Not going to be any music. Pity.
There are notes and notes, of course: notes to oneself and notes to others; notes taken, made, jotted, and passed. Mash, doctor’s, suicide, and condolence notes. Field, class, and case notes; notes for general circulation; foot and head notes, notes of hand. But it’s the bookish notes that academics care most about, the ones that intervene between the things we read and the things we write. […]
In his 1689 De arte Excerpendi, the Hamburg rhetorician Vincent Placcius described a scrinium literatum, or literary cabinet, whose multiple doors held 3,000 hooks on which loose slips could be organized under various headings and transposed as necessary. Two of the cabinets were eventually built, one for Placcius’s own use and one acquired by Leibniz. It was an early manifestation of the principle that still governs our response to the knowledge explosion: The remedy for the problems created by information technology is more information technology. […]
There’s no evidence that Leibniz made any use of his literary cabinet. Despite his lifelong interest in organizational schemes—he designed one of the earliest book-indexing systems—Leibniz’s note-taking was as disorganized as it was obsessive.
{ Geoffrey Nunberg/The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }
