join-the-dots

Over dinner following Monday’s History of Material Texts seminar, I learnt about commonplacing and commonplace books. Lucia Knoles defines commonplacing as “the act of selecting important phrases, lines, and/or passages from texts and writing them down” and the commonplace book as a “notebook in which a reader has collected quotations from works s/he has read.” She continues: “Commonplace books can also include comments and notes from the reader; they are frequently indexed so that the reader can classify important themes and locate quotations related to particular topics or authors.”

Similarly, Robert Darnton explains: “Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it…. The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality…. The era of the commonplace book reached its peak in the late Renaissance, although commonplacing as a practice probably began in the twelfth century and remained widespread among the Victorians. It disappeared long before the advent of the sound bite.”

To me, this seems very similar to blogging: selection and transcription of important phrases, lines and passages from texts; addition of one’s own comments and notes; provision of an index or other classification system so that important themes may be identified; creation of a work stamped with one’s personality via the choice of passages and nature of comments and notes; rearrangement and alteration of emergent patterns through the addition of new excerpts. I wonder if anyone has looked at the apparent similarities between commonplacing and blogging in an academic context. From a cursory websearch, it appears not, but I think it would be a really interesting topic to research further. If only I had the time….

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2004 at 5:08 pm and is filed under join-the-dots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.