John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685) | Hacker News Reader

John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685)

publicdomainreview.org

71 pointsbenbreen12 comments

Common-place books as compendia of book excerpts was a tradition going back to classical times.[1] During the Renaissance, when people began to elevate observation over historical authority, personal notebooks shifted from being collections of quotes to what we now think of as research journals.[2]

John Locke was an obsessive recorder of all manner of observations in notebooks. He emphasized recording spontaneous thoughts and putting complex ideas on paper to facilitate reasoning about them. He was one of the main promoters of the modernist reliance on evidence and argument rather than citation of authorities.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Too-Much-Know-Scholarly-Information/d...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Notebooks-English-Virtuosi-Modern-Sci...

A hashing algorithm based on tagging a piece of knowledge with some descriptive “head” (key) which is then organised alphabetically, augmented by including the first vowel after the initial letter. The unaugmented alphabetical approach results in an unbalanced table (i.e. wasted paper), the use of the vowel helps distribute the heads more evenly. Also by a quirk of language also helps arrange concepts with similar etymological roots side by side.

What I don't exactly get is how the pages are assigned. It's not really a hashing algorithm in that sense, it's more like a dictionary data structure where the user has to choose the storage locations. It's only possible to work from one end or the other, or more or less randomly. Either way fragmentation will creep in. This looks like it happens in the image of Locke's index.

My take on it is that its one page per index, and the indexing method just mostly naturally balances the entries across these ...

Do you guys have your own commonbooks?

I have written an app in electron for myself, based mostly on zettelkasten ideas from Archiver, but with more shortcuts and a Little different flow. I find it very useful

I basically have one. I just use a plain text file formatted according to `fortune` conventions.

I use zettelkasten The Archive and find it quite useful. Mainly mine is just a mess of random notes though

Yes-ish. I have been doing it with TiddlyWiki, including somewhat publishing one wiki as my static website.

On this subject: do any of you know if it's legal to deeply quote (long and/or frequent quotes) works to assemble a digital notebook that references them and post the whole thing online (quotes and all)? I'm worried that at some point I (and others) would violate copyright in doing so.

I use index cards to write out quotes I want to preserve.

I carry a passport-sized traveler's notebook (Midori-style). One insert is for a minimal bullet journal to track personal projects/todos/dates/etc. Another is for long-form journalling, and I also transcribe any interesting quotations/excerpts/poetry/etc here.

When it's full, I go through and transfer these to a collection I have in an online note-taking site (used to be Springpad, now Quip, probably migrating again sometime soon).

I have a third insert that has quotations/verses specific to my Catholic faith, so I can have them accessible. I suppose this is the closest to a traditional common-place book.

I feel lucky to be able to `grep` a word from a directory of files and tend to always find my scratch notes on a topic.

and it gives me opportunity to practice my general VIM skillz. Haha.

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