He’ll share a pithy quote like “the purpose of a literature review is to build an argument, not a library.” I appreciate this quote, which seems to express the sentiment that lit reviews are human sense-making activities.
Then, scroll down and there’s a dozen-tweet thread outlining how to use some new A.I. tool to quickly build a literature review.
Pick a lane, man!
Using A.I. to speed-run the search process doesn’t necessarily prevent the slow and humane aspect of research; still, the whiplash is amusing.
* * * * *
Recently, I’ve been thinking about notebooks. The gradual and iterative advent of the journal seems like “codex 2.0” in relation to the book’s “codex 1.0”, similar to how “web 1.0” refers to the early internet when pages were static and mostly read-only, and “web 2.0” to describe when the internet became more participatory and social.
In Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, he traces the origins of the notebook to a time when paper beccame more widely available, allowing for more diverse use cases. Early Italian merchants developed and implemented a recognizable system of bookkeeping. Artists painted more realistic depictions of their subjects aided with a greater ability to draft sketches prior to mixing oils. Many also began keeping commonplace books which their owners used to copy out quotations, aphorisms, maxims, and the like.
An image of “Item #21917 Bell’s Common-Place Book, Form'd generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” which is an old bound book, with green material and a red label that says COMMON PLACE BOOK.
John Locke developed a particular method of maintaining commonplace books, published by a certain John Bell. About Locke’s method and its audience, Robert Darton wrote (2000) in the New York Review of Books that:
“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book.”
Actually, students are often advised to read research papers out of order.
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.
This sounds to me an awful lot like reference management.
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 own personality. . .
Make a book of your own, or… a literature review and thus an argument of your own.
By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selection into patterns reveal an epistemology — a process of knowing — at work below the surface"
Most of our contemporary paper-bound knowledge management systems can trace back to some earlier use. Thus, I would argue scholarly reference management can likely claim the commonplace book as a forebear.
James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Repository: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University Bibliographic Record Number: 2031683 Call Number: Osborn b205
There is similarity in the form and function of the first commonplace books and modern reference management practice. The two practices may also share some intentionalities. Creating a record of some thought for later individual remembrance and meaning-making is one intention, for sure.
But commonplace books were tools of sociality, objects to be shown and discussed. We can imagine how maintaining these collections might change when its purposes move from the individual to something more social.
In his book, Allen pointed to the emergence of printed common-place anthologies, which he characterizes as “exemplars of advertising’s most powerful promise: that of benefit acquired without effort.”
For figures like Erasmus, the “work of selection and copying was the very point, as it taught discrimination and trained the mind.”
Shortcuts to help find and collect references are not new. Such tools and techniques are growing. Some of these may prove to be useful. But as we explore these and their effort-saving benefits, let us not forget that effort in sense-making is a benefit. Such efforts, sometimes, are the very point.
Now, working in a lab that uses hypertext notebooks as modern alternatives to physical commonplace books, I’m hooked! I keep preaching how well they support Zettlekasten-style note-taking and writing in my department.
Have you played around with block-based hypertext notebook options like Roam, Tana, Obsidian, and Logseq? It might be a good post and workshop idea…
?
Arthur Boston:
Thanks Jay! No, I’ve not worked with any of those. I’m a big paper notebook person these days. Sounds like a post you could write ;-)
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