Creating a digital personal notebook
Commonplace books can be traced to the Roman era, and were a standard exercise in Renaissance Europe. Making one involves copying down your favorite lines from other people’s works into an annotated notebook. These can be song lyrics, movie dialogue, poems and any inspiring bits you find in your reading and listening. Here’s a guide for making one, with modern technology.
Get inspired. The Yale University Library has scanned pages of historical commonplace books in its holdings, and the Harvard Library has a few in its own online collection, as well as images of a version of John Locke’s 17th-century guide to making commonplace books, which was originally published in French.
Take notes. For sheer simplicity, collecting your commonplace entries in a word-processing document stored online is one option. If you find that approach unwieldy, consider the note-taking app that came with your phone — Apple’s Notes or Google Keep. Just enter quotations and other text snippets whenever you get the urge. To skip the typing or pasting, Google Keep can scan and transcribe text from images of book pages, and Apple’s Siri voice assistant or the Google Assistant can create a note and take dictation.
Convert a paper notebook. What if you’re someone who has been keeping a physical commonplace book for years but would like to digitize the whole thing without retyping it all? One method: Snap a photo of each page and import the image into your notes app, which also preserves the look of your original hand-scrawled entries.
The New York Times
Me: Just be careful what you write in it as it could be used in a Court Of Law against you, for thinking the thoughts, which might be illegal in themselves, without you actually doing any of the things you thought of doing.
