Nice to see more literature on HN recently -- Infinite Jest came up yesterday to my delight.

Pale Fire is not my favorite Nabokov novel, largely because it's so successful at getting you in the head of someone who just fully and completely gives you the ick, top to bottom, in nearly every sentence.

This paper is awesome, though. I particularly like that Mr. Rowberry went ahead and graphed a bunch of connections, very cool.

That said, I don't think he mentions and definitely does not dive deeply into a very hypertext-y thing Nabokov did which was to write his novels using 4x6 cards. He reportedly would shuffle them and deal them out during production/finishing of his novels.

It reminds me of Zettelkasten a little, although the shuffling would be verboten to Zettelkasten practitioners. Either way, managing a novel through 4x6 cards makes me think most of his novels would be amenable to some sort of graph analysis / linking.

It's easy to imagine Pale Fire written this way, but I have a hard time imagining say Ada or Ardor written this way, I think largely because it's so long, but also because the scenes themselves are longer than I imagine can be written on notecards. But, maybe he used them for key points, images, scene goals.. lots of possibilities.

Shuffling zk (Zettelkasten) cards is just fine. [1] The meaning of a note is largely determined by its connections, and so approaching a note through a different set of connections gives it a different meaning. Finding new paths uncovers new meanings, which is at least one of the zk points. Shuffling cards is one way you might find new paths.

[1] If you have physical cards you are destroying the default hierarchical path if you shuffle them and that could be a pain in arse to reconstruct, and your ability to find a note with physical cards also depends on the hierarchy. Digital cards have different problems.

Ryan Holiday shows his index card system in a few videos, including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk

I also often think of the passage from Pirsig's Lila where his box of index cards gets upended upon return from the bar.