commonplace book

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A commonplace book (or commonplaces) are a way to compile and store knowledge, usually by writing information into books, notebooks, card catalogs, or in more modern settings on one's own website.

Variations on this structural theme and the broader functional purposes and UI for aggregation/collecting, memory, learning, spaced repetition and similar patterns of knowledge related work include florilegium (books of flowers), anthologies, notebooks, miscellanies, pocket books, memoranda books, diaries, thesauruses ("treasure chests"), albums, scrapbooks, sylva rerum ("forests of things"), table books, vade mecum ("go with me"), waste books/sudelbücher, second brains, and digital gardens. This page can serve as an aggregation point for some of these related ideas until or unless it becomes worthwhile to separate these to delineate some of the different specific features they may have.

For closely related forms, see also:

Brief History

The general concept of the commonplace book dates to the 1500's (though earlier precursors exist) as books became more common in society. Often due to the exorbitant cost of texts, readers would read and take notes from them into their commonplace books for future contemplation, providing direct quotations at a later date, or future reference prior to returning the book to its owner or passing it along to another. In some sense they became repositories for marginalia, highlights and notes one wanted to keep after the possession of a book was released. Commonplaces are frequently used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they have learned. Each commonplace book is unique to its creator's particular interests.


A variety of means and methods for compiling and organizing commonplaces have been devised over their hundreds of years of use. An early how-to book entitled A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (1706) was written by philosopher John Locke in which he provided techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, and formulating speeches. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion.


The IndieWeb site as a Commonplace book

Given the prevalence and variety of post types on indieweb sites, their form and function often makes them de facto modern day commonplace books. Traditional commonplace books can often be found to have notes, the equivalent of bookmarks, reposts, articles, sketches or diagrams, reviews, recipes, lists of things read, and quotations which have direct correlates of indieweb post types.

The ability to tag, hyperlink, and search indieweb sites adds to their general usability in a way that traditional handwritten commonplace books lacked. Rarely, if ever, were commonplace books written in chronological order like journals or in reverse chronological order like blogs. More sophisticated search and archive pages (temporal or by category, tag, or topic) preclude this structural need now.

Commonplace books can be contrasted with other early written forms like diaries, journals, scrapbooks, and travelogues. Some of these functions are served by traditional blogs and personal websites while other post types along the lines of a "life log" or features of quantified self sites round out some of what may also make an indieweb site.

My website is adactio.com. I love my website. Even though it isn’t a physical thing, I think it might be my most prized possession.

It’s a place for me to think and a place for me to link.

— Jeremy Keith in <A>

Examples

IndieWeb examples

  • Kevin Marks In many conversations with Kevin, one will begin to notice a pattern. He will often not only have previously thought about the topic at hand, but at one time or another he'll have written a blog post about it detailing those thoughts. He'll then do a quick search of his site(s) and proffer the link which not only contains an/the(?) "answer", but likely a lot of other additional thought and material above and beyond that one is likely to be interested in as well.
  • Chris Aldrich I speficially state on my homepage "I use this website as my primary hub for online presence and communication and to some extent as my online commonplace book." The primary categories on my site give a bit of an index overview of some of the material I "collect" and in which I'm interested. I often post quotes, quick recipes, bookmarks of things I want to read in certain categories, and notes/highlights/marginalia from books I've read.
  • Greg McVerry Captures all his annotations, bookmarks, and links to read articles from his blog. He also captures all class activity as a teacher.
  • Kimberly Hirsh uses her blog as a commonplace book and her website pages as a digital garden.

Past examples

Examples in the Wild

  • Nelson Minar "A few folks have subscribed to this blog recently. Welcome! I am not writing for you. I am truly, only, writing work notes for myself. Stuff I learn and don’t want to forget."

This weblog is mainly for myself, used as a commonplace book in which I put ideas, quotations, facts, and citations that I might want to use later. That’s why the topics are diverse and often esoteric. I’m not trying to build an audence or get a lot of hits on a counter. My impression is that most visitors arrive because search engines have led them to here and I’m one of the few websites in the world that address some key word they’re interested in.

Since I am not writing for other people, especially (you will see the exceptions—things such as posts I also use as comments on other blogs, excerpts from letters or articles I have written or will write, and so forth), please do not think I am deliberately trying to offend someone or that I am cleverly pushing a hidden agenda. I’m not, simply because I don’t expect enough people to read this blog for such efforts to be worthwhile. Actually, I probably shouldn’t even fix my typos, and perhaps I’ll stop doing that. You’re weclome to read, and I’ll try to write well simply to avoid getting into bad habits, but I’ll not expend more effort than if I were writing this into a hidden fil in my PC.

Sharing ideas, in any form, is what the web empowers us to do. This is my online journal and commonplace book.

  • George Mokray

    • All mistakes are mine. Hubevents Notes are raw notes from some of the events attended from the weekly Energy (and Other) Events around Cambridge, MA at http://hubevents.blogspot.com and books I've been reading. This is something of an electronic commonplace book.

  • Jake Reeder began collecting his notes and annotations of Jacques Derrida using paper and pen, but transferred them into the cleverly named website Return to Cinder. The site ultimately grew to include additional writers and works (thus also making it a personal library of sorts. It ultimately became valuable enough to Reeder that he turned his site into a note taking platform available for other users called Databyss which appears to be a silo note taking platform that allows users to "Write and cite, research and re-search, and never get lost in Databyss. Welcome to your new word processor."
  • Thomas Foster, a public zettelkasten/memex on a personal site
    • Note: The site identifies itself as a zettelkasten, but doesn't appear to have the actual functionality as of 2022-03.

Shared Examples

Examples of shared or small community-based commonplace books.

Historical Examples

For user examples, potential design work, and awareness of history, below is a list of physical (non-digital) commonplace books. Some of these were originally handwritten on paper, in codices, or in notebooks, but are available as printed and purchasable editions. Some may have been digitized and are now available online.

  • Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE)' Meditations began as a private collection of notes, thoughts, and quotations.
  • The Loci communes (Commonplaces) or Capita theologica (Theological Chapters) or Kitāb al-rawḍa (Book of the Garden) is a Byzantine Greek florilegium containing a mix of Judeo-Christian and pagan selections. It was originally compiled in the late 9th or early 10th century and subsequently enlarged around the year 1000. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loci_communes_(Pseudo-Maximus)
  • Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
  • Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
  • Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
  • H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
  • W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972) started a commonplace book in a journal in May 1928 as a medical student. He kept it for 44 years until his death at which point it occupied 25 volumes comprising 7,189 pages and was indexed with 1,600 index cards. The British Library created a digital archive of his commonplace which has been published online with extensive cross linking based on his original index. http://www.rossashby.info/index.html
  • ...

Collections of Examples

  • The internet itself could be though of as a massive living and ever-growing commonplace book which can be digitally queried to provide the answers to nearly every conceivable question.
  • ...


Platforms

Open source

Below are some various non-silo or open source platforms which might be used for commonplace books, some specific examples of these in use may appear in IndieWeb examples above.

  • Foam, an open source second brain/Zettelkasten building tool for VS Code with graph visualisations
  • logseq is a privacy-first, open-source platform for knowledge sharing and management. Code on GitHub.
  • trilium hierarchical note taking application
  • Cardigan Bay - the wiki engine created to run ThoughtStorms wiki is a personal wiki-like notebook application. It's open-source; written in Clojure and distributed as a JAR file that will run on Windows, Linux (and probably Mac); has automatic backlinks; an embeddable Clojure interpreter (so you can embed code in pages); full text search; a bookmarklet to quickly bookmark web-pages into it; an embeddable RSS feed-reader; a RecentChanges & RecentChanges RSS feed; and exports pages as flat HTML files that can be hosted on any web-server. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7_THeK9EBw for a quick overview.

Non-silo, non-opensource

  • nvUltra - Searchable, portable, MultiMarkdown notes app, iOS only (private beta in Summer 2020)

Silos

Given the classical definition of a commonplace book and modern day use cases, some of the following silos could be used as or considered commonplaces. Their uses and user interfaces could be used as examples for designing or building one's own digital commonplace book.

Resources

Presentations


Books


Articles

  • 2002 Cory Doctorow My Blog, My Outboard Brain
    • “Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this -- it's one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.”
  • 2003 Randall L. Anderson: Metaphors of the Book as Garden in the English Renaissance
    • The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 33, Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies and Anthologies (2003), pp. 248-261 (14 pages); Published By: Modern Humanities Research Association
    • https://doi.org/10.2307/3509029
    • Explains that seventeenth-century commentators saw miscellanies as private, idiosyncratic collections and commonplace books as produced with a readership in mind, for reference. Reminiscent of modern blogs and digital gardens?
  • 2008-05 Kate Eichhorn: Archival Genres: Gathering Texts and Reading Spaces (archived)
    • Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies. Issue 12, May 2008. Visual & Cultural Studies Program, University of Rochester.
    • This article correlates the commonplace book and the blog as archival genres, transitional collections and spaces where readers interact with texts and straddle public and private spheres.

Quotes

  • 2020-06-10 The Study: Issue #32 — Keeping a Commonplace Book

    Commonplace Book is NOT: … a journal, … your collection of morning pages., … a stream of consciousness rambling of your thoughts.

    …

    NOT using these apps as your permanent commonplace book repositories though. Apps die and technologies change, but…


    …paper is forever

  • tl;dr for an online commonplace book (maybe needs curation / deliberation details)
  • “For example, I've been blogging for four years, which means I've poured out about a million words' worth of my thoughts online. This regularly produces the surreal and delightful experience of Googling a topic only to unearth an old post that I don't even remember writing.”—Clive Thompson Your Outboard Brain Knows All in Wired 2007-09-25
  • “Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.”—Cory Doctorow, My Blog, My Outboard Brain on 2002-05-31
  • “every single thing I post on here—whether it's a link, a blog post, or anything else—is really a “note to self.””— Jeremy Keith in Associative trails
  • “the distinction between personal blogs and…whatever else it is that we do to try and share ourselves on the internet.”—Lucy Bellwood, Commonplace on 2021-04-25
  • “The best personal blogs I've come across feel like a glimpse in to someone's personal notebook, something filled mostly with notes written with the author in mind first and foremost vs notes that have been written with a wider audience in mind.”—@Piper Haywood2021-04-22
  • "With a lovely flower drawn into this illuminated printed leaf from the Floretus cum commento, a twelfth-century florilegium (literally “books of flowers”) attributed to Bernard de Clairvaux [Cologne, 1499], could this make Clairvaux the patron saint of digital gardens?"— Chris Aldrich 2021-06-11

Sessions

Related sessions at IndieWebCamps

History of this page

Split page question

Should this page be split, e.g. separating digital garden into its own page?

  • +1 Tantek Çelik: reason: those using "digital garden" mean something in particular (see https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/ ) and seem to have no attachment or affinity with "commonplace book" (which is also quite an academic-sounding phrase/term). Even if they are conceptually similar, there is a very different attitude about them, and frankly even their metaphors are quite contrasting: dead tree vs. living plants — Tantek Çelik 14:11, 3 April 2021 (PDT)
  • +1 Yousef Amar: reason: echo that I've never heard the term "commonplace book" before, but "digital garden" is quite pervasive, and I would consider it distinct. I also find the metaphor to imply different things (e.g. a place others can visit and maybe even participate in tending to, plants that you tend to over time, rather than the more unchanging or chronological nature of something scrapbook-like or journal-like, etc) — Yousefamar.com (talk) 12:24, 5 April 2023 (PDT)
  • ...

2023-04-07 Tantek Çelik stubbed digital garden for these reasons and started moving specific content there.

See Also

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