

Two Paths For The Future of Text: The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book - aaronharnly
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2010/04/the-glass-box-and-the-commonplace-book.html

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aaronharnly
Commenter Nick Carr makes an excellent point, which, if you'll forgive me, I
will copy-and-paste:

 _While I think there is, at a mechanical level, a clear parallel between the
two practices, at an intellectual level they could hardly be more different.
Commonplacing was a means of more deeply internalizing an author's words, as
its early practitioners often pointed out. It was a sign of attentiveness, of
profound engagement with text. The cutting and pasting, or mashing up, that we
do online today tends to be much more cursory and superficial._

I have a "commonplace book", though I didn't know to call it that – a notebook
where I hand-copy interesting passages from books I'm reading. Perhaps I'll
start doing the same with passages from the web, as an intentional slowing-
down of the process of textual palimpsest generation...

