From Scrapbook to Zettelkasten: Discovering the Slip Box

A Conversation in Venice ~ The Slip Box ~ Communication Partner ~ Recursion

~ Tension ~ Same Old Problem

 

Left: Zettelkasten mock up with Scrapbook themes.
Right: Sawangwongse Yawnghwe work at the Venice Biennale 2026.

File Under: A Conversation in Venice

At the Venice Biennale 2026, we found ourselves standing in front of a group of paintings by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe. The paintings looked a little like diagrams and a little like maps, although they were not the sort of maps that would reliably get you from one place to another. Words, names, arrows, and relationships organically spread across the surface. They seemed to be conveying a complicated political history all at once.

We started talking with another visitor, a German art teacher named Philipp. He seemed also interested in the graphical nature of the art. One topic led to another and we ended up talking about note taking and saving information. Philipp mentioned Notion, the digital workspace used for organizing notes and projects. He also mentioned the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and the philosopher Hans Blumenberg. Both were known for maintaining elaborate collections of notes using a system called Zettelkasten.

It sounded slightly formidable, as German words can when you see them for the first time. But the literal translation is unassuming: a box of slips of paper. A slip box.

We made a note of the word, along with notes about the conversation, and continued through the exhibition.

Later, we entered the exchange with Philipp into Scrapbook and asked what else in our collection might be related to the idea of the Zettelkasten.

That was when things became interesting.

File Under: The Slip Box

A Zettelkasten is a collection of individual notes, traditionally written on small pieces of paper or index cards and kept in a box. But it is not simply a filing cabinet in miniature.

The important part is linking between notes. A note does not sit alone under a broad heading and wait patiently to be retrieved. It points to other notes. One thought leads to another. A new note can branch off from an older one, connect two subjects that had previously seemed unrelated, or become the start of a trail that grows over time.

Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten became famous partly because of its scale. Over decades, he accumulated tens of thousands of notes and used them as a working partner in his writing. The system did not merely help him remember things. It helped him encounter his own ideas again in new combinations.

This is the part that caught our attention.

Most organizational systems promise to help you put things in the correct place. A Zettelkasten seems to accept that the more interesting question is what might happen when two things placed years apart unexpectedly find each other.

There is an appealing modesty to the physical object. No elaborate machinery is required. You need paper, a box, a way of numbering notes, and enough patience (stubbornness?) to create links between them. Intelligence is not hidden inside the box. Rather, it accumulates gradually through the act of connecting one thought to another.

Our Scrapbook is not a Zettelkasten in any strict sense. It contains photographs, journal entries, maps, recipes, travel notes, and various fragments that seemed worth saving at the time. It has categories, links, metadata, and search. It has also become much larger and stranger than anything that could fit comfortably into a wooden card catalogue.

What was satisfying with learning about Zettelkasten was that the underlying idea felt familiar. We had been circling around it for years, although not always aware of it.

File Under: Communication Partner

Luhmann is the right center of gravity for this story, not simply because he kept a very large number of index cards. Other people have managed that, especially if they have ever attempted to organize a lifetime of recipes, jokes, or book notes.

What makes his system interesting is the way he described his relationship with it. A mature Zettelkasten was not merely a storage box or an external memory. It became a kind of communication partner.

At first, a collection gives back only what you put into it. You write a note, place it somewhere sensible, and retrieve it later. But as the notes multiply and the links between them accumulate, the system begins to develop enough internal complexity to surprise you. A new entry leads to an old one you had forgotten. Two thoughts written years apart suddenly sit next to each other and suggest a third. The system returns something that was already yours, but not in a form you had anticipated.

This is not magic. The slip box has not become sentient. It is still paper, numbering, cross-references, and the accumulated work of the person tending it. But, in a way it feels like it is communicating with us.

We have written elsewhere about Scrapbook starting to "talk back" after we added a large language model (LLM) to it. That phrase now seems less novel than we first thought. Luhmann had already described a similar experience with his paper system. The tools were different, but the surprise was recognizable: a collection could become more than a passive repository. It could participate in the development of an idea.

File Under: Recursion

There is a pleasing recursion to how this all played out.

First, we were standing in front of Yawnghwe’s paintings at the Biennale, looking at diagrams that attempted to capture complicated networks of political history.

Then we began talking with Philipp. The conversation wandered from the paintings to Notion, then to Luhmann, Blumenberg, and the Zettelkasten.

We entered the new term into Scrapbook.

Later, we asked Scrapbook where we had encountered related ideas before.

The assistant (looking only at our data) reached backward through the collection and returned with a small intellectual family tree: the cabinet of curiosities, Vannevar Bush’s memex, the Microsoft Research project MyLifeBits, and our own earlier attempts to describe Scrapbook. All of these are detailed entries in Scrapbook.

We had not filed those older notes under Zettelkasten because we had not yet learned the word. But there they were related, waiting patiently in digital drawers.

The relationship is not a clean historical progression. The Zettelkasten predates several of the digital projects. It is better to think of these as overlapping attempts to solve related problems:

Cabinet of curiosities
A personal collection of objects and fragments chosen because they matter to the collector.

Zettelkasten
A network of linked notes designed not only to preserve ideas but also to generate new ones.

Memex
Vannevar Bush’s imagined personal archive, navigated through associative trails rather than rigid hierarchies.

MyLifeBits
A digital attempt to capture and connect the documents, images, and other traces of a life.

Scrapbook
Our homegrown combination of archive, journal, database, photo collection, linked notes, and now LLM-assisted retrieval.

The amusing part is that the Scrapbook assistant surfaced this connection by behaving in a way that seemed suspiciously close to the point of a Zettelkasten. It returned a set of old notes in a new combination and helped us see an argument that had been taking shape without us noticing it.

We discovered the Zettelkasten twice: first through a conversation in Venice and then through Scrapbook’s ability to connect that conversation to older fragments of our own thinking.  

File Under: Tension

Our previous Scrapbook posts reveal two slightly different impulses.

The first is intentional curation. In our earlier post, Seven Laws of Organization and Disorganization, Scrapbook appears as our small rebellion against the chaos of camera rolls, social-media feeds, scattered chats, and cloud-based systems that save everything while making it surprisingly difficult to find anything. Each Scrapbook entry is a deliberate act of remembering.

The second impulse is productive surprise. In our earlier post about Scrapbook as a digital cabinet of curiosities and vademecum, the collection is not valuable only because it is orderly. It is valuable because an old photograph, a stray note, or an observation made during a trip can lead somewhere unexpected.

A Zettelkasten sits between these two impulses.

It requires curation. Notes must be written, linked, numbered, and tended. But it cannot be too tidy. Its usefulness depends on a certain controlled disorder. The point is not merely to place each note in the correct drawer. The point is to create enough trails that an older thought can return in a new context.

Scrapbook has always lived somewhere in this tension. We built it to impose a little order on our lives. However, after many years, we are starting to learn its greatest value may be its ability to return some of the disorder to us in useful forms.

The reward for carefully organizing your life for years is that your filing system could eventually start making suggestions.

File Under: Same Old Problem

We should be clear: we are not claiming to have invented anything. We are not Vannevar Bush, Niklas Luhmann, or Hans Blumenberg. We are two people who save too many digital artifacts and occasionally manage to find them again when we need them.

What struck us about discovering the Zettelkasten was not that we had unknowingly built one. We had not, at least, not in any strict sense. Scrapbook is too sprawling for that: part archive, part database, part journal, part photo album, part cabinet of curiosities, and now part talkative assistant.

What struck us was that we had been dancing around the same problem for years.

How do you collect the fragments of a life without turning them into an inert pile? How do you leave enough trails that one thought can lead back to another? How do you create a system orderly enough to be useful but loose enough to surprise you?

People have been worrying about these questions for a long time, using whatever tools happened to be available to them. Paper slips in boxes. Index cards. Cabinets. Microfilm. Hyperlinks. Databases. Search engines. Now large language models. Technology changes, but the itch remains much the same.

Perhaps the fact that we are so interested in this says something about us. We like collections. We like categories, except when we don't. We like the feeling that a forgotten meal, a half-remembered walk, or an idea scribbled down years ago has not entirely disappeared.

There may also be faint anxiety underneath it all: the suspicion that a life can become inaccessible even to the people who lived it.

This feels especially relevant now because many of us store large portions of our lives inside systems we did not design. Our photographs live in camera rolls and cloud libraries. Our observations sit inside old chats, social-media feeds, and apps we may stop using in three years. These platforms are often very good at saving things. They are also very good at deciding, on our behalf, which things should return.

A phone offers a memory from five years ago because its algorithm has noticed a date, a face, or a location. A social platform resurfaces a post because it expects a reaction. Sometimes the result is delightful. Sometimes it is baffling. But in either case, the editorial decision is not entirely ours. The system channels the story.

Scrapbook is our small attempt to preserve a little more agency. It is not perfect. It still contains unclear notes, missing links, duplicate entries, and photographs we will probably never identify. Its assistant sometimes makes connections that are illuminating and sometimes makes connections that are simply wrong.

But at least it is rummaging through our mess, a mess we chose and can still edit.

And in this case, it did something useful. We encountered the idea of the Zettelkasten in Venice, added it to Scrapbook, and asked a question. Scrapbook reached backward and found a trail we had not quite seen before: cabinets of curiosities, the memex, MyLifeBits, our own old notes about organization, and the system itself.

The question is no longer whether we can save everything. We more or less can. The harder question is whether we will still have a say in how our own stories are assembled, connected, and returned to us. A Zettelkasten is one answer. Scrapbook is our imperfect answer. At the very least, we would rather do some of the remembering ourselves.