I was delighted to click over to this short piece earlier today, which described a prevalent feature in the intellectual life of the enlightenment era: the commonplace book. This book was not "commonplace" as in ordinary, but the physical record of a practice known as commonplacing, in which readers copied out striking or important passages of work that they read, ideas, comments, and eventually, insights built up from this whole corpus of material. In a sense, it is engagement through appropriation into one's own personal corpus.
I think that I (and most actively reading, actively writing people that I know) engage in this process to some extent. Aside from hoarding journal paper printouts and PDFs, we rip out interesting magazine articles, may tape up inspirational or grounding quotes over our desks, and maybe write out or photocopy passages as well. Most of us also likely own many books which--perhaps unlike the enlightenment era thinkers--we view as disposable enough to mark up aggressively without confining ourselves to marginalia.
A quick googling of "commonplacing" directed me to a short article from the University of Chicago Library. Besides some pictures of commonplace books, it makes the important note that "While the commonplace book allowed readers to personalize their reading by making it useful, this process of textual engagement was also highly prescribed, "common" in the sense that it filtered one's reading through social norms that determined what was textually significant and what not." What I would be very interested to know is to what extent this modern process of appropriation and accrual is also mediated by social norms about textual significance. For example, might it feel embarrassing to copy out some lines from a paperback romance novel (however meaningful they were to you), in a way it would probably NOT be embarrassing to write down lines from Martin Luther King? What about jotting down passages from Harry Potter, a series that is very important to me and many others around the world? Despite its emotional resonance and cultural embeddedness, I think most of us would have a unspoken sense that Harry Potter is somehow "less significant" in terms of literary merit and ideas contained than are works in the established literary canon...regardless of whether we find this hierarchy of values personally true or not.
Questions of significance aside, I think that this practice of collecting, digesting, and re-arranging bits of text is very important for solidifying the ideas you have already encountered and preparing the ground for new ones to sprout. I would argue that this practice is perhaps even more important in the sciences than in the humanities, partly because it is so damn easy to waltz through a dense or technical text without absorbing very much of it. And then, you can't later find that key passage that you remember as phrasing a difficult concept so perfectly... Despite my trying to reduce the amazing quantity of paperwork that I drag around with me, I have gone back to keeping small notebooks full of passages and quotations for just this reason. I am sifting out the pieces that I think are useful to me as ideas, independently of the pressing pieces of project work that happens to be in front of me today.
I disagree with the author of the piece in the first link ("Bring Commonplacing Back to Education") that a blog is the modern-day commonplace book. To be frank, that kind of aggregation of readings and thoughts had been my initial intent for this blog. However, I am dismayed to find that others cannot read my mind and discern my intent in a giant posted list of all the links I read today. While there is nothing to prevent me from posting this, it seems unsatisfying and frankly a bit pointless. A blog is generally written for an audience. While each individual post may be small, there is an expectation that it will convey some comprehensible message; random fragments of thought are seen as seen as hurried or thoughtless as best, and deliberately pretentious at worst. The modern commonplace book in the form of personal reading journal or research journal or folder of clippings has the creator/curator as its only audience-- no justification is necessary for the inclusion (or exclusion!) of certain content. Ideas do not need to be fully formed, and can be annotated directly onto existing material as the writer sees fit. I think that a strength of this tool is its privateness and lack of audience, especially in higher education (or any realm, really) where there is continuous pressure to crank out ideas and arguments. Even worse, there is often enforced compartmentalisation of ideas with little demand for broader synthesis. Out of the spotlight, understanding has a chance to evolve at its own pace and crossbreed between genres as it will. Inviting public commentary on these processes, as possible in a blog, seems only to be replicating the type of environment to which the author hoped that the virtual commonplace book would be an antidote.
In conclusion, I now have a clearer picture of what I had already suspected: for peace of mind and productivity, it is wisest not to conflate this public blog with the private role of my scribbly, tatty notebook and its slips of paper!
