
John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685) - benbreen
https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685/
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wrp
Common-place books as compendia of book excerpts was a tradition going back to
classical times.[1] During the Renaissance, when people began to elevate
observation over historical authority, personal notebooks shifted from being
collections of quotes to what we now think of as research journals.[2]

John Locke was an obsessive recorder of all manner of observations in
notebooks. He emphasized recording spontaneous thoughts and putting complex
ideas on paper to facilitate reasoning about them. He was one of the main
promoters of the modernist reliance on evidence and argument rather than
citation of authorities.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Too-Much-Know-Scholarly-
Information/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Too-Much-Know-Scholarly-
Information/dp/0300112513/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Notebooks-English-Virtuosi-Modern-
Sci...](https://www.amazon.com/Notebooks-English-Virtuosi-Modern-
Science/dp/022610656X/)

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rusk
A hashing algorithm based on tagging a piece of knowledge with some
descriptive “head” ( _key_ ) which is then organised alphabetically, augmented
by including the first vowel after the initial letter. The unaugmented
alphabetical approach results in an unbalanced table ( _i.e._ wasted paper),
the use of the vowel helps distribute the heads more evenly. Also by a quirk
of language also helps arrange concepts with similar etymological roots side
by side.

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notfashion
What I don't exactly get is how the pages are assigned. It's not really a
hashing algorithm in that sense, it's more like a dictionary data structure
where the user has to choose the storage locations. It's only possible to work
from one end or the other, or more or less randomly. Either way fragmentation
will creep in. This looks like it happens in the image of Locke's index.

~~~
rusk
My take on it is that its one page per index, and the indexing method just
mostly naturally balances the entries across these ...

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qnsi
Do you guys have your own commonbooks?

I have written an app in electron for myself, based mostly on zettelkasten
ideas from Archiver, but with more shortcuts and a Little different flow. I
find it very useful

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vollmond
I carry a passport-sized traveler's notebook (Midori-style). One insert is for
a minimal bullet journal to track personal projects/todos/dates/etc. Another
is for long-form journalling, and I also transcribe any interesting
quotations/excerpts/poetry/etc here.

When it's full, I go through and transfer these to a collection I have in an
online note-taking site (used to be Springpad, now Quip, probably migrating
again sometime soon).

I have a third insert that has quotations/verses specific to my Catholic
faith, so I can have them accessible. I suppose this is the closest to a
traditional common-place book.

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foxhop
I feel lucky to be able to `grep` a word from a directory of files and tend to
always find my scratch notes on a topic.

~~~
xtiansimon
and it gives me opportunity to practice my general VIM skillz. Haha.

