About Me
I am a learning designer based in Ottawa, Canada. I’ve just finished the Masters of Distance Education programme at Athabasca University (yippee!). If you want to know more, visit my personal web site.
About Verbatim and Commonplace Books
This blog is an experiment for managing the notes and quotations that I’ve hitherto gathered on 3×5 index cards, a system characterized by frantic search at the eleventh hour through piles of cards for the one quotation that is just right for a particular paper or a presentation. This card is often found under the cat.
Throughout the early modern period, commonplace books were a staple of the learned, holding within their pages treasured notes, excerpts, drawings, culinary recipes and medicinal tinctures, religious passages…really anything worth remembering (and in fact, often memorized). At the turn of the 17th century, philosopher John Locke offered a set of complex rules for their organization, thereby providing a means to deal with a growing concern of the time: information overload. Following his rules, commonplace book compilers, as they were known, could efficiently reduce vast amounts of knowledge into a slim, portable volumes (Dacome, 2004. Alas, only available with a subscription).
Even though commonplace books have fallen out of favour, they share striking similarities with the way we use blogs today to organize our information and space (with the significant distinction that blogs are public; I don’t believe commonplace books were until modern day historians realized their cultural value). Since reading Steven Berlin Johnson’s description of his research system in the New York Times Book Review (Jan 30, 2005), I have wondered if blogs and tagging systems could help organize notes and quotations that create the kind of semantic links or serve as a springboard for new ideas and inspiration he talks about. And so, knowing that I may instead be showing the same lack of imagination for which the Lockean compilers were often criticized, I’ve created Verbatim, a personal commonplace repository for quotations about learning, a topic broad enough to embrace pretty much everything I find interesting, but narrow enough to be in the company of other edubloggers. As for types of quotations…generally I dislike the short ones that have been stripped of their context, and therefore their original meaning. With the possible exception of the subject of technology-mediated learning, the quotations I select generally come from books I am reading because, I suspect most of the good stuff is not available online (yet). Since I have to manually transcribe these, chances are the quotations aren’t very long either. James Farmer and others have written about blogs as a form of individual self-expression. I wonder how much sense it makes to use only other people’s words? Or will the careful selection, transcription and the organization over time ultimately reveal less about the quoted and more about the compiler…er, I mean blogger…as Steven describes here:
The other thing that would be fascinating would be to open up these personal libraries to the external world. That would be a lovely combination of old-fashioned book-based wisdom, advanced semantic search technology, and the personality-driven filters that we’ve come to enjoy in the blogosphere. I can imagine someone sitting down to write an article about complexity theory and the web, and saying, “I bet Johnson’s got some good material on this in his ‘library’….I can imagine saying to myself: “I have to write this essay on taxonomies, so I’d better sift through Weinberger’s library, and that chapter about power laws won’t be complete without a visit to Shirky’s database.”
As a final note, and could you expect otherwise : ) …some quotations about commonplace books and the art of commonplacing.
