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.

Ok, I’ll not try to summarize how Latour outlines his idea of Dingpolitik — (that we do not have hard facts, but matters of concern & that it’s about how publics gather around an issue, how an issue is a ‘thing’, not a fact but a gathering together). He uses of course etymology and refers to the Icelandic Thing — the parliament — to describe what a thing is; I’ll not go into the important role of mediation, of deliberation and yes, rhetoric; I’ll just say that I find this redefinition of politics very exciting and very clear. It also makes me pick up the texts that he refers to, specifically Dewey’s The Public and its Problems — Dewey being a favorite of mine ever since I read Art as Experience.

I’ve spent lots of hours in the shady garden in Kanne, going through every page of what N. calls ‘the brick’ (the catalogue). No I did not read every word, but at least I’ve seen every page and I’ve read a good deal of the articles. Sometimes I put a post-it on a page, sometimes with a few words scribbled on it. I’ll go through those ‘bookmarks’, harvesting the quotes…

‘Gathering’ (coming together, collecting): how — I thought — is that connected to the current technology around blogs…. rss (our own, personalized collection), gathering of different bits of content through keywords, using folksonomy; how Technorati (etc.) aggregates content; how even search engines do this. A blog collects bits of writing (and images, and links, and keywords) and people (readers) and other blogs. But the content is also collected, harvested, gathered.

I’m not stating anything new here — I’m trying out the words, and try to think (or visualize even) the different layers of mediation.

When I do this, I’m actually also going back full circle to what is probalby one of Latours many starting points for Making Things Public: the issue network-research of Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers, that lead, in any case for N., also to the rediscovery of Dewey’s ideas about the public, and how publics gather (form) around an issue.

I somehow like to tie that in to current webtechnologies and current practices of online writing too. (Speaking as a blogger, blogs as partial conversations, blogging for oneself, publishing without a public, yet one’s texts are gathered, and most importantly maybe — bringing in rhetorics — the ‘ethos’ of the blogger).

Well, maybe it’s also sort of tying it (‘my thoughts on blogging’) into the politico-philosophical discourse.

Just thinking aloud. // Some quotes then…

“The cognitive deficiency of participants has been hidden for a long time because of the mental architecture of the dome in which the Body Politik was supposed to assemble. We were told that all of us — on entering this dome, this public sphere — had to leave aside in the cloakroom our own attachments, passions and weaknesses. Taking our seat under the transparant crystal of the common good, through action of some mysterious machinery, we woudl then collectively endowed with more acute vision and higher virtue.

(…)

Unfortunately, much like the Tower of Babel, those ‘palaces of reason’ (…) are no longer able to house the isssues they were supposed to gather.”

Remember how ‘messy’ is the world of blogs…

Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’, in Latour & Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM / MIT, Cambridge Ma, 2005, p. 30

Last week I made another attempt at structuring my information-gathering behavior. I’m not sure if it is necessary, but I feel it is necessary. Generally I am relying solely on my own memory, being helped a bit by my browser who supplies a full url when I start typing www.cy… or n…. or blo… I visit a few blogs, maybe am reminded of a few places by glancing at the links-lists. But that’s it. I think I’m missing too much and forgetting too many good places. For instance, I always feel helpless when I’m trying to remember where to go for political news, or political commentary.

What I am searching for is something that would come close to one’s daily, personalized newspaper + weekly magazine. Information on topics (and from commentators and reporters) that you’d like to keep in close touch with. You pick up on it during breakfast, and it might keep you occupied later on in the day when you feel like catching up some more.

(And no my dear newspaper-journalists, todays newspapers do not have that function anymore. Not for me. However much I like newspapers — and last week I enjoyed reading De Volkskrant and the NRC in the park. It happens too often that a whole newspaper only contains one or two articles that I want to read (and pay for). That is including the news and including the cultural reviews and the sportspage. And looking at the development of newspapers I am very pessimistic. Yes, there have been good innovations: the routing has become much better, as well as the lay-out. But the content is diminishing, and I don’t generally identify a lot with all the lifestyle-stuff. The choice of what belongs on the front page is mediocre (NRC) to ridiculous (De Volkskrant) — and then we’re talking quality newspapers. Okay, I can live with that, but then, there are not many commentators or ‘columnists’ that I like reading. (The attention given to the Jan Blokker affair — almost 80 years old he leaves the Volkskrant for the NRC — is equally ridiculous. Yes, it shows very well how newspapers are managed, but hell, please give someone else a chance after 35 years. I cannot remember that I’ve ever been struck by a piece written by Jan Blokker. The same applies to Hofland. By which I mean to say: I do not want to go back to the “good old times” of newspapers. The problem with the ‘Blokker-affair’ is that the whole decline of the quality newspaper is seen in terms of the “good old newspaper” versus “the new newspaper of the evil manager”. That’s not a very helpful perspective when we try to find ways to ensure “quality information” and “quality journalism”.)

Sorry for ranting.

Getting back to topic. There are several ‘tools’ (? or rather techniques, or strategies?) to accomodate this situation (the problem of daily information-gathering). These are some of them:

— bookmarks. (They are usefull as ‘earmarks’ in a book. For me not useful for structuring daily information gathering).

— social bookmarking. (Great for discovering good stuff and getting an idea of the importance of certain sources. Not useful for structuring daily information gathering).

— put your own blog in the centre: your linklist is the list of blogs/sites to check daily. (I know I probably should do this. I tried in the past. I hardly used it then. Maybe it’s different when I would integrate del.ico.us and some Technorati-stuff. Maybe it’s different now I use WordPress. Yet I also know I’m stubborn).

— an old-fashioned personal links-page. (I made that. The lists became too long. I sometimes use it, when I get stuck or think I’ forgetting sources of information. Mostly I find out I actually did not forget anything.)

— use RSS and an RSS-reader.

Well, that’s the attempt of last week. I picked up on NetNewsWire again. Cleaned up the list of subcriptions (and rediscovered some forgotten sites) and then spent some time revisting blogs, searching and subscribing to feeds. In fact RSS sounds like exactly the solution for my ‘problem’. Well, it’s not the first time for me to think that. I tried it before. It worked when I was spending unconnected time in trains, I spent much of that time reading through feeds. I was back to personal memory and clicking links as soon as I was connected.

So I’m trying again, because I hope for a bit more structure, and more general and political information, now I’m reading less and less newspapers. Disappointment: blogs that are central for you that do not do RSS. Newssites that do not have feeds.

Live is not perfect.

More Danah Boyd on privacy (I’ve been catching up on reading RSS-feeds): http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/privacy/.

How much of our “private” information do we voluntarily reveal online? When’s the moment that we actually do not care anymore? At what point does the public – private difference not apply anymore to how we live, give form to and structure our lives? Do (young?) people make a difference between a public and a private self; or rather between different public selves?

Just wondering.

“For the purpose of this report, interaction (that is face-to-face interaction) may be roughly defined as the reciprocal influence on individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence. (…) A ‘performance’ may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants. Taking a particular participant and his performance as a basic point of reference, we may refer to those who contribute the other performances as the audience, observers, or co-participants. The pre-established pattern of action which is unfolding during a performance and which may be presented or played through on other occasions may be called a ‘part’ or ‘routine’.” p. 26/27

(At which point Goffman refers to Von Neumann & Morgenstern’s The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour in a footnote).

“A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropiate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be realized.” p. 81

(Reminder to myself: on p. 232/233 Goffman describes five perspectives for analyzing ‘social establishments’: technical, political, structural, cultural and dramaturgical).

“In this report the performed self was seen as some kind of image, usually creditable, which the individual on stage and in character effectively attempts to induce others to hold in regard to him. While this image is entertained concerning the individual, so that a self is imputed to him, this self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action, being generated by that attribute of local events which renders them interpretable by witnesses. A correctly staged and performed scene leads to audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation — this self — is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited, or discredited”. p. 244/245

The next paragraph is even better maybe; Goffman regards the person as a “peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time”, while the means for producing selves are “often bolted down in social establishments”. The theater metaphor provides him with the idea of a ‘back region” with “tools for shaping the body”, a “front region with its fixed props”; co-participants on stage and an audience. He then states: “The self is a product of all of these arrangements, and in all of its parts bears the marks on this genesis.” p. 245.

(It’s this framework that allows for applying ‘Goffman’ to the scene of personal publishing.)

“A character staged in a theatre in not in some ways real, not does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confidence man; but the succesful staging of either of these types of false figures involves use of real techniques — the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations.” p. 246/247

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin Books, London, 1990 (1959).

Goffmann applied to blogging by Danah Boyd: http://www.zephoria.org/alterity/archives/2005/03/goffman_and_pos.html.

“The thirteenth-century Franciscan, St. Bonaventura, said that there were four ways of making books: ‘A man might write the works of others, addding and changing nothing in which case he is simply called a ‘scribe’ (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a ‘compiler’ (compilator). Another writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a ‘commentator’ (commentator) … Another writes both his own work and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding others’ for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an ‘author’ (auctor).’ ”

Quoted in Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Communications and Cultural Transformations in early-modern Europe, Cambridge UP, 1979, p. 121/122

I promised to up some quotes from Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ambient/, a book that takes a closer look at some of the webdevelopments of the past two years, focussing on yes, findability, traceability, and wayfinding. What to say about a book like this one? Yes, I recognize the problems that Morville identifies, yes, he gives a good overview of current developments (the chapter on the Semantic Web versus folksonomies is balanced and therefore quite good), yes in this very American way that also will appeal to intelligent businessmen, he gets his message across and also refers to Wittgenstein of Lakoff & Johnson when he likes too, or to some obscure psychology-paper if that’s necessary. His writing style is maybe a bit too informal, too much talking-as-if-he’s-presenting-in-front-of-you, but I’m not unsympathetic towards such a pedagogic approach (because that’s what it is). So why does a book like this leave me unstatisfied? Firstly because he doesn’t have new information for me (but he probably has for others). Secondly because when he is critical — and Morville certainly is critical — he only skims the surface, doesn’t dig, doesn’t go into the entangledness of politics, economics and technology. It never becomes really dark and dirty: he believes in markets, intelligent customers and discriminating consumers — but abhors fastfood. He’s not always optimistic, he knows — and points out — that humans are blind and lazy in many respects, but he certainly believes that we have the power to design technology that is good for us, as the internet shows. Nevertheless, if one is not so up to date, this book might bridge the gap.

Well, some quotes then…

“This fast food approach to information drives librarians crazy. “Our information is healthier and tastes better too” they shout. But nobody listens. We’re too busy Googling.” p. 55

“The Web allows our information seeking to grow more iterative and interactive with each innovation. The berrypicking model [of aquiring information] is more relevant today than ever.” p. 60

“The human natural tendency in information seeking is to fallback on passive and sampling and selecting behaviors derived from millions of years of [evolution]” p. 61 (Actually a quote from Marcia Bates, 2002)

“Most of the world will never be ready for the Semantic Web. And We’re still waiting for the few that constitute the rest to catch up.” p. 133

“… most categories we emply in daily life are defined by fuzzy cognitive models rather than objective rules.” p. 133 [Morville pits Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By against the Semantic Web].

“How will we make sense of this tower of babble? In the midst of this cacophony, to whom will we listen? Who will we trust? Will we rely on formal hierarchy or free tagging, library or marketplace, cathedral or bazaar? Will we place our confidence in words or people? And are we talking about cyberspace or ubicomp? The answer lies in the question, for we will not be bound by the false dichotomy of Aristotelian logic. To manage complexity, we must embrace faceted classification, polyhierarchy, pluralistic aboutness and pace layering. And to succeed we must collaborate across categories, using boundary objects to negotiate, translate, and forge shared understanding.” p. 153/154

“Findability is at the center of a fundamental shift in the way we define authority, allocate trust, make decisions, and learn independently.” p. 162

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, O’Reilly, Sebastopol Ca. 2005.

More Morville: http://www.findability.org/.

‘Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference material, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.’

Allan Kay & Adele Goldberg, ‘Personal Dynamic Media’, Computer 10 (3): p. 31-41, March 1977. (Quoted from Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort (eds.) The New Media Reader, MIT Press, Cambridge &c, 2003, p. 394.)

We have that, don’t we.

New issue of Will Stuart’s samizdat mag Tourette (Black Rainbow) will be presented next week, tuesday june 6th at De Appel in Amsterdam, from 19.00h on. Expect fotocopied quality text & image that will tickle & soothe the brain. (Or something like that). — It’s not for sale! (But voluntary donations are of course welcome).

I’d say this is another direction which publishing is taking. No distribution, non-commercial, cheap, but high quality content + excellent choice of material. And sort of operating on the brink of copyright-legislation. (Like old-fashioned xeroxed magazines?)

It’s not directly print-on-demand, on the other hand: I’d be interested to obtain a print-out of material that Will Stuart thinks is interesting… I’d give them a voluntary donation for selection + the effort of printing out. (The re-invention of publishing?) So in that sense it is similar to ‘print-on-demand’.

This is already from last week (21th May): the presentation of the Ubiscribe POD. Only now I’m beginning to realize what we’ve done…

PS, left to right: your blogger, Inga Zimprich, Jouke Kleerebezem, Sandra Fauconnier, Claudia Hardi.