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#+TITLE: A historical survey of note taking 
#+DATE: <2019-03-21 jeu.>
#+AUTHOR: Christophe Pouzat
#+EMAIL: christophe.pouzat@parisdescartes.fr
#+LANGUAGE: en
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#+CREATOR: Emacs 26.1 (Org mode 9.1.9)


* Table of contents                                            :TOC:
- [[#illustrations-used-in-the-first-figure][Illustrations used in the first figure]]
- [[#wax-tablet-and-stylus][Wax tablet and stylus]]
  - [[#from-the-scroll-to-the-codex][From the /scroll/ to the /codex/]]
- [[#codex-significance][/Codex/ significance]]
- [[#eusebius-and-the-invention-of-cross-references][Eusebius and the invention of cross-references]]
  - [[#eusebian-canons][Eusebian canons]]
- [[#let-us-not-forget-china][Let us not forget China]]
- [[#getting-organized-by-using-the-right-slot][Getting organized by using the right slot]]
- [[#constructing-a-notebook-index-the-john-locke-way][Constructing a notebook index the John Locke way]]

* Illustrations used in the first figure

All illustrations are taken from Wikimedia Commons
- Top left: A clay tablet (pre-cuneiform period, -3000).
- Top center: A fresco from Pompeii with the portrait of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Paquius_Proculo][Terentius Neo and his wife]]. She carries a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet][wax tablet]] and a /stylus/ (the main medium of note-takers up to the 19th century); he carries a /volumen/ or [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scrolls][scroll]], the stuff of books until the beginning of the Common Era.
- Top right: a notebook made of paper from the 17th century with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book][commonplaces]]. "Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means "a theme or argument of general application", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom (Wikipedia).
- Bottom left: An [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_card][index card]], a notes medium whose use exploded with bureaucratization and the development of libraries. Still heavily used in the humanities. Apparently first used (if not created) by the father of taxonomy, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus][Carl Linneaus]]. You can find his cards at: [[http://linnean-online.org/61332/#/0]].
- Bottom center: A [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_note][Post-it note]] as most of us use every day.
- Bottom right: A "modern days" numerical tablet.    

* Wax tablet and stylus

From the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet][Wikipedia page]]:

#+BEGIN_QUOTE
A wax tablet is a tablet made of wood and covered with a layer of wax, often linked loosely to a cover tablet, as a "double-leaved" diptych. 
It was used as a reusable and portable writing surface in Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.

Writing on the wax surface was performed with a pointed instrument, a stylus. Writing by engraving in wax required the application of much 
more pressure and traction than would be necessary with ink on parchment or papyrus,[1] and the scribe had to lift the stylus in order to 
change the direction of the stroke. Therefore, the stylus could not be applied with the same degree of dexterity as a pen. A straight-edged, 
spatula-like implement (often placed on the opposite end of the stylus tip) would be used in a razor-like fashion to serve as an eraser. 
The entire tablet could be erased for reuse by warming it to about 50 °C and smoothing the softened wax surface. The modern expression of 
"a clean slate" equates to the Latin expression "tabula rasa".
#+END_QUOTE 

** From the /scroll/ to the /codex/

 The shift from the /scroll/ to the /codex/ is fundamental for development of written civilization.

 A scroll (from the Old French escroe or escroue), is a roll of papyrus, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchment][parchment]], or paper containing writing.

 From [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scrolls#Replacement_by_the_Codex][Wikipedia]]:

 #+BEGIN_QUOTE
 The codex was a new format for reading the written word, consisting of individual pages loosely attached to each other at one 
 side and bound with boards or cloth. It came to replace the scroll thanks to several problems that limited the scroll's function 
 and readability. For one, scrolls were very long, sometimes as long as ten meters. This made them hard to hold open and read, a 
 difficulty not helped by the fact that most scrolls in that era were read horizontally, instead of vertically as scrolling virtual 
 documents are read now. The text on a scroll was continuous, without page breaks, which made indexing and bookmarking impossible. 
 Conversely, the codex was easier to hold open, separate pages made it possible to index sections and mark a page, and the protective 
 covers kept the fragile pages intact better than scrolls generally stayed. This last made it particularly attractive for important 
 religious texts.
 #+END_QUOTE

 The bottom left mosaic shows Virgil seating (70-19 BCE) holding a scroll of the /Aeneid/, with Clio, muse of history, also holding a scroll.

 As explained by Frédéric Barbier (/Histoire du Livre/): "The scroll / volumen imposes a complex reading practice: one must unroll (/explicare/) and roll at the same time; that forbids working on several scrolls (the original text and its commentary) at the same time or to take notes. It imposes a continuous reading and making consultation impossible."

 Scrolls are clearly unsuited to "nomadic reading"; can you imagine Ulysses embarking for his Odyssey carrying the 24 scrolls/volumen of the Iliad?

 The term /volumen/ is the origin of our modern /volumes/ (a book in several volumes) as of the word for the geometrical concept.

 Switching from scroll to codices required two innovations:
 - The collection of wax tablets bound together with leather strands.
 - The generalization of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchment][parchment]] (usually sheep skin specially processed) as a replacement for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus][papyrus]]. This generalization could be due (according to Pliny the Elder) to a rivalry between the cities of Pergamon and Alexandria for cultural hegemony: [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy_V_Epiphanes][Ptolemy V Epiphanes]] King of Egypt wanted to block [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eumenes_II][Eumenes II]] from developing in Pergamon a library that could compete with the one of Alexandria; he therefore imposed an embargo on papyrus export (Egypt was the sole papyrus producer). Eumenes looked for an alternative and fostered parchment development. The link between Pergamon and parchment is much clearer in German where Pergamon is written in the way as in English but where parchment is written /Pergament/.

 Switching from scrolls to codices will have major consequences on books organization as well as on the reading practices, it will later on allow printing development.

 The main revolution brought by the codex is the /page/. Thanks to this structural element, the reader can access directly to a specific chapter or a specific part of the text, while scrolls imposed continuous reading *at a time when there were no blanks between words*. According to Collette Sirat: "Twenty centuries will be necessary to realize the paramount importance of the codex for our civilization through the *selective reading* it made possible as opposed to the continuous reading. It opened room for the elaboration of mental structures where the text is dissociated from the speech and its rhythm."

 Notice the red letters used on the codex (bottom right), an example of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubrication][rubrication]] used by scribes to mark paragraphs. With printing and the high cost of colors it entailed, an empty space started to be used to that end. Thinking about it, colors don't cost anything on a numerical support and could perfectly be used again in the same way.  

* /Codex/ significance

Following Frédéric Barbier (/HISTOIRE DU LIVRE/, Armand Colin, 2009):
- /Codex/ invention is crucial for the development of written civilization.
- The /codex/ lends itself to *consultation reading*.
- We can add to the /codex/ a "navigation system" making consultation easier.
- We can take notes while consulting a /codex/.
- The combination of the /codex/ with the /Carolingian minuscule/ constitutes an extremely powerful intellectual tools, never seen before.

Example of /Carolingian minuscule/ can be found on the corresponding [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule][Wikipedia page]].

Over centuries, /codices/---that we often call /manuscripts/---will slowly evolve and gain modern days book attributes:
- separation between words (VIIth century),
- start of punctuation (VIIIth century),
- table of content,
- running title,
- paragraph marks (rubrication, XIth century),
- pagination,
- index (XIIIth century).

An interesting point: Torah's content got "fixed" before the /codex/ generalization and today Torah scrolls are still used.  

* Eusebius and the invention of cross-references

From the Wikipedia page on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebius][Eusebius]]:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Eusebius of Caesarea (ad 260/265 – 339/340), also known as Eusebius Pamphili, was a historian of Christianity, exegete, and Christian polemicist. He became the bishop of Caesarea Maritima about 314 AD. Together with Pamphilus, he was a scholar of the Biblical canon and is regarded as an extremely learned Christian of his time. He wrote Demonstrations of the Gospel, Preparations for the Gospel, and On Discrepancies between the Gospels, studies of the Biblical text.
#+END_QUOTE

According to Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams (2006) /Christianity and the Transformation of the Book/, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, his writings are crucial for our knowledge of the first three centuries of Christian history. /He brought several essential innovations to the book's organization like the cross-references/.

** Eusebian canons

 Quote from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebius#Biblical_text_criticism][Wikipedia]]:
 #+BEGIN_QUOTE
 For an easier survey of the material of the four Evangelists, Eusebius divided his edition of the New Testament into paragraphs and provided it with a synoptical table so that it might be easier to find the pericopes that belong together. These canon tables or "Eusebian canons" remained in use throughout the Middle Ages, and illuminated manuscript versions are important for the study of early medieval art, as they are the most elaborately decorated pages of many Gospel books.
 #+END_QUOTE

* Let us not forget China

The link between the /codex/ generalization, on the one hand, and the apparition of "navigation guides" like the table of content, the index, the running title, on the other hand as a counterpart in the Chinese civilization.

In China, competitive examinations to become a high ranking state employee developed in the IXth century (CE). The main part of these exam was a paper on what we would now call general knowledge of the Classics where the students were asked to demonstrate their knowledge through appropriate quotations.

To fulfill the need of "textbook" appropriate for this kind of examination what is called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leishu][leishus]] were produced. They are described as follows on Wikipedia: 
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The leishu are composed of sometimes lengthy citations from other works and often contain copies of entire works, not just excerpts. The works are classified by a systematic set of categories, which are further divided into subcategories. Leishu may be considered anthologies, but are encyclopedic in the sense that they may comprise the entire realm of knowledge at the time of compilation.
#+END_QUOTE   

The efficient use of the leishu requires an indexing system, a table of content, etc. Very interestingly, the scroll will be abandoned and the codex will generalize in China around that time, as observed by Ann Blair in her book /TOO MUCH TO KNOW/, Yale Univ. Press, 2010 (pp. 28-31).
 
Most of the leishus *were printed* (from the IXth century on!). The picture on the right side (a banknote printing plate) is there to remind us of who was (by far) the most advanced at that time. The Chinese were of course printing their leishus on paper that they discovered in the VIIIth century BCE.

* Getting organized by using the right slot

Now that we briefly reviewed the timeline of the main navigation elements of the books---navigation elements that can of course be applied to our lab/note-books---we come back to the paper slips and cards as notes media.

We see (again) Placcius' and Leibniz's closet since it displays both the benefits and the shortcomings of media that hold *a single note*.

Obvious shortcomings are:
- Paper slips and cards get easily lost.
- They are essentially useless if they are not *classified* in addition to being filed.
These problems are solved by Placcius' cabinet, the content of which is fundamentally accessed through the index.

Clear benefits are:
- Paper slips can be easily reorganized when they contain information on several subjects.
- Paper slips can be directly pasted in a book when composing an anthology or a compendium.

This last technique (pasting when making an anthology) was systematically used by the Renaissance polymath [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Gessner][Conrad Gessner]] (1516-1565) who even got his paper slips by cutting parts of pages from books (don't do that with library books)!

* Constructing a notebook index the John Locke way

We will now learn about an index construction technique due to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke][John Locke]] (1632-1704), the grand-father of liberalism and a major investor in the /Royal African Company/, the largest company in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke#Constitution_of_Carolina][slave-trade]] business at that time...

The indexing method is here illustrated using my own notebook. The two pages that are displayed describe the structure of a dataset in the [[https://www.hdfgroup.org/][HDF5]] format on the left side and the corresponding structure (designed to map the former one) of a =data frame= object of the [[https://www.r-project.org/][R]] language. This dataset contain *calcium* concentration measurements made in *neurons*. This notes were taken while writing some computer *code* to analyze the data.

The precise content of the pages does not matter here in order to understand how Locke's method works. The important points are:
- The pages are numbered (we are seeing here pages 86 and 87).
- Keywords are written at the bottom of the page: *code*; *neuro*; *calcium*.

This method can be applied after note-taking, you just need to have few pages left at the end of your notebook. That's in fact what I did since I had started filling my notebook before learning about the method (I learned about while preparing the French version of this lecture in September 2017).


We now the index. It is located at the end of the notebook although Locke recommends placing it at the beginning. Since I did not know about the method when I started the notebook, I had to place it at the end...

The idea is to enter the keywords used in the notebook based on their *first letter* and the *first vowel following the first letter*.

The index is therefore made of the 26 letters (you see letters "A" to "R" here, the remaining ones are on the next page) subdivided the five most common vowels ("y" goes together with "i" in that case).

Pages 86 and 87 contained the keyword *code* that goes into the entry "Co" of the index (you see "86-89" because the following pages also concern code for the same project). The keyword *Neuro* giving an entry on line "Ne", while the keyword *Calcium* gives an entry on line "Ca".

The keyword *Criquet* (not shown above) gives an entry on line "Ci".

It is also a good idea to list the set of keywords used in the notebook on the page preceding or following the index.

