This is also roughly the way that zettelkasten and commonplace books have worked for centuries.

This passage is an excellent reason for "why" to keep one, which few sources I've seen bother to mention.

This is a great analogy for a commonplace book

What does this tell us about Julia? Very meta.

What other translations of Il Cortegiano exist?

Is there a truly handsome volume of it currently in print?

Another major example of a significant zettelkasten.

A fascinating quote in the history of the commonplace book on it's way to becoming the Memex.

a good name for entries in a commonplace

ruminant machines is an interesting concept, it sounds like a cross between a cow and Memex.

It would almost have to be the case that with his method and notebooks being so well known that they influenced Niklas Luhmann's idea of a zettelkasten.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg used his notebooks as thinking tools with respect to scientific methodology.

Purchased a copy of this on 2021-05-12

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'></span> in Via: Gimmick Book — Gordon Brander (<time class='dt-published'>05/12/2021 14:04:29</time>)</cite></small>

Oh look! A page about me in someone else's commonplace book.

Here's translated quote from the 1700's in which Georg Christoph Lichtenberg directly links the idea of double-entry bookkeeping to the idea of a commonplace book (or waste book or in his tongue Sudelbücher).

Not to dissimilar to my recent observation:

Backlinks in digital gardens, commonplace books, or wikis are just an abstract extension of the accounting concept of double-entry bookkeeping.

I added this section.

I've heard references of people using these in combination with or also for commonplace books.

Here's the beginning of the digital example of Isaac Newton's Waste Book.

It's been a while since I've seen someone mention either gimmick books or waste books in relation to commonplace books.

This certainly fits into the broad general ideas surrounding note taking, commonplace books, and zettelkasten as tools for thought. People generally seemed to have used relatively similar methods but shoehorned them into the available tools they had at the time.

This also, incidentally isn't too far off from how indigenous peoples the world over have used memory techniques (memory palaces, songlines, etc.) to hold together and pollinate their own thinking.

Raymond Llull took things a step further with his combinatoric methods, though I've yet to see anyone attempting that in the area of digital gardens.

I've annotated something about Isaac Newton's Waste Book for calculus before (possibly in Cambridge's Digital Library itself, but just in case, I'm making a note of it here again so it doesn't get lost.

In my own practice, I occasionally use small notebooks to write temporary notes into before transferring them into other digital forms. I generally don't throw them away, but they're essentially waste books in a sense.

compare Vademecum with commonplace books

This has to be one of the baddest-ass things I've seen in months. I wish more people had public-facing commonplace books like this!

Bonus points that Whitney calls it a Whiki! :)

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>whitney trettien</span> on Twitter: "I'm excited to share a digital edition of Susanna Collet's 17th-century commonplace book, held at @morganlibrary. @zoe_braccia & I made it using @digitalmappa. It features a full transcription/facsimile & a searchable library of Collet's source texts. https://t.co/VSCMmBhMS6 https://t.co/fyrbwS9kk1" (<time class='dt-published'>04/09/2021 10:49:31</time>)</cite></small>

Susanna Collet's Commonplace Book

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Whitney Trettien</span> in Digital Book History (<time class='dt-published'>04/07/2021 12:59:11</time>)</cite></small>

This also supports Obsidian wikilinks

An interesting thread with some links to the [[agora]] and various pieces others are building.

I love the phrase "elephant paths" (the correct translation?) for maps of content.

I also like the idea of having a set up for doing digital captures of physical notebook pages. I'll have to consider how to do this most easily. I should also look back and evaluate how to continue improving my digital process as well.

We really need to get around to scheduling the second session of Gardens and Streams.

This sounds like a fun way to get together. I'm personally curious to see people taking their Obsidian data and turning them into IndieWeb-friendly linked Memexes. It's interesting to use Obsidian to have a thought conversation with one's self, but it could also be interesting if they could have conversations with each other via Webmention.

For me the more difficult piece is not so much getting the thing online, but setting it up so that the backlinks all work properly using the [[wikilink]] syntax.

This is much the way I feel and write. I keep my site more as a personal commonplace book and write primarily for myself. Others read it from time to time and comment, but in the end, it's really all just for me.

heard about this before, read

This is a pretty solid overview of a literature review workflow. He doesn't use the words, but this is not a half bad way to build a digital commonplace book or digital garden/personal wiki for research use.

I hadn't thought about using Grav as the method for storing and displaying all of it, but perhaps it's worth looking into?

This looks fascinating. I'm not so much interested in the coding/programming part as I am the actual "working in public" portions as they relate to writing, thinking, blogging in the open and sharing that as part of my own learning and growth as well as for sharing that with a broader personal learning network. I'm curious what lessons might be learned within this frame or how educators and journalists might benefit from it.

I've seen some people building digital commonplace books in real time, but I'm also curious to see more academics doing it and seeing what tools and platforms they're using to do it.

Given the prevalence for these in text, I'd be particularly curious to see them being done as .txt or .md files and then imported into platforms like Obsidian, Roam Research, Org Mode, TiddlyWiki, et al for cross linking and backlinking.

I've seen some evidence of people doing some of this with copies of the bible, but yet to see anyone digitize and cross link old notebooks or commonplace books.

Books

I'm curious what this system was? Was it influenced by systems of John Locke's commonplace book? It could also have been the sort of system which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann.

Whatever it was, it must have been massive and somewhat well thought through if it reached such a tremendous size.

He talks about stories being important to us.

This is because there's an organization and order to our stories, which is important to our memory, individually and culturally.

The idea of photographs helping to spark our memories of times and spaces.

Urgency vs. acceptance

h/t Jacky A.

Folks like Ben Thompson are effectively writing books. Take a year of his essays, edit them for brevity and clarity, and you’d have a brilliant edition of This Year in Tech. And so in a strange way, Stratechery in paid newsletter form is as much a Future Book as a bounded Kindle edition.

And this isn't a new thing, publishers were mining the blogosphere for books from websites in the early 2000s.

Purchasing a book is one of the strongest self-selections of community, and damn it, I wanted to engage.

Why the future book never arrived? I might posit that the book we want needs more context about us (perhaps a commonplace book?). If it had this then it could meet us where we are and help to give us the things we need.

An Algebra text would be dramatically different things to a 4th grader, an 8th grader, and a college math major. It could still be the same book, but hide or reveal portions of it's complexity depending on our background and knowledge of its subject.

Perhaps it would know our favorite learning modalities and provide them based on whether we're motivated by stories, audio, video, data visualizations, or other thoughts and ideas.

Ravi outlines some of how he syndicates from his Drupal website to Twitter.

I particularly appreciated that he's using a sort of taxonomy within Drupal to add some of his particular content to "books" which aggregate related content together. If this were done in an editable outline then it should be easier to aggregate and edit later into an actual book. This would be a cool UI to have within a website for writing and creating.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>hyperlink.academy</span> in The Future of Textbooks (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:54:19</time>)</cite></small>

I wonder something related, but even broader, "How do we get everyone to work in public?"

Adalja, Amesh. ‘The Words That Shaped COVID-19’. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 21, no. 2 (1 February 2021): 179. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30954-3.

One of the pieces missing from Hypothes.is is the curateable notebook which more easily allows one to create new content from one's annotations.

Search is certain there, but being able to move the pieces about and re-synthesize them into new emergent pieces is the second necessary step.

I personally identify with this since I'm porting my annotations and thoughts to a notebook as part of a process for active thinking, revision, writing, and eventual publication.

Books to look into.

this will go nicely with a text from my Educational Ethnography class, Hybrid Ethnography

A command line tool for placing Hypothes.is annotations into [[Obsidian]].

I love this idea. I have a fairly extensive personal commonplace book and collect and archive tons of material, but really should delve more deeply into the topic. I'd be particularly interested in the taxonomies portions you've outlined.

Similar to my own ideas of networked digital commonplace books or the idea of a networked Memex.

I think it is ridiculous that they came up with the idea to segregate the schools, while also leaving black students with the worst school supplies.

Not much substantive or new here for me.It is an intriguing question, but it's better to write my own response elsewhere.

I've heard one or two mentions of Athens before, but don't think I've actively bookmarked it. Here are some of the primary references.

This project is somewhat related to getmemex.com

Zegnat et al.: FYI WorldBrain's Memex (= getmemex.com) has some shared history with my WebMemex project; we collaborated for some months, then went in somewhat different directions; I focussed on web page snapshotting for a while, and got distracted with other things; WorldBrain's version added more and more features and got a lot closer to what I had in mind for WebMemex. — via treora # 21:34 on 2021-02-12

Interesting example of a personal wiki or commonplace book.

This word is exactly the point. What if this web page were a public thing within Roam? Then other people's notebooks could comment within their own, but using notifications (via Webmention) could be placed into a comments section at the bottom of one's page or even done inline on the portions they're commenting on using block references.

What about publishing in a place that could make one's ideas dramatically better? If Roam or competitiors had page to page discussions (think short notes/status updates on Twitter, but without the extra "crap"), then one would come for the ideas and the conversation, but in a format that's meant for improving and elevating one's thoughts and ideas.

This may not appeal to Harry and Mary Beercan, but it would cater to a large enough group to make things worthwhile.

This is an important point and is generally true.

But it's also why I like the idea of linking Roam or similar tools to Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is puts some of the conversation into other documents which are linear, but allow side conversations which could be moved into one's public/private notebooks.

Similarly, longer articles within a digital garden could be this more linear space where conversations occur and continue to hone ideas.

But why can't it do both?

Because it's on the same platform, they could allow people to make their notes public and shareable. They could add Webmention support so that one notebook could talk to another!

C'mon people!!? Don't you remember the dream of the Memex?

Well interlinked notes increases their future expected value which in turn gives one more reason to not only take more notes, but to take better notes.

This is a major problem of most note taking applications. Having the ability to inter-link one's notes in ways that allow one to revisit, revise, and rearrange them is incredibly valuable.

They don't unless you're building a wiki or commonplace book that can interact with those of others. (Roam research isn't doing this---yet, but they should.) Ideally small building block pieces will allow it to dovetail with other systems that could potentially do the same thing.

Sounds kind of like they're wishing for Hypothes.is?

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #indieweb 2021-02-15 (<time class='dt-published'>02/14/2021 17:38:55</time>)</cite></small>

Many people anecdotally have said that they find it difficult to either write on their sites or actually hit publish when they're done. This is great advice for getting over that.

A fascinating and thoughtful article. One of the best things I've read in a month.

The value of journalism must take account of the increase in textual productivity gained by the interconnected Internet and not solely by the number of editors, reporters, and size or number of newspapers.

Of course we also need to account for the signal to noise ratio created by the masses of people who can say anything they like, which can also be compounded by the algorithmic feed of social platforms that give preference to the extremes and content that increases engagement (a measure which doesn't take into account the intrinsic value of the things which are shared.)

How can we measure and prefer the content with more intrinsic value? Similar to the idea of fast food and healthier food? How can we help people to know the difference between the types of information they're consuming.

Technology is providing us with the ability to build the most amazing commonplace books, thought spaces, and thinking machines, but somehow we're ignoring the power they have.

The thoughtfulness and design of of Hypothes.is is incredibly valuable to me specifically because it dramatically increases my textual productivity in combination with my digital commonplace book.

Connect this to the Jeremy Dean's idea of it helping to facilitate a conversation with texts. Nate Angell had a specific quote of it somewhere, but it might also reside in this document: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682753.2017.1362168

By not providing the ability to select text, copy it, or share it, some digital applications are dramatically lowering the textual productivity of their content.

A fantastic example of the value of networked thought based solely on the ability of everyone's commonplace books to talk to each other.

Definition: textual productivity

A measure of how much additional knowledge is generated by a system of ideas and thoughts interacting with each other.

Reframing:

SEO is really just various commonplace books competing to be the most important zettels in the world for particular taxonomies.

What if we add in a dose of Llull's combinatorial thought to the idea of a search engine? What if the search engine can remember the top 50 categories in my personal commonplace book and show overlapping searches of those terms? What if it's even more combinatorial and randomly chooses overlaps from any words in my commonplace? Is that more or less valuable as an idea generator?

Is it more fruitful to randomly work on various entries every day in an effort to tie them into our other thoughts?

Google search is just an algorithmic search version of John Locke's commonplace book index iterated across millions of individual commonplace books.

The internet isn't a new invention, it's just a more fixed version of the melange of text, ideas, and thought networks that have existed over human existence.

First there was just the memory and indigenous peoples all over the world creating vast memory palaces to interconnect their thoughts. (cross reference the idea of ancients thinking much the way we do now from the fist episode or so of Literature and History)

Then we invite writing and texts which help us in terms of greater storage without the work or relying solely on memory. This reaches it's pinnacle in the commonplace book and the ideas of Llull's combinatorial thought.

Finally we've built the Internet which interconnects so much more.

But now we need to go back and revisit the commonplace book and memory techniques to tie them altogether. Perhaps Lynne Kelly's concept of The Third Archive is what we should perfect next until another new instantiation comes to augment the system.

Interesting examples of remixed work.

I must do some research into Niklas Luhmann to see if he was aware of Locke's work or the broader idea of commonplace books in general as it seems pretty obvious that his refinesments on their systems brought him to his conceptualization of the zettelkasten.

Written in 2010, this may be one of the first mentions I've seen that relates blogging and websites to commonplace books.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>The Public Domain Review</span> in John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685) (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 14:10:02</time>)</cite></small>

Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting in its own way. The assembled texts reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.

A nice little analogy here.

That point warrants pondering, because the history of reading has become one of the most vital fields of research in the humanities; yet it consists for the most part of case studies, which do not fit into a general pattern. Instead of sharing a common view of long-term trends, historians of reading tend to treat their subject as a moving target driven by the interplay of binary opposites: reading by turning the leaves of a codex as opposed to reading by unrolling a volumen, reading printed texts in contrast to reading manuscripts, silent reading as distinct from reading aloud, reading alone rather than reading in groups, reading extensively by racing through different kinds of material vs. reading intensively by perusing a few books many times. Now that the research has shifted to commonplace books, we may add segmental vs. sequential reading to the list.

This paragraph is a good overview of areas of research into reading.

Only fifteen of the thirty-seven commonplace books were written in his hand. He might have dictated the others to a secretary, but the nature of his authorship, if it existed, remains a matter of conjecture. A great deal of guesswork also must go into the interpretation of the entries in his own hand, because none of them are dated. Unlike the notes of Harvey, they consist of endless excerpts, which cannot be connected with anything that was happening in the world of politics.

I find myself wondering what this study of his commonplace books would look like if it were digitized and cross-linked? Sadly the lack of dates on the posts would prevent some knowledge from being captured, but what would the broader corpus look like?

Consider the broader digital humanities perspective of this. Something akin to corpus linguistics, but at the level of view of what a single person reads, thinks, and reacts to over the course of their own lifetime.

How much of a person could be recreated from such a collection?

Foucault probably offers the most helpful theoretical approach. His “archaeology of knowledge” suggests a way to study texts as sites that bear the marks of epistemological activity, and it has the advantage of doing justice to the social dimension of thought.

He is right, I think, to treat commonplace books as sites to be mined for information about how people thought in a culture based on different assumptions from our own.

This is an interesting take, and particularly because the writers may not have expected their commonplace books to be read or studied.

My particular version may be slightly more suspect. While I keep one, it's digital and more public facing. Therefore there is the chance that people (though I suspect a vanishingly small number) may read my words and be influenced by them. Generally however, I feel like 99.9999% of the time I'm writing just to have a conversation with myself and the expectation that it will make me better.

But help can be had from a study of some similar material by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton.3 They published a dazzlingly original analysis of the marginalia of Gabriel Harvey, a lawyer and secretary to the Earl of Leicester in Elizabethan England. Harvey read and reread a 1555 edition of Livy’s History of Rome over a period of twenty-two years, leaving behind a trail of annotations, which often can be linked to contemporary events. In fact, he filled the margins with so many allusions and cross-references that they turned into a kind of palimpsest or a commonplace book within a book.

Annotations so heavy in a book that it becomes a commonplace book within a book is an interesting take.

Why pause over this arcane, forgotten book? Because it shows how an archaic genre could be used to impose order on experience in modern times. Commonplace books served far more effectively in this manner several centuries earlier, when they were standard tools of readers. By studying them, historians and literary scholars have come closer to understanding reading, both as a specific cultural practice and as a general way of construing the world. But it is a tricky business, especially when the researcher moves from questions about who readers were and what they read to the problems of how they made sense of books.

To some extent, this same thing will very likely be done with social media in 50 or 100 years' time.

Trousers should shiver on the shoe but not break. —Arnold Bennett’s tailor

A gentleman: superficially perhaps, a man who never looks as if he’d just had his hair cut.

No gentleman can be without three copies of a book; one for show (and this he will probably keep at his country house), another for use, and a third at the service of his friends. —Richard Heber

Some great examples from Geoffrey Madan's notebooks

Overview of reading patterns by early modern Englishmen.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>The Public Domain Review</span> in John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685) (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 14:10:02</time>)</cite></small>

Might be an interesting source to read.

Also feels in form a bit like the combinatorial method of Raymond Llull, but without as much mixing.

I hadn't known about the earlier French version of John Locke's book.

Interesting use of hyperthymesia here. Also Swift using the concept of "supplemental memory" giving at least a historical mile marker of the state of mnemotechy which may have been known at the time.

Short overview of John Locke's commonplace book method. Nothing I haven't seen before sadly.

And probably not a method I would personally use unless I was thinking about paper solutions.

Mostly an advertisement for their other materials, but a reasonable overview particularly with

4 Benefits of Keeping a Commonplace Book

• To remember what inspired you
• To save hours on research.
• To find unexpected connections.
• To focus your future reading.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>J. D. Biersdorfer</span> in Create a Digital Commonplace Book - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 12:20:08</time>)</cite></small>

Supposedly helped to popularize commonplace books in the Renaissance.

This article has lots of examples of commonplace books and talks about a few of the older online methods for collecting and keeping them.

It doesn't touch on any of the newer applications with backlink UI like Roam Research, Obsidian, Foam, etc.

And as Kimberly Hirsh indicated, it doesn't include keeping one on your own website where you can truly keep it for yourself.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Kimberly Hirsh</span> in Kimberly Hirsh (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 05:48:31</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>J. D. Biersdorfer</span> in Create a Digital Commonplace Book - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 12:20:08</time>)</cite></small>

a nice example of a commonplace book by an archaeologist

There's surely a link between this and the idea of thought spaces in the blogosphere or the idea of a commonplace book/digital garden/wiki.

Read this book

Perhaps if they went the step further to set up domains for their customers, they could ostensibly use them not only as book blogs, but also to replace their social media habits?

An IndieWeb friendly platform run by your local bookseller might be out of their wheelhouse, but it could potentially help solve their proximal problem while also solving one of society's problems all while helping to build community.

This is where bits like version control of academic documents can be incredibly valuable!

See: https://boffosocko.com/2014/09/17/revision-control/

I've been trying this sort of thing out with a TiddlyWiki for a while and have got a reasonable sort of workflow for doing it. The key is to reduce the overhead so that one can quickly take notes in a manner that interlinks them and makes it seem worthwhile to come back to them to review and potentially reorganize them. Doing this practice in public has a lot of value as well. I'll have to come back and look at some of how this was built at a later time.

Alright, I think I may now have things set to use an IFTTT applet to take my Hypothes.is feed and dump it into a file on OneDrive.

The tiny amount of clean up to the resultant file isn't bad. In fact, a bit of it is actually good as it can count as a version of spaced repetition towards better recall of my notes.

The one thing I'll potentially miss is the tags, which Hypothes.is doesn't include in their feeds (tucked into the body would be fine), but I suppose I could add them as internal wiki links directly if I wanted.

I suspect that other storage services that work with IFTTT should work as well.

Details in a blogpost soon...

Testing cross-linking:

See Also:

• [[Obsidian]]
• [[Hypothes.is]]
• [[note taking]]
• [[zettlekasten]]
• [[commonplace books]]
• [[productivity]]

hat tip to Hypothesis, for such a generally wonderful user interface for making annotating, highlighting, bookmarking, and replying to web pages so easy!

This is a reasonable synopsis for why to keep a zettlekasten or commonplace book and how to use it to create new material. It fits roughly in line with my overall experience in doing these things.

This idea underlies the reason why one might want to have a public online commonplace book or digital garden.

There's a nice kernel of an idea here that one's website should be built and made (useful) for ones self first and only secondarily for others. This is what makes it a "personal" website.

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me happy about the IndieWeb!

One person tinkers around with an idea and posts about how they did it. Someone else sees it and thinks it's cool and wants it for themselves. They then modify it for their system, maybe with some changes or even improvements, and post the details on their site.

They've both syndicated copies to IndieWeb news or to the IndieWeb wiki, so that in the future, others looking for that sort of UI research or examples can find them and potentially modify them for their own personal use.

And the cycle begins anew...

This seems to be a frequent excuse for people to spin up yet another website rather than attempting to tackle the UI subscription problem.

Social readers would be well advised to think about this problem so people could have a single website with multiple types/kinds of content.

Platforms should better delineate how to allow publishers and readers to more easily extract the posts that they're interested in following.