- Mar 2024
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In the 1740s, Thomas Harrison invented a wooden filing cabinet in which the file cards could be hooked on little tin plates. On each of these plates was written the name of the entry (i.e., the re-spective subject heading), and the plates were arranged in strictly alphabeti-cal order.22
Thomas Harrison invented a wooden filing cabinet in the 1640's for storing slips of paper. Each slip could be hooked onto tin plates which contained the topical or subject headings that were arranged in alphabetical order.
Harrison's description was anonymously published with corrections and improvements by Vincent Placcius in De arte excerpendi. Vom gelehrten Buchhalten liber singularis (Stockholm/Hamburg, 1689), 124–59, in his hand-book on excerpting systems.
Update 2024-03-18: The 1740s reference here must be a misprint and is perhaps 1640s as Harrison was a 17th century person and Placcius published results in 1689.
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Instead of jotting down every note, thought, observation, excerpt, andreading on a single slip of paper and leaving them there, Placcius recom-mends grouping them, by dint of appropriate libros excerptorum (see figure2.5),39 excerpt books that follow the pattern that had guided the design ofregisters and bound library catalogs since Konrad Gessner; Placcius citesthe entire section “ De Indicibus Librorum ” from the Pandectae .40 Perhapshis strong vote for the bound form of this storage technology and againstJungius’s method is a way of warning against lifelong knowledge accumula-tions that merely gather treasures without being recombined and pub-lished as new books. Jungius, keen on including new resources, delays hisown publications time and again, leaving them unfinished or simply asraw paper slip potential in storage, on call. 4
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- May 2023
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British historian of science, StaffanMueller-Wille at the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter, recently claimedthat Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the father of modern taxonomy,had “invented” the card index to manage his information storage and retrieval.
How can Linnaeus (1707-1778) be said to have invented the card index or the index card when there are systems that predate him including Vincent Placcius and Leibnitz?
Linnaeus' version were all of a standard size at least. Would this have been a shift in the definition or did others have and recommend "cards of equal size" before this?
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- Jul 2022
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Famously, Luswig Wittgenstein organized his thoughts this way. Also famously, he never completed his 'big book' - almost all of his books (On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations, Zettel, etc.) were compiled by his students in the years after his death.
I've not looked directly at Wittgenstein's note collection before, but it could be an interesting historical example.
Might be worth collecting examples of what has happened to note collections after author's lives. Some obviously have been influential in scholarship, but generally they're subsumed by the broader category of a person's "papers" which are often archived at libraries, museums, and other institutions.
Examples: - Vincentius Placcius' collection used by his students - Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten which is being heavily studied by Johannes F.K. Schmidt - Mortimer J. Adler - was his kept? where is it stored?
Posthumously published note card collections - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project - Ronald Reagan's collection at his presidential library, though it is more of an commonplace book collection of quotes which was later published - Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary - Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura - others...
Just as note collections serve an autobiographical function, perhaps they may also serve as an intellectual autobiographical function? Wittgenstein never managed to complete his 'big book', but in some sense, doesn't his collection of note cards serve this function for those willing to explore it all?
I'd previously suggested that Scott P. Scheper publish not only his book on note taking, but to actually publish his note cards as a stand-alone zettelkasten example to go with them. What if this sort of publishing practice were more commonplace? The modern day equivalent is more likely a person's blog or their wiki. Not enough people are publicly publishing their notes to see what this practice might look like for future generations.
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- May 2022
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Don't worry, Niklas Luhmann never 'got' the whole evergreen vs. fleeting notes thing either. They're Ahrensian inventions. They're not Zettelkasten concepts, they're Ahrenskasten concepts.
Ahrens uses the phrase permanent notes and never uses the words evergreen notes. Evergreen notes stems from Andy Matuschak's reading of Ahrens, likely with a side reference to the idea of evergreen articles which is a closely related commonplace idea in journalism.
The difference between the permanent(evergreen) and fleeting comes from where one chooses to put the actual work into their system. One can collect thousands of fleeting notes in their system, but it's more likely that it will eventually collapse on itself and do the author no good. Better is to put as much work in up front to get to a good permanent note that is reusable in potentially many contexts.
Much of this stems back at least as far as Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) where he offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge from books as well as a history of the subject of note taking. In the book, he warns specifically against the practice exhibited by Joachim Jungius (1585-1657) who left behind approximately 150,000 slips (or scraps) of paper (zettels). Because there was no index to it or links between the notes Jungius' collection was ostensibly useless following his death. His scraps were literally a "scrap heap".
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newrepublic.com newrepublic.com
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Ideally, skilled readers organized notes into personal “arks of study,” or data chests. Vincent Placcius’s De arte excerpendi contains an engraving of a note cabinet, or scrinia literaria, in which notes are attached to hooks and hung on bars according to thematic organization, as well as various drawers for the storage of note paper, hooks, and possibly writing supplies. Both Placcius and later Leibniz built such contraptions, though none survives today. While these organizational tools cannot be directly linked to modern computers, it is difficult not to compare them. Placcius’s design looks strikingly like the old punch-card computation machines that date from the 1880s, and the first mainframes, such as the 1962 IBM 7090.
"arks of study" being used as early data chests or stores is a fascinating conceptualization
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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The first early modern card index was designed by Thomas Harrison (ca 1640s). Harrison's manuscript on The Ark of Studies[5] (Arca studiorum) was edited and improved by Vincent Placcius in his well-known handbook on excerpting methods (De arte excerpendi, 1689).
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- Apr 2022
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A cluster of his stu-dents—Martin Fogel, Michael Kirsten, and Vincent Placcius, all based in Ham-
burg—spread his legacy by publishing manuals on note-taking and leaving abundant notes of their own.
Vincentius Placcius, Martin Fogel, and Michael Kirsten were all students of Joachim Jungius in Hamburg and spread Jungius' legacy of note taking by leaving collections of their own notes as well as publishing manuals on the practice.
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and argue that notes were oftenvalued not only by those who took them but by others who hoped to put themto use.
One example of this that I've already found is the practice of Joachim Jungius who's survivors had trouble figuring out what to do with his extensive note collection. It apparently resulted in the publication of De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization by Vincentius Placcius.
link to : - https://hypothes.is/a/dBE8wFO0EeybR8_urfbYOw - https://hypothes.is/a/SyenKlO2Eeys0esqwOgjUw
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In his manuscript, Harrison spoke of machina with respect to his filing cabinet and named his invention ‘Ark of Studies’. In rhetorical culture, ‘ark’ had been a metaphor that, among many others, denoted the virtual store-house that orators stocked with vivid images of memorable topics (res) and words (verba). In Harrison’s manuscript, ‘ark’ instead became a synonym for ‘mechanical’ memory. In turn, in the distinction between natural and artificial memory, consciousness was compelled to leave its place and to shift to the op-posing side.
Thomas Harrison used the word machina to describe his 'Ark of Studies', a filing cabinet for notes and excerpts from other works. This represents part of a discrete and very specific change on the continuum of movement from the ars memoria (artificial memory) to the ars excerptendi (note taking). Within the rhetorical tradition relying on creating memorable images for topics (res) and words (verba) the idea of an ark was often used as a memory palace as seen in Hugh of St. Victor's De arca Noe mystica, or ‘‘The Ark of Noah According to the Spiritual Method of Reading" (1125–30). It starts the movement from natural and artificial memory to a form of external and mechanical memory represented by his physical filing cabinet.
Reference Yates and Carruthers for Hugh of St. Victor.
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- Feb 2022
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Local file Local file
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Just collecting unprocessedfleeting notes inevitably leads to chaos.
Collecting fleeting notes and not processing them into something more useful and permanent will eventually end in abject failure.
An example can be seen in the note taking of Joachim Jungius in 1657. He compiled approximately 150,000 slips (also known as scraps) with excerpts and ideas without any sort of order, arrangement, index or reference system. Following his death his students and heirs could make nothing of the massive "scrap heap". As a result, Vincent Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi (1689) specifically warns against this practice (p. 72).
(cross reference from : https://hypothes.is/a/SyenKlO2Eeys0esqwOgjUw)
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- Jan 2022
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archive.org archive.org
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https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_IgMVAAAAQAAJ/page/n155/mode/2up
On page 138 Placcius shows an (uncredited?) version of Thomas Harrison's Ark of Studies.
p 140:
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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).
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Placcius recommended considering the first, the second, and the third letters in the words listed in the subject index in order to avoid spending too much time in searching for an entry;
Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 84–5;
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- Dec 2021
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Hybrid card index in book form. (From Placcius 1689, p. 67.)
Vincentius Placcius recommends excerpting to slips which can be kept in a book form, but which are a sort of hybrid card catalog/index.
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De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization by Vincen-tius Placcius. It offers an overview of contemporary procedures, instruc-tions on regular excerpting, and an extensive history of the subject. Placcius expressly warns against a loose form of indexing as pursued by Jungius. 38
- Placcius 1689, p. 72.
Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge as well as a history of the subject.
In the book, he warns specifically against the loose form of indexing exhibited by Joachim Jungius. (p72)
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