I used to be a champion of atomism, even before PKM influencers made it a thing. Chopping things up in order for the machine to have more interstices to insert its superior connective tissue is precisely what I used to promote. But when I put that ideal into practice, it nearly destroyed me. And I’m still suffering from that lifestyle choice today.
In 2008, I had large swathes of text written for my dissertation. I read an article in NYT (or somewhere) by a guy who used DT to write his MLK biography. So I bought DT Pro and wrote a script that chopped up all my MS Word documents at their headings, made groups with the heading names, and placed the cut subsections inside, and converted them to RTF so I could edit them inside DT.
“Now all things are broken into topical bits!” I thought. “Now I can let DT’s AI work its magic and resynthesize everything better than it was before, like that MLK guy.”
It was a disaster, of course. The synthesis under the See Also function and the synthesis of contiguous paragraphs in good writing are different things.
So now I have PTSD about atomic notes and the whole Zettlekasten fad.
I know what you’re thinking. “You dumbass. The whole Tinderbox marketing crap about letting structure emerge organically blah blah is only meant for people whose work is already at the “jumble of disconnected bits” phase. You should have used DT’s AI relationship-finding See Also & Classify powers only at the early stage, and only if you’re someone who works by taking a small note, clearing your memory, writing another small note, clearing you memory again, and so on.”
Yeah, you’re probably right.
But consider this (with an eye to deriving a general principle, what we here in Tübingen call an allgemeines Prinzip): A single chapter file that contains 20 sections in their original order contains more information than a folder with 20 files. That information is their order.
Isn’t it better to access the text you need AND be able to see that accessed text in its original context?
P.S. — I think this whole atomism fantasy needs some serious research and debate. In practice, a strict folder hierarchy confronting me and coercing me into creating my notes in the right folder from the start is the most helpful thing the computer screen can do for me while I write. But I still keep trying the Zettlekasten/links-only thing anyway, because it sounds so exciting on paper.