Commonplacing

Having recently read a number of books and essays about Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection, I’ve been struck by the level of insight we have about the man and his thinking. Not only do we know what he thought, we know when he thought it and, in some instances, even what caused him to think the way he did.

How can we know this of someone who died in 1882?

Steven Johnson provides an answer in his Where Good Ideas Come From. Mr. Darwin, it appears, was nothing if not meticulous and he kept numerous notebooks on topics ranging from geology to transmutation. It should come as no surprise that someone thought these notebooks noteworthy (no pun intended) why they live on ‘til this day. You can even buy edited version off of Amazon if you feel so inclined.

These notebooks act as a backdoor into the mind from which sprung masterpieces like On the Origin of Spicies. They are an invaluable resource. But what makes them so interesting, to me, at this point in time, isn’t so much the records themselves as much as how they where kept. As Johnson explains, Darwin didn’t just keep notebooks; like many of his contemporaries, he kept “commonplace books”.

Wikipedia describes commonplace books (or commonplaces) as scrapbooks aiding the remembrance of useful facts and concepts. But Johnson, quoting historian Robert Darnton, provides a much more insightful explanation that speaks to the process of “commonplacing” (the verb used to denote the act of keeping a common place book). I’ll recreate the quote here:

“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishman read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke them into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. They then reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding new excerpts. Reading and writing where therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things…”

Here then, we have the answer to how we can know why Darwin thought the things he did. His commonplace books explain how he built his arguments; what led him to draw the conclusions that he did. And he wasn’t alone: in reading Johnson I get the feeling that commonplacing was as common in turn-of-the-century England as blogging or tweeting is today. The question is, is blogging the modern-day equivalent?

The answer, I think, is yes and no.

The idea of commonplacing appeals to me for several reasons. If you’ve ever worked with me you’ll know that I like to use visualizations to “build” nacent ideas. And Building to Think is kind of like a commonplace book in the sense that it’s where I try to explain what I’ve learned. But there is a disconnect between the two. Whereas blogging is about the narration of ideas, commonplacing is about building them.

Commonplacing, the way I understand it, is sort of like blogging and bookmarking (e.g., Delicious, Evernote, Zootools) combined, coupled with a touch of the creative chaos that only a blank slate can provide. And it’s this latter ingredient, I think, that makes commonplacing different. It’s less linear, more all-over-the-map, and more conducive to serendipity—the secret sauce of innovation.

Does this mean commonplacing is a lost art? I’m not so sure, but I can’t help to think that future generations will look back at present-day Darwins and wish they had left open backdoors into their minds. The journey is, after all, said to be more important than the destination and insights can get lost along the way. Who knows, perhaps what is needed are new tools with which to take commonplacing into the 21st century.