- Oct 2021
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medium.com medium.com
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Did we segment before we designed the product? If not, why not?What were the segments? How did we get to these? Which ones would we serve initially? Do they represent a sizable market?What criteria were they based on? How different are these segments in their WTP? Can we respond differently to each segment? If so, how?How did we describe the segments? What observable criteria do we have in these descriptions? Do our descriptions and observable criteria on each segment pass our sales team’s sniff test?How many segmentation schemes do we have in our company? Can we consolidate to one segmentation across product, marketing, and sales?Who in our company is responsible for segmentation? At what point in the innovation cycle does this person (or people) get involved?
Queste sono le domande che un CEO dovrebbe porsi riguardo la segmentazione per la creazione di un prodotto.
- Abbiamo fatto una segmentazione prima di creare il prodotto? Se no perché?
- Quali sono i segmenti che abbiamo individuato, in che modo ci siamo arrivati, quale abbiamo deciso di servire inizialmente, rappresentano un mercato sostenibile?
- In funzione di quale criterio sono distinti i segmenti? In che modo cambia la #WTF dei differenti segmenti? Possiamo rispondere diversamente ad ogni segmento?
- In che modo descriviamo i segmenti? Quali sono i criteri osservabili che abbiamo in queste descrizioni?
- Quanti schemi di segmentazione abbiamo? Riusciamo a consolidare su un solo segmento tutte le nostre energie aziendali?
- Chi è il responsabile della segmentazione? In che momento interviene?
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Do Segmentation Right:Begin with WTP data — By clustering individuals according to their WTP, value, and needs data, you will discover your segments — groups of people whose needs, value, and willingness to pay differ.Use common sense — Practicality and common sense are as important as statistical indicators.Create fewer segments, not more — Serving each new segment adds significant complexity for sales, marketing, product and service development, and other functions. Smart companies start with a few segments — three to four — and then expand gradually until they reach the optimal number.Don’t try to serve every segment — The products and services you develop should match your company’s overall financial and commercial goals. A segment must deliver enough customers — and enough money — to make the investment worthwhile.Describe segments in detail in order to address them — Investigate whether each segment has observable criteria for customizing your sales and marketing messages to them.
Come si può segmentare in maniera efficace?
- Si comincia con i dati emersi dall'analisi sul #WTP, si creano cluster di individui in funzione di WTP, valori e bisogni, così emergono dei segmenti;
- Punta a pochi segmenti, non molti, ogni segmento porta con sé entropia che deve essere gestita, il numero ideale di segmenti è 3-4 e poi ci si espande in maniera graduale fino a raggiungere il numero ottimale;
- Non devi servire ogni segmento, il prodotto che crei dovrebbe essere coerente con gli obiettivi generali ed economici della tua azienda. Un segmento deve essere visto come un investimento;
- Descrivi ogni segmento in dettaglio e cerca criteri evidenti nel comportamento del segmento per poter customizzare il più possibile;
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The message here is clear: You need to create segments in order to design highly attractive products for each segment. And you must base your segmentation on customers’ needs, value, and WTP. This way, segmentation becomes a driver of product design and development, not an afterthought.
Quale è il modo migliore per definire le caratteristiche migliori di un prodotto?
Bisogna analizzare il mercato e segmentare i bisogni, valori e WTP dei consumatori. In questo modo la segmentazione diventa la guida della creazione del prodotto.
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New products fail for many reasons. But the root of all innovation evil is the failure to put the customer’s willingness to pay for a new product at the very core of product design.
Quale è una delle prime cose che si deve valutare nell'elaborazione di un prezzo per un prodotto?
Una dele prime cose da valutare è la volontà di pagare per il nuovo prodotto in questione da parte dei consumatori, questa deve essere messa al centro del processo di creazione del nuovo prodotto.
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Startup companies are much more likely to possess Feature Shock and Undead pricing problems. However, some product launches are treated as Minivations and startup companies with Hidden Gem technology may not see the need for a pivot. Regardless of the problem you may encounter, there are certain things you can do to find the solution.
Quelli mostrati nella tabella sono i 4 tipi di problemi in termini di #pricing che si possono incontrare nella creazione di un prodotto.Tra i problemi che si verificano più di frequente nelle startup abbiamo il fenomeno del #featureshock oppure dell' #undead
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Feature shocks happen when you try to cram too many features into one product, creating a confusing and often expensive mess. In a sincere effort to have it be “all things to all people,” you launch a product that pleases few. The result is the product’s value is less than the sum of the parts. Due to its multitude of features — none of them a standout — these products are costly to make, overengineered, hard to explain, and usually overpriced.
Si ha un problema di #featureshock nel momento in cui si cerca di inserire troppe funzioni all'interno di un prodotto.
Così facendo si incorre nella situazione in cui cercando una soluzione "unica per tutti" si crea una soluzione che accontenta nessuno ed il cui valore è inferiore al valore delle sue singole parti. In questo modo tutte le caratteristiche si annullano tra loro e ci si ritrova con un prodotto che inoltre è nella maggior parte dei casi:
- costoso da creare;
- complicato da creare;
- difficile da spiegare;
- troppo costoso da acquistare
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No one wants to sell his or her idea short. Minivations are products that tap neither a product concept’s full market potential nor its full price potential. Companies that fall into the minivation trap underexploit the market opportunity and the price they could have charged, thereby robbing themselves of profits. Minivations go down as undermonetized products cursed with a “what might have been” tag.
Il caso del problema di #minivation è quello in cui il prodotto non raggiunge né il massimo del potenziale di mercato né il massimo del potenziale di prezzo. Le aziende che cadono in questa trappola sono aziende che danno al proprio prodotto un prezzo più basso di quanto sia effettivamente il suo valore ed in questo modo rinunciano a dei guadagni.
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With a hidden gem product, a company has a brilliant, even revolutionary idea but fails to both recognize it and quantify the product’s value to customers. Or the company decides it lacks the capabilities to bring the unusual idea to market. Hidden gems often end up in limbo, neither launched nor killed. They often don’t make it to market, but if they do, they arrive undervalued, as freebies or deal sweeteners.
Ci si ritrova in un caso di #hiddengem quando si ha un'idea innovativa, addirittura rivoluzionaria, ma non si riesce a riconoscere sia la portata di impatto dell'idea sia a darle il giusto valore.
In questo modo ci si ritrova con trascurare l'idea non riuscendo mai a portarla sul mercato, oppure si decide in maniera volontaria di non farla evolvere mai.
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Applied to monetizing innovation, an undead product is one that still exists in the marketplace, but demand is virtually nonexistent. The product, for all intents and purposes, is dead, yet it continues to “walk around” like a zombie.
Un prodotto #undead è semplicemente un prodotto che ancora infesta il mercato ma che ha una richiesta quasi inesistente.
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When an undead is in the making, you become delusional and detest any evidence that goes against your beliefs. You resist objectivity and keep investing time, feeling you have come too far. Once the product is in the market, your sales teams can’t sell it, and it causes them to miss their targets — by a lot.
In che modo si può capire se ci si ritrova a lavorare con un prodotto #undead ?
Si può capire che ci si ritrova con un prodotto di questo tipo se si diviene sempre più illusi riguardo il prodotto e si odia e disprezza ogni prova che vada contro le proprie convinzioni.
Si cerca di resistere all'oggettività e si continua ad investire tempo, emozioni ed altre risorse. Una volta che il prodotto è poi sul mercato il team sales e marketing non riescono a piazzarlo né farci alcuna vendita, spesso sbagliando il target.
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Myth #1: If you simply build a great new product, customers will pay fair value for it. “Build it, and they will come” is the mantra. Why we believe it: because Star Wars, FedEx, Harry Potter were all rejected by directors, businessmen, and editors and were wild successes. But they are the exceptions not the rule.Myth #2: The new product or service must be controlled entirely by the innovation team working in isolation. Why we believe it: because Henry Ford said that customers would have wanted a faster horse. Indeed, the Innovators Dilemma, Different, Play Bigger, etc. put a premium on this as well. The fine line that must be walked is that of being different in a way that we are confident will resonate with customers. Confident because you have talked, consulted, argued, and shown the product to customers and more importantly, gauged their willingness to pay.Myth #3: High failure rate of innovation is normal and is even necessary. Why we believe it: sports analogies.Myth #4: Customers must experience a new product before they can say how much they’ll pay for it. Why we believe it: because its safe.Myth #5: Until the business knows precisely what it’s building, it cannot possibly assess what it is worth. Why we believe it: a cost-plus mindset that ties willingness to pay with what it cost us to build.
Ci sono alcuni miti riguardo l'elaborazione del #pricing.
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The most important aspect of moving to a “design the product around the price” innovation process is finding out as early as you can whether customers value your innovation and would pay for it. You can only determine customers’ WTP by actually asking them — not by imagining what they will say.Two pieces of information are important in this phase: customers’ overall WTP for a product (the price range they have in mind) and their WTP for each feature (so you know which features matter most and which features don’t matter at all).Five types of research questions will help you get these answers. Best practices in having these discussions include positioning them as “value talks” (not as pricing discussions), expecting key insights to come from the simplest questions, mixing structured with unstructured questions, and not relying solely on quantitative data.
La valutazione della volontà di pagamento da parte dei clienti è una delle valutazioni più importanti da fare quando si decide il prezzo di un prodotto. Ci riferiamo ad essa con #WTP.
Dei 4 problemi di #pricing discussi in questo libro, una #WTP effettuata nelle fasi iniziali del progetto è determinante e capace di evitare il manifestarsi di TUTTI I PROBLEMI DI PREZZO.
Per poter capire questa #WTP è essenzialmente necessario se effettivamente i consumatori danno valore al tuo prodotto oppure no, un valore economico, si intende.
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Direct, purchase probability: “what do you think could be an acceptable price?” “What do you think would be an expensive price?” “What do you think would be a prohibitively expensive price?” “Would you buy this product at $?”Purchase probability questions: “On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is, I would never buy this product and 5 is, I would most definitely buy this prdouct, how would you rate this product?” 4 or 5 you stop. Less than 3 lower the price and try again.Most–least: create a subset of your features and ask them to rank the features from most valuable to least. Change the subset for 5 different sets. You will end up with rich feature by feature feedback.Build-your-own: give them a list of features and ask them to build their “ideal product.” As they add features, the price increases. See where they stop with features and price.Purchase simulations: A.K.A Conjoint analysis. This is where you test the pricing of certain bundles of features. Changing bundles and prices. Definitely the most complex option and usually requires software and/or a consultant to manage. As expected, however, the results can be game changing.
Questo è un framework che si può utilizzare per stabilire la #WTP riguardo un prodotto.
- Fare domande di questo tipo, volte a verificare la probabilità di acquisto in maniera diretta:
- Quanto pensi possa essere un prezzo accettabile per questo prodotto?
- Quanto pensi possa essere un prezzo esagerato per questo prodotto?
- Quanto pensi possa essere un prezzo proibitivo per questo prodotto?
- Compreresti questo prodotto alla cifra di..?
- Domande volte a verificare la probabilità di acquisto in maniera indiretta:
- Su una scala da 1 a 5, dove 1 è "Non comprerei mai questo prodotto" e 5 è "Lo comprerei sicuramente" che voto daresti a questo prodotto? Se il voto è <= di 3 abbassa il prezzo e riprova;
- Crea un gruppo di feature del prodotto e chiedi alle persone di metterle in ordine dalla più valida alla meno valida, usa 5 gruppi di caratteristiche;
- Dai una lista delle caratteristiche alle persone e chiedigli di creare il loro "prodotto ideale" con le caratteristiche che gli hai fornito, ad ogni caratteristica aggiunta aumenta il prezzo, vedi dove si fermano nel processo di aggiunta;
- Testa diverse configurazioni di caratteristiche, cambiando configurazione e prezzo, di solito questo test richiede software o consulenti per poter essere effettuato, i risultati però sono validissimi.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjZAdPX6ek0
Osculatory targets or plaques were created on pages to give priests
Most modern people don't touch or kiss their books this way and we're often taught not to touch or write in our texts. Digital screen culture is giving us a new tactile touching with our digital texts that we haven't had since the time of the manuscript.
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- Sep 2021
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www.academia.edu www.academia.edu
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tracydurnell.com tracydurnell.com
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I think it’s valuable to add some initial thinking and reflection when I bookmark an article or finish reading a book, but haven’t yet figured out a process for revisiting recent notes to find connections and turn that into longer or more complex thought.
This is definitely the harder part of the practice, but daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews can definitely help.
To start I primarily focused on 3-5 broader sub-topics of things I felt were most important to me and always did those first. This helps to begin aggregating things and making a bigger difference. The rest of my smaller "fleeting" notes I didn't worry so much about and left to either come back to later or just allow them to sit there.
I think Sonke Ahrens' book How to Take Smart Notes was fairly helpful in laying this out.
Incidentally the spaced repetition of review is also good for your memory of the things you find important.
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s3.us-central-1.wasabisys.com s3.us-central-1.wasabisys.com
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I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper).
I'd be curious to see those who are using Hypothes.is as a communal reading tool in coursework utilize this outline (or similar ones) in combination with their annotation practices.
Curating one's annotations and placing them into a commonplace book or zettelkasten would be a fantastic rhetorical exercise to extend the value of one's notes and ideas.
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For example, I will be keeping my own Commonplace Book this semester, and because of my particular research interests I may include headings such as “Cosmetics,” “Perfume,” “Odors,” and “Cannibalism.”
Based on these headings, I think it would be quite interesting to read her commonplace, but I suspect the heading Cannibalism is a sly side-reference to Montaigne's own "Des cannibales".
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Public link to the document: https://docdrop.org/pdf/Creating-a-Commonplace-Book---Kennedy-Colleen-E_-0r3r1.pdf/
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I will be looking for your conscious choice in your entry selections, dedicated organizational patterns and curation techniques, self-reflection and thoughtful responses in your short writing exercises, and as a whole, your engagement with and understanding of our various texts.
Focus on some of the conscious choices, organization and curation are pieces missing from modern digital note taking space in talking about digital gardens and zettelkasten.
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Please include only quotations, and a brief bibliographic reference. Do not add commentary explaining why you like or chose a particular quotation. (e.g. Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy 3.2.1-15, or Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy 3.2.1-15,or evenas simple asThe Spanish Tragedy 3.2.1-15).
She's a bit over-prescriptive here in terms of the form a commonplace book should contain. In particular, she seems to be holding to the form up to the 17th Century. Personally in a classroom exercise, I wouldn't include this particular limitation.
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☞An index(the final pages of the Commonplace Book) of at least 20 words. The index will be listed alphabetically (or thematically, then alphabetically) by your commonplace book headings with page numbers. You may decide to also add cross-references to authors, other frequently appearing terms that were not heading chapters, etc. (Figure 9)
One might also suggest the use of John Locke's method here: See: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685
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☞(excerpts) Beal, Peter. Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology: 1450 to 2000.Oxford, GB: OUP Oxford, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 19 December 2016.☞Lesser, Zachary and Peter Stallybrass. “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly, (2008), 371–420.☞Smyth, Adam. “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits.” Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture. Manuscript Culture in the British Isles. Eds. Lawrence-Mathers, A. and Hardman, P. Rochester, U.S.: Boydell and Brewer, 90-110.☞Summers, David. “—the proverb is something musty: The Commonplace and Epistemic Crisis in Hamlet.”Hamlet Studies 20.1-2(1998): 9-34.
sources to add to my reading list, if not already there
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Each class session on the syllabus in whichwe discussQ1 Hamlet(WEEKS 2-3), please cometo each class with two index cards withquotations of yourchoosing, andwith possible headings for such a quotation. On certain class sessions, I may give you more of a prompt, such as: to choose a line or phrase that is part of our everyday speech that youencounteredin Hamlet; orto cite a line from the major avengersof the scenes we discuss that day; etc. I will also be writing lines on index cards;we will share these in class, I will collect the cards, and returnthem the following class session.
An example of a teacher using index cards as a "low stakes" commonplace. The added benefit is that they can be passed around and shared as well.
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We may think of Pinterest as a visual form of commonplacing, as people choose and curate images (and very often inspirational quotations) that they find motivating, educational, or idealistic(Figure 6). Whenever we choose a passage to cite while sharing an article on Facebook or Twitter, we are creating a very public commonplace book on social media. Every time wepost favorite lyrics from a song or movie to social media or ablog, weare nearing the concept of Renaissance commonplace book culture.
I'm not the only one who's thought this. Pinterest, Facebook, twitter, (and other social media and bookmarking software) can be considered a form of commonplace.
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forum.artofmemory.com forum.artofmemory.com
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Some interesting finds Josh.
Related to some of the bullet journal (aka BuJo) and journaling space you will eventually come across the idea of "morning pages" which is a technique where you spend a block of time (usually in the morning, but ideally just before you want to do your creative thinking work) where you write for a set amount of time or number of pages. The goal of this method (and to some extent bullet journaling) is to clear the cruft and extraneous details out of your head to be able to better prioritize and focus on your creative work. There's a relatively large group of people doing this as a technique, so even knowing the phrase can help one to find the literature.
Tangentially related to this and memory (via our old friend rhetoric), I've been doing some significant research into the commonplace book tradition and general note taking with an eye towards knowledge acquisition, creation, and spaced repetition systems. This has led into research into the areas of the zettelkasten, digital note taking, digital gardens and the like. All fascinating areas which overlap memory via rhetoric. I suspect that many mnemonists in the Renaissance used commonplace books as physical written memory palaces, though I've yet to find anything in my research that directly links them other than the relationship they have in the long tradition of rhetoric in Western culture. Since you mention music and writing lyrics, I recently noted that Eminem has a commonplace technique which he calls "stacking ammo" by which he compiles ideas for his lyrics. His method is certainly less structured than a traditional commonplace book, but the overall form traces back to our friends Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.
If you delve into some of the Bullet Journal and journaling literature you'll find a subculture of people (YouTube has hundreds of people with entire channels dedicated to the topic) who write into their daily/weekly planners and decorate them with stickers, washi tape, photos, calligraphy, drawings, etc. I've called some of this "productivity porn" before, but if you search commonplace book on Instagram or Pinterest you'll find examples of people whose journals and notes are becoming physical memory palaces where the visuals are likely helping them remember portions of their lives or what they're writing. The stickers and images to some extent are serving the purpose of drolleries seen in Medieval manuscripts as mnemonic devices.
And finally, tangentially related to all of this is another interesting sub-genre of memory and note taking called sketchnotes which combines active listening, writing, and drawing into a mnemonic related note taking activity. I'm actually a bit surprised to find so little on the technique here on the forum. Searching for sketchnotes on social media will provide lots of examples and there are many "What are sketchnotes" short videos on YouTube that will give you an idea of what's going on. Many of these talk about a memory component, but not being mired into the sub-topic of rhetoric, they're usually not using the same framings we would (here on the forum), though the effects one might expect are the same.
Some related richer resources for these areas, to help people from going down the rabbit hole within the performative social media spaces:
- How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
- This touches on note taking within a zettelkasten framing, but is also applicable to the commonplace book tradition
- Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde
- This is one of the bibles in the space and gives a solid overview of what, why, how, etc.
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton
- How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Ebooks Are an Abomination: If you hate them, it’s not your fault. by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/09/why-are-ebooks-so-terrible/620068/
Ian Bogost has a nice look at the UI affordances and areas for growth in the e-reading space.
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Skimming through pages, the foremost feature of the codex, remains impossible in digital books.
This is related to an idea that Tom Critchlow was trying to get at a bit the other day. It would definitely be interesting in this sort of setting.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Has anyone built a generalizable text zoom JavaScript library that let's you progressively summarize an article as you zoom in and out?<br><br>(Why yes I am procrastinating my to-do list. You?)
— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) September 17, 2021 -
So do all manner of other peculiarities of form, including notations of editions on the verso (the flip side) of the full title page and the running headers all throughout that rename the book you are already reading.
I do dislike the running headers of digital copies of books as most annotation tools want to capture those headers in the annotation.
It would be nice if they were marked up in an Aria-like method so that annotation software would semantically know to ignore them.
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Ebook devices are extremely compatible with an idea of bookiness that values holding and carrying a potentially large number of books at once; that prefers direct flow from start to finish over random access; that reads for the meaning and force of the words as text first, if not primarily; and that isn’t concerned with the use of books as stores of reader-added information or as memory palaces.
Intriguing reference of a book as a memory palace here.
The verso/recto and top/middle/bottom is a piece of digital books that I do miss from the physical versions as it serves as a mnemonic journey for me to be able to remember what was where.
I wonder if Ian Bogost uses the method of loci?
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The iPad’s larger screen also scales down PDF pages to fit, making the results smaller than they would be in print. It also displays simulated print margins inside the bezel margin of the device itself, a kind of mise en abyme that still can’t actually be used for the things margins are used for, such as notes or dog-ears.
It would be quite nice if a digital reader would allow actual writing in the margins, or even overlaying the text itself and then allowing the looking at the two separately.
I do quite like the infinite annotation space that Hypothes.is gives me on a laptop. I wish there were UI for it on a Kindle in a more usable and forgiving way. The digital keyboard on Kindle Paperwhite is miserable. I've noticed that I generally prefer reading and annotating on desktop in a browser now for general ease-of-use.
Also, I don't see enough use of mise en abyme. This is a good one.
In Western art history, mise en abyme (French pronunciation: [miz ɑ̃n‿abim]; also mise en abîme) is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story. The term is derived from heraldry and literally means "placed into abyss". It was first appropriated for modern criticism by the French author André Gide.
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The weird way you tap or push a whole image of a page to the side—it’s the uncanny valley of page turning, not a simulation or replacement of it.
This may be the first time I've seen uncanny valley applied to a topic other than recognizing people versus robots or related simulacra.
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If you have a high-quality hardbound book nearby, pick it up and look at the top and bottom edges of the binding, near the spine, with the book closed. The little stripey tubes you see are called head and tail bands (one at the top, one at the bottom). They were originally invented to reinforce stitched binding, to prevent the cover from coming apart from the leaves. Today’s mass-produced hardcover books are glued rather than sewn, which makes head and tail bands purely ornamental. And yet for those who might notice, a book feels naked without such details.
It is an odd circumstance that tail bands are still used on modern books that don't need them. From a manufacturing standpoint, the decrease in cost would dictate they disappear, however they must add some level of bookiness that they're worth that cost.
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In other words, as far as technologies go, the book endures for very good reason. Books work.
Aside from reading words to put ideas into my brain, one of the reasons I like to read digital words is that the bigger value proposition for me is an easier method to add annotations to what I'm reading and then to be able to manipulate those notes after-the-fact. I've transcended books and the manual methods of note taking. Until I come up with a better word for it, digital commonplacing seems to be a useful shorthand for this new pattern of reading.
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The ancient Romans sometimes connected wax tablets with leather or cords, suggesting a prototype of binding. Replacing the wax with leaves allowed many pages to be stacked atop one another, then sewn or otherwise bound together.
early book prototypes
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sakai.duke.edu sakai.duke.edu
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ethodists, the Evangelicals took up the theme. Hannah More contributed her own imperishable lines on "Early Rising": Thou silent murderer, Sloth, no more My mind imprison'd keep; Nor let me waste another hour With thee, thou felon Sleep.10
The number of quotes and passages here makes me wonder what his sources were and how he came to them?
Did he keep a commonplace book and collect references on time? Find them via other's or from published collections? The number and types of them, particularly in the non-technical literature he's citing makes me think that something like a commonplace pattern is being leveraged here.
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v1.sonarmp3.net v1.sonarmp3.net
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Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's 'Scrapbooks' ('Sudelbücher'), Op. 37a: IX.
Music for waste books! :)
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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As the title of a research paper that the Vallée-Tourangeaus wrote with Lisa G. Guthrie puts it, “Moves in the World Are Faster Than Moves in the Head.”
Perhaps this is some of the value behind the ability to resort index cards within a zettelkasten over the prior staticness of the commonplace tradition? The ideas aren't anchored to the page, but can be moved around, rearranged.
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www.library.upenn.edu www.library.upenn.eduLoss2
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How have chance survivals shaped literary and linguistic canons? How might the topography of the field appear differently had certain prized unica not survived? What are the ways in which authors, compilers, scribes, and scholars have dealt with lacunary exemplaria? How do longstanding and emergent methodologies and disciplines—analysis of catalogs of dispersed libraries, reverse engineering of ur-texts and lost prototypes, digital reconstructions of codices dispersi, digital humanities. and cultural heritage preservation, and trauma studies to name a few,—serve to reveal the extent of disappearance? How can ideologically-driven biblioclasm or the destruction wrought by armed conflicts -- sometimes occurring within living memory -- be assessed objectively yet serve as the basis for protection of cultural heritage in the present? In all cases, losses are not solely material: they can be psychological, social, digital, linguistic, spiritual, professional. Is mournful resignation the only response to these gaps, or can such sentiments be harnessed to further knowledge, understanding, and preservation moving forward?
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thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com
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https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-005-interview-with-chris-aldrich/
This didn't turn out too badly for a half an hour. As ever I dislike listening to my own voice.
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/
A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.
I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.
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Encourage imitation. By seeing imitation as intellectually empty and even fraudulent, we neglect one of the most powerful learning tools we have. How might we build imitation more deliberately into our pedagogy? How might we use an intentionally-designed apprenticeship model for more types of learning?
The history of rhetoric is littered with suggestions to imitate. Early commonplace book handbooks encouraged it heavily.
Cross reference: https://hyp.is/mCsl9voQEeuP3t8jNOyAvw/maggieappleton.com/echo-narcissus
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To use your brain well, get out of your brain. Paul calls this offloading. To think well, she says, “we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world” (243).
This is certainly what is happening in the commonplace book tradition and even more explicitly in the zettelkasten tradition.
What other methods of offloading exist besides writing and speaking? Hand gestures? Dance? What hidden modalities of offloading might indigenous societies use that Western culture might not be cognizant of?
Often journaling or writing in a diary is a often a means of offloading the psychological cruft of one's day to be able to start afresh.
This is some of the philosophy behind creating so-called "morning pages".
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfXE6VCBo3k
This boils down to distilling one's notes down to something smaller.
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www.ivoox.com www.ivoox.com
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In this episode I discuss my experience with the niche and extremely powerful note-taking system known as the Zettelkasten.
The word "niche" here provides a window into how much of our cultural history we've really lost.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).
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Soon enough the Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbittry, and H. L. Mencken’s benighted boobocracy. They were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about middle America.”
what a lovely sentence
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When asked for his views on which classic works to include among the Great Books, the science historian George Sarton pronounced the exercise futile: “Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view.”
How does one keep the spirit of these older books alive? Is it only by subsuming into and expanding upon a larger body of common knowledge?
What do they still have to teach us?
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In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act
Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?
What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.
Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confession_album
Interesting historical personal document type. This feels like it has some influence within the realm of the commonplace book tradition.
Is there a way to revive these in an internet age and nudge them along with webmentions?
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github.com github.com
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https://github.com/piperhaywood/commonplace-wp-theme
How awesome is this?! A custom WordPress theme for your online commonplace book.
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nicksimson.com nicksimson.com
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https://nicksimson.com/posts/2021-commonplace-books/
Introductory post about how Nick has found and begun looking at digital commonplace books.
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thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com
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twitter.com twitter.com
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... @ChrisAldrich Have you read Montaigne? Regarding: I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper). I’d be curious to see those who are using http://Hypothes.is as a social ...
Certainement... I wish I had a commonplace ceiling!
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www.academia.edu www.academia.edu
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https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_
An interesting looking assignment for creating a commonplace book.
Annotations for the .pdf document available here: https://hyp.is/B7BXuArgEeyJB5PFTw2x2A/docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/Creating-a-Commonplace-Book---Kennedy-Colleen-E_-0r3r1.pdf
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medium.com medium.com
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Essentially a scrap book in which to keep ideas, stories, notes, experiments, explanations, random thoughts and jokes.
https://medium.com/kens-commonplace-book/about
An example of a digital commonplace on Medium.com
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neilcommonplacebook.wordpress.com neilcommonplacebook.wordpress.comAbout1
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Mine is a 21st century commonplace book, no more and no less. No other purpose. Just a voice, a collection, a series of letters to whom they may concern. What more do you want? I have started a new blog because I want to recapture that simple purpose.
Example of a blogger using WordPress to create a digital commonplace book: https://neilcommonplacebook.wordpress.com/about-2/
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digitalcollections.tcd.ie digitalcollections.tcd.ie
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dailynous.com dailynous.com
- Aug 2021
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www.khanacademy.org www.khanacademy.org
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there are very few medieval scenes in which someone is reading but not writing—where books are present but pens are not. In part, this has to do with medieval study practices. Readers would usually have a pen nearby even when they were just reading. After all, remarks and critiques needed to be added to the margin at the spur of the moment. “Penless” images, while rare, often show a crowded desktop.
Images of Medieval reading practices generally pictured pens along with books. In the rare cases where pens were not included, the desks pictured were messy and thus covered up the pens involved.
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www.khanacademy.org www.khanacademy.org
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Using the book: an introduction
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www.khanacademy.org www.khanacademy.org
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on average a stunning fifty percent of the medieval page was left blank.
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punctumbooks.com punctumbooks.com
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Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication.
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punctumbooks.com punctumbooks.com
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Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible handwriting….here we have copied out fine passages from the classics;…here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. ~ Virginia Woolf, “Hours in a Library”
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www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk
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https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/notebooks?sort=date&order=desc
The notebooks, waste books, and commonplace books of Isaac Newton
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blog.library.villanova.edu blog.library.villanova.edu
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Local file Local file
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commonplace tabulae effectively functioned as memory aids to beused in conjunction with other texts and the direct observation of objects.
The commonplace tabulae created by Linnaeus used spatial layout which also served as memory aids.
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Although the popularity of Linnaeus’s works are sometimes attributedto genius of his system, such economic and practical advantages of his topically arrangedPhilosophiasuggest that the success of his book also may be linked to the fact that his readersfound his commonplace practices familiar and, hence, memorable.
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commonplacing was both a spatial and concep-tual method of categorization that he used to order and reorder various sources of informationinto lists, tables and indices inscribed on, and in relation to, a multiplicity of objects.
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It seems, however, that he did add an innovative twist to the commonplace arcaconceptwhen he coupled the tradition with the spatial arrangement of plants in his botanical garden
Carl Linnaeus didn't completely invent the commonplace cabinet (arcae), but did expand it with his spatial arrangement of plants within his botanical garden.
Garberson's Libraries, Memory and the Space of Knowledge has more on prior examples apparently.
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For several examples of how commonplacing gave rise to filing systems during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,see Malcolm, ‘Thomas Harrison and his “Ark of Studies”’.
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The impactof such practices upon eighteenth-century visual and material culture is recounted in te Heesen, The World in a Box.
This reference appears to show some of the historical link between the method of loci in rhetoric with that of commonplacing ideas within books. The fact that the word box may suggest some relational link between commonplacing and zettelkasten.
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This connection between the topical space of book pages andcabinet interiors was reinforced by the very word, loculus, which Linnaeus generally used to referto cabinet compartments. This term was diminutive of locus, that is, the word employed by clas-sical orators to denote a ‘place’ in the mind reserved for related ideas or concepts. Early modernhumanists drew direct analogies between the label assigned to such places in the mind and theheads that they used to gloss the content of quotations and personal observations. This relationshipbetween the ‘space’ of the mind and space on the page facilitated the logic of commonplacing all
the way through the eighteenth century.
Direct linguistic analogies for commonplacing one's notes and the placing of ideas into the memory via the word locus.
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Although it is difficult at present to know the precise impact of such filing systems, it is clear thatLinnaeus’s design mirrored the ways in which he arranged heads in his notes and books. The inte-rior space of his cabinet was divided into two open-faced columns, which meant that it was a phys-ical instantiation of a bilateral table.
The design of Carl Linnaeus' specimen cabinets mirrored that of the bilateral tables and the ways he arranged his heads in his notes and books.
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Lauren-tius Normann (Lars Norman), the professor of logic and metaphysics at the University ofUppsala, used a kind of commonplace cabinet a full three decades before Linnaeus matriculatedthere as a student.
Laurentius Normann (Lars Norman) had a commonplace cabinet that predated Carl Linnaeus.
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Like the spatial hierarchies presented in the Philosophia botanica, he wanted asimple form of linear order that allowed him to access his sheets quickly. Such a desire led himto reject the spatial divisions featured in many contemporary curiosity and medical cabinets, thatis, closed drawers that were stacked in multiple columns. This rejection was probably linked tothe fact that he had already seen a better way forward in the form of filing systems that werephysical instantiations of commonplace divisions used so often in books.
Linnaeus used the logic of topical headings in commonplace books as an intellectual framework for designing a better filing system for his physical plant specimens. This was in marked contrast to the sorts of contemporary curiosity and medical cabinets that others were using at the time.
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In contrast to the sheets used by other contemporary natural-ists, he refrained from binding his into a proper book and this allowed him to stack them in abespoke cabinet (arca) in a manner that allowed him to insert, remove and reorder them as he sawfit (Figure 9).64 It was for this reason that the Philosophia botanica gave explicit instructions onhow to build the cabinet and how to organize the specimen sheets within it. He recommended thatthe internal space be split into two columns with shelves that were collectively divided intotwenty-four sections, each of which was assigned a numerical head that represented a class withinhis system.65Each class section was filled with select specimen sheets divided by bands intogenera. In his words: If the folding doors are marked with the numbers and names of the genera, with the space on the shelvescorresponding exactly, and linden bands are kept between the spaces, enclosing the same genera andthemselves marked with the number of the genera, then any plant can be pulled out and produced with-out delay.66
Note here the idea of being able to file things away, reorder them, and find them quickly. Search was a likely motivator.
He's essentially created an early form of zettelkasten, but for plants.
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C. Linnaeus, Örtabok(1725/1727). This was a student notebook now housed at Växjö. It is available online at http://www.vaxjo.se/ortaboken/.
This could be a cool online resource.
I'm curious what the UI looks like and what additional digital affordances were made for it.
Update: the link 404's. May have to search elsewhere for it.
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In Ong’s words: ‘The ageof topical logics is the age in which the titles of books become, typically, nouns in the nominativecase, and, specifically, nouns which are not merely expressive of the form of discourse but whichdirectly “stand for” the book’s “contents.”
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In other words, the chapter titles of the Fundamenta botanicawere effectively titularheads which were transferable from one book to another and which served as labels for textualunits that could be moved through the space of the page in a manner that split books into chap-ters and chapters into books.
In much the way one might move around portions of ideas under heads in a commonplace book, Carl Linnaeus was moving around bigger ideas/chapters within books and moving from one book to another.
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Müller-Wille and Scharf ‘Indexing Nature’, also points out that Linnaeus interleaved blanksheets into his texts so that he could take notes. Cooper points out that this had been a common practice in natural historysince at least the late seventeenth century (Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 74–5).
Apparently interleaving blank sheets into texts was a more common practice than I had known! I've seen it in the context of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) using the practice to take notes in his Bible, but not in others.
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Like so manynaturalists of the Enlightenment, he was familiar with a wide variety of textual techniques, manyof which were direct descendants of the compositional and pedagogical tools used to harness themnemonic utility of words inscribed on the clean spaces of erasable surfaces such as librellos dememoria and chalk boards, or upon more permanent forms of print such as commonplace books(adversaria), cabinet labels, marginaliaand printed books.
Some interesting concepts to explore here.
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when he laid out the early form of his classification method in a pamphletentitled Methodus(1736), he used heads to order the text.16
Carl Linnaeus' classification method in Systema Naturae, his famous nomenclature system, was informed by the traditional topical headings of commonplace books.
[16] The content of Methodus and the nature of the heads is addressed in S. Müller-Wille, ‘Introduction’, in C.Linnaeus, Musa Cliffortiana: Clifford’s Banana Plant, translated by S. Freer (Liechtenstein: A.R.G. Gantner VerlagK.G., 2007), 33
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First, what were the economies of attention thatguided his commonplacing techniques? Second, what type of impact did his note-taking skillshave upon the way that he arranged information in texts?
The two questions addressed in this article.
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The foregoing studies suggest two strands of commonplacing circa 1700. The first was thecollection of authoritative knowledge, usually in the form of quotations. The second was thecollection of personal or natural knowledge, with Francis Bacon’s lists, desiderata and apho-risms serving as early examples. While Moss has shown that the first strand was losing popular-ity by the 1680s, recent scholarship has shown that the second retained momentum through theeighteenth century,9especially in scientific dictionaries,10instructional cards,11catalogues,12
loose-leaf manuscripts,13syllabi14and, most especially, notebooks.15
There are two strands of commonplacing around 1700: one is the traditional collection of authoritative knowledge while the second was an emergent collection of more personal knowledge and exploration.
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In recent decades there have been a number of stud-ies that have shown how humanist approaches to commonplacing not only evolved in tandemwith attempts to coherently arrange naturaliain studioli, wunderkammernand museums, butalso facilitated the conceptual development of natural history. Key works that led up to this rein-terpretation were Walter Ong’s work on Ramus, Frances Yates’s history of the art of memory,Tony Grafton’s defence of humanistic textual practices and, crucially, Paolo Rossi’s argumentthat Francis Bacon used topical logic to organize his lists and tables.7Once the topical box wasopened, a number of seminal studies on commonplacing natural knowledge followed. Keyentries in this canon are works written by Ann Blair, Ann Moss, Jonathan Spence and HowardHotson.8
Lots of references to add or read here.
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Eddy, Mathew Daniel, Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus's Philosophia Botanica, Intellectual History Review, 20 (2010), 227-252
Tags
- curiosity cabinets
- intellectual history
- books
- personal knowledge management
- digitized examples
- Jonathan Edwards
- zettelkasten
- organization
- information management
- adversaria
- commonplace cabinets
- commonplace books
- Carl Linnaeus
- topical headings
- interleaved books
- research methods
- taxonomies
- rhetoric
- examples
- filing cabinets
- Walter Ong
- method of loci
- marginalia
- loci
- arcae
- design
- Bible
- herbarium
- annotations
- attention
- Systema Naturae
- want to read
- memory
- note taking
- librellos de memoria
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www.academia.edu www.academia.edu
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Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 550 pp + 60 figures.
I can't wait to read Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)!
I see some bits on annotation hiding in here that may be of interest to @RemiKalir and @anterobot.
If you need some additional eyeballs on it prior to publication, I'm happy to mark it up in exchange for the early look.
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hedgeschool.substack.com hedgeschool.substack.com
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This now brings diversity to the table. It is deliberately interdisciplinary. Notes from poets interact with notes from scientists and notes from wise elders.
This is the closest phrase I've seen in the zettelkasten space that ties back directly into the commonplace book tradition of sententiae.
Kudos to the author for this.
I like the fact that he highlights the diversity of thought he's getting by plumbing the depths of a variety of types of writers and creators. Very reminiscent of another early commonplace book tradition of the bee analogy.
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hedgeschool.substack.com hedgeschool.substack.com
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Fleeting notes while reading is your way of having a conversation with the author. It may not eventuate to anything but the process instantly places agency back in your hands.
The idea of taking notes here as a conversation both with onesself as well as the author is essentially the old idea of making annotations in the margins of a book.
He's repackaging it in the framing of a zettelkasten, but it's the same sort of conversation that @remikalir talks about, though in that case Remi is usually talking about class-wide group conversations with a text.
Cross-reference this with Luhmann's paper Communicating with Slip-boxes which is a portion of the story from the zettelkasten perspective.
Certainly someone in the commonplace or annotation traditions mentioned the idea of a conversation? Either with themselves, with the author, or with the text itself? Was this ever tacitly acknowledged before Luhmann?
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The Zettelkasten methodology was developed by German Social Scientist Niklas Luhmann.
Here again is another example indicating that Niklas Luhmann developed the idea instead of it having evolved over several hundred years from the commonplace book and becoming more specific with the wide adoption of index cards in society once mass manufacture was more easily available.
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archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
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https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_objects/195243
The Bodleian Archives has copies of John Locke's commonplace book(s).
Interesting to see that this one had 531 pages, most of which were blank.
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diggingthedigital.com diggingthedigital.com
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Aaron linkt in zijn blogpost aan meer bronnen die ik zeker eens verder wil onderzoeken voor mijn eigen Frankopedia.
I love that Frank calls his personal wiki / digital garden / online commonplace book "Frankopedia".
I should come up with a more clever name for mine.
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united-states.kinokuniya.com united-states.kinokuniya.com
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kimberlyhirsh.com kimberlyhirsh.com
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https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2019/04/01/dissertating-in-the.html
A description of some of Kimiberly Hirsh's workflow in keeping a public research notebook (or commonplace book).
I'd be curious to know what type of readership and response she's gotten from this work in the past. For some it'll bet it's possibly too niche for a lot of direct feedback, but some pieces may be more interesting than others.
Did it help her organize her thoughts and reuse the material later on?
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Sketchnoting forces students to take ideas from a lesson and turn them into their own ideas. It also forces modality shifts.
Reviewing over a lecture after the fact to create sketchnotes is incredibly similar to some of the point and purpose of Cornell Notes.
While watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOHcWhdguIY
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blog.codinghorror.com blog.codinghorror.com
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This essay has some good points. I still like Clean Code and SOLID things for OO code. As usual we need to think about all of this and not only following advices/practices without context
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www.dur.ac.uk www.dur.ac.uk
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Eminem shows Anderson Cooper his form of commonplace book in a 60 Minutes interview.
Instead of calling it "commonplacing", he uses the phrase "stacking ammo".
Cooper analogizes the collection as the scrawlings of a crazy person. In some sense, this may be because there is no order or indexing system with what otherwise looks like a box of random pages.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/sorrybabyxo</span> in Eminem has his own version of commonplace system containing words that rhyme. : commonplacebook (<time class='dt-published'>08/10/2021 09:45:39</time>)</cite></small>
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https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/jb8x3d/what_does_your_indexing_system_look_like/
Brief discussion of indexing systems for commonplace books. Locke's system is mentioned. Another person uses a clunky system at the bottom of pages to create threaded links.
Intriguingly, one person mentions visiting theirs often enough that they remember where things are. (spaced repetition with a bit of method of loci going on here)
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I remember also seeing this as an indexing system for index cards in 2007. https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/sets/72157594200490122/
It's not too dissimilar a pattern from the early 20th century edge-notched cards which were used to make sorting collections easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card Of course doing this for a notebook isn't going to work as easily.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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In her book Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt, writer Marge Piercy described how she used needle cards instead of a notebook: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}I keep neither a journal nor a notebook. I have a memory annex which serves my purposes. It uses edge-notched cards. Edge-notched cards are cards which have holes around the borders as opposed to machine punch cards which are punched through the body. The cards are sorted with knitting needles. I have a nice sophisticated system which I call the "General Practitioner."[12]
Interesting to see that Marge Piercy used an edge-notched card system for personal use in the manner of a commonplace book.
See reference: Piercy, Marge (1982). Parti-colored blocks for a quilt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 27–28. doi:10.3998/mpub.7442. ISBN 0472063383. OCLC 8476006.
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www.wordsense.eu www.wordsense.eu
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https://www.wordsense.eu/Sudelbuch/
Definition/origin of the word sudelbücher. A portmanteau of sudeln ("to blog, to scrawl") + buch ("book").
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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Digital garden design can often use the gardening metaphor to focus attention on an active tending and care of one’s personal knowledge base and building toward new knowledge or creations.
I wonder where outliners fit within this discussion? Are they a flavour or digital gardening? It has been interesting seeing some of Dave Winer's engagements with Roam Research
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digitalcollections.nypl.org digitalcollections.nypl.org
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https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b80117a0-7e3a-0132-11ef-58d385a7bbd0
Henry David Thoreau's commonplace book digitized in the New York Public Library Digital Collections
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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An academic during the early part of the blogosphere analogizes blogs and early online culture to commonplace books, coffeehouse culture, and carnivals.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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The first step in translating experience, either of other men's writing, or of your own life, into the intellectual sphere, is to give it form. Merely to name an item of experience often invites you to explain it; the mere taking of a note from a book is often a prod to reflection. At the same time, of course, the taking of a note is a great aid in comprehending what you are reading.
on the purpose of taking notes, annotating one's reading, or commonplacing
highlight is a quote from
C. Wright Mills' profound "Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship," as found in his book on The Sociological Imagination.[16]
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www.connectedtext.com www.connectedtext.com
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In writing my dissertation and working on my first book, I used an index card system, characterized by the "one fact, one card" maxim, made popular by Beatrice Webb. [4]
I've not come across Beatrice Webb before, but I'm curious to see what her system looks like based on this statement.
From the footnotes:
She observed in the appendix to her My Apprenticeship of 1926, called The Art of Note-Taking: "It is difficult to persuade the accomplished graduate of Oxford or Cambridge that an indispensable instrument in the technique of sociological enquiry - seeing that without it any of the methods of acquiring facts can seldom be used effectively - is the making of notes" Webb, Beatrice (1926) My Apprenticeship (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.), pp. 426-7.
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www.notesaboutnotes.com www.notesaboutnotes.com
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Commonplace Book
Just noticed that Mark Bernstein, the writer of Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas, has page about commonplace books on his site, which he wrote with his note taking cum digital gardening tool Tinderbox.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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In 2003, Ross's family gave his journals, papers, and correspondence to the British Library, London. Then, in March 2004, on the last day of the W. Ross Ashby Centenary Conference, they announced the intention to make his journal available on the Internet. Four years later, this website fulfilled that promise, making this previously unpublished work available on-line.
The journal consists of 7,189 numbered pages in 25 volumes, and over 1,600 index cards. To make it easy to browse purposefully through so many images, extensive cross-linking has been added that is based on the keywords in Ross's original keyword index.
This definitely sounds like a commonplace book. Also an example of one which has been digitized.
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edwardbetts.com edwardbetts.com
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Now, whenever I have a thought worth capturing, I write it on an index card in either marker pen or biro (depending on the length of the thought), and place in the relevant box. I use index cards for books, blogs, conversations I overhear at the club, memories, etc. They’re in my coat pocket when I fetch the kids from school. I leave them handy in the locker at the swimming pool (where I do much of my best thinking). And I run with them. Sound weird? Well, I’m in good company. Ryan Holiday[116], Anne Lamott[117], Robert Greene[118], Oliver Burkeman[119], Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Nabokov[120] and Ludwig Wittgenstein[121] all use (d) the humble index card to catalogue and organise their thoughts. If you’re serious about embarking on this digital journey, buy a hundred-pack of 127 x 76mm ruled index cards for less than a pound, rescue a shoebox from the attic and stick a few marker-penned notecards on their end to act as dividers. Write a “My Digital Box” label on the top of the shoebox, and you’re off.
apparently a quote from Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money by David Sawyer FCIPR.
Notes about users of index card based commonplace books.
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edwardbetts.com edwardbetts.comBooks1
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Edward Betts is using his website as a commonplace book of sorts with a wide variety of topic headings based on his reading.
He also keeps a separate wiki: https://edwardbetts.com/wiki/
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www.rossashby.info www.rossashby.info
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http://www.rossashby.info/origins.html
This page looks like a zettelkasten card embedded into a commonplace book.He's cross linking ideas using page numbers. I wonder if he's also got headings as well?
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groups.google.com groups.google.com
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I am also interested in the work and method of Ross Ashby. His card index and notebooks have been put online by the British Commputer Society. I am fascinated by his law of requisite variety and how variety relates to complexity and its unfolding in general and in relation to design.
Sounds like Ross Ashby kept a commonplace book here.
Could be worth looking into: http://www.rossashby.info/ and digging further.
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en.wiktionary.org en.wiktionary.org
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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/adversaria
Note the use of adversaria also as a book of accounts. This is intriguing and gives a historical linguistic link to the idea of waste books being used in the commonplace tradition. When was this secondary use of adversaria used?
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. Very few are actually developed plots—for the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on. —H. P. LovecraftPresented to R. H. Barlow, Esq., on May 7, 1934—in exchange for an admirably neat typed copy from his skilled hand.
Somewhat bizarre that Wired published this in this form without any sort of preamble or description.
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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An edited and published volume of Ronald Reagan's commonplace book, which he kept on index cards.
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www.usatoday.com www.usatoday.com
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http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-05-08-reagan-notes-book-brinkley_n.htm
An article indicating that President Ronald Reagan kept a commonplace book throughout his life. He maintained it on index cards, often with as many as 10 entries per card. The article doesn't seem to indicate that there was any particular organization, index, or taxonomy involved.
It's now housed at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA.
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thoughtcatalog.com thoughtcatalog.com
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Heyyy!!! I am so happy to see that I am not the only one following a similar system. I have lots of books marked in the same way and also with notes (by the way when taking notes use black ink - blue reflects in light and tired mind - ) and then my solution. After reading it all and taking notes, I categorized all my notes and distribute around my Excel file as attaching. Using this way I can add it to different categories and use it every where.
Look up Ken Wilber's system, which he apparently used for researching and writing his books.
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Heyyy!!! I am so happy to see that I am not the only one following a similar system. I have lots of books marked in the same way and also with notes (by the way when taking notes use black ink - blue reflects in light and tired mind - ) and then my solution. After reading it all and taking notes, I categorized all my notes and distribute around my Excel file as attaching. Using this way I can add it to different categories and use it every where.
Example of person using Excel to keep a commonplace book.
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ryanholiday.net ryanholiday.net
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Just this year I made a gmail account, just for me to send myself creative ideas, interesting quotes, and write down moving experiences. I also send myself articles that I like and it’s nice to be able to write my thoughts or key words to go with it. Then the email can be organized into folders for the different themes. It’s a really easy way to bring it all with me and to never feel like I have to wait to record an idea.
An example of someone using a gmail account to create a commonplace book!
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I have been thinking about putting this system into place for my own writing. I first came across it whilst reading ‘Lila’ by Robert Pirsig.
Apparently Robert Pirsig mentions the commonplace book idea in his book Lila.
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It’s not totally dissimilar to the Dewey Decimal system and old library card catalogs.
Ryan Holiday notes the similarity of his method to that of the Dewey Decimal system and library card catalogs.
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Ronald Reagan also kept a similar system that apparently very few people knew about until he died. In his system, he used 3×5 notecards and kept them in a photo binder by theme. These note cards–which were mostly filled with quotes–have actually been turned into a book edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley. These were not only responsible for many of his speeches as president, but before office Reagan delivered hundreds of talks as part of his role at General Electric. There are about 50 years of practical wisdom in these cards. Far more than anything I’ve assembled–whatever you think of the guy. I highly recommend at least looking at it.
Ronald Reagan kept a commonplace in the form of index cards which he kept in a photo binder and categorized according to theme. Douglas Brinkley edited them into the book The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom.
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-It looks like the system is also very similar to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. Though again, his discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered.
Ryan Holiday on 2014-04-01 mentioning Niklas Luhmann and his Zettelkasten and linking to another article.
Note he doesn't use the phrase commonplace book here, though the comments includes it.
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www.gentlemanstationer.com www.gentlemanstationer.com
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Zealous stationery guy writing generally about starting a commonplace book. He's more interested in the tactile portion of the process seemingly over the format and form.
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www.gentlemanstationer.com www.gentlemanstationer.com
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Unlike traditional journaling or commonplacing, my pocket notebooks don’t have any set format, and mostly amount to a collection of short lists, reminders, and random stream-of-consciousness jottings. These notebooks essentially serve the same purpose as scratch paper, only I have all of my random musings gathered together in one place as opposed to scattered around my desk on post-its and the backs of old grocery lists.
This is an example in the wild of someone using pocket notebooks as waste books. Though in this case they weren't actively moving pieces into a more permanent commonplace.
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www.erasmusdarwin.org www.erasmusdarwin.org
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentarii
Relation to hypomnema
I'm curious how accurate these may have been and could they have contained falsehoods to support later re-imaginings of history? (cf. Relatio in the article Forging Communities by Jennifer Paxton).
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_rerum
Presumably these are the same sylvae mentioned by Earle Havens on page 10 of his book Commonplace Books (Yale, 2001).
Where do these fit into a historical commonplace tradition? From a timing and logical perspective they certainly could be a transplant from other parts of Europe in modified forms.
I'll note that some of the pattern is similar to printed bibles in the 1900's (and perhaps going back earlier) in the United States which held pre-printed pages for adding this sort of historical personal family data that would likely be handed down from generation to generation.
Compare and contrast this form to the idea of the Relatio chronicle in Jennifer Paxton's essay Forging Communities: Memory and Identity in Post-Conquest England.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammelband
Sammelband (/ˈzæməlbænt/ ZAM-əl-bant, plural Sammelbände /ˌzæməlˈbɛndə/ ZAM-əl-BEN-də or Sammelbands), or sometimes nonce-volume, is a book comprising a number of separately printed or manuscript works that are subsequently bound together.
Compare and contrast this publishing scheme with the idea of florilegium and commonplace books.
Did commonplace keepers ever sammelband their own personal volumes? And perhaps include more comprehensive indices?
What time periods did this pattern take place? How does this reflect on the idea of reorganizing early modern information management practices? Could these have bled over into the idea of the evolution of the Zettelkasten?
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomnemata
See definition of hypomnema.
May be useful to look at some of these literary works to compare/contrast them against commonplace books and their general use in early writings.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomnema
Hypomnema (Greek. ὑπόμνημα, plural ὑπομνήματα, hypomnemata), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.
Compare and contrast the idea of this with the concept of the commonplace book. There's also a tie in with the idea of memory, particularly for meditation.
There's also the idea here of keeping a note of something to be fixed or remedied and which needs follow up or reflection.
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books.google.com books.google.com
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Google Ngram Viewer for "commonplace book",florilegium,memex,"note taking"
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The issue of terminology is still problematic since some scholars insist that thegenre must be defined expansively in order to reflect accurately early modernpractice. Adam Smyth’s sixteen characteristics of commonplace book culture(II, A) are particularly useful in this regard
Adam Smyth compiled sixteen characteristics of commonplace book culture. This could be an interesting starting point for comparing and contrasting all the flavors of commonplace book relatives.
Adam Smyth, “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits,” in Women and Writing, c.1340–c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (2010), pp.90–110
See also possibly: Smyth, Adam. “Printed Miscellanies: An Opening Survey,” in his “Profit and Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England,1640–1682 (2004), pp.1–31.
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Many of the snippets here talk about what was in individual commonplace books and how their contents indicated what was admired. What about the negative image of all the things which were excluded?
What things did people read which they didn't commonplace? What does that say about them? Their times? The way they thought?
Could their commonplacing be compared with their marginalia to show what rose to certain levels of interest and what didn't? Digging through the records to find and verify marginalia may be incredibly tedious in comparison with specifically kept things.
Some of my own fleeting notes, which I keep because it's easy, may show some interesting things about the way I think in comparison to those things upon which I expand, keep, and value more for my work and my worldview.
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William Poole, “The Genres of Milton’sCommonplace Book,” inThe Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. NicholasMcDowell and Nigel Smith (2009), pp.367–81, argues that since Milton’scommonplace book was an exercise in moral philosophy (the discipline towhich his headings of ethics, economics, and politics correspond), it wascompiled for action.
John Milton's commonplace book was an exercise in moral philosophy and it was compiled for action, not just a collection.
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Yeo, “Notebooks as Memory Aids” (II, G), locates Locke’s views at a crucialjuncture in the status of memory, when commonplace books were seen assites for ordering information and not as prompts for recalling it.
Interesting datum along the timeline of commonplacebooks and memory. Worth logging and following.
Note the difference in the ideas of ordering information versus being able to recall it. How does this step in the evolution figure for the concept of the zettelkasten?
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Hesperides, or The Muses’ Garden. Hao Tianhu, “Hesperides, or the Muses’Gardenand its Manuscript History,”Library10(2009),372–404, convincinglyunpacks the complicated history ofHesperides, a manuscript commonplacebook of thousands of passages of contemporary verse and prose extractsarranged alphabetically under headings which exists in two extant versions:Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.b.93(compiled c.1654–66) and a secondversion based on the former that was prepared for print in1655–65but neverprinted, was cut up in the nineteenth century by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, and now exists in three Folger manuscripts and seventy scrapbooksat the Shakespeare Centre Library in Statford-upon-Avon. Gunnar Sorelius,“An Unknown Shakespearian Commonplace Book,”Library28(1973),294–308, demonstrates that the source of the Shakespeare quotations cut andpasted into over sixty of Halliwell-Phillipps’ Shakespearean scrapbooks was amanuscript that also once contained the now-fragmentary Folger MSSV.a.75,79, and80, and argues that the manuscript is valuable for the light itsheds on seventeenth-century taste and on how a reader spontaneously editedShakespeare. Beal (III, E), vol.1, part2(1980), p.450, discovered thecompiler’s identity (John Evans), an entry in the Stationers’ Register for1655and an advertisement of1659indicating thatHesperideswas to be publishedby Humphrey Moseley (though it never was), and the existence of FolgerMS V.b.93.
This provides evidence and at least a date for the idea of cutting up books into scraps and then rearranging them to create a commonplace. Where does this fit into the continuum on the evolution of the zettelkasten idea?
How was this rearrangement physically done besides the cutting up of pieces? Were they pasted in? Clipped? other?
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Francis Bacon. Angus Vine, “Commercial Commonplacing: FrancisBacon, the Waste-Book, and the Ledger,”EMS16(2011),197–218, analyzesBacon’s manuscript ‘Comentarius Solutus’ which includes comments onorganizing his twenty-eight notebooks, including several commonplacebooks, one of which is extant (British Library, MS Harley7017, fols83-129v); Bacon’s proposal of a method of note-taking that followed the mer-cantile practice of double-entry bookkeeping reconciled his desire to makethe commonplace book engage with not only words but also the world.
Francis Bacon used double-entry bookkeeping as par of his commonplace practice.
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readers did not merely read for extractiblewisdom but also retained an interest in the work as a whole.
I'll note that I'm often reading for the inventio. It's not always what one can extract, but what interesting ideas that might be sparked anew.
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RECENT STUDIES IN COMMONPLACE BOOKS
Burke provides a sort of miniature commonplace book about journal articles and books on commonplaces!
A great resource for an overview of some of the more recent studies (since year TK?) on commonplace book research.
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Randall L.Anderson, “Metaphors of the Book as Garden in the English Renaissance,”YES33(2003),248–61, explains that seventeenth-century commentators sawmiscellanies as private, idiosyncratic collections and commonplace books asproduced with a readership in mind, for reference.
This would appear to be an interesting direct connection of the analogy of commonplaces to digital gardens.
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Harold Love (III, G) distinguishes usefully between the common-place book and the miscellany
Look this up. I'd love to see a more delineated comparison of the difference between commonplace books and miscellanies.
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KateEichhorn, “Archival Genres: Gathering Texts and Reading Spaces,”InvisibleCulture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture12(2008), correlates thecommonplace book and the blog as archival genres, transitional collectionsand spaces in which readers interact with texts and straddle public and privatespheres.
Interesting analogy of the genres of commonplacing and blogging.
What axes of genre and publication might one consider in creating such a comparison?
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Peter Beal, “Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Com-monplace Book,” inNew Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renais-sance English Text Society,1985–1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (1993), pp.131–47,
Look up this reference.
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The term “commonplace book” typically refers to a collection ofhumanist-inspired extracts from classical writers arranged under topicheadings, but it is also sometimes used to describe an unstructured compi-lation of verse and prose passages. In this essay, the term refers to a book inwhich extracts were collected for reference, usually under topic headings.
Burke takes a much more limited definition of commonplace book than I generally do.
Tags
- negative images
- open questions
- John Milton
- John Locke
- scraps
- Francis Bacon
- digital gardens
- active reading
- Adam Smyth
- history
- exclusion
- zettelkasten
- scrapbooks
- blogging
- references
- commonplace books
- inclusion
- rhetoric
- worldview
- zettel
- inventio
- genres
- philosophy
- miscellany
- definition
- memory
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album_(Ancient_Rome)
Historical precursor of the idea of the modern album (photograph as well as musical), which also bears some resemblance to the commonplace book.
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Local file Local file
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" Havens' inclusive approach and argument for a broad definition of the commonplace book responds to previous scholarship whose scope has been restricted to documents that fit classical theories of the commonplace. In Havens' view, this exclusivity obscures much of the actual history and personal practices of compilers of commonplaces, particularly because it focuses on Renaissance humanist compilations that were made for print.
I take this more inclusive approach to note taking as well.
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Reviewed Work(s): Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century by Earle Havens
Review by: Daniel Knauss
Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2, Marriage in Early Modern Europe (Summer, 2003), pp. 610-611
Published by: Sixteenth Century Journal
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20061514
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Review: Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought by Ann Moss
Author(s): Terence Cave
Review by: Terence Cave
Source: Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 337-340
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.337
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One might weU see a further example of this process in the incorporation into Alsted's Consiliarius académicas et schohsticus (1610) of a category of random, day-to-day observations and reading notes ("ephemerides" or "diaria").
Is this similar to the mixing of a daily journal page with note taking seen in systems like Roam Research and the way some use Obsidian?
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Moss points out the implied analogy between the commonplace-book and "moveable type, capable of both setting a page of text in an apparentiy immutable form and of rearranging all the eléments of that page into other pattems for other meanings" (p. 252); with characteristie prudence, she mentions this analogy only when it finally becomes explicit in one of her later texts, Jean Oudart's Methode des orateurs oí 1668
The ideas of moveable type and moveable information can be an important idea in the evolution of commonplace books to zettelkasten and thence into digital forms of commonplaces.
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At the heart of these is the shift from a manuscript culture to a print culture, which leads first to a rapid increase in the production and use of commonplace-books, and eventuaUy to a kind of implosión, where the wealth of materi-als available in print makes it virtuaUy impossible to devise a comprehen-sive compendium.
Was the decline of commonplaces in culture due to a sort of defeatist attitude about the ever-increasing amount of information?
Evidence of this can be found in the expressions of how impressive Niklas Luhmann's 90,000 index card zettelkasten is. For those without the value of keeping and using one, it can seem a lot of work, but to what end?
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The importance of the Renaissance commonplace-book and the theory that underpins it has been acknowledged since the pioneering work of Robert Bolgar and others and reiterated by numerous Renaissance special-ists ever since.
Look into Robert Bolgar, this is the first I've seen his name in the space.
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After a long and influential career, commonplace books lost their influence in the late seventeenth century. Classical passages were relegated to the anti- quarian scholar; they no longer molded discourse and life. Men who sought confirmation in empirical evidence and scientific measurement had little use for commonplace books.
I believe that Earle Havens disputes the idea of the waning of the commonplace book after this.
I would draw issue with it as well. Perhaps it lost some ground in the classrooms of the youth, but Harvard was teaching the idea during Ralph Waldo Emerson's time during the 1800s. Then there's the rise of the Zettelkasten in Germany in the 1700s (and later officially in the 1900s).
Lichtenberg specifically mentions using his commonplace as a scientific tool for sharpening his ideas.
Can we find references to other commonplacers like Francis Bacon mentioning the use of them for science?
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Moss shows how Protestant pedagogues such as Johann Sturm at Strasbourg used commonplace books in the schoolroo
What was the relationship, if any, between Johann Sturm, a Protestant pedagogue, and Petrus Ramus? Any link here in the offloading of memory into the commonplace book as a means of sidelining the ars memoria?
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. Publishers quickly produced numerous printed commonplace books in order to satisfy the deman
I'll note that we've seen a similar trend here in publishers making copies of bullet journals in the past several years.
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Review of Ann Moss. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xiv + 345 pp. f, 80. ISBN: 0-1981- 5908-0
Author(s): Paul F. Grendler Review by: Paul F. Grendler Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 1001-1002 Published by: University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2901782
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themorningnews.org themorningnews.org
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Imagine a zettelkasten created by post?
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awarm.space awarm.space
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https://awarm.space/fast/standard-ebooks
Always fun to see people trying some of the same experiments I've done. A few interesting tidbits here to refine some of the process perhaps?
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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He mentions Amazon wishlists that pile up and never get used. Similar to the way people pile up bookmarks and never use or revisit them.
One of the benefits of commonplace books (and tools like Obsidian, et al.) is that one is forced to re-see or re-discover these over time. This restumbling upon these things can be incredibly valuable.
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www.jvt.me www.jvt.me
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h-book
h-book is an experimental microformat at best.
I might recommend for minimizing the vocabulary that one might use the existing
h-productinstead and allow parsers to find an ISBN, Library of Congress book number, ASIN, UPC, or other product code to determine "bookness".
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drkimburns.com drkimburns.com
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How do you remember what you read?
I too keep a commonplace book. First it was (and in part still is) on my personal website. Lately I've been using Hypothes.is to annotate digital documents and books, the data of which is piped into the clever tool (one of many) Obsidian.md, a (currently) private repository which helps me to crosslink my thoughts and further flesh them out.
I've recently found that Sönke Ahrens book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers is a good encapsulation of my ideas/methods in general, so I frequently recommend that to friends and students interested in the process.
In addition to my commonplace book, I also practice a wealth of mnemonic techniques including the method of loci/songlines and the phonetic system which helps me remember larger portions of the things I've read and more easily memorized. I've recently been teaching some of these methods to a small cohort of students.
syndication link: https://drkimburns.com/why-i-keep-a-commonplace-book/?unapproved=4&moderation-hash=d3f1c550516a44ba4dca4b06455f9265#comment-4
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https://drkimburns.com/why-i-keep-a-commonplace-book/
A personal statement from a researcher that keeps one where she describes some of the how and why.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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oldandgreat · 21hMe, and probably others, would be really interested to hear your book recommendations!2ReplyGive AwardShareReportSavelevel 4FluentFelicityOp · 20hThank you for sharing. I hope I am able to engage more intelligent readers like yourself in the future.I also agree with the other redditor. It's clear you have a much more comprehensive mental model of knowledge management than most of us who even regularly engage with this stuff.
I've probably read more and deeper about the space than most, but a lot of my knowledge here is practical in having worked on and used a commonplace for a while. I've generally figured out what does and doesn't work for me over the years. Having more than six months experience sure helps a lot. :) Book recommendations: Practical note taking and reading:
- Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
- A recent sine qua non of note taking. Regardless of the form you're using, there's some very solid and practical advice here.
- Doren, Charles Van, and Mortimer J. Adler. How to Read a Book. Revised and Updated ed. edition. Touchstone, 2011.
- Adler compiled a massive encyclopedia using a version of a community zettelkasten. He's mired in the general tradition and this is a classic about how to think about reading.
- Photo: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2FG8GNF/mortimer-j-adler-surrounded-by-his-great-ideas-photo-by-george-skaddingthe-life-picture-collection-via-getty-images-2FG8GNF.jpg History:
- Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library New Haven, CT, 2001.
- Great introduction to the definition and form over the last 2000 years. Nice timeline of history and some examples of use.
- Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159087.001.0001.
- Comprehensive with some interesting speculation about their origin and evolution of commonplaces. Related books that are also relatively fun (for the space).
- Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know. Yale University Press, 2011. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.
- Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. The MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.
- Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
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FluentFelicityOp · 12hBrilliant... I must ask you to share a little of your story. What brought you to have learned this much history and philosophy?
I've always had history and philosophy around me from a relatively young age. Some of this stems from a practice of mnemonics since I was eleven and a more targeted study of the history and philosophy of mnemonics over the past decade. Some of this overlaps areas like knowledge acquisition and commonplace books which I've delved into over the past 6 years. I have a personal website that serves to some extent as a digital commonplace book and I've begun studying and collecting examples of others who practice similar patterns (see: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book and a selection of public posts at https://boffosocko.com/tag/commonplace-books/) in the blogosphere and wiki space. As a result of this I've been watching the digital gardens space and the ideas relating to Zettelkasten for the past several years as well. If you'd like to go down a similar rabbit hole I can recommend some good books.
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uniweb.uottawa.ca uniweb.uottawa.caMembers2
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Victoria E. Burke, Commonplace Genres, Or Women’s Interventions in Non-Traditional Literary Forms: Madame de Sablé, Aphra Behn, and the Maxim, World-making Renaissance Women: Rethinking Women's Place in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Cambridge University Press Cambridge, 2022Editors: Pamela S. Hammons and Brandie R. SiegfriedEarly modern literatureSeventeenth-century women's writingFranceLiterary Genre
Another interesting one to pick up when it comes out.
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Victoria E. Burke, Commonplacing, Making Miscellanies, and Interpreting Literature, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1680, Oxford University Press Oxford, 2022Editors: Danielle Clarke, Sarah C.E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-BaumannBook historyEarly modern literatureManuscript studiesSeventeenth-century women's writing
This looks like a fun read to track down.
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digitalcollections.tcd.ie digitalcollections.tcd.ie
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Papers of John Millington Synge: Literary Papers
John Millington Synge, the author of [[The Playboy of the Western World]] has several digitized commonplace books available at [[Trinity College Dublin]]'s library:
https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/concern/subseries/tx31qh73c?locale=en
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halfanhour.blogspot.com halfanhour.blogspot.com
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I would rather see the scientists and the healers and the artists depicted in a heroic light.
Why are so many villains in comic books depicted as scientists? Has this harmed the American psyche? Encouraged an anti-science temperament?
Observation sparked, in part, to episode of Young Sheldon, Season 1 about Sheldon's eating issues.
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delong.typepad.com delong.typepad.com
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To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
The distinctions between being informed and enlightened.
Learning might be defined as the pathway from being informed as a preliminary base on the way to full enlightenment. Pedagogy is the teacher's plan for how to take this path.
How would these definitions and distinctions fit into Bloom's taxonomy?
Note that properly annotating and taking notes into a commonplace book can be a serious (necessary?) step one might take on the way towards enlightenment.
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Mortimer]. Adler
Adler apparently kept a commonplace book in the form of a massive zettelkasten (and may have kept a more traditional commonplace book as well). I wonder if they detail any note taking details or advice here.
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commonplaces.io commonplaces.io
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This looks like a bookmarking service that is billing itself as a digital commonplace book. I'm not sure about the digital ownership aspect, but it does have a relatively pretty UI.
Looks like it works via a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/commonplaces-your-digital/ckiapimepnnpdnoehhmghgpmiondhbof
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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u/MushroomPuddle17 days agoGetting started with a commonplace notebook as someone who isn't creative? .t3_ojhwrb ._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; } Hello everyone!I've known about commonplace books for years and always feel a surge of inspiration when I see them but I'm really not creative. I don't know what I'd ever write in one? I don't ever really have any grand ideas or plans. I don't seem to have conversations or read things that necessarily inspire me. I just live a very regular life where nothing really sticks out to me as important. I've tried bullet journals before and had the same issue.Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd really appreciate it.
I'm not sure what you mean by your use of the word "creative". I'm worried that you've seen too many photos of decorative and frilly commonplace books on Instagram and Pinterest. I tend to call most of those "productivity porn" as their users spend hours decorating and not enough collecting and expanding their thoughts, which is really their primary use and value. Usually whatever time they think they're "saving" in having a cpb, they're wasting in decorating it. (Though if decorating is your thing, then have at it...) My commonplace is a (boring to others) location of mostly walls of text. It is chock full of creative ideas, thoughts, and questions though. If you're having trouble with a place to start, try creating a (free) Hypothes.is account and highlighting/annotating everything you read online. (Here's what mine looks like: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich, you'll notice that it could be considered a form of searchable digital commonplace book all by itself.) Then once a day/week/month, take the best of the quotes, ideas, highlights, and your notes, replies, questions and put them into your physical or digital commonplace. Build on them, cross link them, expand on them over time. Do some research to start answering any of the questions you came up with. By starting with annotating things you're personally interested in, you'll soon have a collection of things that become highly valuable and useful to you. After a few weeks you'll start seeing something and likely see a change in the way you're reading, writing, and even thinking.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I've used something like this in a textbook before while also using different colored pens to help differentiate a larger taxonomy. I found it to be better for a smaller custom cpb that only had a narrow section of topics. In my larger, multi-volume commonplace, I have a separate volume that serves as an index and uses a method similar to John Locke's, though larger in scope and shape. Sadly in this case, the index would be much too large (with too many entries) to make the high five method practicable.
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www.highfivehq.com www.highfivehq.com
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Highfive Notebook indexing method
A clever method for creating an index or tracking system in a bound notebook by creating an index and then marking the edge of the page for related pages.
Could also be used for tracking one's mood or other similar taxonomic items.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/mor-leidr </span> in Has anyone used this indexing system? Curious what you think : commonplacebook (<time class='dt-published'>07/30/2021 12:29:53</time>)</cite></small>
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Of interest to many here, I and a few others have been maintaining a list of personal website-based online commonplace books, examples, tools, and related information for a few years. It can be found on the IndieWeb Community's wiki (aka a community-based digital commonplace book) at: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book
It's got:
- links to online examples to view for potentially creating your own digital commonplace;
- lists of tools and resources for creating and maintaining a digital (and especially online) commonplace;
- lists of articles and related books which some (especially beginners) may find helpful;
- examples of written, historical and sometimes digitized and browsable online commonplaces;
- details about other commonplace "flavors" including: anthologies/florilegium, waste books/sudelbücher, wikis, second brains, and the increasingly popular Zettelkasten and digital gardens.
Syndicated copies: https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/ourjnl/resources_for_personal_digital_online_commonplace/
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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u/thepoisonouspotato5 months agoWhat should I use for a Digital Commonplace book? .t3_lxgjgl ._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; } I never really kept my notes digitally, I have mostly used physical notebooks for journaling, bujoing and other stuffs, mostly decorating and spending a lot of time on it. But with my Uni and all the study pressure and a busy life I am often demotivated to get back on paper, cause I always find this voice inside me, "it should look good". So I'm planning to try a Digital Commonplace book, but since I never really did anything digitally I'm not sure if I can stick to it or not and I'm not up for investing in something I might leave in mid way. Anything you wanna suggest I can use as a beginner?
Did you pick something? How's it going? For ease of use and simplicity, I most often recommend and personally use the free Obsidian.md, so that I can own all the data and do other things with it easily if I choose. They've also got a very useful forum and a discord with sections on use for education/academia. If you're starting one for educational purposes, I highly recommend reading How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens. It's written in the framing of a Zettelkasten, an index-card-based cousin of the commonplace, but the method is essentially equivalent to commonplacing and often seen in digital spaces lately. For other digital and online versions of commonplace software, I've been updating a list I (and others) maintain at https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book which has lots of options for either self-hosted solutions, commercial solutions as well as public/private options and examples.
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browninterviews.org browninterviews.org
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I like the idea of some of the research into education, pedagogy, and technology challenges here.
Given the incredibly common and oft-repeated misconception which is included in the article ("But Zettelkasten was a very personal practice of Nicholas Luhmann, its inventor."), can we please correct the record?
Niklas Luhmann positively DID NOT invent the concept of the Zettelkasten. It grew out of the commonplace book tradition in Western culture going back to Aristotle---if not earlier. In Germany it was practiced and morphed with the idea of the waste book or sudelbücher, which was popularized by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg or even re-arrangeable slips of paper used by countless others. From there it morphed again when index cards (whose invention has been attributed to Carl Linnaeus) were able to be mass manufactured in the early 1900s. A number of well-known users who predate Luhmann along with some general history and references can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten.
I suspect that most of the fallacy of Luhmann as the inventor stems from the majority of the early writing about Zettelkasten as a subject appears in German and hasn't been generally translated into English. What little is written about them in English has primarily focused on Luhmann and his output, so the presumption is made that he was the originator of the idea---a falsehood that has been repeated far and wide. This falsehood is also easier to believe because our culture is generally enamored with the mythology of the "lone genius" that managed Herculean feats of output. (We are also historically heavily prone to erase the work and efforts of research assistants, laboratory members, students, amanuenses, secretaries, friends, family, etc. which have traditionally helped writers and researchers in their output.)
Anyone glancing at the commonplace tradition will realize that similar voluminous outputs were to be easily found among their practitioners as well, especially after their re-popularization by Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon in the emergence of humanism in the 1500s. The benefit of this is that there is now a much richer area of research to be done with respect to these tools and the educational enterprise. One need not search very far to discover that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau's output could potentially be attributed to their commonplace books, which were subsequently published. It was a widely accepted enough technique that it was taught to them at Harvard University when they attended. Apparently we're now all attempting to reinvent the wheel because there's a German buzzword that is somehow linguistically hiding our collective intellectual heritage. Maybe we should put these notes into our digital Zettelkasten (née commonplace books) and let them distill a bit?
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www.kristofferbalintona.me www.kristofferbalintona.me
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I argue Zettelkasten’s essence is to repeatedly revisit, recall, and engage with that which you have learned, iterating upon the writing artifacts of that process—your crystallized thoughts—over time. Engaging with what you learn is the crux to a successful knowledge management system. The contribution of backlinks is too commonly conflated with the contribution of that routine. Backlinks are a complementary feature.
I think that this is the biggest part of the value proposition as well. Backlinks can be fun and useful, but it's all the other pieces that add the most value.
The long tradition of commonplace books in the Western intellectual tradition underlines this as well. The Zettelkasten is simply an iteration of the commonplace book instantiated into index card form.
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forum.obsidian.md forum.obsidian.md
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https://forum.obsidian.md/t/epub-support/1403
Some interesting resources here, though none currently suit workflows I'm keen to support yet. There is a reference to FuturePress' epub.js which could be intriguing, though even here, I'm more likely to stick with Hypothes.is for annotating and note taking to keep context.
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forum.obsidian.md forum.obsidian.md
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https://forum.obsidian.md/t/workflow-reading-ebook-epub-mobi-azw-etc-in-obsidian/17977
This is a clever hack for getting ebooks from Calibre to be readable within Obsidian, potentially for cutting/pasting and taking notes directly.
I think I still prefer my other methods, but this might be fun to play around with since I have so much stored in Calibre.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Watched up to 2:33:00 https://youtu.be/wB89lJs5A3s?t=9181 with talk about research papers.
Some interesting tidbits and some workflow tips thus far. Not too jargony, but beginners may need to look at some of his other videos or work to see how to better set up pieces. Definitely very thorough so far.
He's got roughly the same framing for tags/links that I use, though I don't even get into the status pieces with emoji/tags as much as he does.
I'm not a fan of some of his reliance on iframes where data can (and will) disappear in the future. For Twitter, he does screencaptures of things which can be annoying and take up a lot of storage. Not sure why he isn't using twitter embed functionality which will do blockquotes of tweets and capture the actual text so that it's searchable.
Taking a short break from this and coming back to it later.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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In the Western tradition, these memory traditions date back to ancient Greece and Rome and were broadly used until the late 1500s. Frances A. Yates outlines much of their use in The Art of Memory (Routledge, 1966). She also indicates that some of their decline in use stems from Protestant educational reformers like Peter Ramus who preferred outline and structural related methods. Some religious reformers didn't appreciate the visual mnemonic methods as they often encouraged gross, bloody, non-religious, and sexualized imagery.
Those interested in some of the more modern accounts of memory practice (as well as methods used by indigenous and oral cultures around the world) may profit from Lynne Kelly's recent text Memory Craft (Allen & Unwin, 2019).
Lots of note taking in the West was (and still is) done via commonplace book, an art that is reasonably well covered in Earle Havens' Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001).
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roam.garden roam.garden
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There's apparently a product that will turn one's Roam Research notes into a digital garden.
Great to see a bridge for making these things easier for the masses, but I have to think that there's a better and cheaper way. Perhaps some addition competition in the space will help bring the price down.
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bzawilski.medium.com bzawilski.medium.com
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A lot of guru-esque figures have appeared in the personal knowledge management arena, but once you reach past some of the marketing bluster, there’s a lot to be gained by taking up a note-taking system to help organize your thoughts.
Sadly this article takes the magical thinking/guru idea to the extreme and misses the longer tradition of these ideas in Western thought.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.orgHeadword1
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The term 'lemma' comes from the practice in Greco-Roman antiquity of using the word to refer to the headwords of marginal glosses in scholia; for this reason, the Ancient Greek plural form is sometimes used, namely lemmata (Greek λῆμμα, pl. λήμματα).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headword
No mention here of the use of headwords within the commonplace book tradition.
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hackaday.com hackaday.com
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https://hackaday.com/2019/06/18/before-computers-notched-card-databases/
Originally suggested by Alan Levine. Some interesting specific examples here, but I've been aware of the concept for a while.
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bookriot.com bookriot.com
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thomasfoster.co thomasfoster.co