“[Ann Blair] argues that historians have paid disproportionate attention to what she calls “literary reading” and not enough to other modes of encountering and engaging textual materials ranging from browsing and skimming to buying and collecting to annotating, cutting and pasting, and dog-earing. For Blair these other modes of acting upon texts are important in all historical moments, but in situations where readers feel themselves overwhelmed by information, they become all that much more crucial and telling.” p. 1

“According to her [Ann Blair] argument, an explosion of book production during the early modern period led to the development of a broad discourse on modes of textual practice. In some instances the problem of “information overload” led to a new emphasis on readerly “diligence” as in the cases of the theologians Francesco Sacchini and Johann Heinrich Alsted. In other instances, the same problem led to new theories and practices of consultative and instrumental reading such as those of Francis Bacon or Samuel Johnson.” p. 1/2

“In a world of rapid change, quick access to knowledge becomes as important as knowledge itself. During the early modern period, the encyclopedia survived by adaptation. If the Medieval encyclopedia aimed to reflect the universe itself, more and more, the early modern encyclopedia aimed to reflect the possibilities of knowing a changing universe of representation.” p. 4

“… during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries factors such as an increasing production and dissemination of books, developing networks of scientific communication, discoveries and innovations in the sciences, and new economic relationships all conspired to produce such quantities of new information that a substantial reorganization of the intellectual world was required. (…) by the end of the seventeenth century, it was widely understood that “representing and ordering the world” would be “impossible unless the representations themselves were put in order.”” p. 6

From Daniel Rosenberg, ‘Early Modern Information Overload’, in Journal of the History of Ideas 64.1 (2003) p. 1-9

“As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.”

Wrote Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, 1755

“… consider … the arts of transmission in the broad sense of the phrase as Bacon used it—namely, as the whole of the procedures that circulate, record, and organize knowledge.”

“David Hume declared explicitly that the fundamental advantage of the printing press seemed to be the potential to continuously improve and amend books in various editions.”

“On all of these levels it is interesting to note that the turning point is not the introduction of the printing press but much earlier, in the eleventh century, when the use of images became more complex and when the separation of words and efficient forms of punctuation became common. Various research instruments like verbal concordances (word indexes) and material concordances (subject indexes) were developed, overcoming even the mistrust for conventional cataloguing systems like alphabetical order, which bore no relation to the ultimate order of the world. The printing press was introduced into a foment of active experimentation with the forms of presentation and the organization of manuscripts, which were innovations connected with mostly autonomous developments like the increase and consequent standardization of available books. Collectively, these developments created a favorable environment for the consolidation and the success of the typographical innovation.”

“Terence Cave speaks of a discovery of the reader in the sixteenth century, based on a circular and indeterminate relationship between the writer and the reader; 31 the writer writes so as to compel the reader to elaborate his or her own autonomous perspective, that is, to presuppose his or her active role. A practice of generative reading is thus stabilized, where the text is used as material to be interpreted according to criteria and interests completely foreign to the one writing.” [See: See Terence Cave, “The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance,” in MIMESIS: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. J. Lyons and S. Nichols (Hanover, N.H., 1984), pp. 149–65.]

“[T]he medieval allegorical reading aimed at identification with, and not at detachment from, the perspective presented in the text (which was not that of the writer, but on a noncontingent and nonsubjective level).”

[Then, comparing the age of mass media with the age of the internet:]

“Where there was anonymity there is now personalization, where there was unilaterality there is interactivity, where there was the mass there is individual configuration, and above all, where there was an instrument expected to be as not noisy as possible, to not interfere with the message, there is now a machine used precisely to process information.”

“Computers and only computers are able to radically loosen the unity of communication in the search for new forms that mostly had not been considered by the one who produced the information.”

“Features that are perfectly casual from the point of view of the one drafting them, such as recurrent constructions and the redundancy present in lists or directories, are used by the computer in order to achieve effective ways of processing, with unpredictable results (think of compression techniques or the work of search engines).”

“In this case, information is valuable not because of what it conveys by itself (everyone builds their own information from their own perspective) but because it selects possibilities–a place from which one can start, like a computer does, to create more and more complex forms. Information then has value only as a precondition for a further decomposition into elements, which leads to recombination into forms.”

Elena Esposito, ‘ The Arts of Contingency’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004, http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.esposito.htm.

“The memo, for example, might have an audience of one, or none; it might be read once, or never. But however vanishingly ephemeral its interest, it must nonetheless be preserved, that is, filed.”

“In an argument notably ingenious, if not persuasive, he [Herbert Spencer in Philosophy of Style] asserts that poetry is in fact more economical than prose in its demand on the reader’s attention. The evidence for this point is the extreme compression of poetic language, particularly figurative language; but Spencer has confused compression, which might very well tax the reader’s attention by producing ambiguity, with a concept of brevity that would seem to resist ambiguity as an impediment to communication.”

[Ah — wasn’t it Yuri Lotman who, much later, argued along the same lines?]

“Tufte’s critique of PowerPoint confirms a distinction between concision and clarity, since the burden of his critique is to remind us that sometimes more words are required in order for communication to be effective. There is no easy correlation between the quantity of words and the quality of communication, and this mysterious intransigence of language, which goes very deep, means that it will probably never be possible to reduce writing to rules, schemata, or the algorithms that run computer programs.”

“The norm of clarity arose from the publicness of print culture, which presupposed that written communications were addressed ideally to everyone, to the hypothetical “general reader.””

John Guillory, ‘The Memo and Modernity’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004, http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.guillory.htm.

“If and when the old humanities deal not with man, their topics are cultural technologies such as writing, reading, counting, singing, dancing, drawing—surprisingly almost the same skills that every free young man and girl in Lakedaimon or in Athens once displayed. For the humanities, there is nothing nontechnical to teach and research.”

“[T]oday’s knowledge is only as powerful as its implementations are. The future of the university depends on its faculty to unite separated notation systems of alphabets and mathematics into a superset, which Vilem Flusser once ironically called the alphanumerical code.”

“The secret manifest in commercial chip designs, operating systems, and application program interfaces (APIs) lies in the fact that technical documentation – in screaming contrast to all technical history – is not published anymore.”

Friedrich Kittler, ‘Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004.

Yeah, behind the academic wall, but luckily here they are for everyone: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_the_history_of_ideas/v064/64.1blair.html; Ann Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping With Information Overload ca. 1550-1700’, and the Rosenberg article: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_the_history_of_ideas/v064/64.1rosenberg.html.

The whole list: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_the_history_of_ideas/. But you got that already.

Another article to read: Daniel Rosenberg, ‘Early Modern Information Overload,’ Journal of the History of Ideas (2003). Behind the academic walls… Rosenberg is here: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~dbr/.

And did not know this project: http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/did/. Collaborative translation of Diderot & D’Alemberts Encyclopedia.

Also very handy; the dictionary of ideas: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/DicHist/analytic/.

Copied two articles from Critical Inquiry 31, (Autumn 2004) on the art of transmission & read those this afternoon:

Ann Blair, ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’ (p. 85-107)
Alan Liu, ‘Transendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse’ (p. 49-84)

Ann Blair writes: “This historical interest [in note taking] is fueled not only by the rapid growth of the history of reading, of which the study of note taking is an offshoot, bit also by our current experience with new technologies and our sense (often more diffuse than articulate) that the computer is changing both the way we take notes and the kind of notes and writing we produce.” (p. 89)

Let’s make that ‘sense’ more articulate…

Apart from that, I think that my interest in note taking also derives from the fact that I have never been able to devise a working systems of note taking for myself, but keep on dreaming about it. Notes are in my notebook, on post-its stuck on the pages of books, in the margin on photocopied articles, in text-files on the computer (both in VoodooPad, TextEdit, BBEdit, MacJournal and — very rarely — a wiki), entries on my blog, and sometimes even sheets of A4-paper. I dream of having a database of quotations (like a commonplace book), a full bibliography with annotations, also covering websites. It seems so easy…

Upcoming workshop at Mediamatic, from 11-13 september: RFID, Internet of Things: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11944-en.html. There’s a reading list online at http://www.mediamatic.net/article-9691-en.html.

One of the features speakers is, yes, yours truly. Next to Julian Bleecker, http://research.techkwondo.com/ and Timo Arnall, http://www.elasticspace.com/.

Lately I’ve been doing a tiny bit of research in the use of commonplace books. There is a close resemblance between the function of commonplace books (in for instance the Seventeenth century) and how some people use blogs. Some bloggers see, or call their blogs commonplace books. It’s a pretty well-known comparision, but I never really explored it until now.

Here’s some quick info, with links, and links to some pictures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/compb.htm
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/46800

Here’s a danish blog that uses ‘commonplace book’ as a category — seems to have nice quotations… http://www.bookish.dk/index.php?cat=23. And a blog that calls itself a commonpace book: http://www.constantreader.org/v2/commonplace.html.

Some more relevant stuff:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/2005/08/the_blog_as_a_record_of_readin.html
http://cut-and-paste.de/
http://www.diyplanner.com/

There’s much more, but my dear reader, you can google as well as me.

In Making Things Public Anke te Heesen has a very nice short article about notebooks. I copied quite a few paragraphs from it; waht follows here is a digest of her article. I love the way she sees the notebook as a paper machine, as a technology that is an actor in how we write, store and process thoughts.

“The notebook as a paper-machine consists of the function noting and storing notes. ‘To note’ means first and foremost ‘to write down’, from the Latin notare, with the connotations sign, mark and writing, or from noscere, which means ‘to get to know’. ‘Note’, from notitia refers to this, namely, ‘to be known’. (…) Therefore apart from the actual act of wrigin, noting also describes a particular kind of perception: taking notice of something. Etymologically, here writing and taking notice are contained in one procedure, which at the same time implies habitual forming of a person and results in a praxis with paper that requires certain gestures, performed acts, rituals and tools.” p. 584

“From the sixteenth century on, bits of knowledge have been noted down in books with blank pages, stored in special boxes or placed in pigeonholes or compartments on bookshelves. In that era, the notes and small pieces of paper were the smallest material text-units of intellectual work. Organized note-taking was understood as a writing technique that could be learned, and it was one of the essential skills in the learned world.” p. 585

“Already in 1605, Francis Bacon recommends in Advancement of Learning the use of ‘commonplace books for entering the fruits of reading, quotations and references: ‘I hold that the diligence, and pains in collecting common Places, is of great use in certainty and studying.'” p. 586

“The philosopher John Locke, who influenced entire generations of English gentlemen with his instructions of how to make commonplace books, rendered the procedure methodical. In one of his texts, published in 1706, he described how to keep such a notebook. The ‘Memory is the treaurey or Storehouse,’ he said, but one must provide memory with an orderly basis. ‘It would be just for all the World as serviceable as a great deal of Household Stuff, when if we wanted any particular Thing we could not tell were to find it.’ This organization begins with reading. One should first read a book but not write anything in the notebook. ‘The places we design to extract from are to be marked on a piece of Paper, that we may do it after we have read the Book out.’ So after putting in all the bookmarks, one should read the book a second time and decide what is relevant enough to be written down in the notebook. ‘I take a White Paper Book and what Size I think fit. I divide the two first pages, which face another, by parallel lines,’ and make an index. In so doing, one froms one’s own keywords. A commonplace book thus refers a quotation noted down to its original context (its origin, the book) and, a the same time, is a stock to draw on for the memory, the speech to be given or the text to be written.” p. 586

“Entire generations of intellectuals and young gentlemen were educated to practice this technique. The notebook was a technique in service of discipline.” p. 587

“Notebooks were a place for collecting things, a technique for discipline, chronological recording and evidence. Such a book with its blank or gradually filling pages was a paper-machine which took in what one fed it but at the same time directed the entries.” p. 588

“From the beginning, this paper technology adhered to certain rules: The entries had to be written in a straight line , and no blots or spots should mar the paper. A margin, which in the earliest years was often signalized by a fold in the paper, provided space for notes and commentaries and played a significant role in administrative forms of writing (files).” p. 588

Anke te Heesen, ‘The Notebook, A Paper Technology’, in Latour & Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM / MIT, Cambridge Ma, 2005, p. 582-589

So now on my desk:
John Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place Book: http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0326.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/adv1.htm.