http://messnerenglish.weebly.com/who-uses-a-writers-notebook.html
Example of a teacher using the commonplace book tradition within her class, though she frames it as a "writer's notebook". I like the way she uses examples of cultural figures who are doing this same sort of pattern.
Of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness to the flesh. -Ecc. 12:12
see also: https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/12-12.htm
Ecclesiastes 12:12
when Britannica conducted followup research on whether or not the books were actually being read, they found that buyers who really read the books were the exception. The two largest sub-categories among buyers who were more likely to have read the books were housewives and men trained in some sort of technical profession.
Research by Britannica (source?) indicated that the Great Books of the Western World sold well but were not often read.
Link to: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Owen Gingerich Copernicus
certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.
Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?
Are we training thinkers or doers?
It would lack a unique personality or an “alter ego,” which is what Luhmann’s system aimed to create. (9)
Is there evidence that Luhmann's system aimed to create anything from the start in a sort of autopoietic sense? Or is it (more likely) the case that Luhmann saw this sort of "alter ego" emerging over time and described it after-the-fact?
Based on his experiences and note takers and zettelkasten users might expect this outcome now.
Are there examples of prior commonplace book users or note takers seeing or describing this sort of experience in the historical record?
Related to this is the idea that a reader might have a conversation with another author by reading and writing their own notes from a particular text.
The only real difference here is that one's notes and the ability to link them to other ideas or topical headings in a commonplace book or zettelkasten means that the reader/writer has an infinitely growable perfect memory.
https://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/the-scope-and-nature-of-darwins-commonplace-book/
Erasmus Darwin's commonplace book
It is one of the version(s?) published by John Bell based on John Locke's method and is a quarto volume bound in vellum with about 300 sheets of fine paper.
Blank pages 1 to 160 were numbered and filled by Darwin in his own hand with 136 entries. The book was started in 1776 and continued until 1787. Presumably Darwin had a previous commonplace book, but it has not been found and this version doesn't have any experiments prior to 1776, though there are indications that some material has been transferred from another source.
The book contains material on medical records, scientific matters, mechanical and industrial improvements, and inventions.
The provenance of Erasmus Darwin's seems to have it pass through is widow Elizabeth who added some family history to it. It passed through to her son and other descendants who added entries primarily of family related topics. Leonard Darwin (1850-1943), the last surviving son of Charles Darwin gave it to Down House, Kent from whence it was loaned to Erasmus Darwin House in 1999.
Mortimer J. Adler's slip box collection (Photo of him holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.)
Though if we roughly estimate this collection at 1000 cards per box with roughly 76 boxes potentially present, the 76,000 cards are still shy of Luhmann's collection. It'll take some hunting thigs down, but as Adler suggests that people write their notes in their books, which he would have likely done, then this collection isn't necessarily his own. I suspect, but don't yet have definitive proof, that it was created as a group effort for the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World and its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWkwOefBPZY
Some of the basic outline of this looks like OER (Open Educational Resources) and its "five Rs": Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and/or Redistribute content. (To which I've already suggested the sixth: Request update (or revision control).
Some of this is similar to:
The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb [Tantek Çelik](http://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb110
Idea of collections of learning as collections or "playlists" or "readlists". Similar to the old tool Readlist which bundled articles into books relatively easily. See also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/26/indieweb-readlists-tools-and-brainstorming/
Use of Wiki version histories
Some of this has the form of a Wiki but with smaller nuggets of information (sort of like Tiddlywiki perhaps, which also allows for creating custom orderings of things which had specific URLs for displaying and sharing them.) The Zettelkasten idea has some of this embedded into it. Shared zettelkasten could be an interesting thing.
Data is the new soil. A way to reframe "data is the new oil" but as a part of the commons. This fits well into the gardens and streams metaphor.
Jerry, have you seen Matt Ridley's work on Ideas Have Sex? https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex Of course you have: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/3e2c5c75-fc49-0688-f455-6de58e4487f1/attachments/8aab91d4-5fc8-93fe-7850-d6fa828c10a9
I've heard Jerry mention the idea of "crystallization of knowledge" before. How can we concretely link this version with Cesar Hidalgo's work, esp. Why Information Grows.
Cross reference Jerry's Brain: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/4bfe6526-9884-4b6d-9548-23659da7811e/notes
Perhaps it may be helpful to dramatically reframe the question of how to keep a zettelkasten? One page blog posts from people who've only recently seen the idea and are synopsizing it without a year or more practice themselves are highly confusing at best. Can I write something we don't see enough of in spaces relating to zettelkasten? Perhaps we should briefly consider the intellectual predecessor of the slip box?
Start out by forgetting zettelkasten exist. Instead read about what a commonplace book is and how that (simpler) form of note taking works. This short article outlined as a class assignment is a fascinating way to start and has some illustrative examples: https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_. If you're a writer, researcher, or journalist, perhaps Steven Johnson's perspective may be interesting to you instead: https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/the-glass-box-and-the-commonplace-book-639b16c4f3bb
Collect interesting passages, quotes, and ideas as you read. Keep them in a notebook and call it your commonplace book. If you like call these your "fleeting notes" as some do.
As you do this, start building an index of subject headings for your ideas, perhaps using John Locke's method (see: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685).
Once you've got this, you've really mastered the majority of what a zettelkasten is and have a powerful tool at your disposal. If you feel it's useful, you can add a few more tools and variations to your set up.
Next instead of keeping the ideas in a notebook, put them on index cards so that they're easier to sort through, move around, and re-arrange. This particularly useful if you want to use them to create an outline of your ideas for writing something with them.
Next, maybe keep some index cards that have the references and bibliographies from which your excerpting and note taking comes from. Link these bibliographical cards to the cards with your content.
As you go through your notes, ideas, and excerpts, maybe you want to further refine them? Write them out in your own words. Improve their clarity, so that when you go to re-use them, you can simply "excerpt" material you've already written for yourself and you're not plagiarizing others. You can call these improved notes, as some do either "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes".
Perhaps you're looking for more creativity, serendipity, and organic surprise in your system? Next you can link individual notes together. In a paper system you can do this by following one note with another or writing addresses on each card and using that addressing system to link them, but in a digital environment you can link one note to many multiple others that are related. If you're not sure where to start here, look back to your subject headings and pull out cards related to broad categories. Some things will obviously fit more closely than others, so be more selective and only link ideas that are more intimately connected than just the subject heading you've used.
Now when you want to write or create something new on a particular topic, ask your slip box a question and attempt to answer it by consulting your index. Find cards related to the topic, pull out those and place them in a useful order to create an outline perhaps using the cross links that already exist. (You've done that linking work as you went, so why not use it to make things easier now?) Copy the contents into a document and begin editing.
Beyond the first few steps, you're really just creating additional complexity to a system to increase the combinatorial complexity of juxtaposed ideas that you could potentially pull back out of your system for writing more interesting text and generating new ideas. Some people may neither want nor need this sort of complexity in their working lives. If you don't need it, then just keep a simple commonplace book (or commonplace card file) to remind you of the interesting ideas and inspirations you've seen and could potentially reuse throughout your life.
The benefit of this method is that beyond creating your index, you'll always have something useful even if you abandon things later on and quit refining it. If you do go all the way, concentrate on writing out just two short solid ideas every day (Luhmann averaged about 6 per day and Roland Barthes averaged 1 and change). Do it until you have between 500 and 1000 cards (based on some surveys and anecdotal evidence), and you should begin seeing some serendipitous and intriguing results as you use your system for your writing.
We should acknowledge that that (visual) artists and musicians might also keep commonplaces and zettelkasten. As an example, Eminem keeps a zettelkasten, but it is so minimal that it is literally just a box and slips of paper with no apparent organization beyond this. If this fits your style and you don't get any value out of having cards with locators like 3a4b/65m1, then don't do that useless work. Make sure your system is working for you and you're not working for your system.
Sadly, it's generally difficult to find a single blog post that can accurately define what a zettelkasten is, how it's structured, how it works, and why one would want one much less what one should expect from it. Sonke Ahrens does a reasonably good job, but his explanation is an entire book. Hopefully this distillation will get you moving in a positive direction for having a useful daily practice, but without an excessive amount of work. Once you've been at it a while, then start looking at Ahrens and others to refine things for your personal preferences and creative needs.
The addressing system that many digital note taking systems offer is reminiscent of Luhmann's paper system where it served a particular use. Many might ask themselves if they really need this functionality in digital contexts where text search and other affordances can be more directly useful.
Frequently missed by many, perhaps because they're befuddled by the complex branching numbering system which gets more publicity, Luhmann's paper-based system had a highly useful and simple subject heading index (see: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V, for example) which can be replicated using either #tags or [[wikilinks]] within tools like Obsidian. Of course having an index doesn't preclude the incredible usefulness of directly linking one idea to potentially multiple others in some branching tree-like or network structure.
Note that one highly valuable feature of Luhmann's paper version was that the totality of cards were linked to a minimum of at least one other card by the default that they were placed into the file itself. Those putting notes into Obsidian often place them into their system as singlet, un-linked notes as a default, and this can lead to problems down the road. However this can be mitigated by utilizing topical or subject headings on individual cards which allows for searching on a heading and then cross-linking individual ideas as appropriate.
As an example, because two cards may be tagged with "archaeology" doesn't necessarily mean they're closely related as ideas. This tends to decrease in likelihood if one is an archaeologist and a large proportion of cards might contain that tag, but will simultaneously create more value over time as generic tags increase in number but the specific ideas cross link in small numbers. Similarly as one delves more deeply into archaeology, one will also come up with more granular and useful sub-tags (like Zooarcheology, Paleobotany, Archeopedology, Forensic Archeology, Archeoastronomy, Geoarcheology, etc.) as their knowledge in sub areas increases.
Concretely, one might expect that the subject heading "sociology" would be nearly useless to Luhmann as that was the overarching topic of both of his zettelkästen (I & II), whereas "Autonomie" was much more specific and useful for cross linking a smaller handful of potentially related ideas in the future.
Looking beyond Luhmann can be highly helpful in designing and using one's own system. I'd recommend taking a look at John Locke's work on indexing (1685) (https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685 is an interesting source, though you're obviously applying it to (digital) cards and not a notebook) or Ross Ashby's hybrid notebook/index card system which is also available online (http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html) as an example.
Another helpful tip some are sure to appreciate in systems that have an auto-complete function is simply starting to write a wikilink with various related subject heading words that may appear within your system. You'll then be presented with potential options of things to link to serendipitously that you may not have otherwise considered. Within a digital zettelkasten, the popularly used DYAC (Damn You Auto Complete) may turn into Bless You Auto Complete.
Are there examples of people using The Brain in public as more extensive commonplace books or zettelkasten?
A fantastic example of an extensive mind map from Jerry Michalski using The Brain.
There are lots of interesting links and resources, but on the whole
How many of the nodes actually have specific notes, explicit ideas, annotations, or excerpts within them?
Without these, it's an interesting map and provides some broad context, but removes local specific context of who Jerry is and how he explicitly thinks. One can review the overarching parts to extract what his biases may be based on availability heuristics, but in areas of conflicting ideas which have relatively equal numbers of links within a particular area, one may not be able to discern arguments from each other.
Still a fascinating start and something not commonly seen in the broader literature.
I'll also note that even in a small sample of one video call with Jerry sharing his screen while we talked about a broad sub-topic it's interesting to see his prior contexts as we conversed. I've only ever had similar experiences with Bill Seitz who regularly drops links to his wiki pages in this sort of way or Kevin Marks (usually in text chat contexts and less frequently in video calls/conversations) who drops links to his extensive blogging history which also serves to add his prior thoughts and contextualizations.
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/v48una/randomly_found_out_a_friend_of_mine_uses_note/
Example of a card index note taking method in the wild. Sounds a bit more like a commonplace book rather than a highly organized zettelkasten.
As told in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman byJames Gleick
Forte cleverly combines a story about Feynman from Genius with a quote about Feynman's 12 favorite problems from a piece by Rota. Did they both appear in Gleick's Genius together and Forte quoted them separately, or did he actively use his commonplace to do the juxtaposition for him and thus create a nice juxtaposition himself or was it Gleick's juxtaposition?
The answer will reveal whether Forte is actively using his system for creative and productive work or if the practice is Gleick's.
Songwriters areknown for compiling “hook books” full of lyrics and musical riffs theymay want to use in future songs. Software engineers build “codelibraries” so useful bits of code are easy to access. Lawyers keep“case files” with details from past cases they might want to refer to inthe future. Marketers and advertisers maintain “swipe files” withexamples of compelling ads they might want to draw from
Nice list of custom names for area specific commonplaces.
digital, we can supercharge these timelessbenefits with the incredible capabilities of technology—searching,sharing, backups, editing, linking, syncing between devices, andmany others
List of some affordance of digital note taking over handwriting: * search * sharing * backups (copies) * editing * linking (automatic?) * syncing to multiple spaces for ease of use
American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger oncewrote on the subject of “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’sthat I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledgeabout that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words,[but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”7
7 Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 421.
relate this to Eminem's "stacking ammo".
There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a SecondBrain to perform for us:1. Making our ideas concrete.2. Revealing new associations between ideas.3. Incubating our ideas over time.4. Sharpening our unique perspectives.
Does the system really do each of these? Writing things down for our future selves is the thing that makes ideas concrete, not the system itself. Most notebooks don't reveal new associations, we actively have to do that ourselves via memory or through active search and linking within the system itself. The system may help, but it doesn't automatically create associations nor reveal them. By keeping our ideas in one place they do incubate to some extent, but isn't the real incubation taking place in a diffuse way in our minds to come out later?
your Second Brain is a privateknowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning andgrowth, not just a single use case
Based on Tiago Forte's definition of a second brain the primary distinction from a commonplace book is solely that it is digital.
Note here that he explicitly defines a second brain as being private. Historically commonplace books were private affairs though there are examples of them being shared from person to person as well as examples that have been printed.
This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain
Tiago Forte directly equates a "digital commonplace book" with his concept of a "Second Brain" in his book Building a Second Brain.
Why create a new "marketing term" for something that should literally be commonplace!
Popularized in a previous period of information overload, theIndustrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies, the commonplace book was more than a diary or journalof personal reflections
Commonplace books were popularized in the late 1400s/early 1500s in handbooks by Desiderius Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, Rudolphus Agricola, and others along with the rise and accessibility of printed books.
Would have been nice to have some more background and history on their development and evolution. Mentions of florilegia, vade mecum, others perhaps? Other cultures?
I had discovered somethingvery special
Notice the creation myth being born here? Does he really believe that no one has noticed this before?
What about all the handbook writers who encouraged commonplacing in the 1500s, much less their predecessors?
I’ve spent years studying how prolific writers, artists, and thinkersof the past managed their creative process. I’ve spent countlesshours researching how human beings can use technology to extendand enhance our natural cognitive abilities. I’ve personally
experimented with every tool, trick, and technique available today for making sense of information. This book distills the very best insights I’ve discovered from teaching thousands of people around the world how to realize the potential of their ideas.
All this work just for this? When some basic reading of historical note taking, information management, and intellectual history would have saved him the time and effort? Looking through the references I'm not seeing much before even 2010, so it seems as if he's spent most of his time reinventing the wheel.
Now, this eye-opening and accessible guide shows how you caneasily create your own personal system for knowledge management,otherwise known as a Second Brain.
Marketing speech to convert an old idea (commonplacing) into a new siloed service one needs to pay for.
A revolutionary approach to enhancing productivity,creating flow, and vastly increasing your ability tocapture, remember, and benefit from the unprecedentedamount of information all around us.
Some great marketing copy, but I'm anticipating a book that is going to lay out some general techniques that go under the topic of commonplace book, a concept that goes back over 2,000 years. This is the opposite of revolutionary.
Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Atria Books, 2022. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Building-a-Second-Brain/Tiago-Forte/9781982167387.
“What does one do with what has been written?” Niklas Luhmann asks: “To be sure,one will initially produce mostly waste. But we have been raised such that we expectsomething useful from our activities or otherwise quickly lose heart. Thus, one shouldconsider whether and how to process the notes so that they are available for later access,or at least provide such a comforting illusion.”
"To be sure, one will initially produce mostly waste." -Niklas Luhmann
How true!!! I see many people with this initial problem and not an insignificant few give up entirely because of this.
Somewhere in Stuttgart, 1785: Still in high school, a fifteen-year-old reader begins towrite on loose sheets of paper with order, diligence, and discretion: “In his reading, heapproached works in the following way: everything that seemed noteworthy to him—and what didn’t!—he wrote on a single sheet, which he labeled above with the generalheading under which the particular content should be subsumed. In the middle of theupper edge, he then wrote the keyword of the article in large letters, frequently inFraktur. He organized the sheets themselves again according to the alphabet, and dueto this simple mechanism, he was always ready to use his excerpts at any moment.” 1With each of his alphabetized notes, the young reader established a new address thatwould henceforth constitute the site for the concepts upon which his future activitiesas philosopher and scholar would be based.
Markus Krajewski indicates here that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) kept a zettelkasten, though from the sound of it, his sheets, organized by head words have more of a ring of commonplace book.
ooks Are Feminist
Feminism & Comic Books
Right now, it’s most prominently in my comic books. I don’t want to blow the story, but basically one of the main threads is a revolution launched against the main character.
Feminism & Comic Books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_book
Found looking for information about the tradition of birthday books.
Danzico, Liz. “Between the Lines: The Social Life of Marginalia.” Interactions 18, no. 3 (May 2011): 12–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/1962438.1962443.
A short synopsis article about marginalia with some simple questions. She's read a fair amount in the space from the 2010s given references, but little I hadn't encountered before. The Robin Sloan tidbit was interesting as well as the etymology of marginalia, though these will need better references.
Even if we can capture patterns and overcome sharing, we might come back to consider the commonplace book.
How cool would it be if we could aggregate old commonplace books to create indicators of how often older books were not only read, but which annotations resonated with their readers during subsequent periods of history and overlay them in some visual way? Something like a historical version of Amazon Kindle's indicators that a certain number of readers have highlighted a particular sentence of a book.
https://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/index.htm
A great example of an online commonplace book prominently featuring quotes with an index featuring authors, titles, categories, and even translators. Even more interesting, it looks like it's hand built using a large table.
Toward the end of the 18th century English publisher John Bell published notebooks entitled Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” These included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”
At the end of the 18th century, John Bell (1745–1831), an English publisher published notebooks with the title Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke. The notebooks commonly included 550 pages, of which eight pages included instructions on John Locke's indexing method.
Link to: - Didn't Erasmus Darwin use one of these?!
Ideally, skilled readers organized notes into personal “arks of study,” or data chests. Vincent Placcius’s De arte excerpendi contains an engraving of a note cabinet, or scrinia literaria, in which notes are attached to hooks and hung on bars according to thematic organization, as well as various drawers for the storage of note paper, hooks, and possibly writing supplies. Both Placcius and later Leibniz built such contraptions, though none survives today. While these organizational tools cannot be directly linked to modern computers, it is difficult not to compare them. Placcius’s design looks strikingly like the old punch-card computation machines that date from the 1880s, and the first mainframes, such as the 1962 IBM 7090.
"arks of study" being used as early data chests or stores is a fascinating conceptualization
As John Dickerson recently put it on Slate, describing his attempt to annotate books on an iPad: “It’s like eating candy through a wrapper.”
[[similies]]
The aim of these books wasn’t regurgitation but rather combinatorial creativity. People were encouraged to improvise on themes and topics. Gathering raw material alone — in this case, information — is not enough. We must transform it into something new. It is in this light that Seneca advised copying the bee and Einstein advised combinatorial play.
I was really hoping for so much more in this essay on the combinatorial creativity, espcially since the author threw the idea into the title. The real meat must be in the two linked articles about Seneca and Einstein.
There is a slight mention of combinatorics in the justaposition of pieces within one's commonplace book, and a mention that these books may date back to the 12th century where they were probably more influenced by the combinatoric creativity of Raymond Lull. It's still an open question for me just how far back the idea of commonplaces goes as well as how far back Lull's combinatoric pieces go...
The last element in his file system was an index, from which hewould refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entrypoint into a line of thought or topic.
Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).
Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.
This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.
are there others? should they be broken up differently?
And yes, some add-ons exist, but I just wish the feature was native to the browser. And I do not want to rely on a third party service. My quotes are mine only and should not necessary be shared with a server on someone's else machine.
Ownership of the data is important. One could certainly set up their own Hypothes.is server if they liked.
I personally take the data from my own Hypothes.is account and dump it into my local Obsidian.md vault for saving, crosslinking, and further thought.
During his college studies, he kept notebooks labeled "The Mind," "Natural Science" (containing a discussion of the atomic theory), "The Scriptures" and "Miscellanies," had a grand plan for a work on natural and mental philosophy, and drew up rules for its composition.[9]
Commonplace Books, Quotation and Misquotation Sources, Researching Quotes Sources for good quotations and for researching questionable quotes.
A wonderful resource of quotation related material online.
This "commonplace book" is a collection of personally chosen quotations. This is not really a "quotations" site like so many on the web. Rather, it is words I save as I read. I give an accurate citation whenever I can.
https://3stages.org/quotes/index.html
I thought I'd bookmarked this before, but apparently not in my notebook. Example of an explicit online commonplace book, primarily with quotes from J. Jacobs' reading.
What's your opinion on the note card system? Do you personally use it? .t3_ugqnle._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; }
For commonplace items, I've found notebooks with good indices more valuable. Note cards are better if you're taking atomic notes that you plan on actively reusing in your writing work which is more of a zettelkasten feature/functionality cards are easier to move around, re-arrange, and create outlines for your writing when you get to that point. Historically it was the ability to re-arrange and reuse one's commonplace items that helped to spawn and popularize the idea of zettelkasten, which are often more frequently used by writers, researchers, and academics for creating new content. Historically it was the ability to re-arrange and reuse one's commonplace items that helped to spawn and popularize the idea of zettelkasten, which are often more frequently used by writers, researchers, and academics for creating new content.
Some of the difference can be personal choice, practicality, ease-of-use, and the functionality you hope to get out of one method or the other. Honestly there's no reason you couldn't do both if you chose, but it may help to have a common index which will allow you to search for and find things you need. A set of useful historical examples can be found in the mid-twentieth century comedians including Bob Hope (pages he kept in files), Phyllis Diller (index cards), Joan Rivers (index cards), and actor/politician Ronald Reagan who maintained what some might call a commonplace book of quotes which he kept on index cards, but held in a notebook-like binder similar to a photo album with pages that he could place the cards in, but still allow him to move them around (both from slot to slot, or move whole pages at a time). The loosest system I've yet seen is that of Eminem who kept ideas and lyrics written on hotel stationery or random slips of paper which he kept wholly unorganized and unindexed in a cardboard box in a method he called "stacking ammo." Do what you think will work best for you and try it out for a while. You can always change methods later on if your needs change.
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. -- Umberto Eco. Foucault's Pendulum p. 190.
This is a stunning quote with respect to the idea of note taking and creating connections between pieces of information or knowledge.
It's highlighted to an even greater degree that this quote appears in someone's online digital commonplace book!
Many writers have devised lots of little systems, and the fact that everyone into PKM mentions this one guy supports my argument. What percentage of history's greatest and most prolific writers did not use a Zettelkasten? More than 99%, probably. Luhmann is an exception that proves the rule.
There is a heavy availability heuristic at play here. Most people in the recent/modern PKM space are enamored with the idea of zettelkasten and no one (or very few) have delved in more deeply to the history to uncover more than Luhmann. There definitely are many, many more. If we expand the circle to include looser forms like the commonplace book then we find that nearly every major thinker since the Renaissance kept some sort of note taking system and it's highly likely that their work was heavily influenced by their notes, notebooks, and commonplace books.
Hell, Newton invented the calculus in his waste book, a form of pre-commonplace book from which he apparently never got his temporary notes out into a more personal permanent form.
A short trip to even the scant references on the Wikipedia pages for commonplace book and zettelkasten will reveal a fraction of the extant examples.
This is all too correct. Sadly the older methods for writing, note taking, thinking, and memory have fallen by the wayside, so most literate moderns don't have the tradition most of (elite educated) Western culture has had for the past 2000+ years. The long tradition of commonplace books and their related versions including waste books, florilegium, sudelbücher, scholia, glossae, notebooks, anthologies, sylvae, table books, vade mecum, memoranda books, diaries, miscellanies, pocket books, thesauruses, etc. underlines your thesis well. The Zettelkasten, exactly like almost all of these others, is simply an iteration of the commonplace book instantiated into index card form. One of the reasons that Umberto Eco's advice on writing seems so similar to the zettelkasten method is that he was a medievalist scholar who was aware of these long traditions of writing, note taking, and memory and leveraged these for himself, though likely in a slightly different manner. Would anyone suggest that he didn't have a voluminous output or an outsized impact on society and culture? If one really wants to go crazy on the idea of backlinks and the ideas of creativity and invention, perhaps they ought to brush up on their Catalan and read some Ramon Llull? He was an 11th century philosopher and polymath who spent a lot of time not only memorizing much of his personal knowledge, but who invented combinatorial creative methods for juxtaposing his volumes of information to actively create new ideas. I guarantee no backlinking system held a match to his associative methods. Now if someone wanted to mix some mysticism into the fray, then perhaps there might be a competition... Many who are now writing so positively about Zettelkasten or backlinks are doing so in much the same way that humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon did when writing about and re-popularizing commonplace books in the 1500s. The primary difference being that the chance that they leave as lasting a legacy is much smaller. Worse many of them are crediting Luhmann for the actual invention of the Zettelkasten when his is but one instantiation on a long evolution of many note taking devices over literal millennia. I'm still waiting for folks to spend more time talking about Carl Linnaeus' revolutionary invention and use of the index card. Or John Locke's system for creating a new indexing system for commonplace books. Generally we don't talk about these innovations because their users spent more of their time using their systems to get other more important things done for their legacies. In the end, the message seems clear, anyone can be incredibly productive; most of it boils down to having some sort of system of reading, thinking, note taking, and new production and sticking with it for a while. Have a system; use your system; evolve it slowly to work well for you and the way you think and work.
P.G. Wodehouse
tagged
https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook
IFTTT.com sent out a marketing email today in which one of the five major headlines was "Automated Notebook": "Your Ideas and Inspiration in one place" with a big "Explore" button that goes to https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook
Eddy, Matthew Daniel (anticipated 2022). Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo173084820.html
https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/curating-my-blog-archive/
I like the overall look and effect done here to create a table of contents in WordPress, but it seems like some quirky gymnastics to pull it off. How might this be done in a more straightforward way? Are there any plugins for WordPress that could create a page that keeps the categories and the descriptions? And particularly a page that primarily only shows articles and not other content types?
Link this to my work on my own index at https://boffosocko.com/about/index/
Amanda CAARSON I've been a web developer since 1999, and I've been on the indieweb since 2015. This site is a commonplace book for all my online activity and will eventually be a home for archives of all of my online content.
Example of a personal website indicating that it's a commonplace book. (Highly likely through my own influence.)
OPDS Endpoint: http://www.feedbooks.com/catalog.atom
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/11/19/joan-didion-on-keeping-a-notebook/
A nice little advertisement for Joan Didion's essay "On Keeping a Notebook". Mostly it's pull quotes from the piece without any additional commentary. I've downloaded a copy of the book to read the piece in full myself.
Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
ADD Friendly Ways to Organize your life by Judith Kolberg & Kathleen Nadeau, PhD.
The bookitself participates in the history it recounts: it has a title page, table of contents,footnotes, a bibliography and an index to assist the reader, while the digitalcopy enables the reader to search for individual words and phrases as well asto copy-and-paste without disfiguring a material object.
Some scholars study annotations as part of material culture. Are they leaving out too much by solely studying those physically left in the books about which they were made, or should we instead also be looking at other sources like commonplace books, notebooks, note cards, digital spaces like e-readers that allow annotation, social media where texts are discussed, or even digital marginalia in services like Hypothes.is or Perusall?
Some of these forms of annotation allow a digital version of cut and paste which doesn't cause damage to the original text, which should be thought of as a good thing though it may separate the annotations from the original physical object.
Semantic networks and functions in intelligence.
To add to statistical ML
Innate ...
The easiest and simplest way to get out of a reading slump or to get into reading in the first place is to begin small. Novellas offer (almost) the sumptuousness and holisticness of novels. But they also don’t strain the mind too much because they are quick reads. Here are 10 short and easy to read books that will help beginners start reading. This list of novellas and short novels that are easy to slip into, not just because of their length but also because of the style of writing itself.
https://gobookmart.com/10-short-and-easy-to-read-books-that-will-help-beginners-start-reading/
We all get distracted while reading books. Many of the students will also agree that for them, books – play as a catalyst for the sleep. Here are 10 ways to minimise distractions while reading. Anyone who feels like he or she get distracted often while reading, then these are some sure shot ways to keep distractions to a minimum while reading and enjoy the process in its entirety.
https://gobookmart.com/10-ways-to-minimise-distractions-while-reading/
What makes for a great reading experience? Is it just the number of pages one reads in a day? Or is it something deeper, more intentional, more fulfilling? We believe it is the latter. So, if you are also wondering, how to read books more deeply and intricately? Here’s a list of ways you can get more out of a book you’re reading.
https://gobookmart.com/how-to-read-books-more-deeply-and-intricately/
published under the title‘An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments’, which firstappeared in Le Monde in 1973, Barthes describes the method thatguides his use of index cards:I’m content to read the text in question, in a ratherfetishistic way: writing down certain passages,moments, even words which have the power tomove me. As I go along, I use my cards to writedown quotations, or ideas which come to me, asthey do so, curiously, already in the rhythm of asentence, so that from that moment on, things arealready taking on an existence as writing. (1991:181)
In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.
Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?
Every business person is aware that having a good service or great product offering is not even half the battle. The most flourishing companies are the ones that manage to stand out from the marketing and digital field and receive consistent customer interest and awareness. You can have access to the best products but without an effective marketing strategy, your business will struggle a lot and would not get a chance to stand out. In this article, we are going to read about new marketing books to understand marketing in a different way.
https://gobookmart.com/new-marketing-books-to-understand-marketing-in-a-different-way/
7 Notes could also focus on original thoughts, as in the Pen-sées of Blaise Pascal, the “commonplace book” of George Berkeley, or the Sudel-bücher of Georg Lichtenberg, which were devoted to original reflections ratherthan to excerpts from the writings of other authors.
Examples of notes focusing on one's original ideas and reflections rather than excerpts of others' works.
Francis Bacon explained succinctlythat notes could be made either “by epitome or abridgement” (that is, by sum-marizing the source) or “by heads or commonplaces” (that is, by copying a pas-sage verbatim or nearly so and storing it in a notebook under a commonplaceheading for later retrieval and use). Bacon considered the latter method “of farmore profit and use,” and most note-taking advice focused on this practice of ex-cerpting.46
This quote is worth looking up and checking its context. Particularly I'm interested to know if the purpose of summarizing the source is to check one's understanding of the ideas as is done in the Feynman technique, or if the purpose is a reminder summary of the piece itself?
Link to Ahrens mentions of this technique for checking understanding. (Did he use the phrase Feynman in his text?)
One of his last works, the Aurifodina, “The Mine of All Arts and Sci-ences, or the Habit of Excerpting,” was printed in 1638 (in 2,000 copies) andin another fourteen editions down to 1695 and spawned abridgments in Latin(1658), German (1684), and English.
Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:
Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.
For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?
Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?
One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.
This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.
How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?
Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?
It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.
An eighteenth- century manual of bookkeeping listed three stages ofrecords a merchant should keep: waste book, journal (arranged in systematicorder), and ledger (featuring an index to access all people, places, and merchan-dise)
Early modern scholars referred most often to merchants as exemplars for theirhabit of keeping two notebooks: a daybook (or journal) to record transactionsin the order in which they occurred and a ledger in which these transactionswere sorted into categories, as in double- entry bookkeeping
In addition, FrancisBacon compared one of his notebooks to a “merchant’s waste book, where toenter all manner of remembrance of matter, form, business, study, touching my-self, service, others; either sparsim or in schedules, without any manner of re-straint.”3
Compare this with her paper: Blair, Ann. “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (September 2004): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1086/427303.
Where she footnotes:
Francis Bacon compared one of his notebooks to a merchant’s waste book; see Brian Vickers, introduction to Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers (Oxford, 1996), p. xliii.
and linked note: https://hypothes.is/a/DSCwQjrVEeyv8U-0GOufYQ
During the same period zibaldone designated notebooks kept bywriters, artists, and merchants to record a wide variety of information: outgoingletters, copies of documents, indexes to books, lists of paintings, and excerptscopied from all kinds of texts, including poetry, prose, merchants’ manuals, legalsources, and tables of weights and measures.27
Italian merchants of the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies are known for keeping ricordanze that combined personal and practicalinformation.
Compare this with the waste book tradition in accounting.
But modern note-taking is more idiosyncratic to each note-taker and no longer follows a set of subject headings that pedagogical practicesand printed reference works helped to standardize.
Early modern reference works, handbooks, and pedagogical practices created a sort of standardized set of subject headings amongst note takers.
A similar sort of effort could have been seen in the blogosphere of the early 2000s in which Technorati and their search functionality may have helped to standardize some of these same sorts of taxonomic issues within their product which was widely used at the time.
Referencebooks also typically offered a larger collection of excerpts than most individualscould amass in a lifetime.
This makes me wonder if it would be a useful product to have a highly linked note collection to sell to others in a modern context? It could be done entirely in text files for compatibility with Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. Ideally it would be done in a more commonplace way with quotes and interlinked and could be expanded upon by the purchaser.
Conrad Gesner, for example, observed in his editionof Stobaeus: “I ask you, who of the learned doesn’t either take commonplacenotes or wish they did from their daily reading on moral matters?”1
A complaint more specific to the quantity of books was articulated in 1522 by the jurist Giovanni Nevizzano of Asti (d. 1540) who observed that the great number of available books made it hard to find the books one needed. Proper selection among the many books available was crucial because “if a scholar does not have the books required for his subject, he does not enjoy the privi-leges of a scholar.”20
This same sort of quote is often repeated in the present while vitiating against the corporate publishers who own most of research publishing and charge for it dearly.
The moralist critique of ostentatious book owning articulated by Seneca in the first century CE was at the core of Sebastian Brant’s complaints in his Ship of Fools (1494).19
Compare this idea to the recent descriptions of modern homes using books solely for decoration or simply as "wallpaper".
In this way the pressures of the multitude and diversity of authorita-tive opinion, already articulated in the previous century by Peter Abelard (1079–1142), were heightened by the development of reference books, from indexes and concordances that made originalia searchable and to the large compilations that excerpted and summarized from diverse sources.
Prior to the flourishing of reference materials, Peter Abelard (1079-1142) had articulated the idea of "the multitude and diversity of authoritative opinion" to be found in available material. How was one to decide which authority to believe in a time before the scientific method?
Getting Started in Instructional Technology ResearchFourth Edition by Steven M. Ross and Gary R. Morrison
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/magazine/commonplace-books-recommendation.html
An interesting essay centering the idea of a commonplace book, but without describing a particular use case.
Why did she keep it? How is she actually using it? There is an analogy of it with a diary, but it feels like the writer is keeping one, but not actively using it for anything but nostalgic purposes.
Why not get more out of it?
Nicholson Baker on commonplace books: “My own bristling brain-urchins of worry melt in the strong solvent of other people’s grammar.”
When I lived in Austin, I updated it regularly as I read at my desk; in Brooklyn, where I had no room for a desk, I would take photos of passages in library books and transcribe them later in a coffee shop. These days I live semi-nomadically, without a fixed address, and I email myself lines. Every few months I sift through them and copy the ones that still resonate into my book.
Here's an example of someone using photos on their phone and email in the vein of a waste book.
https://readlists.jim-nielsen.com/
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jim Nielsen</span> in (Re)Introducing Readlists (<time class='dt-published'>03/25/2022 23:09:14</time>)</cite></small>
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/reintroducing-readlists/
Web serendipity has struck again. I was just looking for a tool that would do this very thing and so missed Readlists as a service.
Fun to see Jeremy Keith's book featured here.
this is george have you have you um found that there are people who are natural thinkers like this uh the zettlecaston type thinking the 01:15:45 bottom-up thinking whatever you want to call it have you studied great thinkers and looked at their patterns and seen that they do that or is it all over the place 01:16:00 i i'm not an expert on i i know what i like in in terms of works um 01:16:13 i think there are similarities between the thinkers i read and i believe 01:16:26 they're often systematic and have found a way to deal with complexity to be able to put heterogeneous 01:16:40 ideas different ideas into a coherent theory system and i think the only way to do that 01:16:54 is by having some kind of external um brain or an equivalent of it
George is asking a good question here and one I've even asked myself, but doesn't seem to have spent any time looking at intellectual history.
Almost all great thinkers were not only significant writers as well, but most, at least in Western culture, kept significant notes of their work, had a commonplace book(s), waste books, sudelbücher, zettelkasten, etc.
Of course most were also fairly wealthy and had the free time to be able to do their work which also helped to tip the balance in their favor.
nicholas lerman is a sample of one 01:09:54 and if the zerocarton is a tool for thinking there are all these other thinkers out there who are thinking um and do we know how they're thinking how their 01:10:07 how you know what note systems are they using i'd like to i'd like to be able to place lerman yeah amongst all these others and and sort of in the zerocast and 01:10:23 see what others are doing as well and yeah i mean if there was one project i would have loved to do is going around 01:10:36 asking everyone i whose work i admire how do you do it how do you do it exactly what do you do in the morning how do you sit down how do you digest the books you're reading 01:10:48 um i was obsessed with the idea and it's just because i'm too shy to follow up on that
Some discussion of doing research on zettelkasten methods and workflows.
What do note taking methods and processes look like for individual people?
What questions would one ask for this sort of research in an interview setting (compared to how one would look at extant physical examples in document-based research)? #openquestions
Link this to the work of Earle Havens on commonplace books through portions of history.
Topic A topic was once a spot not a subjecttopic. to ̆p’ı ̆k. n. 1. The subject of a speech, essay, thesis, or discourse. 2. A subject of discussion or con-versation. 3. A subdivision of a theme, thesis, or outline.*With no teleprompter, index cards, or even sheets of paper at their disposal, ancient Greek and Roman orators often had to rely on their memories for holding a great deal of information. Given the limi-tations of memory, the points they chose to make had to be clustered in some meaningful way. A popular and quite reliable method for remembering information was known as loci (see Chapter 9), where loci was Latin for “place.” It involved picking a house you knew well, imagining it in your mind’s eye, and then associating the facts you wanted to recall with specifi c places inside of that house. Using this method, a skillful orator could mentally fi ll up numerous houses with the ideas he needed to recall and then simply “visit” them whenever he spoke about a particular subject. The clusters of informa-tion that speakers used routinely came to be known as commonplaces, loci communes in Latin and koinos topos in Greek. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle referred to them simply as topos, meaning “places.” And that’s how we came to use topic to refer to subject or grouping of information.**
Even in the western tradition, the earliest methods of mnemonics tied ideas to locations, from whence we get the ideas of loci communes (in Latin) and thence commonplaces and commonplace books. The idea of loci communes was koinos topos in Greek from whence we have derived the word 'topic'.
Was this a carryover from other local oral traditions or a new innovation? Given the prevalence of very similar Indigenous methods around the world, it was assuredly not an innovation. Perhaps it was a rediscovery after the loss of some of these traditions locally in societies that were less reliant on orality and moving towards more reliance on literacy for their memories.
Human minds are made of memories, and today those memories have competition. Biological memory capacities are being supplanted, or at least supplemented, by digital ones, as we rely on recording—phone cameras, digital video, speech-to-text—to capture information we’ll need in the future and then rely on those stored recordings to know what happened in the past. Search engines have taken over not only traditional reference materials but also the knowledge base that used to be encoded in our own brains. Google remembers, so we don’t have to. And when we don’t have to, we no longer can. Or can we? Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology offers concise, nontechnical explanations of major principles of memory and attention—concepts that all teachers should know and that can inform how technology is used in their classes. Teachers will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of memory for learning, useful ideas for handling and discussing technology with their students, and an understanding of how memory is changing in our technology-saturated world.
How much history is covered here?
Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?
They get harder to read the longer I wait to transcribe them.
He's using his Field Notes notebooks as waste books and transcribing the important pieces into other places as necessary.
He also indicates that he's taking brief, reminder notes (or fleeting notes) contemporaneously and then expanding upon them later as necessary.
https://book.micro.blog/
Some content from this blog has been copied over to TiddlySpace so I can farm it for ideas and such.
Example of a blog being used as a source of material for creating new ideas.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Learning Commons </span> in Annotating a text - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - LibGuides at Mater Christi College (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 13:46:42</time>)</cite></small>
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Learning Commons </span> in Annotating a text - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - LibGuides at Mater Christi College (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 13:46:42</time>)</cite></small>
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Learning Commons </span> in Annotating a text - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - LibGuides at Mater Christi College (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 13:46:42</time>)</cite></small>
https://bookmarks.reviews/
https://pennmaterialtexts.org/homepage
How awesome looking is this? Note the regular online meetings/presentations and the backlog of videos on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ng6px3fgc4Yjw-en1GcsA
This is a pretty cool looking project for language learning.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Manny Rayner </span> in Manny Rayner’s review of Abécédaire le petit prince | Goodreads (<time class='dt-published'>02/18/2022 11:40:10</time>)</cite></small>
We have been doing some work recently to make LARA support picture-based texts, and this is our first real example: a multimodal French alphabet book based on Le petit prince. If you're a fan of the book and beginner level in French, you might find it fun! Start Chrome or Firefox and go here.
There's a set of 26 pages, one for each letter, and each page comes in three versions. In the Semantic version, you can click on the picture and hear the word spoken in French; hovering gives you a translation. In the Phonetic version, you can hover over the word and spell though it one letter group at a time. Clicking on a letter group will play the sound and show you other words where that sound occurs. In the Examples version, you'll see a French sentence from Le petit prince which uses the word, annotated with audio and translations both for the individual words and for the sentence as a whole.
The screenshot above illustrates. The D word is dessins ("drawings"). This is the Phonetic version: I've just clicked on the letter group in, and it's played the sound /ɛ̃/, the nasalised vowel that this letter group usually represents in French, and shown me that the same sound also occurs in invisible ("invisible") and jardin ("garden"). If you go to the Examples version, you see the sentence Mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau. ("My drawing wasn't supposed to be a hat") from the first chapter of the book.
Comments will be very welcome! We're thinking of doing more of these and want to know where we can improve things.
Together: responsive, inline “autocomplete” powered by an RNN trained on a corpus of old sci-fi stories.
I can't help but think, what if one used their own collected corpus of ideas based on their ever-growing commonplace book to create a text generator? Then by taking notes, highlighting other work, and doing your own work, you're creating a corpus of material that's imminently interesting to you. This also means that by subsuming text over time in making your own notes, the artificial intelligence will more likely also be using your own prior thought patterns to make something that from an information theoretic standpoint look and sound more like you. It would have your "hand" so to speak.
eBook 978-1-952271-05-2 $24.99
because, of course, you've got to read the digital version of this book!
We need to getour thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we canlook at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into alinear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical readerinstantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to callextremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print,perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extremeprofessionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it wastime for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the rightwords during writing requires much more floating attention.
Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.
Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.
Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.
Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.
Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.
Be extra selective withquotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding
what they mean.
When quoting material it should have great phrasing and reasonable stand-alone meaning. Preferably the source or person being quoted should have stature or gravitas with respect to the idea at hand. Quotes should recall the classical idea of sententiae as imagined by Aristotle and Quintilian and seen throughout the commonplace book tradition.
a system is neededto keep track of the ever-increasing pool of information, which allowsone to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim ofgenerating new ideas.
The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.
“ Reports of the destruction of books in transport from Lilienfeld in 1789 are well known. At that time, books were used by the coachmen to patch bad roads. ”
In the late 1700's Vienna there were reports of coachmen using books to patch bad roads.
Sacrilege!
Indeed, the Jose-phinian card index owes its continued use to the failure to achieve a bound
catalog, until a successor card catalog comes along in 1848. Only the<br /> absence of a bound repertory allows the paper slip aggregate to answer all inquiries about a book ’ s whereabouts after 1781. Thus, a failed undertaking tacitly turns into a success story.
The Josephinian card index was created, in part on the ideas of Konrad Gessner's slip method, by accumulating slips which could be rearranged and then copied down permanently. While there was the chance that the original cards could be disordered, the fact that the approximately 300,000 cards in 205 small boxes were estimated to fill 50 to 60 folio volumes with time and expense to print it dissuaded the creation of a long desired compiled book of books. These problems along with the fact that new books being added later was sure to only compound problems of having a single reference. This failure to have a bound catalog of books unwittingly resulted in the success of the index card catalog.
It seems to be the fate of libraries that a particular order always coincides with a director ’ s term of service. As soon as a new director, prefect, or manager takes over, one of the fi rst acts tends to be rejection of the present order in favor of establishing a new, often completely different one, mostly legiti-mized by the allegedly encountered chaos that almost forces reorganiza-tion.
This reorganization of library books and location systems with the change of library directors in the late 1700s sounds similar to the sorts of standards problems today.
You may say that it isn ’ t necessary to read every last book. Well, it ’ s also true that in war you don ’ t have to kill every last soldier, but we still need every one of them. — General Stumm von Bordwehr, in Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities
Transferring my notes from notebooks into nvALT is a process that I always enjoy. When I fill up a physical notebook, I'll go through it, acting as a sort of loose, first filter for the material I’ve accumulated. I’ll cross out a few things that are obviously garbage, but most of my notes make the cut, and I transcribe them into nvALT.When that’s done, I throw away the notebook.
Robin Sloan has a waste book practice where he takes his notes in small Field Note notebooks and transcribes them into nvAlt. When he's done, he throws away the notebook.
Little Free Anti-Racism Library Los Angeles, California 90045USAFind us at 33.9620, -118.4176
In a general sense Cicero contrasted the short-lived memoranda of the merchant with the more carefully kept account book designed as a permanent record.[7]
Cicero (1930). Pro Quinto Roscio comoedo oratio,"The Speeches". Translated by Freese, John Henry. Cambridge, Massachusetts. pp. 278–81.
(Not sure if I had this in my notes already from other reading, but adding again just in case.)
So it was with somewhat mixed feelings that I learned some American high school teachers assign “The Sympathizer” as required reading in their classes. For the most part, I’m delighted. But then I worry: I don’t want to be anyone’s homework. I don’t want my book to be broccoli.
Especially love:
I don’t want to be anyone’s homework. I don't want my book to be broccoli. —Viet Thanh Nguyen
This is an unfortunate side effect of novels assigned for reading in school.
Books can indeed be dangerous. Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.
—Viet Thanh Nguyen
https://smithery.com/2022/01/14/making-the-most-of-moments-that-matter/
A company created a custom commonplace book for attendees of a conference. Not sure how they tummeled people into using them in interesting ways though.
Could also have done something along the lines of a sketchnote process as well. I liked their idea of having stickers to place in these as well, though that's more of a scrapbook process...
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Tom Critchlow </span> in Tom Critchlow on Twitter: "Love this meditation from @willsh on building artefacts, commonplace books, and more: https://t.co/zJmkMcaUN2 (and look at those physical keys they forged for a workshop!!!!)" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>01/22/2022 23:05:44</time>)</cite></small>
In the more recent decades, of course, personal collation of this sort is well supported by digital tools – early blog platforms, Delicious, Tumblr, Pinterest, and so on – and we toyed briefly with the idea of something as a shared digital experience or app.
Indication here of digital platforms like Delicious, Tumblr, and Pinterest standing in for digital commonplace books.
The effect was beautifully suggested by Victor Hugo in a familiar passage in Notre-Dame de Paris (183 1) when the scholar holding his first printed book turns away from his manuscripts, looks a t the cathedral, and says "This will kill that" (Ceci tuera cela). Print also destroyed "the invisible cathedrals of memory." For the printed book made it less nec- essary to shape ideas and things into vivid images and then store them in Memory-places.
In Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) Victor Hugo depicts a scholar holding his first printed book. He turns away from his manuscripts to look at the cathedral and says "This will kill that" (Ceci tuera cela). Similarly the printed book made it far less necessary to store one's knowledge into cathedrals of memory.
https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_IgMVAAAAQAAJ/page/n107/mode/2up
Page 90-91 of De arte excerpendi shows the exact same index scheme for commonplace books suggested by John Locke in 1685 (French) and later .published as A new method of making common-place-books (1706, in English).
He also jotted down, as Johannes Schmidt has found in his research, a few keywords along with the respective page num-bers (in early modern Europe, this excerpting system was called adversaria or lemmata).83
In early modern Europe the system of excerpting from reading material was called adversaria or lemmata.
With respect to the Ark of Studies, for example, Johann Benedict Metzler did not use gratifying words; yet he nonetheless recommended numbering the hooks (aciculas) to which the paper slips should be attached and recording the matching of number and heading in a subject index. In this way, Metzler noted, scholars would not be compelled to leave empty spaces between entries and to recalibrate the entire content any time a new entry (a new commonplace) should be added.65
65 Johann Benedict Metzler, Artificium excerpendi genuinum dictus Die rechte Kunst zu excer-piren (Leipzig, 1709), 23–4; 30; 91–2
Is there really any mathematical difference between alphabetical order and a numerical decimal order? Can't they be shown to be one-to-one and onto?
To a layperson they may seem different...
Placcius recommended considering the first, the second, and the third letters in the words listed in the subject index in order to avoid spending too much time in searching for an entry;
Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 84–5;
Just Christoph Udenius, for example, sug-gested leaving thirty or forty blank pages at the end of a commonplace book to be filled in with a well-made subject index, or devoting a separate in-octavo booklet for this essential task;
Just Christoph Udenius, Excerpendi ratio nova (Nordhausen, 1687), 62–3; Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 84–5; Drexel, Aurifodina, 135.
What earlier suggestions might there have been for creating indices for commonplaces?
Definition of adversaria 1 : commentaries or notes (as on a text or document) 2 : a miscellaneous collection of notes, remarks, or selections : commonplace book
I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.
Interesting that he makes no reference to the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions—particularly because we know he (later?) had an extensive system of index cards.
A few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances.
Adler is analogizing friendship to books here.
Most of the world's great books are available today, in reprint editions.
Published in 1941, this article precedes the beginning of the project of publishing the Great Books of the Western World for Encyclopedia Britannica, so Adler isn't just writing this from a marketing perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
What an awesome little site. Sadly no RSS to make it easy to follow, so bookmarking here.
I like that she's titled her posts feed as a "notebook": https://telepathics.xyz/notebook. There's not enough content here (yet) to make a determination that they're using it as a commonplace book though.
Someone in the IndieWeb chat pointed out an awesome implementation of "stories" she's got on her personal site: https://telepathics.xyz/notes/2020/new-york-city-friends-food-sights/
I particularly also like the layout and presentation of her Social Media Links page which has tags for the types of content as well as indicators for which are no longer active.
This makes me wonder if I could use tags on some of my links to provide CSS styling on them to do the same thing for inactive services?
Reflecting upon Robert Darnton's comment, perhaps my personal reading and writing style is more representative of the seventeenth century than the twentieth or twenty-first. Throughout my career in the antiquarian book trade, which began in the 1960s, I found myself moving between subjects in the course of a day as I catalogued various books in stock, read about other books for sale, or discussed the different interests of clients. With access to the Internet in the 1990s it was, of course, possible to follow-up more efficiently on diverse topics with Internet searches and hyperlinks. The way that HistoryofInformation.com is written, as a series of reading and research notes connected by links and indexed in a database, may be viewed to a certain extent as analogous to the method of maintaining and indexing commonplace books described by Locke.
Jeremy Norman, an antiquarian bookseller, indicates that his website is written in much the same manner as John Locke's commonplace book.
I go through my old posts every day. I know that much – most? – of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.
Cory Doctorow calls his blog and its archives his "outboard brain".
First and foremost, I do it for me. The memex I've created by thinking about and then describing every interesting thing I've encountered is hugely important for how I understand the world. It's the raw material of every novel, article, story and speech I write.
On why Cory Doctorow keeps a digital commonplace book.
My composition is greatly aided both 20 years' worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I've mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily. A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.
Cory Doctorow's commonplace makes it easier to search, quote, and reuse in his process of synthesis.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Philpin</span> in // John Philpin (<time class='dt-published'>01/05/2022 22:55:00</time>)</cite></small>
In this spirit he castigated Alexander Harden as "an enemy of the spirit that was fed by a small mind with a large card index," taking up what appears to have been a common criticism of the author, who because of his style that relied overly much on quotations [Die Fackel, Heft 360-62 (1912)].
Some of this critique relates to my classification about the sorts of notes that one takes. Some are more important or valuable than others.
Some are for recall and later memory, some may be collection of ideas, but the highest seems to be linking different ideas and contexts together to create completely new and innovative ideas. If one is simply collecting sententiae and spewing them back out in reasonable contexts, this isn't as powerful as nurturing one's ideas to have sex.
Francis Bacon, for instance, thought that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."
An interesting classification of books which fits a fair amount of my own views, particularly looking at the difference between fiction, poetry, and non-fiction.
Source?
https://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2020/09/a-book-which-kills.html
A short piece about the book Shadows from the Walls of Death by R. C. Kedzie to highlight arsenic in wallpaper.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Manfred Kuehn</span> in Taking note: Grafton on the Future of Reading (<time class='dt-published'>01/01/2022 12:57:23</time>)</cite></small>
If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.
Early English Books Online offers a hundred thousand titles printed between 1475 and 1700. Massive tomes in Latin and the little pamphlets that poured off the presses during the Puritan revolution—schoolbooks, Jacobean tragedies with prompters’ notes, and political pamphlets by Puritan regicides—are all available to anyone in a major library.
Chadwyck-Healey and Gale, which sell their collections to libraries and universities for substantial fees.
But Google also uses optical character recognition to produce a second version, for its search engine to use, and this double process has some quirks. In a scriptorium lit by the sun, a scribe could mistakenly transcribe a “u” as an “n,” or vice versa. Curiously, the computer makes the same mistake. If you enter qualitas—an important term in medieval philosophy—into Google Book Search, you’ll find almost two thousand appearances. But if you enter “qnalitas” you’ll be rewarded with more than five hundred references that you wouldn’t necessarily have found.
I wonder how much Captcha technology may have helped to remedy this in the intervening years?
Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices.
What was the form of his system? From where did he learn it? What does it show about the state of the art for his time?
Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s “Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings.
Likely from Aurifondina artium et scientiarum omnium excerpendi solerti, omnibus litterarum amantibus monstrata. worldcat
h/t: https://hyp.is/tz3lBmznEeyvEmOX-B5DxQ/infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/11/future-reading-.html
But this is not the main reason. The other three programs try to achieve the connection or linking between different topics or cards (mainly) by assigning keywords. But this is not what Luhmann's approach recommended. While he did have a register of keywords, this was certainly not the most important way of interconnecting his slips. He linked them by direct references (Verweisungen). Any slip could refer directly to the physical and unchanging location of any other slip.
Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten had three different forms of links.
Many note taking systems are relying on the older commonplace book taxonomies and neglect or forego both of the other two sorts of links. While the second can be safely subsumed as a custom, one-time version of the third, the third version is the sort of link which helps to create a lot of direct value within a note taking system as the generic links between broader topic heading names can be washed out over time as the system grows.
Was this last link type included in Konrad Gessner's version? If not, at what point in time did this more specific direct link evolve?
That’s it. That’s the only pro I could think of. What were some cons?• From January 1st, 2021, there was a “judge” behind my head, forming impressions and making “hmmmm” and “ummmm” noises when I picked up a book, failed to read on a consistent, schedule, etc.• I felt as though I could not pick up more difficult books and gain from them, as I felt that any longer and/or more difficult book would throw me off my path. I wanted to do some of the classic “Hard Books” ™ in 2021, and that never happened.• I also started to have the completely irrational thought that it somehow “wouldn’t count” toward the challenge if I just picked up and read something that I enjoyed, but that was immensely short. This included most poetry (though I did read some) and most graphic novels (ditto). This is a damn shame, because I would have loved to delve more into both of these genres, and will be doing so a lot more.
You end up optimizing for the thing that you were measuring.
Mr. Byers coined a term — “book-wrapt” — to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library.
Considering the absence of a systematic order, we must regulate the process of rediscovery of notes, for we cannot rely on our memory of numbers. (The alternation of numbers and alphabetic characters in numbering the slips helps memory and is an optical aid when we search for them, but it is insufficient. Therefore we need a register of keywords that we constantly update.
Luhmann indicated that one must keep a register of keywords to assist in the rediscovery of notes. This had been the standard within the commonplacing tradition for centuries before him. The potential subtle difference is that he seems to place more value on the placement links between cards as well as other specific links between cards over these subject headings.
Is it possible to tell from his system which sets of links were more valuable to him? Were there more of these topical heading links than other non-topical heading links between individual cards?
This looks a lot like Linktree, but for books.
Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives.
The format of many "great books" courses is to help students relate the texts to their own lives, not to have a better understanding of the books or to hone methods of interpreting them.
This isn't too dissimilar to the way that many Protestants are taught to apply the Bible to their daily lives.
Are students mis-applying the great books because they don't understand their original ideas and context the way many religious people do with the Bible?
The idea of the great books emerged at the same time as the modern university. It was promoted by works like Noah Porter’s “Books and Reading: Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them?” (1877) and projects like Charles William Eliot’s fifty-volume Harvard Classics (1909-10). (Porter was president of Yale; Eliot was president of Harvard.) British counterparts included Sir John Lubbock’s “One Hundred Best Books” (1895) and Frederic Farrar’s “Great Books” (1898). None of these was intended for students or scholars. They were for adults who wanted to know what to read for edification and enlightenment, or who wanted to acquire some cultural capital.
Brief history of the "great books".
A potential tool to replace Goodreads.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Kevin Smokler</span> in Kevin Smokler on Twitter: "who else is planning a shift from @goodreads to @thestorygraph in the coming year? Eh, @readandbreathe ?" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>12/13/2021 20:39:28</time>)</cite></small>
In fact, the methodical use of notebooks changed the relationship between natural memory and artificial memory, although contemporaries did not immediately realize it. Historical research supports the idea that what was once perceived as a memory aid was now used as secondary memory.18
During the 16th century there was a transition in educational centers from using the natural and artificial memories to the methodical use of notebooks and commonplace books as a secondary memory saved by means of writing.
This allows people in some sense to "forget" what they've read and learned and be surprised by it again later. They allow themselves to create liminal memories which may be refreshed and brought to the center later. Perhaps there is also some benefit in this liminal memory for allowing ideas to steep on the periphery before using them. Perhaps combinatorial creativity happens unconsciously?
Cross reference: learning research by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski.
Commonplaces were no longer repositories of redundancy, but devices for storing knowledge expansion.
With the invention of the index card and atomic, easily moveable information that can be permuted and re-ordered, the idea of commonplacing doesn't simply highlight and repeat the older wise sayings (sententiae), but allows them to become repositories of new and expanding information. We don't just excerpt anymore, but mix the older thoughts with newer thoughts. This evolution creates a Cambrian explosion of ideas that helps to fuel the information overload from the 16th century onward.
Simultaneously, there was a revival of the old art of excerpting and the use of commonplace books. Yet, the latter were perceived no longer as memory aids but as true secondary memo-ries. Scholars, in turn, became increasingly aware that to address the informa-tion overload produced by printing, the best solution was to train a card index instead of their own individual consciousness.
Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.
Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the German Jesuit Jeremias Drexel noted that in the celebrated Justus Lipsius, one can find ‘tam copiosa, and illustris eruditio’ (a so abundant and glorious erudition) because the Flemish philosopher not only read many books; he also selected and ex-cerpted the best from them.5
Jeremias Drexel, Aurifodina artium et scientiarum omnium. Excerpendi sollertia, omnibus lit-terarum amantibus monstrata (Antwerp, 1638), 18–19
https://publish.obsidian.md/danallosso/Bloggish/Actual+Books
I've often heard the phrase, usually in historical settings, "little book" as well and presupposed it to be a diminutive describing the ideas. I appreciate that Dan Allosso points out here that the phrase may describe the book itself and that the fact that it's small means that it can be more easily carried and concealed.
There's also something much more heartwarming about a book as a concealed weapon (from an intellectual perspective) than a gun or knife.
“It’s become more and more important as the years went on,” said Marc Resnick, executive editor at St. Martin’s Press. “We learned some hard lessons along the way, which is that a tweet or a post is not necessarily going to sell any books, if it’s not the right person with the right book and the right followers at the right time.”
This seems like common sense to me, why hasn't the industry grokked it?
“I could fit this in my pocket,” I thought when the first newly re-designed @parisreview arrived. And sure enough editor Emily Stokes said it’s was made to fit in a “large coat pocket” in the editor’s note.
I've been thinking it for a while, but have needed to write it down for ages---particularly from my experiences with older manuscripts.
In an age of print-on-demand and reflowing text, why in goodness' name don't we have the ability to print almost anything we buy and are going to read in any font size and format we like?
Why couldn't I have a presentation copy sized version of The Paris Review?
Why shouldn't I be able to have everything printed on bible-thin pages of paper for savings in thickness?
Why couldn't my textbooks be printed with massively large margins for writing notes into more easily? Why not interleaved with blank pages even? Particularly near the homework problem sections?
Why can't I have more choice in a range of fonts, book sizes, margin sizes, and covers?
Talking about his process, he quoted the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett: “I connect every music-making experience I have, including every day here in the studio, with a great power, and if I do not surrender to it nothing happens.” During our conversations, Strong cited bits of wisdom from Carl Jung, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Karl Ove Knausgaard (he is a “My Struggle” superfan), Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep, Harold Pinter (“The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression”), the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, T. S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and old proverbs (“When fishermen cannot go to sea, they mend their nets”). When I noted that he was a sponge for quotations, he turned grave and said, “I’m not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns.”
Based on the collection of quotes and proverbs it sounds more like he's got his own commonplace book which he uses to inform his acting process. Sounds almost like he uses them so frequently that he's memorized many of them.
Interesting that he refers to them as "hymns".
Compare this with Eminem's "stacking ammo" for a particular use case.
h/t to Kevin Marks for directing me to this article for this.
From 1676 onward, he follows an excerpting practice that directly refers to Jungius (via one of his students). Regarding Leibniz ’ s Excerpt Cabinet He wrote on slips of paper whatever occurred to him — in part when perusing books, in part during meditation or travel or out on walks — yet he did not let the paper slips (particularly the excerpts) cover each other in a mess; it was his habit to sort through them every now and then.
According to one of his students, Leibniz used his note cabinet both for excerpts that he took from his reading as well as notes an ideas he came up separately from his reading.
Most of the commonplace book tradition consisted of excerpting, but when did note taking practice begin to aggregate de novo notes with commonplaces?
It is an important fact that the Bibliotheca Universalis addresses a dual audience with this technology of indexing: on the one hand, it aims at librarians with its extensive and far-reaching bibliography; on the other hand, it goes to didactic lengths to instruct young scholars in the proper organization of their studies, that is, keeping excerpted material in useful order. In this dual aim, the Bibliotheca Universalis unites a scholar ’ s com-munication with library technology, before these directions eventually branch out into the activity of library professionals on the one hand and the private and discreet practices of scholarship on the other hand
Konrad Gessner's Bibliotheca Universalis has two audiences: librarians for it's extensive bibliography and scholars for the instruction of how to properly organize their studies by excerpting material and keeping it in a useful order.
Dominicus Nanus did in the Polyanthea
Example of a commonplace book to look into
Gessner 1548, fol. 24, following Zedelmaier 1992, p. 88. It is worth noting the fi rst hint about the origin of the German word Kartei : chart books, chartaceos libros , are apparently already in use around 1550.
chart books, cartaceros libros
What are these? Shape/form? Contents?
The second volume of the Bibliotheca Universalis , published in 1548 under the title Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium , contains a list of keywords, ordered not by authors ’ names, but thematically. This intro-duces a classifi cation of knowledge on the one hand, and on the other hand offers orientation for the novice about patterns and keywords (so-called loci communes ) that help organize knowledge to be acquired.
Konrad Gessner's second edition of Bibliotheca Universalis in 1548 contains a list of keywords (loci communes) thus placing it into the tradition of the commonplace book, but as it is published for use by others, it accelerates the ability for others to find and learn about information in which they may have an interest.
Was there a tradition of published or manuscript commonplace books prior to this?
One more thing ought to be explained in advance: why the card index is indeed a paper machine. As we will see, card indexes not only possess all the basic logical elements of the universal discrete machine — they also fi t a strict understanding of theoretical kinematics . The possibility of rear-ranging its elements makes the card index a machine: if changing the position of a slip of paper and subsequently introducing it in another place means shifting other index cards, this process can be described as a chained mechanism. This “ starts moving when force is exerted on one of its movable parts, thus changing its position. What follows is mechanical work taking place under particular conditions. This is what we call a machine . ” 11 The force taking effect is the user ’ s hand. A book lacks this property of free motion, and owing to its rigid form it is not a paper machine.
The mechanical work of moving an index card from one position to another (and potentially changing or modifying links to it in the process) allows us to call card catalogues paper machines. This property is not shared by information stored in codices or scrolls and thus we do not call books paper machines.
I began this site in 2008 in an effort to bring some structure to a long held habit: taking notes about the books I read in a seemingly endless number of notebooks, which then piled up, never to be opened again. I thought a website would make that habit more fruitful and fun, serving as a reference, something the notebooks never did. It did that handily, and more, including making space for me to write and think about adjacent things. More than a dozen years later and this site has become the place where I think, often but not exclusively about books—but then books are a means of listening to the thoughts of others so that you can hear your own thoughts more clearly. Contributions have waxed and waned over the years as life got busy, but I never stopped reading, and I always come back.
Several things to notice here:
On the other hand, paremiologists seldom specify "definitions"-much less ori- gins-of proverbial expressions that they collect, for the simple reason that so little can be known with certainty.
Paremiology (from Greek παροιμία (paroimía) 'proverb, maxim, saw') is the collection and study of proverbs.
Paremiography is the collection of proverbs.
Indexing Paper: Create Your Own Indexes For The Stuff You Read
https://www.amazon.com/Indexing-Paper-Create-Indexes-Stuff/dp/1926892267/
This really could be quite useful to those with a paper commonplace book or zettelkasten
https://www.amazon.com/Marginalia-Paper-Very-Margin-Notebook/dp/192689202X/
Marginalia Paper, you know, for annotating your own writing...
A must-have for the Hypothes.is fan who wants to go the hipster route.
https://www.amazon.com/Blog-Paper-Advanced-Taking-Technology/dp/1926892100/
Doing some research for my Paper Website / Blog.
Similar to some of the pre-printed commonplace books of old particularly with respect to the tag and tag index sections.
I sort of like that it is done in a way that makes it useful for general life even if one isn't going to use it as a "blog".
How can I design mine to be easily photographed and transferred to an actual blog, particularly with Micropub in mind?
Don't forget space for the blog title and tagline. What else might one put on the front page(s) for identity? Name, photo, address, lost/found info, website URL (naturally)...
Anything else I might want to put in the back besides an category index or a tag index? (Should it have both?)
Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.
This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).
Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond
This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.
This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?
By examining works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Montaigne, and others, he dispels the notion of literary texts as static or closed, and instead demonstrates how the unsettled conventions of early print culture fostered an idea of books as interactive and malleable.
Jeffrey Todd Knight in Bound to read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature examines the works of various writers to dispel the notion of literary texts as static. He shows how the evolution of early print culture helped to foster the idea as interactive and malleable. This at a time when note takers and writers would have been using commonplacing techniques at even smaller scales for creating their own writing thus creating a similar pattern from the smaller scale to the larger scale.
This pattern of small notes building into larger items with rearrangement which is seen in Carl Linnaeus' index card-based notes as well as his longer articles/writings and publication record over time as well.
In Bound to Read, Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates this culture of compilation—of binding and mixing texts, authors, and genres into single volumes—and sheds light on a practice that not only was pervasive but also defined the period's very ways of writing and thinking.
In this early period of print, before the introduction of commercial binding, most published literary texts did not stand on shelves in discrete, standardized units. They were issued in loose sheets or temporarily stitched—leaving it to the purchaser or retailer to collect, configure, and bind them.
In the early history of printing, books weren't as we see them now, instead they were issued in loose sheets or with temporary stitching allowing the purchaser or retailer to collect, organize, and bind them. This pattern occurs at a time when one would have been thinking about collecting, writing, and organizing one's notes in a commonplace book or other forms. It is likely a pattern that would have influenced this era of note taking practices, especially among the most literate who were purchasing and using books.
This looks interesting with respect to the flows of the history of commonplace books.
Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England by Megan Heffernan
Lowering these risks and adapting to those we can no longer avoid will require a mobilisation of resources on the scale of a war economy.
We did it for the Second World War. We can do it again.
Anything by Chuck Klosterman.
I also got into Ayn Rand and George Orwell during the Buckyballs v. The Man days.
I’ve been casually looking into WordPress themes designed for news websites since they’re often broken into categories, but haven’t found anything I liked so far.
I haven't had time to look into it yet, but Piper has a custom WordPress theme she's created specifically for commonplace books: https://github.com/piperhaywood/commonplace-wp-theme