COMMONPLACE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 336/ 05 Jul 2022 12:30

A ‘commonplace book’, according to my dictionary, is “a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.” My late friend and long-term associate Felix Dennis used to keep one, a largish leather-bound album that went with him on all his travels, filled with clippings, photos and hand-written notes of whatever happened to capture his attention (often poems). I myself was never inclined to note-taking in the era of paper – I’ve never kept a diary and only started to collect common (and not so common) places after the arrival of the personal computer. When I did start, it was back in the clunky, pre-Windows days, thanks to a nifty utility from Borland called ‘Sidekick’  which popped-up a window over any other DOS application so one could dash off a quick note. 

Once in Windows-land I sought out ever more capable free-form text databases – Idealist, AskSam, Threadz Organiser, Bonsai and half a dozen more – to soak up my inspirations about work-in-progress and enable me to find them again later. Stuck with each for a couple of years, but as Windows’ hierarchical file system gradually became more capable, especially for indexed search, I found myself relying ever less on databases and their pesky file formats. Then the rise of The Web changed everything, and not merely because I could store stuff in The Cloud but because more and more of my inspirations came from The Cloud. 

At first it was search engines like Lycos and AltaVista, then the all-conquering Google, but retaining search results meant links and bookmarks, which had to be stored and organised themselves. Cue a fierce competition between Chrome, Firefox, Explorer and Opera for best hierarchical bookmark manager. There were apps that stored web pages locally, but only as hideous subdirectories holding scores of irritating HTML files. That all changed with Pocket, which stores links to wanted web pages in its own cloud in an almost transparent fashion by clicking a single icon. Pocket continues to be the core of my data hoard even after I abandoned Windows for a Chromebook. I still send articles containing matter I might need later there while I’m reading them, which ends up storing far more than I actually use (I do purge my Pocket list occasionally, and its own tagging and search facilities are good). But nowadays I also download really vital articles immediately into a local folder containing the project they’re aimed at (for example these columns). When I say ‘download’, what I actually mean is ‘print to PDF’ which captures an article with all its pictures and formatting intact. 

I don’t worry about the space textual ‘commonplaces’ occupy, now that 128 gig USB sticks are so cheap, but pictures are a more worrying matter. Photo organising for pictures that I take myself – whether local, or online like Flickr and Google Photos – isn’t the problem, it’s pictures I’ve just grabbed from the ‘net because they tickled me, and which I’m too idle to categorise, tag or even name properly so they can be easily found again. That said though, most of what I do nowadays (including this column) doesn’t involve any pictures. 

I review books for a political journal, the sort of books that sometimes require me to quote extensively from the text, and I discovered quite a while ago that asking for a Kindle or PDF edition of the review book is a great advantage, just for the searchability. In a huge tome like Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital And Ideology’, being able to search and bookmark is a life-saver. At first Amazon was less than helpful in the matter of extracting book content and annotations: for example I found that notes made on my hardware Kindle or Android tablet could only be cut-and-pasted from within the PC version of the Kindle reader which I no longer use. 

Thankfully that’s all changed, and in a most helpful way. When I review books in more recent Kindle readers, in addition to searching and bookmarking pages I can highlight passages in four different colours, attach notes to them, copy them to the clipboard and even report typos and other errors back to the publisher. And this annotating activity gets automatically saved as a ‘Notebook’ which I can export either as plain text or in one of three approved academic footnote formats, and share wirelessly between my devices (Chromebook, phone or Galaxy Tab). Viewing a Notebook filtered by highlight colour can in effect turn it into a full-text database of colour-coded categories, just like those databases I played with in the bad old days. It can even export notes and annotations as a deck of flashcards, which I could one day use to perform acts of mass stupefaction on an unsuspecting audience… 

[Dick Pountain can recite the ‘fair use’ rules in his sleep (and sometimes does)]