33 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Jan 2024
    1. With your Kokuyo Binder- do you know of a way to bind relatively large numbers of pages together? I want to use something like this as my commonplace book and archive as I go, but once I get enough archived on a given subject, I'd like to bind it as a sort of compendium. Does that seem possible with these or are they not good for larger numbers of pages?

      reply to u/modspyder at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/18fbwqx/comment/ko8bksm/

      The small plastic binder I use comfortably holds 50 pages, but has room for maybe 25 more (though not 50). You could use several of them for binding together groups of pages like that. Searching around might reveal larger ring binders here if you want larger books.

      For larger quantities:

      You can use book rings (sold in various sizes) or even binder clips to hold these sheets together in batches, but with the ability to remove them or add sheets later.

      File folders might be a useful option too for holding things together in categories.

      With some inexpensive book binder's glue and cardboard you could bind together much larger numbers of sheets into custom books for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nivNPCoAHcM is a good basic primer, but you could also do more complicated bindings and covers or have pages bound at FedEx/Kinkos or other higher end professional binders depending on your need and ultimate budget. For this the sky may be the limit, though anything over 1000 pages may be getting awfully bulky.

  3. Nov 2023
    1. Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from…the parent…to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.

      Interesting to contemplate the evolution of the idea of evolution through the Darwin family.

      Charles would obviously have read his grandfather's book, but it also bears noting that he also had access to his grandfather's commonplace book (and likely his other papers).

      See also: https://hypothes.is/a/FmVxQuqJEey33Uu0UTcMlg

  4. Jun 2023
    1. What I love and appreciate from Metivier, he will cite his sources. He makes it super easy to go back to his sources and mine those materials myself. He gives credit to other memory experts and is transparent throughout his books and course about where he is in his own process of growing and learning. In summary, we don't need originality, we need what works and in the scholarly world- syncretizing multiple sources and distilling them into a process IS original even if every building block is coming from another source. We're all standing on the shoulders of the giants before us.

      My note-taking method is informed by the commonplace book and zettelkasten: why reinvent a wheel that needs no reinventing (it is only, really, about translating things from one medium to another)

    2. As Chris Aldridge says, for centuries the Zettelkasten approach was the standard and universal method for producing books and articles - until personal computers took over. Nearly every serious work ever published before the 1980s was drafted either with index cards or paper slips, or else with notebooks in a commonplace style. Every writer had their own take on these two options, but that’s what they all used. Then, in a single decade, word processing software took over. These days, most writers use something like Microsoft Word or Google Docs (just try persuading your publisher you’re not giving them a docx file). Scrivener became popular because it critiqued the ‘endless roll of paper’ model and reverted to an index card interface of sorts. But it remained a niche.Today, you either thrive on that word processor model or you don’t. I really don’t, which is why I’ve invested effort, as you have, in researching previous writing workflows, older than the all-conquering PC of the late 1980s and early 90s. At the same time, new writing tools are challenging the established Microsoft way, but in doing so are drawing attention to the fact that each app locks the user into a particular set of assumptions about the drafting and publishing process.The current academic scene is a brutal war to publish or perish. It’s not unusual for a researcher to write or co-write 30-40 peer-reviewed articles per year. General publishing is also frenetic. In the UK, 20 books are published every hour of the day. It all makes Luhmann’s ‘prolific’ output look lazy. Now though, AI is blowing the entire field apart. From now on, prolific writing is what computers do best. There’s no reason not to publish 20,000 books per hour. Soon enough, that will be the output per ‘author’. Where the pieces will eventually land is anyone’s guess. For example, the workflow of the near future might involve one part writing and nineteen parts marketing. Except that AI has got that sewn up too. Meanwhile, until the world ends, I’m just having fun doing my thing.

      Before the advent of the computer, the use of a zettelkasten or commonplace book to research was "common place".

      What happened with the transition? Perhaps the methodology was lost in the transition, people just dumping things into a word file?

  5. May 2023
    1. Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. —“Hours in a Library”
  6. Apr 2023
    1. Ryan Holiday o prowadzeniu commonplace book, choć tak naprawdę nie o tym, bo też o karteczkowej metodzie. Właściwie to niewiele wyjaśnie jak to działa i czym należy się kierować. Wg mnie to mało użyteczny zbiór cytatów i obserwacji, jednak dobry tekst do zainspirowania się, aby gromadzić informację i rozbudowywać swój zbiór wiedzy.

    1. Etymologia słowa 'collect' w kontekście gromadzenia zbioru, w konkteście charakteru commonplace book i innych sposobów gromadzenia notatek.

  7. Jan 2023
    1. It is, however, important to keep in mind that, reflecting the trajectory ofGoitein’s study of the Geniza, there are often two sets of cards for a givensubject, one general and one related to the India Book.44

      Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research,” 144.

      Goitein's cards are segmented into two sets: one for subjects and one related to the India Book.

  8. Oct 2022
    1. Dzienniki Janiny Turek, która prowadziła je przez 57 lat, zawierają najdrobniejsze zapisy z życia codziennego. Notatki są podzielona na 36 kategorii, towarzyszą jej różne pamiątki, np. pocztówki.

  9. Sep 2022
    1. Autor przedstawia ideę commonplace book, przywołując zbiór cytatów na ten temat, przedstawiając to, jak rozumiano ten sposób gromadzenia informacji i tekstów (miejsce do przechowywania wiedzy), jak robili to różni ludzie (notatniki z wydzielonymi działami); przedstawia też powody czy motywacje, stojące za taką praktyką (potrzeba przywołania myśli, zebranych argumentów), na końcu zestawia commonplace book z internetem.

    1. Autorka przedstawia zagadnienie robienia notatek i ich organizacji. Podaje również techniczne informacje na temat notatników i sposobów zapisywania informacji.

      Autorka przedstawia następujące metody notowania: - metoda Cornella - plan punktowy, zarys (outline) - mapa myśli - commonplace book (autorka pokazuje przykład notatek Leonarda da Vinci) - dziennik (bullet journal) - Zettelkasten.

      Ponadto autorka jeszcze podaje wskazówki, dotyczące ulepszenia metod notowania: ręczne notowanie, wyodrębnianie najważniejszych zagadnień, zadawanie pytań, używanie własnych słów, tagowanie notatek.

    1. Krótka historia nie tylko samej metody commonplace-book, co także informacje na temat książki Johna Locka (zob. Locke et al. 1706; Locke 1812) oraz dodatkowe informacje, zaczerpnięte z Roberta Darntona (Darnton 2000; zob. też: Darnton 2009). Na końcu są też informacje na temat porównania tej metody i prowadzenia notatek oraz strony przez samego autora, czyli Jeremy'ego Normana.

    2. (Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” New York Review of Books 47 (20)[December 21, 2000] 82, 86)

      https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/12/21/extraordinary-commonplaces/

      Zob. też: Darnton 2009. (rozdział 10: The Mysteries of Reading)

  10. Jun 2022
    1. Tiago's book follows the general method of the commonplace book, but relies more heavily on a folder-based method and places far less emphasis and value on having a solid index. There isn't any real focus on linking ideas other than putting some things together in the same folder. His experience with the history of the space in feels like it only goes back to some early Ryan Holiday blog posts. He erroneously credits Luhmann with inventing the zettelkasten and Anne-Laure Le Cunff created digital gardens. He's already retracted these in sketch errata here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.

      I'll give him at least some credit that there is some reasonable evidence that he actually used his system to write his own book, but the number and depth of his references and experience is exceptionally shallow given the number of years he's been in the space, particularly professionally. He also has some interesting anecdotes and examples of various people including and array of artists and writers which aren't frequently mentioned in the note taking space, so I'll give him points for some diversity of players as well. I'm mostly left with the feeling that he wrote the book because of the general adage that "thought leaders in their space should have a published book in their area to have credibility". Whether or not one can call him a thought leader for "re-inventing" something that Rudolphus Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus firmly ensconced into Western culture about 500 years ago is debatable.

      Stylistically, I'd call his prose a bit florid and too often self-help-y. The four letter acronyms become a bit much after a while. It wavers dangerously close to those who are prone to the sirens' call of the #ProductivityPorn space.

      If you've read a handful of the big articles in the note taking, tools for thought, digital gardens, zettelkasten space, Ahren's book, or regularly keep up with r/antinet or r/Zettelkasten, chances are that you'll be sorely disappointed and not find much insight. If you have friends that don't need the horsepower of Ahrens or zettelkasten, then it might be a reasonable substitute, but then it could have been half the length for the reader.

    1. level 2ojboal · 2 hr. agoNot quite understanding the value of Locke's method: far as I understand it, rather than having a list of keywords or phrases, Locke's index is instead based on a combination of first letter and vowel. I can understand how that might be useful for the sake of compression, but doesn't that mean you don't have the benefit of "index as list of keywords/phrases" (or did I miss something)?

      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.

  11. Nov 2021
    1. In Bound to Read, Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates this culture of compilation—of binding and mixing texts, authors, and genres into single volumes—and sheds light on a practice that not only was pervasive but also defined the period's very ways of writing and thinking.
    2. In this early period of print, before the introduction of commercial binding, most published literary texts did not stand on shelves in discrete, standardized units. They were issued in loose sheets or temporarily stitched—leaving it to the purchaser or retailer to collect, configure, and bind them.

      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.

    3. 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

  12. Jul 2021
  13. uniweb.uottawa.ca uniweb.uottawa.ca
    1. Victoria E. Burke, Commonplacing, Making Miscellanies, and Interpreting Literature, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1680, Oxford University Press Oxford, 2022Editors: Danielle Clarke, Sarah C.E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-BaumannBook historyEarly modern literatureManuscript studiesSeventeenth-century women's writing

      This looks like a fun read to track down.

  14. May 2021
    1. @chrisaldrich, I’ll be intested to see how you help bring together your knowledge to create a more mnemonic way to visualize and remember bird calls and traits. I’ve also added your blog to my news reader with all the good ideas there as well. Thanks for all your great feedback!

      https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/bird-sound-encoding/63013/15

      I'll apologize in advance for the noisy-ness of my website. I use it as a commonplace book and post almost everything I do on the web there first (including social media). If it gets to be too much, you can subscribe to individual topics of interest (like https://boffosocko.com/category/Memory/feed/, which is sure to include any bird related work) so that you're just getting what you want instead of the overzealous firehose which can be upwards of 10 to 20,000 posts a year, depending on how much of my stream I make public.

    1. As the erudite Samuel Hartlib explained in 1641, “Zwinger made his excerpta by being using [sic] of old books and tearing whole leaves out of them, otherwise it had beene impossible to have written so much if every thing should have beene written or copied out.”

      And to think of how I complain about how hard it is to excerpt notes from sources and get them into my own personal commonplace book?!

      Makes me wonder who the inventor of the first cut and paste was?

  15. Jan 2021
    1. Long before there was the Internet, there was the commonplace book — a creative and intellectual ledger of fragmentary inspirations, which a writer would collect from other books and copy into a notebook, often alongside his or her reflections and riffs. These borrowed ideas are in dialogue with the writer’s own imagination and foment it into original thinking. Over long enough a period of time — years, decades, often a lifetime — the commonplace book, while composed primarily of copied passages, comes to radiate the singular sensibility of its keeper: beliefs are refined, ideas incubated, intellectual fixations fleshed out, and the outlines of a personhood revealed. (Brain Pickings is, in an unshakable sense, a commonplace book.)
  16. Oct 2020
    1. my blog posts to be long-lived pieces of my consciousness: something I may want to refer back to, or remember in the future.

      a commonplace book!

    1. and serve as pre-prints to work that may live later on, or always exist in their current format

      Thinking of a personal site as a pre-print server is an interesting concept and somewhat similar to the idea of a commonplace book.

    1. The blog was not just the venue in which I started putting together the ideas that became my second book, the one that made promotion and various subsequent jobs possible, but it was also the way that I was able to demonstrate that there might be a readership for that second book, without which it’s much less likely that a press would have been interested.

      This sounds like she's used her blog as both a commonplace book as well as an author platform.

    1. So most people say this is the original vision of the web.

      I look it and say, it's just another version of the commonplace book!

    2. I’m shocked and amazed that we still struggle to find materials.

      Something about this sentence and its lead up reminds of this particularly great section of the Microformats wiki about why not email: http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-better-than-email

    3. It really is the ultimate garden.

      I've long wanted to create my own personal wiki, and while reading this thus far have continued to think about it. Perhaps I need to just jump in and build one to supplement my stream-based commonplace book? I'll need to think about how to best dovetail the two together.

    1. 2011-06-23 at OSBridge2011 having lunch with Ward, Tantek exclaimed: The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb

      This is what I want too!

    1. Luhmann didn’t only write a lot and developed the most complex of all theoretical bodies in the social sciences. He was known for his vast knowledge and deep thinking. He didn’t run to his Zettelkasten when you asked him something. This is because he practiced thinking through writing and processing in the context of the Zettelkasten.

      I read Zettelkasten (German for “slip box”, or “card index”) and immediately think commonplace book!

    2. The Barbell Method takes this into account by integrating your reading habit into your knowledge work with two steps: Read the book. Read swiftly but don’t skip any parts unless they make you vomit or put you to sleep. Mark all the passages that stand out and contain useful, interesting or inspiring information. Read the book a second time. But now you read the marked parts only. This time you make notes, connect them to past notes (Zettelkasten Method!) and think about what you’ve read. Make mindmaps, drawings, bullet points – everything that helps you to think more clearly.
    1. Some other interesting wikis Credit for inspiration for this whole project comes from a variety of wikis and wiki-like collections on the web: buster.wiki/ - Strong design and everything has a date by the looks of it which enables an RSS feed. Very polished and thought through. are.na - A platform that all the cool kids use for building personal knowledge libraries. Lightly social, perhaps the right answer but slightly questionable if they’ll be around for a long time. Ymmv. Brendan’s /canon - this was part of the original inspiration for me. A curated list of pure stock - things that Brendan returns to again and again. He has a template you can copy too. Worrydream’s quotes page - just a massive list of interesting quotes collected by Brett Victor. Notice how being one giant page makes it instantly searchable. daywreckers.com - from Ben Pieratt, not quite a wiki but a very minimal site designed to collect the dots. A daily visit from me. derek sivers’ daily journal - a post from Derek Sivers on how to keep a text-file long-term store for your ideas and notes. And there’s lots more too - this twitter thread has a whole bunch of interesting rabbit holes. And, you can of course find this list of wikis on my wiki :)

      An interesting list here to be sure.

      As I'm thinking about it I also have to think about not only my own blog cum commonplace book, but I do also keep a private digital set of structures in OneNote (primarily) as well as some data Evernote which serve a lot of the same functionality.