that you write are brief sentences outlining what the following paragraph intends to cover. They do not summarize or spoil what is written in the paragraph; rather they help organize its content.
Headings have been shown to produce better summaries, outlines, and reformulation of material. This in turn helps enhance your recall of the material you read.664
Headings are classified as organizational signals, and have demonstrated a tendency to improving a reader’s recall of information (unlike highlighting).665
Headings are usually provided in texts whose author is awesome (like me), and who put the work in to organize their material into chunks with a heading attached.
However, so-called “learned” authors (scientists and scholars, like Luhmann) may forgo such niceties. In such a case it may be a useful practice to create your own headings. I don’t recommend doing this directly in the book (i.e., marginalia). Rather, I recommend using your bibcard for this practice.
The third extraction method is that of summaries. This is analogous to creating a reformulation note, which is covered in detail in the next chapter. These are best for tackling difficult material. If tackling difficult material, I recommend creating reformulation notes using the 1-step book-to-maincard method. In brief, you go straight from book to creating an entire notecard dedicated to reformulating the difficult idea you just read.
Let’s now turn to the grand-daddy of all the extraction strategies: the two-step Luhmannian bibcard method.
The Two-Step Luhmannian Bibcard Method
A phase transition took place in the eighteenth century during the enlightenment wherein the reading styles of scholars changed. “An enlightened reader was no longer supposed to collect and memorize ‘factoids’ that he found in the texts of others,” observed scholar, Fabian Krämer.666 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when scholars read, their focus centered on collecting bits of knowledge (excerpting). During the enlightenment, scholars began to read by recording their own thoughts (observations).667 Essentially, reading and observing became “closely intertwined.”668 The observations one made while reading could then be used to process an idea more fully. This could be done by way of (1) creating reflection notes on the material in order to integrate ideas into one’s own theories and creative work, (2) testing an author’s conclusions by way of experiment, and (3) writing critical reviews of books (which became a popular practice during the enlightenment).
These deeper ways of processing texts begins with recording one’s observations. The container with which one records such observations is that of the bibcard. This is what we’ll be covering in this section.
In the course of using the Antinet, I’ve tried out all of the methods mentioned previously. I’ve come to conclude that the best method in the majority of cases is what you’re about to learn now: The 2-step bibcard method.
In Luhmann’s first Antinet, he primarily adopted the 1-step book-to-maincard method. As Johannes Schmidt observes, “the early notes from the 1950s and 1960s frequently tended to be more of the running-text kind and more closely reflected the original readings.”669
In Luhmann’s second Antinet, his method changed.
Here’s an overview of this process:
This method entails extracting knowledge from external sources by placing it on a bibcard.
On the front-side of the bibcard, are three items: (1) the bibliographic details of the source, (2) your goal in engaging the source, and (3) an overview of the source if available (such as a brief overview of its table of contents). This is already covered in the chapter on selection.
On the back-side of the bibcard, are the bibnotes. The bibnotes are the observations you have while reading. These are the internal thoughts and ideas you wish to select from the material. With these items, you’ll either: (1) convert them into main notes by excerpting them, reformulating them, or reflecting on them, or (2) forego elaborating on the items by storing them as ExRefs. By foregoing elaboration, you allow the items to ruminate until the time wherein you’re working on a relevant project which will benefit from including the material.
Here’s a picture of a bibcard:
How to Read with a Bibcard
Reading using the bibcard method typically involves three items: (1) a physical book, (2) a pen, and (3) the bibcard.
Ideally I recommend physical books (as opposed to reading digital versions). For almost a decade, I read with a Kindle; however a few years ago I transitioned back to using physical books because I felt a stronger spiritual, even sacred, connection to physical books. Reading physical books also seemed more effective in helping me comprehend what I was reading. Research now backs my observations. Recently, a scientific study found that “reading comprehension is reduced when reading from an electronic device.”670
The bibcard method works better with physical books than digital books. You simply place the bibcard in any location at the back of the book. When you finish your reading session, place it where you left off, using the bibcard as a bookmark.
In addition, you’ll want a pen available at the ready. I like to clip the pen onto the back cover of the book.
Here’s how it looks:
Inside the book you’ll see the bibcard, which acts as a bookmark, and clipped onto the book’s back cover is a pen.
I’ve tried a lot of reading setups. A lot of them have pluses and minuses. Certain ones are fine; however, in unusual situations, like while reading in bed or on a sandy beach, they fail miserably. For instance, reading with a Moleskine notebook while lying in bed isn’t something that works for most people. With the bibcard reading method, one can read in bed on their back right before falling asleep and still have everything they need to extract a key idea.
Reading outdoors is also more supported by physical books. Luhmann once said, “I like working in the sun.”671 For those who like reading outside, this is also a great setup because it requires minimal supplies and isn’t subject to the limitations some screens have when used in bright direct light.
Here’s a photo of Luhmann reading in the sun using this method. Note what looks like a bibcard sticking out of the book.
photo credit: Niklas Luhmann—Theory of Society 4_13 by Schwumbel; philomag, “Niklas Luhmann Und Die Aufrichtigkeit,” Philosophie Magazin, accessed April 26, 2022, https://www.philomag.de/artikel/niklas-luhmann-und-die-aufrichtigkeit.
Bibnotes
A bibnote is what Sönke Ahrens refers to as a literature note, even though it doesn’t make sense to call them literature notes (as that indicates the notes are from literature). For several reasons, I prefer the term bibnote. A bibliography is a collection of the works you cite in your research, it’s not just composed of literature. The notes one takes can certainly be from a medium beyond literature. You can take notes from YouTube videos, lectures, podcasts, you name it. Furthermore, it can be argued that readers should not confine themselves to reading only literature. In the words of John Aubrey, a fellow of the Royal Society, “material gathered should not be confined to that offered in books.”672
Since the notes you take while engaging with your sources emanate from your “bibliography” (your list of references), I like to refer to these notes as bibnotes.
Bibnotes are made in bullet-point format. The briefer they are, the better. They begin with a page number in parentheses, and then list out the thought or observation.
For instance, here’s a bibcard with bibnotes I took while listening to a podcast.
note: I put timestamps of the ideas in parantheses. I placed them after the bibnote; however I now typically place the timestamp or page number on the left-hand side before the bibnote.
I like to think of the nature of these individual bibnotes as observations. They’re observations that you have as you engage with a source. By source I mean a book, podcast, lecture, YouTube video, etc.
John Locke’s notes were of kindred nature and were referred to as “observation” notes. The scholar, Richard Yeo, refers to them as “short comments connected with books [Locke] was reading.”673
Much of the time your bibnotes don’t even have to be a short comment. They can be condensed even more by simply writing a keyterm.
As Johannes Schmidt observes, bibnotes are “not simply excerpts,” and that Luhmann “jotted down only a few keywords in the course of his reading along with the respective page numbers.”674
I do the same by simply writing a page number down, and then the keyterm. I signal it’s a keyterm by underlining it. For instance, see this bibcard:
The bibnote (27) Zone of Genius signals to me that on page 27, there is material relating to the concept of sticking within your “Zone of Genius.” In other words, sticking with your core competency and focusing on your gifts. Because Zone of Genius is underlined, it indicates that it’s a keyterm pertaining to a core idea, which already has an entry in my index box.
Here is a picture of page 27 in The Intellectual Life:
When I thought of the keyterm Zone of Genius, it was in regards to the idea that one should not “aim at what is beyond their powers, and thus run the risk of falling into error, [and of those] who waste their real capacity in order to acquire some capacity that is illusory…”675
In this instance, I didn’t have immediately relevant use for this idea, and therefore I didn’t develop a maincard for it. Instead, I created an ExRef. Here’s a picture of it in the area of my Antinet pertaining to Zone of Genius. Within this area there’s a card of Zone-of-Genius-related ExRefs:
The concept of Zone of Genius is important to me; yet I decided it’s not immediately applicable to my current project—that project being the book you’re reading right now. I mean, Zone of Genius technically could be relevant to this book, and I could dedicate a section of the book to it (which I guess, indirectly I’m kind of doing right now). However, you have to draw a line in the sand and focus on the most pertinent material for your task at hand. And right now, we have our hands full enough with the material covered in this book. Simply creating an ExRef allows me to delay processing until I have use for it (which will probably be for a future project).
This gives you a glimpse into one of my bibcards. Let’s now turn our attention to one of Luhmann’s bibcards:
I enlisted the help of the Antinet’s Reddit community to help translate this card.676 Luckily, a community member answered the call and provided a translation despite the fact that Luhmann’s handwriting has been called abysmally bad and hideous.677 As such, some of the bibnotes are completely indecipherable (designated by […]). Here is the translation:
V1. No specific metaphysical theory is necessary. But from this follows not, that no metaphysical theory is necessary
1 Ambiguity of the concept or reality
2 reality as function of expectedness [Original in English]
51 nothing-universe / everything universe, ours somewhere in between […] depends on, that we all must take note of […]
6 Observations as parallel runs[…] between observer & observed [Original in English]
7 The faster we change, the more we can notice [Original in English]
10 inferred[…] scientist / historian [Original in English]
20 Induction: evaluable for legal argumentation (if the result doesn’t satisfy, one changes the premises)
23 Error as […] Coping […]
25 Induction as slow operation
26 W[…] als sec[…] […] prädikas […]
27 Paradox of the liar [Original in English]
31 Observation as primitive concept of science [Original in English]
35 randomness [Original in English]
40 Chance is definitively compatible with causality [Underlined]
44 Chance: not connection to [or: relation with] other events
46 randomness [Original in English]
65 The Experimental paradox 107p [Original in English]
There are several patterns we can glean from this translation. First, note how Luhmann simply jotted down keyterms like randomness. Second, he also wrote down terms in the following way {keyterm} as {supporting context}. In essence, Luhmann stated the keyterm first, and then inserted the phrase as. After as Luhmann would provide a snippet of detail that would contextualize the keyterm. For instance, we see the phrase reality as function of expectedness. This method of creating bibnotes stands as both a way of thinking and a practice one should experiment with. It results in building knowledge around the keyterm (not around the supporting context, which sits in a subordinate position to the main idea of the keyterm).
The Bib Box
Luhmann’s bibliography box (aka, the bib box) was a critical component of his Antinet. The cards in this section show Luhmann’s thoughts before they were processed fully into main notes. Luhmann’s second Antinet contained 67,000 cards, with 15,000 (roughly 22%) of them bibcards.
Given how large a portion of Luhmann’s second Antinet was devoted to bibcards, you would think these would be outlined in Sönke Ahrens’s book How to Take Smart Notes. Yet this component of Luhmann’s system is almost completely omitted in Ahrens’s tutorial. His instructions for how to create this critical component of the Antinet is basically: “I strongly recommend using a free program like Zotero.”678
