He uses the idea of "wealth" here for notes created in a commonplace instead of "treasure" or storehouse as is the historical tradition, this is an indication of a complete schism between the older traditions and the new.

would sign with herself each day for how many words she committed to write.

Not really enough evidence for a solid quote here. What was his source?

He cites the following shallowly: <br /> - Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories: Positive Obsession (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 123–36.<br /> - 2 Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2020).<br /> - 3 Dan Sheehan, “Octavia Butler has finally made the New York Times Best Seller list,” LitHub.com, September 3, 2020, https://lithub.com/octavia- butler-has-finally-made-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/.<br /> - 4 Butler’s archive has been available to researchers and scholars at the Huntington Library since 2010.

Using the P.A.R.A. method puts incredible focus on immediate projects and productivity toward them. This is a dramatically different focus from the zettelkasten method.

The why's of the systems are dramatically different as well.

Organize for actionability.

(Applicable only for P.A.R.A.?)

This is interesting for general project management, but potentially not for zettelkasten-type notes. That method has more flexibility that doesn't require this sort of organizational method and actually excels as a result of it.

There is a tension here.

Notes primarily for project-based productivity are different from notes for writing-based output.

The P.A.R.A. method seems like an admixture of one's projects/to do lists and productivity details and a more traditional commonplace book. Keeping these two somewhat separate mentally may help users with respect to how these folders should be used.

Resources (of P.A.R.A.) sound specifically like a more traditional commonplace book space.

In addition to this as a standalone quote...

If nothing else, one should keep a commonplace book so that they have a treasure house of nifty quotes to use as chapter openers for the books they might write.

What here is exactly innovative? He's talking about a centuries old idea.

He's just giving you something slightly updated to imitate.

Locke's method is certainly a compact one and is specifically designed for notebooks of several hundred pages where you're slowly growing the index as you go within a limited and usually predetermined amount of space. If you're using an index card or digital system where space isn't an issue, then that specific method may not be as ideal. Whichever option you ultimately choose, it's certainly incredibly valuable and worthwhile to have an index of some sort.

For those into specifics, here's some detail about creating an index using Hypothes.is data in Obsidian: https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/20/creating-a-commonplace-book-or-zettelkasten-index-from-hypothes-is-tags/ and here's some detail for how I did it for a website built on WordPress: https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/04/an-index-for-my-digital-commonplace-book/

I'm curious to see how others do this in their tool sets, particularly in ways that remove some of the tedium.

Perhaps it may be helpful to dramatically reframe the question of how to keep a zettelkasten? One page blog posts from people who've only recently seen the idea and are synopsizing it without a year or more practice themselves are highly confusing at best. Can I write something we don't see enough of in spaces relating to zettelkasten? Perhaps we should briefly consider the intellectual predecessor of the slip box?

Start out by forgetting zettelkasten exist. Instead read about what a commonplace book is and how that (simpler) form of note taking works. This short article outlined as a class assignment is a fascinating way to start and has some illustrative examples: https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_. If you're a writer, researcher, or journalist, perhaps Steven Johnson's perspective may be interesting to you instead: https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/the-glass-box-and-the-commonplace-book-639b16c4f3bb

Collect interesting passages, quotes, and ideas as you read. Keep them in a notebook and call it your commonplace book. If you like call these your "fleeting notes" as some do.

As you do this, start building an index of subject headings for your ideas, perhaps using John Locke's method (see: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685).

Once you've got this, you've really mastered the majority of what a zettelkasten is and have a powerful tool at your disposal. If you feel it's useful, you can add a few more tools and variations to your set up.

Next instead of keeping the ideas in a notebook, put them on index cards so that they're easier to sort through, move around, and re-arrange. This particularly useful if you want to use them to create an outline of your ideas for writing something with them.

Next, maybe keep some index cards that have the references and bibliographies from which your excerpting and note taking comes from. Link these bibliographical cards to the cards with your content.

As you go through your notes, ideas, and excerpts, maybe you want to further refine them? Write them out in your own words. Improve their clarity, so that when you go to re-use them, you can simply "excerpt" material you've already written for yourself and you're not plagiarizing others. You can call these improved notes, as some do either "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes".

Perhaps you're looking for more creativity, serendipity, and organic surprise in your system? Next you can link individual notes together. In a paper system you can do this by following one note with another or writing addresses on each card and using that addressing system to link them, but in a digital environment you can link one note to many multiple others that are related. If you're not sure where to start here, look back to your subject headings and pull out cards related to broad categories. Some things will obviously fit more closely than others, so be more selective and only link ideas that are more intimately connected than just the subject heading you've used.

Now when you want to write or create something new on a particular topic, ask your slip box a question and attempt to answer it by consulting your index. Find cards related to the topic, pull out those and place them in a useful order to create an outline perhaps using the cross links that already exist. (You've done that linking work as you went, so why not use it to make things easier now?) Copy the contents into a document and begin editing.

Beyond the first few steps, you're really just creating additional complexity to a system to increase the combinatorial complexity of juxtaposed ideas that you could potentially pull back out of your system for writing more interesting text and generating new ideas. Some people may neither want nor need this sort of complexity in their working lives. If you don't need it, then just keep a simple commonplace book (or commonplace card file) to remind you of the interesting ideas and inspirations you've seen and could potentially reuse throughout your life.

The benefit of this method is that beyond creating your index, you'll always have something useful even if you abandon things later on and quit refining it. If you do go all the way, concentrate on writing out just two short solid ideas every day (Luhmann averaged about 6 per day and Roland Barthes averaged 1 and change). Do it until you have between 500 and 1000 cards (based on some surveys and anecdotal evidence), and you should begin seeing some serendipitous and intriguing results as you use your system for your writing.

We should acknowledge that that (visual) artists and musicians might also keep commonplaces and zettelkasten. As an example, Eminem keeps a zettelkasten, but it is so minimal that it is literally just a box and slips of paper with no apparent organization beyond this. If this fits your style and you don't get any value out of having cards with locators like 3a4b/65m1, then don't do that useless work. Make sure your system is working for you and you're not working for your system.

Sadly, it's generally difficult to find a single blog post that can accurately define what a zettelkasten is, how it's structured, how it works, and why one would want one much less what one should expect from it. Sonke Ahrens does a reasonably good job, but his explanation is an entire book. Hopefully this distillation will get you moving in a positive direction for having a useful daily practice, but without an excessive amount of work. Once you've been at it a while, then start looking at Ahrens and others to refine things for your personal preferences and creative needs.

Beethoven kept a variation of a waste book in that he kept a pocket notebook for quick capture of ideas. Later, instead of copying them over into a permanent place, he'd translate and amplify on the idea in a second notebook. Later on, he might pick up the idea again in a third notebook with further improvements.

By doing this me might also use the initial ideas as building blocks for more than one individual piece. This is very clever, particularly in musical development where various snippets of music might be morphed into various different forms in ways that written ideas generally can't be so used.

This literally allowed him to re-use his "notes" at two different levels (the written ones as well as the musical ones.)

Beethoven apparently kept organized notebooks for his work. His system was arranged based on the level of finished work, so he had spaces for rough ideas, improved ideas and others for finished ideas.

Source for this?

http://messnerenglish.weebly.com/who-uses-a-writers-notebook.html

Example of a teacher using the commonplace book tradition within her class, though she frames it as a "writer's notebook". I like the way she uses examples of cultural figures who are doing this same sort of pattern.

Is there evidence that Luhmann's system aimed to create anything from the start in a sort of autopoietic sense? Or is it (more likely) the case that Luhmann saw this sort of "alter ego" emerging over time and described it after-the-fact?

Based on his experiences and note takers and zettelkasten users might expect this outcome now.

Are there examples of prior commonplace book users or note takers seeing or describing this sort of experience in the historical record?

Related to this is the idea that a reader might have a conversation with another author by reading and writing their own notes from a particular text.

The only real difference here is that one's notes and the ability to link them to other ideas or topical headings in a commonplace book or zettelkasten means that the reader/writer has an infinitely growable perfect memory.

https://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/the-scope-and-nature-of-darwins-commonplace-book/

Erasmus Darwin's commonplace book

It is one of the version(s?) published by John Bell based on John Locke's method and is a quarto volume bound in vellum with about 300 sheets of fine paper.

Blank pages 1 to 160 were numbered and filled by Darwin in his own hand with 136 entries. The book was started in 1776 and continued until 1787. Presumably Darwin had a previous commonplace book, but it has not been found and this version doesn't have any experiments prior to 1776, though there are indications that some material has been transferred from another source.

The book contains material on medical records, scientific matters, mechanical and industrial improvements, and inventions.

The provenance of Erasmus Darwin's seems to have it pass through is widow Elizabeth who added some family history to it. It passed through to her son and other descendants who added entries primarily of family related topics. Leonard Darwin (1850-1943), the last surviving son of Charles Darwin gave it to Down House, Kent from whence it was loaned to Erasmus Darwin House in 1999.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/engage-brain-never-gonna-popular-call-action-brian-jenner/

The addressing system that many digital note taking systems offer is reminiscent of Luhmann's paper system where it served a particular use. Many might ask themselves if they really need this functionality in digital contexts where text search and other affordances can be more directly useful.

Frequently missed by many, perhaps because they're befuddled by the complex branching numbering system which gets more publicity, Luhmann's paper-based system had a highly useful and simple subject heading index (see: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V, for example) which can be replicated using either #tags or [[wikilinks]] within tools like Obsidian. Of course having an index doesn't preclude the incredible usefulness of directly linking one idea to potentially multiple others in some branching tree-like or network structure.

Note that one highly valuable feature of Luhmann's paper version was that the totality of cards were linked to a minimum of at least one other card by the default that they were placed into the file itself. Those putting notes into Obsidian often place them into their system as singlet, un-linked notes as a default, and this can lead to problems down the road. However this can be mitigated by utilizing topical or subject headings on individual cards which allows for searching on a heading and then cross-linking individual ideas as appropriate.

As an example, because two cards may be tagged with "archaeology" doesn't necessarily mean they're closely related as ideas. This tends to decrease in likelihood if one is an archaeologist and a large proportion of cards might contain that tag, but will simultaneously create more value over time as generic tags increase in number but the specific ideas cross link in small numbers. Similarly as one delves more deeply into archaeology, one will also come up with more granular and useful sub-tags (like Zooarcheology, Paleobotany, Archeopedology, Forensic Archeology, Archeoastronomy, Geoarcheology, etc.) as their knowledge in sub areas increases.

Concretely, one might expect that the subject heading "sociology" would be nearly useless to Luhmann as that was the overarching topic of both of his zettelkästen (I & II), whereas "Autonomie" was much more specific and useful for cross linking a smaller handful of potentially related ideas in the future.

Looking beyond Luhmann can be highly helpful in designing and using one's own system. I'd recommend taking a look at John Locke's work on indexing (1685) (https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685 is an interesting source, though you're obviously applying it to (digital) cards and not a notebook) or Ross Ashby's hybrid notebook/index card system which is also available online (http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html) as an example.

Another helpful tip some are sure to appreciate in systems that have an auto-complete function is simply starting to write a wikilink with various related subject heading words that may appear within your system. You'll then be presented with potential options of things to link to serendipitously that you may not have otherwise considered. Within a digital zettelkasten, the popularly used DYAC (Damn You Auto Complete) may turn into Bless You Auto Complete.

Are there examples of people using The Brain in public as more extensive commonplace books or zettelkasten?

https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/32f9fc36-6963-9ee0-9b44-a89112919e29/attachments/6492d41a-73b2-20d8-b145-3283598c612b

A fantastic example of an extensive mind map from Jerry Michalski using The Brain.

There are lots of interesting links and resources, but on the whole

How many of the nodes actually have specific notes, explicit ideas, annotations, or excerpts within them?

Without these, it's an interesting map and provides some broad context, but removes local specific context of who Jerry is and how he explicitly thinks. One can review the overarching parts to extract what his biases may be based on availability heuristics, but in areas of conflicting ideas which have relatively equal numbers of links within a particular area, one may not be able to discern arguments from each other.

Still a fascinating start and something not commonly seen in the broader literature.

I'll also note that even in a small sample of one video call with Jerry sharing his screen while we talked about a broad sub-topic it's interesting to see his prior contexts as we conversed. I've only ever had similar experiences with Bill Seitz who regularly drops links to his wiki pages in this sort of way or Kevin Marks (usually in text chat contexts and less frequently in video calls/conversations) who drops links to his extensive blogging history which also serves to add his prior thoughts and contextualizations.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/v48una/randomly_found_out_a_friend_of_mine_uses_note/

Example of a card index note taking method in the wild. Sounds a bit more like a commonplace book rather than a highly organized zettelkasten.

Forte cleverly combines a story about Feynman from Genius with a quote about Feynman's 12 favorite problems from a piece by Rota. Did they both appear in Gleick's Genius together and Forte quoted them separately, or did he actively use his commonplace to do the juxtaposition for him and thus create a nice juxtaposition himself or was it Gleick's juxtaposition?

The answer will reveal whether Forte is actively using his system for creative and productive work or if the practice is Gleick's.

Nice list of custom names for area specific commonplaces.

List of some affordance of digital note taking over handwriting: * search * sharing * backups (copies) * editing * linking (automatic?) * syncing to multiple spaces for ease of use

7 Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 421.

relate this to Eminem's "stacking ammo".

Does the system really do each of these? Writing things down for our future selves is the thing that makes ideas concrete, not the system itself. Most notebooks don't reveal new associations, we actively have to do that ourselves via memory or through active search and linking within the system itself. The system may help, but it doesn't automatically create associations nor reveal them. By keeping our ideas in one place they do incubate to some extent, but isn't the real incubation taking place in a diffuse way in our minds to come out later?

Based on Tiago Forte's definition of a second brain the primary distinction from a commonplace book is solely that it is digital.

Note here that he explicitly defines a second brain as being private. Historically commonplace books were private affairs though there are examples of them being shared from person to person as well as examples that have been printed.

Tiago Forte directly equates a "digital commonplace book" with his concept of a "Second Brain" in his book Building a Second Brain.

Why create a new "marketing term" for something that should literally be commonplace!

Commonplace books were popularized in the late 1400s/early 1500s in handbooks by Desiderius Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, Rudolphus Agricola, and others along with the rise and accessibility of printed books.

Would have been nice to have some more background and history on their development and evolution. Mentions of florilegia, vade mecum, others perhaps? Other cultures?

Notice the creation myth being born here? Does he really believe that no one has noticed this before?

What about all the handbook writers who encouraged commonplacing in the 1500s, much less their predecessors?

experimented with every tool, trick, and technique available today for making sense of information. This book distills the very best insights I’ve discovered from teaching thousands of people around the world how to realize the potential of their ideas.

All this work just for this? When some basic reading of historical note taking, information management, and intellectual history would have saved him the time and effort? Looking through the references I'm not seeing much before even 2010, so it seems as if he's spent most of his time reinventing the wheel.

Marketing speech to convert an old idea (commonplacing) into a new siloed service one needs to pay for.

Some great marketing copy, but I'm anticipating a book that is going to lay out some general techniques that go under the topic of commonplace book, a concept that goes back over 2,000 years. This is the opposite of revolutionary.

Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Atria Books, 2022. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Building-a-Second-Brain/Tiago-Forte/9781982167387.

Markus Krajewski indicates here that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) kept a zettelkasten, though from the sound of it, his sheets, organized by head words have more of a ring of commonplace book.

https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2011/between-the-lines-the-social-life-of-marginalia1

Danzico, Liz. “Between the Lines: The Social Life of Marginalia.” Interactions 18, no. 3 (May 2011): 12–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/1962438.1962443.

A short synopsis article about marginalia with some simple questions. She's read a fair amount in the space from the 2010s given references, but little I hadn't encountered before. The Robin Sloan tidbit was interesting as well as the etymology of marginalia, though these will need better references.

How cool would it be if we could aggregate old commonplace books to create indicators of how often older books were not only read, but which annotations resonated with their readers during subsequent periods of history and overlay them in some visual way? Something like a historical version of Amazon Kindle's indicators that a certain number of readers have highlighted a particular sentence of a book.

https://indexhistory.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/boswells-commonplace-book-and-lockes-index/

https://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/index.htm

https://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/index.htm

A great example of an online commonplace book prominently featuring quotes with an index featuring authors, titles, categories, and even translators. Even more interesting, it looks like it's hand built using a large table.

At the end of the 18th century, John Bell (1745–1831), an English publisher published notebooks with the title Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke. The notebooks commonly included 550 pages, of which eight pages included instructions on John Locke's indexing method.

Link to: - Didn't Erasmus Darwin use one of these?!

"arks of study" being used as early data chests or stores is a fascinating conceptualization

I was really hoping for so much more in this essay on the combinatorial creativity, espcially since the author threw the idea into the title. The real meat must be in the two linked articles about Seneca and Einstein.

There is a slight mention of combinatorics in the justaposition of pieces within one's commonplace book, and a mention that these books may date back to the 12th century where they were probably more influenced by the combinatoric creativity of Raymond Lull. It's still an open question for me just how far back the idea of commonplaces goes as well as how far back Lull's combinatoric pieces go...

Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).

Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.

This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.

Building blocks of the note taking system

• atomic ideas
• written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
• cross linked with each other
• cross linked with an index
• cross linked with references

are there others? should they be broken up differently?

Godfathers of Notetaking

• Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
• Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
• Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
• Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
• John Locke (indices)
• Carl Linnaeus (index cards)

Ownership of the data is important. One could certainly set up their own Hypothes.is server if they liked.

I personally take the data from my own Hypothes.is account and dump it into my local Obsidian.md vault for saving, crosslinking, and further thought.

A wonderful resource of quotation related material online.

https://3stages.org/quotes/index.html

I thought I'd bookmarked this before, but apparently not in my notebook. Example of an explicit online commonplace book, primarily with quotes from J. Jacobs' reading.

https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/ugqnle/whats_your_opinion_on_the_note_card_system_do_you/

For commonplace items, I've found notebooks with good indices more valuable. Note cards are better if you're taking atomic notes that you plan on actively reusing in your writing work which is more of a zettelkasten feature/functionality cards are easier to move around, re-arrange, and create outlines for your writing when you get to that point. Historically it was the ability to re-arrange and reuse one's commonplace items that helped to spawn and popularize the idea of zettelkasten, which are often more frequently used by writers, researchers, and academics for creating new content. Historically it was the ability to re-arrange and reuse one's commonplace items that helped to spawn and popularize the idea of zettelkasten, which are often more frequently used by writers, researchers, and academics for creating new content.

Some of the difference can be personal choice, practicality, ease-of-use, and the functionality you hope to get out of one method or the other. Honestly there's no reason you couldn't do both if you chose, but it may help to have a common index which will allow you to search for and find things you need. A set of useful historical examples can be found in the mid-twentieth century comedians including Bob Hope (pages he kept in files), Phyllis Diller (index cards), Joan Rivers (index cards), and actor/politician Ronald Reagan who maintained what some might call a commonplace book of quotes which he kept on index cards, but held in a notebook-like binder similar to a photo album with pages that he could place the cards in, but still allow him to move them around (both from slot to slot, or move whole pages at a time). The loosest system I've yet seen is that of Eminem who kept ideas and lyrics written on hotel stationery or random slips of paper which he kept wholly unorganized and unindexed in a cardboard box in a method he called "stacking ammo." Do what you think will work best for you and try it out for a while. You can always change methods later on if your needs change.

This is a stunning quote with respect to the idea of note taking and creating connections between pieces of information or knowledge.

It's highlighted to an even greater degree that this quote appears in someone's online digital commonplace book!

There is a heavy availability heuristic at play here. Most people in the recent/modern PKM space are enamored with the idea of zettelkasten and no one (or very few) have delved in more deeply to the history to uncover more than Luhmann. There definitely are many, many more. If we expand the circle to include looser forms like the commonplace book then we find that nearly every major thinker since the Renaissance kept some sort of note taking system and it's highly likely that their work was heavily influenced by their notes, notebooks, and commonplace books.

Hell, Newton invented the calculus in his waste book, a form of pre-commonplace book from which he apparently never got his temporary notes out into a more personal permanent form.

A short trip to even the scant references on the Wikipedia pages for commonplace book and zettelkasten will reveal a fraction of the extant examples.

This is all too correct. Sadly the older methods for writing, note taking, thinking, and memory have fallen by the wayside, so most literate moderns don't have the tradition most of (elite educated) Western culture has had for the past 2000+ years. The long tradition of commonplace books and their related versions including waste books, florilegium, sudelbücher, scholia, glossae, notebooks, anthologies, sylvae, table books, vade mecum, memoranda books, diaries, miscellanies, pocket books, thesauruses, etc. underlines your thesis well. The Zettelkasten, exactly like almost all of these others, is simply an iteration of the commonplace book instantiated into index card form. One of the reasons that Umberto Eco's advice on writing seems so similar to the zettelkasten method is that he was a medievalist scholar who was aware of these long traditions of writing, note taking, and memory and leveraged these for himself, though likely in a slightly different manner. Would anyone suggest that he didn't have a voluminous output or an outsized impact on society and culture? If one really wants to go crazy on the idea of backlinks and the ideas of creativity and invention, perhaps they ought to brush up on their Catalan and read some Ramon Llull? He was an 11th century philosopher and polymath who spent a lot of time not only memorizing much of his personal knowledge, but who invented combinatorial creative methods for juxtaposing his volumes of information to actively create new ideas. I guarantee no backlinking system held a match to his associative methods. Now if someone wanted to mix some mysticism into the fray, then perhaps there might be a competition... Many who are now writing so positively about Zettelkasten or backlinks are doing so in much the same way that humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon did when writing about and re-popularizing commonplace books in the 1500s. The primary difference being that the chance that they leave as lasting a legacy is much smaller. Worse many of them are crediting Luhmann for the actual invention of the Zettelkasten when his is but one instantiation on a long evolution of many note taking devices over literal millennia. I'm still waiting for folks to spend more time talking about Carl Linnaeus' revolutionary invention and use of the index card. Or John Locke's system for creating a new indexing system for commonplace books. Generally we don't talk about these innovations because their users spent more of their time using their systems to get other more important things done for their legacies. In the end, the message seems clear, anyone can be incredibly productive; most of it boils down to having some sort of system of reading, thinking, note taking, and new production and sticking with it for a while. Have a system; use your system; evolve it slowly to work well for you and the way you think and work.

https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook

IFTTT.com sent out a marketing email today in which one of the five major headlines was "Automated Notebook": "Your Ideas and Inspiration in one place" with a big "Explore" button that goes to https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/curating-my-blog-archive/

I like the overall look and effect done here to create a table of contents in WordPress, but it seems like some quirky gymnastics to pull it off. How might this be done in a more straightforward way? Are there any plugins for WordPress that could create a page that keeps the categories and the descriptions? And particularly a page that primarily only shows articles and not other content types?

Link this to my work on my own index at https://boffosocko.com/about/index/

https://arush.io/

Example of a personal website indicating that it's a commonplace book. (Highly likely through my own influence.)

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/11/19/joan-didion-on-keeping-a-notebook/

A nice little advertisement for Joan Didion's essay "On Keeping a Notebook". Mostly it's pull quotes from the piece without any additional commentary. I've downloaded a copy of the book to read the piece in full myself.

Some scholars study annotations as part of material culture. Are they leaving out too much by solely studying those physically left in the books about which they were made, or should we instead also be looking at other sources like commonplace books, notebooks, note cards, digital spaces like e-readers that allow annotation, social media where texts are discussed, or even digital marginalia in services like Hypothes.is or Perusall?

Some of these forms of annotation allow a digital version of cut and paste which doesn't cause damage to the original text, which should be thought of as a good thing though it may separate the annotations from the original physical object.

In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.

Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?

Examples of notes focusing on one's original ideas and reflections rather than excerpts of others' works.

This quote is worth looking up and checking its context. Particularly I'm interested to know if the purpose of summarizing the source is to check one's understanding of the ideas as is done in the Feynman technique, or if the purpose is a reminder summary of the piece itself?

Link to Ahrens mentions of this technique for checking understanding. (Did he use the phrase Feynman in his text?)

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

Early modern reference works, handbooks, and pedagogical practices created a sort of standardized set of subject headings amongst note takers.

A similar sort of effort could have been seen in the blogosphere of the early 2000s in which Technorati and their search functionality may have helped to standardize some of these same sorts of taxonomic issues within their product which was widely used at the time.

This makes me wonder if it would be a useful product to have a highly linked note collection to sell to others in a modern context? It could be done entirely in text files for compatibility with Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. Ideally it would be done in a more commonplace way with quotes and interlinked and could be expanded upon by the purchaser.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/magazine/commonplace-books-recommendation.html

An interesting essay centering the idea of a commonplace book, but without describing a particular use case.

Why did she keep it? How is she actually using it? There is an analogy of it with a diary, but it feels like the writer is keeping one, but not actively using it for anything but nostalgic purposes.

Why not get more out of it?

Here's an example of someone using photos on their phone and email in the vein of a waste book.

George is asking a good question here and one I've even asked myself, but doesn't seem to have spent any time looking at intellectual history.

Almost all great thinkers were not only significant writers as well, but most, at least in Western culture, kept significant notes of their work, had a commonplace book(s), waste books, sudelbücher, zettelkasten, etc.

Of course most were also fairly wealthy and had the free time to be able to do their work which also helped to tip the balance in their favor.

Some discussion of doing research on zettelkasten methods and workflows.

What do note taking methods and processes look like for individual people?

What questions would one ask for this sort of research in an interview setting (compared to how one would look at extant physical examples in document-based research)? #openquestions

Link this to the work of Earle Havens on commonplace books through portions of history.

Even in the western tradition, the earliest methods of mnemonics tied ideas to locations, from whence we get the ideas of loci communes (in Latin) and thence commonplaces and commonplace books. The idea of loci communes was koinos topos in Greek from whence we have derived the word 'topic'.

Was this a carryover from other local oral traditions or a new innovation? Given the prevalence of very similar Indigenous methods around the world, it was assuredly not an innovation. Perhaps it was a rediscovery after the loss of some of these traditions locally in societies that were less reliant on orality and moving towards more reliance on literacy for their memories.

How much history is covered here?

Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?

Example of a blog being used as a source of material for creating new ideas.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Learning Commons </span> in Annotating a text - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - LibGuides at Mater Christi College (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 13:46:42</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Learning Commons </span> in Annotating a text - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - LibGuides at Mater Christi College (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 13:46:42</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Learning Commons </span> in Annotating a text - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - LibGuides at Mater Christi College (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 13:46:42</time>)</cite></small>

I can't help but think, what if one used their own collected corpus of ideas based on their ever-growing commonplace book to create a text generator? Then by taking notes, highlighting other work, and doing your own work, you're creating a corpus of material that's imminently interesting to you. This also means that by subsuming text over time in making your own notes, the artificial intelligence will more likely also be using your own prior thought patterns to make something that from an information theoretic standpoint look and sound more like you. It would have your "hand" so to speak.

Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.

Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.

Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.

Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.

Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.

what they mean.

When quoting material it should have great phrasing and reasonable stand-alone meaning. Preferably the source or person being quoted should have stature or gravitas with respect to the idea at hand. Quotes should recall the classical idea of sententiae as imagined by Aristotle and Quintilian and seen throughout the commonplace book tradition.

The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.

https://smithery.com/2022/01/14/making-the-most-of-moments-that-matter/

A company created a custom commonplace book for attendees of a conference. Not sure how they tummeled people into using them in interesting ways though.

Could also have done something along the lines of a sketchnote process as well. I liked their idea of having stickers to place in these as well, though that's more of a scrapbook process...

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Tom Critchlow </span> in Tom Critchlow on Twitter: "Love this meditation from @willsh on building artefacts, commonplace books, and more: https://t.co/zJmkMcaUN2 (and look at those physical keys they forged for a workshop!!!!)" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>01/22/2022 23:05:44</time>)</cite></small>

Indication here of digital platforms like Delicious, Tumblr, and Pinterest standing in for digital commonplace books.

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_IgMVAAAAQAAJ/page/n107/mode/2up

Page 90-91 of De arte excerpendi shows the exact same index scheme for commonplace books suggested by John Locke in 1685 (French) and later .published as A new method of making common-place-books (1706, in English).

In early modern Europe the system of excerpting from reading material was called adversaria or lemmata.

65 Johann Benedict Metzler, Artificium excerpendi genuinum dictus Die rechte Kunst zu excer-piren (Leipzig, 1709), 23–4; 30; 91–2

Is there really any mathematical difference between alphabetical order and a numerical decimal order? Can't they be shown to be one-to-one and onto?

To a layperson they may seem different...

Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 84–5;

Just Christoph Udenius, Excerpendi ratio nova (Nordhausen, 1687), 62–3; Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 84–5; Drexel, Aurifodina, 135.

What earlier suggestions might there have been for creating indices for commonplaces?

Interesting that he makes no reference to the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions—particularly because we know he (later?) had an extensive system of index cards.

What an awesome little site. Sadly no RSS to make it easy to follow, so bookmarking here.

I like that she's titled her posts feed as a "notebook": https://telepathics.xyz/notebook. There's not enough content here (yet) to make a determination that they're using it as a commonplace book though.

Someone in the IndieWeb chat pointed out an awesome implementation of "stories" she's got on her personal site: https://telepathics.xyz/notes/2020/new-york-city-friends-food-sights/

I particularly also like the layout and presentation of her Social Media Links page which has tags for the types of content as well as indicators for which are no longer active.

This makes me wonder if I could use tags on some of my links to provide CSS styling on them to do the same thing for inactive services?

Jeremy Norman, an antiquarian bookseller, indicates that his website is written in much the same manner as John Locke's commonplace book.

https://barnsworthburning.net/

Cory Doctorow calls his blog and its archives his "outboard brain".

On why Cory Doctorow keeps a digital commonplace book.

Cory Doctorow's commonplace makes it easier to search, quote, and reuse in his process of synthesis.

Some of this critique relates to my classification about the sorts of notes that one takes. Some are more important or valuable than others.

Some are for recall and later memory, some may be collection of ideas, but the highest seems to be linking different ideas and contexts together to create completely new and innovative ideas. If one is simply collecting sententiae and spewing them back out in reasonable contexts, this isn't as powerful as nurturing one's ideas to have sex.

What was the form of his system? From where did he learn it? What does it show about the state of the art for his time?

Likely from Aurifondina artium et scientiarum omnium excerpendi solerti, omnibus litterarum amantibus monstrata. worldcat

h/t: https://hyp.is/tz3lBmznEeyvEmOX-B5DxQ/infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/11/future-reading-.html

Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten had three different forms of links.

• The traditional keyword index/link from the commonplace book tradition
• A parent/child link upon first placing the idea into the system (except when starting a new top level parent)
• A direct link (Verweisungen) to one or more ideas already in the index card catalog.

Many note taking systems are relying on the older commonplace book taxonomies and neglect or forego both of the other two sorts of links. While the second can be safely subsumed as a custom, one-time version of the third, the third version is the sort of link which helps to create a lot of direct value within a note taking system as the generic links between broader topic heading names can be washed out over time as the system grows.

Was this last link type included in Konrad Gessner's version? If not, at what point in time did this more specific direct link evolve?

Luhmann indicated that one must keep a register of keywords to assist in the rediscovery of notes. This had been the standard within the commonplacing tradition for centuries before him. The potential subtle difference is that he seems to place more value on the placement links between cards as well as other specific links between cards over these subject headings.

Is it possible to tell from his system which sets of links were more valuable to him? Were there more of these topical heading links than other non-topical heading links between individual cards?

During the 16th century there was a transition in educational centers from using the natural and artificial memories to the methodical use of notebooks and commonplace books as a secondary memory saved by means of writing.

This allows people in some sense to "forget" what they've read and learned and be surprised by it again later. They allow themselves to create liminal memories which may be refreshed and brought to the center later. Perhaps there is also some benefit in this liminal memory for allowing ideas to steep on the periphery before using them. Perhaps combinatorial creativity happens unconsciously?

Cross reference: learning research by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski.

With the invention of the index card and atomic, easily moveable information that can be permuted and re-ordered, the idea of commonplacing doesn't simply highlight and repeat the older wise sayings (sententiae), but allows them to become repositories of new and expanding information. We don't just excerpt anymore, but mix the older thoughts with newer thoughts. This evolution creates a Cambrian explosion of ideas that helps to fuel the information overload from the 16th century onward.

Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.

Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.

Jeremias Drexel, Aurifodina artium et scientiarum omnium. Excerpendi sollertia, omnibus lit-terarum amantibus monstrata (Antwerp, 1638), 18–19

Based on the collection of quotes and proverbs it sounds more like he's got his own commonplace book which he uses to inform his acting process. Sounds almost like he uses them so frequently that he's memorized many of them.

Interesting that he refers to them as "hymns".

Compare this with Eminem's "stacking ammo" for a particular use case.

h/t to Kevin Marks for directing me to this article for this.

According to one of his students, Leibniz used his note cabinet both for excerpts that he took from his reading as well as notes an ideas he came up separately from his reading.

Most of the commonplace book tradition consisted of excerpting, but when did note taking practice begin to aggregate de novo notes with commonplaces?

Konrad Gessner's Bibliotheca Universalis has two audiences: librarians for it's extensive bibliography and scholars for the instruction of how to properly organize their studies by excerpting material and keeping it in a useful order.

Example of a commonplace book to look into

Konrad Gessner's second edition of Bibliotheca Universalis in 1548 contains a list of keywords (loci communes) thus placing it into the tradition of the commonplace book, but as it is published for use by others, it accelerates the ability for others to find and learn about information in which they may have an interest.

Was there a tradition of published or manuscript commonplace books prior to this?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MT6T4CG

Paremiology (from Greek παροιμία (paroimía) 'proverb, maxim, saw') is the collection and study of proverbs.

Paremiography is the collection of proverbs.

https://www.amazon.com/Indexing-Paper-Create-Indexes-Stuff/dp/1926892267/

This really could be quite useful to those with a paper commonplace book or zettelkasten

https://www.amazon.com/Marginalia-Paper-Very-Margin-Notebook/dp/192689202X/

Marginalia Paper, you know, for annotating your own writing...

A must-have for the Hypothes.is fan who wants to go the hipster route.

https://www.amazon.com/Blog-Paper-Advanced-Taking-Technology/dp/1926892100/

Doing some research for my Paper Website / Blog.

Similar to some of the pre-printed commonplace books of old particularly with respect to the tag and tag index sections.

I sort of like that it is done in a way that makes it useful for general life even if one isn't going to use it as a "blog".

How can I design mine to be easily photographed and transferred to an actual blog, particularly with Micropub in mind?

Don't forget space for the blog title and tagline. What else might one put on the front page(s) for identity? Name, photo, address, lost/found info, website URL (naturally)...

Anything else I might want to put in the back besides an category index or a tag index? (Should it have both?)

Jeffrey Todd Knight in Bound to read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature examines the works of various writers to dispel the notion of literary texts as static. He shows how the evolution of early print culture helped to foster the idea as interactive and malleable. This at a time when note takers and writers would have been using commonplacing techniques at even smaller scales for creating their own writing thus creating a similar pattern from the smaller scale to the larger scale.

This pattern of small notes building into larger items with rearrangement which is seen in Carl Linnaeus' index card-based notes as well as his longer articles/writings and publication record over time as well.

In the early history of printing, books weren't as we see them now, instead they were issued in loose sheets or with temporary stitching allowing the purchaser or retailer to collect, organize, and bind them. This pattern occurs at a time when one would have been thinking about collecting, writing, and organizing one's notes in a commonplace book or other forms. It is likely a pattern that would have influenced this era of note taking practices, especially among the most literate who were purchasing and using books.

This looks interesting with respect to the flows of the history of commonplace books.

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England by Megan Heffernan

Reporter John Dickerson talking about his notebook.

While he doesn't mention it, he's capturing the spirit of the commonplace book and the zettelkasten.

[...] I see my job as basically helping people see and to grab ahold of what's going on.

You can decide to do that the minute you sit down to start writing or you can just do it all the time. And by the time you get to writing you have a notebook full of stuff that can be used.

And it's not just about the thing you're writing about at that moment or the question you're going to ask that has to do with that week's event on Face the Nation on Sunday.

If you've been collecting all week long and wondering why a thing happens or making an observation about something and using that as a piece of color to explain the political process to somebody, then you've been doing your work before you ever sat down to do your work.

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/169725470?h=778a09c06f&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

Field Notes: Reporter's Notebook from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_personal_information_managers

I haven't had time to look into it yet, but Piper has a custom WordPress theme she's created specifically for commonplace books: https://github.com/piperhaywood/commonplace-wp-theme

Francis Bacon preferred commonplaces (quotes under topical headings) to adversaria (summaries) as they were "of far more profit, and use".

Note that other references equate these two types of notes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/adversaria

"Adv." (standing for adversaria) is a shelfmark in the Cambridge University Library that is used for books which contain marginal annotations.

Quoted in Vernon F Snow “Ftrancis Bacon's Advice to Fulke Greville on Research Techniques," Huntington Library Quarterly 23, no.4 (1960): 370.

What about the emergence of non-hierarchal methods? (Can these logically be sorted somehow without this structure?)

With digital commonplacing methods, I find that I can sort and search for things temporally by date and time as well as by tag/heading.

Cross reference:

• https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Luhmanns-Denkmaschine-endlich-im-Netz-4364512.html#annotations:ed1DZDnAEeyWdbsat73FrA
• http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html#annotations:IBHItPaBEeuVb1Nwojnj3Q

I've run across Henry Peacham, the younger, in other contexts and his father within the context of rhetoric and commonplacing.

Ryan Holiday's system is a more traditional commonplace book approach with broad headings which can feel project-based or bucket-based and thus not as flexible or useful to some users.

A lot of the literature and shorter articles out there treat many of these systems as recent or "new inventions". Many reference "innovators" like Ryan Holiday or Niklas Luhmann. They patently are not. They've grown out of the Western commonplace book tradition which were traditionally written into books underneath thematic headings (tags/categories in modern digital parlance) until it became cheap enough to mass manufacture Carl Linnaeus' earlier innovation of the index cards in the early 1900s. Then one could more easily rerarrange their ideas with these cards. Luhmann allowed uniquely addressing his cards which made things easier to link. Now there are about thirty different groups working on creating digital tools to do this work, some under the heading of creating "digital gardens".

Often I think it may be easier to go back to some of the books of Erasmus, Melanchthon, or Agricola in the 1500s which described these systems for use in education. Sadly Western culture seems to have lost these traditions and we now find ourselves spending an inordinate amount of time reinventing them.

I'd love to hear your experience in re-introducing it to students in modern educational settings.

I don't like the common framing I see in posts like this that want to credit a particular person for "inventing" a pattern like these that goes back centuries. The fact that we've lost these patterns is a terrible travesty.

It shouldn't take people hours a day with multiple posts, message boards, reading replies, and excessive research to implement a commonplace book. Herein lies a major problem with these systems. They require a reasonable user manual.

One of the reasons I like the idea of public digital gardens is that one can see directly how others are using the space in a more direct and active way. You can see a system in active use and figure out which parts do or don't work or resonate with you.

The fact that there generally aren't courses in high school or college about how to better store and access one's research is a travesty. I feel like there are study skills classes, but they seem to be geared toward strategies and not implemented solutions.

It builds on many of these traditions, but there is a rather sizeable movement in the physical world as well as lots online of sketchnotes which might fit the bill for you Roy.

The canonical book/textbook for the space seems to be Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde.

For a solid overview of the idea in about 30 minutes, I found this to be a useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw