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| description | Notebooks, in which people recorded ideas, quotes and other things of interest, so they could refer to them in conversation, when writing or otherwise in need of inspiration or insight. Reportedly in use by (and since) Michaelangelo, these were popularised in the West during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and early 19th century. People used them as a means to make sense of a rapidly-changing world, and to find their bearings in it. Commonplace books were the key element of an active process of reading and interpreting ideas and fragments of text, and of your own interpretations of and insights arising from them. They were used to connect ideas from diverse sources, and to inspire new ideas and insights from them. They seem like a less systematic and comprehensive forebear of the Zettelkasten method. Both systems provide the affordance of a kind of serendipity that comes from stumbling across unrelated ideas while riffling through the book/slipcase in search of a specific entry. This is something that Restagraph (i.e, the system powering this site) lacks by nature, due to its more precise system of hyperlinks. |