disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium withoutpassing through the Trivium. But the scholastic tradition, though broken andmaimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities:
Is it possible that with the flowering of the storehouse of knowledge and the rise of information overload following Gutenberg's moveable type, we became overly enamored with Sayers' subject-based Quadrivium that we forgot to focus on the basics of the Trivium?
Much like Umberto Eco (How to Write a Thesis), in the closing paragraphs of his essay, Goutor finally indicates that note cards can potentially be reused for multiple projects because each one "contains a piece of information which does not depend on a specific context for its value." While providing an example of how this might work, he goes even further by not only saying that "note-cards should never be discarded" but that they might be "recycled" by passing them on to "another interested party" while saying that their value and usefulness is dependent upon how well they may have adhered to some of the most basic note taking methods. (p35)
Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence ofobjects – very often precious stones, shells or other items ofadornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Oftenthese were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would laterfind being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world.
Is it also possible that these items may have served the purpose of mnemonic devices as a means of transporting (otherwise invisible) information from one area or culture to another?
Can we build evidence for this from the archaeological record?
Relate this to the idea of expanding the traditional "land, labor, capital" theory of economics to include "information" as a basic building block
Over these two centuries, an in-creasing impatience for the ancient art of memory based on the use of imagi-nation could be detected in the academic milieu.
Following the invention of moveable type, the information overload created in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750, placed a major burden and impatience, particularly on academic scholars, on the use of the ancient arts of memory based on the use of imagination. In addition to the education reforms by those like Peter Ramus, this may have been a major motivating factor for forgetting this prior tradition of knowledge acquisition and management.
What is one to do when there's seemingly "too much to memorize"?
All this bears little resemblance to modern literary ideals, in which the author is constructed somewhat heroically as an individual creative source.
This is broadly true in the early West, but becomes far more prevalent after the time of Konrad Gessner (1516 - 1565) whose work coincided with the explosion of information following the use of moveable type in Europe.
Moss points out the implied analogy between the commonplace-book and "moveable type, capable of both setting a page of text in an apparentiy immutable form and of rearranging all the eléments of that page into other pattems for other meanings" (p. 252); with characteristie prudence, she mentions this analogy only when it finally becomes explicit in one of her later texts, Jean Oudart's Methode des orateurs oí 1668
The ideas of moveable type and moveable information can be an important idea in the evolution of commonplace books to zettelkasten and thence into digital forms of commonplaces.