Collective Collection and Digitization: Networking Messy Materials for the Mind
By Shellie Audsley, University of Cambridge
My initial idea for setting up the K-SAA Public Commonplace Book of Romantic Readers as a public engagement initiative was to communalize the commonplace book format. But I soon realized it was merely an attempt to digitally broaden what has always lent itself to collecting community contributions. Perhaps it is precisely the capaciousness and adaptability of the commonplace book format which facilitate more collaborative methods of knowledge collection and organization. There is a less solitary and isolated aspect to the commonplace book than the private notebooks of Locke, Milton and the Wordsworths may exemplify. Likely spanning generations, the Boyle family’s 16th-17th-century commonplace books of medicinal recipes, for instance, include entries in different hands, organized by a neatly copied index that may be more readily accessible than Locke’s particular system of condensing subject headings. Compiled by multiple people for the use of even more, this form of collective labor has precedents in broader regional communities. For example, a research participant at my Cambridge Digital Humanities workshop—“Re-collected Thoughts: “Commonplacing” Practices From Analogue to Digital”—sought to show how methods of generating network visualizations from existing archival materials may shed light on the (likely) diverse group of woman contributors of a medieval commonplace book from Norfolk.
Commonplace books—be they historical or created as records of learning activities—are well-suited for even a global, digital classroom because they practically enable individual efforts of collection to become a collective one. The atomized snippets of knowledge, quotations or just interesting vocabulary collected therein are more manageable and digestible than sprawling bodies of abstract concepts. The structured, curated nature of their contents make them at once the starting points to and reflections of the labyrinthine pathways of cognition—the maps which train the mapmakers. Their format promotes a form of understanding that gives equal weight to the anthologized subjects (i.e. small ideas related to a given domain, objects, recipes, conceptual clusters, what are considered “beautiful lines” etc.) as much as the techniques of selection and classification. And as objects of observation which showcase others’ approaches to collection, they prompt metacognitive questions: why was this quotation or snippet selected and included here? In what context(s) did this reference occur? Is it reliable and useful (and in what ways)? Did I overlook this? Spotlighting such observations beyond individual notes help bring into view collective interests (or sometimes confusion), which can inform pedagogical decisions. Student confidence may be established upon the discovery that a learner’s struggle with challenging texts is not unique, and can be brought to light, discussed, and overcome collaboratively. And these records, once digitalized and visualized using these digital methods, make accessible the developments of common thoughts and observations over time. If these small, geographically scattered clusters are to be collated, they dynamically and interactively provide historicized and historizable glimpses which capture the receptive side of intellectual history at scale—is readerly attention focused on the same aspects of a text over time? Do the same challenges persist into another generation of readers, or another cultural context? Will it be fruitful to adapt and trial our pedagogical strategies accordingly?
Just as analog systems of commonplacing enable efficiency in information collection and retrieval, suitable for the more voracious learners and collectors in history, heir digital counterparts have the capacity to broaden its scope to an unprecedented extent Expansive notes can be combined on grad scales to form a more encyclopedic knowledge base. For instance, the Zettlekasten (“slipbox” or card file) system, as a derivative method, involves the use of notecards as opposed to continuous entries scattered across bound book pages. It thereby encourages cards with individual subject headings to be modularly linked or networked not only by one extensive index but also metadata (i.e. data about data, e.g. [hash]tags). It was adapted in a wide spectrum of professions that engaged systematically with knowledge systems—societal, informational and cultural. Notable users include the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, cyberneticist Ross Ashby (who used it to index his now-digitalised 25 volumes of commonplace books) and art historian Aby Warburg (who branched out to create his Bilderatlas [“picture atlas”], thematic multimedia collections which trace visual motifs throughout history). The modern age sees it continue to inform the creation of various note-taking and personal database software such as Zettlr and Obsidian, which come with similarly free and open-source web clipper add-ons for collecting multimedia web pages. In a way, tools like these enable individual entries to be collated into fully searchable digital commonplace books, which can then—through combining default metadata (e.g. contributor and timestamps) with custom tags (e.g. keywords and categories) and restructuring—be visualized as interactive network graphs using ready-made online tools. The replicability of digital data helps preserve the integrity of individual notes, while allowing specific snippets of observations to be retrieved and added to the collective notes, where they may be juxtaposed in a range of dynamic formats. Each observation becomes a unique data point that is not subsumed into anonymity in the visual representation of the collective notes, but meaningfully contributes to it—just as the world of literature resounds with echoes.
As seen in the so-called “Star Chart” which I have created from globally-sourced entries collected under the theme “Readings, Reading Habits” for the K-SAA Public Commonplace Book Vol.1, the collected snippets translate readily to the “nodes” of network graphs. The body of submissions—consisting of book titles recorded in journal entries/periodical reviews, comments on books, expressions of feelings and the like—could be broken down further into additional nodes as we analyze individual snippets. It could be quickly determined that they contain special geographical information, different types of feelings, genres, source types etc.; patterns could be discerned amidst the messy linkages which show “who read who and what” and “what captured readerly attention two centuries apart”. The process of establishing the “edges” (relations between nodes) itself can be seen as an exercise of taxonomy and connection-building, a valuable skill for developing a big picture of interconnected things. This approach allows the underlying structures of overlapping ideas to be revealed and then expanded organically; done collaboratively, while staying ever alert to the inherent gaps in the collected information, it allows different perspectives to come together and refine one another.
These visualizations of knowledge snippets also offer novel and flexible ways to engage with collective knowledge and data through their dynamic (perhaps imaginary) contours. The submissions collected for the second volume of our Public Commonplace Book—“Field Notes on Freedom”—poetically look like flowers and wind-blown dandelions in the current network graph. This is because the gathered information is clustered around archival objects—the entries were contributed by a school group during a class visit to the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library. Different descriptions, feelings and inference are directed at individual objects of observation—commonplace books, albums, friendship and medical books. Consolidated in one bigger network graph of collective commonplaces, these artifacts are reconstructed in piecemeal, via fragmented notes on their material embellishments, content and individual assumptions. As more inputis added into the public commonplace book from (or about) other literary travelers—more interesting linkages and patterns among objects may be unearthed in larger-scale digital visualizations. It is possible to think of the commonplace-book format as one that best facilitates collective knowledge-building because it enables insights to emerge from the small niches of collective consciousness and understanding. In it we may begin to discover and assemble small ontologies which have, since time immemorial, guided people towards making sense of—as much as generating—new ideas.
About the Author
Shellie Audsley is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge working on Romantic genre-mixing and referentiality. She is also an associate at Cambridge Digital Humanities, where she was a Methods fellow in 2023-4. Her dissertation on the semiotics of genre perception examines lyric-narrative synthesis and patterns of inserted “conceptual fragments” across different types of hybrid prose and verse narratives to address broader critical debates about novel supremacy, lyric subsumption and genre (re)formation.
In 2023, Shellie Audsley initiated and designed the K-SAA’s Digital Public Commonplace Book, inviting Romanticist readers from around the world to contribute collected and original quotations to be used for mapping readerly connections and networks of ideas. The inaugural volume, under the theme of “Reading(s)/reading habits”, explores the “what” and “who” surrounding acts of reading across two centuries through an interactive “Star Chart” network graph. Vol.2, “Field Notes on Freedom”—is now collecting observational snippets about literary travels and objects on the K-SAA Blog. Visitors to the Keats-Shelley House in Rome can contribute to a dedicated future volume here.