- Oct 2022
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Local file Local file
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Pomeroy, Earl. “Frederic L. Paxson and His Approach to History.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 4 (1953): 673–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/1895394
read on 2022-10-30 - 10-31
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he kepthis note pads always in his pocket
The small size and portability of index cards make them easy to have at hand at a moment's notice.
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He took it toWashington when he went into war service in 1917-1918;
Frederic Paxson took his note file from Wisconsin to Washington D.C. when he went into war service from 1917-1918, which Earl Pomeroy notes as an indicator of how little burden it was, but he doesn't make any notation about worries about loss or damage during travel, which may have potentially occurred to Paxson, given his practice and the value to him of the collection.
May be worth looking deeper into to see if he had such worries.
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The mass of Paxson's paper work may appear more clearly nowthan the zest with which he labored, but the essence of his methodwas in the spirit rather than in the product.
Ahrens and others following him have argued that there is a sort of lightness imbued both in one's thinking processes and life by making and accumulating notes. The cognitive load is lessened by offloading one's thoughts onto pieces of paper that can be revised, compared, and juxtaposed as a means of building some written or creative endeavor, even if it's slowly over time.
Frederic L. Paxson's mode of life made this seem to be the case for him. There is evidence that he was easier able to manage his daily life by his note taking system. He accumulated no work on his desk and carried none home and was able to more easily give his attention to others.
Is this a result of breaking things down into tiny, bite sized chunks that were difficult to actually interrupt?
Was it the system or his particular temperament? Are there other examples of this easier mode of life for note takers? Is there a pattern? What portions can be attributed to the system and one's ability to stick to it versus their particular temperaments?
Other than small examples in my own life, this may be one of the first examples I've seen of this mode of work. Definitely worth looking at others.
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Note, "Quotations: make them brief," n.d., unclassified, Paxson File, and note,"Your sentences must be your own." "A long quotation burdens your text. Theprinter commonly puts it in a different type and indicates that it is a thing apart.The quotation will be most effective when it is brief and pertinent and may beamalgamated in your own paragraph. The more completely you understand yoursources the more aptly & gracefully you will quote." "Do not take out of a secondarywork a paragraph or its substance and incorporate it in your work. . . . Use it if youmust, but restate it in your own terms, and make its form entirely yours. Give thefootnote of course but remember that you must be the author."
Paxson doesn't directly indicate to rewrite for one's own digestion and understanding process, but hints at it strongly when he says that "Your sentences must be your own." By making and owning your sentences, you ought to have completely understood the ideas and made them a part of you prior to transmitting them back along to others.
Under Paxon's framing and knowing that he also sometimes held onto is notes for a while before forming final opinions, one's notes, even when public (like my own are), are still just partial truths of thought caught in the moment. It takes further digestion and juxtaposition with additional thoughts which are later rewritten in longer form to make articles, books, etc.
Note taking is a process of sense making seeking out the truth of a situation.
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A note system, he told his stu-dents, should permit rearrangement and study of notes in differentrelationships "until the fact itself is brought out against the back-ground in all its important details."
- Note headed "notes," n.d., Paxson File, unclassified.
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he file wascomplex enough, and the task it represented was large enough, sothat few of his sixty-five doctors, who watched the file grow in theseminar as part of the historical laboratory process, have main-tained full files of their own.
Owing to the size and complex nature of Paxson's note collection which he used and demonstrated to his students in his teaching and historical laboratory process, few of the sixty-five doctors who studied under him maintained files of their own.
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Occasionally he noted down what he heard and saw aswell as what he read, and sometimes what he said and did, althoughhe also kept a diary in separate form.
In addition to an extensive note collection, Paxson kept a separate diary, indicating a different practicing in a different form.
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tie left, however, a record of his own approach to theproblems of writing history in his book reviews, which with hisarticles are probably his most characteristic writings, and in a half-century's accumulation of notes that he used in writing his books,and that he might have used in writing other books.
half-century's accumulation of notes
Tags
- historical method
- note collection loss and damage
- attention
- note taking transmission
- read
- historiography
- Frederic L. Paxson's zettelkasten
- references
- zettelkasten
- note taking advice
- facts
- note taking affordances
- Frederic L. Paxson
- quotations
- journaling
- diaries
- examples
- note taking
- temperament
- unreasonable productivity
- note taking mobility
- quotes
Annotators
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- Apr 2021
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Millions of those displaced have one or multiple disabilities.
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