I really can’t believe that I haven’t contribute to the community after 5 years of paid membership.
Here is one concept I have been considering so many years when using Bear and I really want to share with you guys.
I am passionate about knowledge and I am a scientist who has to read tons of academic publications.
I kept quotes, graphs, links, ideas in Bear and the nested tags just make this so smooth to go back (because knowledge is naturally nested in a messy way).
When I went through some productivity posts and note-taking techniques, I came to realize that Bear’s design fits the idea of “commonplace book” so well.
It is more often mentioned for writing, as a book of reference collection for their professions. You will find a lot of philosophers (or students studying philosophy) talking commonplace book on YouTube.
Personally I found it so useful to use Bear as a digital commonplace book, because the paper one you will need to invent some indexing system yourself.
I think it could be a direction Bear’s marketing team looking into. And I would love Bear to keep it simple but functional (and aesthetic) in the long run because I literally can’t live without my Bear notes now .
Could you describe more precisely how you use Bear as a Commonplace book? I like the idea and have half-heartedly tried it, but never come up with a good implementation. Thank you.
“The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook. You could copy out as much or as little as you wanted, neatly or not, and refer to it a little, or as much, as you wanted. The collection could be poetry or prose, fictional or factual, thematic or random, religious or profane, in Latin or Tuscan, or any mixture of any of these components; you could even draw pictures in it. The notebook itself could be large or small, luxurious or utilitarian.”
Excerpt From The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen; Chapter 4: Ricordi, ricordanzi, zibaldoni (Notebooks in the home, Florence 1300–1500), p. 90
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So, it’s like writing in a Traveler’s Notebook or a Hobonichi, but digitally. One would be able to link between thoughts, perhaps.
There’s also the concept of a Waste Book: looser in concept than a commonplace book, it’s for writing down anything you need to remember right now. Later, one would copy it more carefully into their commonplace book for later use in research or writing. Commonplace books often had user-supplied sections for various topics.
People who had resources in the past did a lot of writing; they didn’t have modern life conveniences to distract them.
Can you briefly describe the basic principles of what you call the commonplace book? And how does it differ from other approaches? I find it quite interesting, but I’ve never heard the term before