Doctor Who, Delicious, and the Commonplace Book
Once again, all my worlds colliding in interesting ways this week. For starters, I got Mark watching Doctor Who — he’s working his way through Season 4 with Doctor David Tennant on Netflix Streaming, and whenever the red envelopes show up, we slowly work our way through Season 5 with Doctor Matt Smith.
What the heck could this possibly have to do with Delicious.com and Commonplace Books, you ask? Excellent question. Here goes…
In the Season 5 episode “The Time of Angels” River Song reappears with her intriguing blue TARDIS book, which basically serves as her commonplace book of all things Doctor-related. But I didn’t think of it as her commonplace book till I saw some tweets coming out of THATcamp about digitizing them, plus Amanda Watson’s Ngram comparing commonplace books to scrapbooks. On top of all this, I’m reading Steven Johnson’s new book Where Good Ideas Come From (*highly* recommended) and I just came to the part in chapter 3 where he talks about the magic of commonplace books, particularly in regards to Darwin, who wrote copious notes and re-read them later to compare with other notes.
So with my brain churning around questions about commonplace books, a seemingly unrelated event happens — rumors spin out of control about my beloved bookmarking site Delicious.com riding off into the dot.com horizon, and suddenly I (and thousands of other people) start really thinking about where to keep our treasure troves of both useful and forgotten links (I’m toying with both Diigo and Pinboard, for what it’s worth…).
But then tonight I came back to Steven Johnson, where I’m still in the middle of musings about commonplace books – especially John Locke’s system of indexing his books and the Enlightenment habit of treating text as a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, here-and-there kind of thing. And I realized that these commonplace books proved invaluable to their writer-owners because they held everything … reading notes, letter drafts, observations, recipes … sound familiar? How many times have you tried to devise a Thing To Hold All Thoughts for yourself? Be it a filing system, a gadget, a piece of software, or a website — many of us are constantly waging this battle to reinvent the commonplace book in a digital age.
I realized that I don’t need a Delicious replacement. I need a whole bloody completely different way of doing things. What can serve as my commonplace book? My home laptop…? My Evernote account …? Do I go back to paper journals…? Right now I have ideas and snippets and quotes scattered across all of these places, which means I have a hard time finding that one recipe I’m thinking of or that one short story I have another idea for. So the good news for me is – Delicious and Yahoo aren’t the problems at all. The bad news is – I need to think about a much bigger picture and do my future self a favor by making up my mind and condensing my workflows.
Speaking of the future … a bit ironic that River Song is still using good old paper as her commonplace book centuries from now, isn’t it? *
*Yes, I know it’s fiction, silly. But I also know the writers can dream up things like sonic screwdrivers and time-eating stone angels, yet they still trust memories to paper. I find that very, very interesting.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
December 18, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Jason C. Romero
I keep going through different systems, but right now I’m settled on text, which seems to be working well and may be the long term solution. I use a macro to put the date and time at the front of the filename to make it sortable, add a single tag, then put a title of some sort, usually the first line of whatever I’m writing.
I use Dropbox to keep everything in sync. It plays extremely well with a wide variety of text editors on the iPad and the iPhone, and of course any old text editor. On the Mac side I’ve been using Notational Velocity, which is a wonderful wonder of a piece of software.
But for other things I drop them into DEVONThink, which is probably closer to my “commonplace” book than my text files, which I mostly use for diary, status, and journal entries, but also for some recipes, scratch files, and tips.
For yet other things I have a “manual wiki” that I edited as an HTML file for a while and recently moved over to a private Google Site page.
I think it really depends how you want to use this information and what kind of access to it you want to have. If all you want to do is bookmark things, then someone floated the idea of Xmarks. I don’t use the social aspect of bookmarking anymore since this has largely been replaced by links on Twitter and Facebook, so it’s been a little surprising to see the clamor over the demise of Delicious. So it goes.
I feel like some kind of wiki would be the best of worlds, but the bottleneck is getting the little snippets into the system in an easy manner. So, until then, I have the various buckets I described above.
Please do update on your thoughts or solutions. I’m fascinated by this particular issue, the management of personal snippets of information, though I suppose I should think of it as people trying to figure out the best way to write their commonplace book.
December 19, 2010 at 11:35 am
Sara
Oh yes, I love Dropbox very, very much. I’ve been converting a lot of folks at my university to it, too. I’ve also played with some different personal wiki solutions — as you said, that seems like the best of worlds once a person gets it organized the way they need it. I tried Voodoo Pad for awhile, but they were taking too long to get editing functionality on the iPhone. I’ve been looking at Trunk Notes (http://www.appsonthemove.com/trunk/) now, but – truth be told – Evernote has integrated itself into my workflows so naturally that it seems like I’m already inclined to go that direction.
With all that said, I still have a soft spot in my heart for paper notebooks. They still seem more permanent and accessible to me, even though I actively avoid re-reading them, for whatever reason. The passage from Steven Johnson made me realize it’s high time I revisit those old thoughts.
December 19, 2010 at 10:19 pm
Jason C. Romero
Yeah, Evernote does seem to hit a sweet spot, especially with how integrated it can be.
I do keep a pad of post its and a thin cahier type Moleskine on me, as well as this fancy .3 mm pen I specially ordered. But generally, I do prefer digital input. Searchable and less to muddle with later.
Though, I do keep eyeing things like that Livescribe pen Evernote advertises, and their fancy notebook for cleverly folding a single sheet into eight parts has got my brain gears turning. I really need to stop tinkering with my system…
Good luck and thanks for the mental gristle. ( ^ _ ^ )
December 27, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Eric
The struggle you describe for keeping track of ideas is one I’ve been waging too. It reminds me of my problems keeping track of people: there just isn’t a piece of software that is adequate to the task of keeping track of address information—at least not one that I’ve found yet. Sure, there are lots of programs that try, but I haven’t found one yet that, say, can understand the difference between household and people in the household (it’s almost a FRBRian distinction) and separate the attributes properly. Ideally, it should recognize hierarchical groups, and be integrated with your OS so you can tag pictures or files with a person name and have it be able to collate files tagged with “Eric” “K” “A” “JW” and “JA” under a query for “Harbeson Family.”
Every year, about this time, I try to compile family and friend contact info so I can send out greeting cards. First I try to update my address software file (I just use the Mac Address Book.app) and get frustrated with it. Then I try to find a better program. Then, not finding one, I try to build my own database. I’ve even toyed with trying to find people to help me create a Linux fork to allow me to do everything I need to (anyone reading this that wants to work on it, let me know!). The result, of course, is that I never get done what I need to get done, because I’m trying too hard to figure out how to build the technology. My solution this year: a paper 3×5 index card file, with separate cards cross-referencing people in the same household with different surnames. We’ll see if it actually helps, but I’m optimistic. I still want to figure out how to make a computer do what it should do, but in the meantime, I need to find a system that works!
So I guess I’m echoing the notion that it might be worth considering the classic paper journal for a commonplace book. I find that it’s always nearby when I need it in a way that my computer can’t be, especially since I can’t bring myself to enter the cell phone or tablet market (at least as long as the folks at Apple are so Orwellian with their software sales)…
FWIW, I’ve used Zotero to manage things I read online and love it….