A living implementation manual
The Antinet, answered in one place
Running an Antinet Zettelkasten raises practical questions that most sources either skip or answer in passing, scattered across a dozen half-agreeing posts. This site answers them from a worked implementation: a complete numbering scheme, applied at full scale, with the reasoning left in.
What is here
The taxonomy is published in two tiers, and the split is the thing to notice first: a canonical list anyone can adopt whole, and one filer's own rows kept off it. The digits are laid out so the second can grow for decades without moving anything in the first.
Filing rules
How an address is computed, and the one decision you make every time you file: does this card continue the one in my hand, or dig into it?
Start here if you have a card and nowhere to put it.
The core disciplines
46 disciplines across five drawers, each with a scope note. The canonical list — nothing in it depends on whose card box it is, so it can be adopted whole.
Start here if you are building the skeleton of a new Antinet.
Extending the core
How to use that list as it is, and how to earn a row of your own: the units digit, the three-card test, the scope-note recipe, and what must never be renumbered.
Start here if the list is missing something you care about.
My extensions
The 5 sub-disciplines my own cards paid for, each with the card that would not file anywhere else. A worked example of the method, not an addition to the list.
Start here if you want to see the method actually applied.
Find the discipline
Four questions, and the one rule that settles most ties: mechanism files with the science, action files with the practice.
Start here if you have a card and two disciplines both look right.
The numbered outline
All 2,576 addresses of the source outline, mapped onto the disciplines. The scheme at full scale, and the evidence the table covers the field.
Start here if you want to stress-test the scheme.
Hub cards
What to do when your interests cut across the numbering — which they will, because an interest is a practice and the table is made of fields of study.
Start here once you have enough cards to lose one.
If you arrived with a question
- Can four digits really hold everything?
- What number does this card get?
- Two disciplines both fit — which do I pick?
- How do I file a card between two others?
- The list has nothing for what I care about
- When have I earned a new discipline?
- What if my topic is not a discipline?
- Is any of this list just your preferences?
The one idea to take away
The four digits are the classification. Everything after the slash is position, not meaning.
Which means the branch never has to be correct — only unique and stable. Almost every difficulty people report with a numbered Zettelkasten comes from trying to make the address carry meaning it was never built to hold. The number's job is to be a pointer other cards can rely on forever. Finding things is a different job, done by hub cards and a keyword index.
The worked example numbers an outline of academic disciplines, but the scheme is not about academia — it is a demonstration at a scale large enough to break a system that does not work. Your own Antinet will file mostly your own thinking, branching off these anchors.