Welcome to this shorter reflection on our most recent project Fear Factor. Building off of the recent Manhattan Project² we completed earlier in the year, this project went deeper into the Cold War focusing on how fear has shaped politics, culture, and society.
This project consisted of two main parts; The Zettlekasten which is a new personal knowledge program, and the actual product, but I’ll get to that later.
First, the Zettlekasten which is a system that helps you organize your thoughts and ideas in a way that allows you to easily make connections and recall past knowledge. It includes fleeting notes, which are short observations captured in the moment, literature notes which are more formal notes about a text, and permanent notes which are standalone ideas that are derived from multiple different sources.
While it was a bit confusing at first, I do understand the value of the system. Having permanent notes as a portal that links to all of the knowledge is a really good way of keeping notes sorted, as it prevents them from being one-off notes that you will never look at again. We practiced using this system over a couple of weeks with multiple different texts, letting us get familiar with the new format.
💡Permanent Notes:
🕯️Literature Notes:
Now, it was time to use this knowledge to create a final product that answers the driving question, “How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?”. For this, we created our own driving question, which ended up being “Is fear necessary to drive technological advancement?”, as well as a format for our project. The format that most stood out to me was creating a small museum-like exhibit, as it’s something unique that we haven’t done much of, unlike a video essay.
After doing some research, I found this format that I liked:
So I used it as inspiration for the final product which you can see here:
In terms of using the Zettlekasten for the final project, it proved useful but I wasn’t able to use it to its full capacity.
During my research, I made around 5 different literature notes of my research. This research went all over the place, as I went down different rabbit holes trying to figure out what I was doing. Using the Zettlekasten I was able to make links between all these notes, making it easier to fit them all into the final piece. In the end project, I was able to incorporate all the knowledge I gained from this research, largely in part in making links between different literature notes.
What I wasn’t able to accomplish was bringing in some of the knowledge in class that we were accumulating for the first couple of weeks. While the in-class knowledge was great as context and background knowledge, it mainly acted as a launchpad into more in-depth research, but I’m sure there are some connections left that I didn’t make.
I tend to struggle with open-ended projects, and this one was no different. That along with some external factors that brought my motivation way down made finishing this project extremely difficult
Of course, we did make a project outline for ourselves, which I do think under normal circumstances was quite well thought out, leaving just enough time to get everything done. However in this case, I still lost a lot of time at the beginning of the project that I had to slowly make up for it at the end. Obviously, this affected how the final project turned out, which could have greatly benefited from an extra weekend of work.
By the end, my feelings on this project are mixed. On one hand, the final product does look quite good, and I like the idea of the Zettlekasten system. On the other hand, the museum could have taken a bit more time to revise and polish. as well as the quality of my Zettlekastening took a hit as I got more confused with the system the deeper I went into an actual project scenario. In general, there were a ton of factors both external and inside this project that were going on, so while it might not be perfect I’m happy I got it as far as I did.
See you next time,
Nolan