tags: algorithms hashing commonplacing
A couple of months ago I stumbled by happy accident onto the topic of keeping a commonplace book , or commonplacing . While this did call up vague memories of reading about commonplace books in my earlier life as a Humanities student, I had fully appreciated neither its power as a tool for memory and worldview-organization nor (and more to the point here) its kinship with a host of techniques used today for organizing large bodies of data.
If you are not familiar with the reading practices of the Renaissance and the early modern periods, a commonplace book is essentially a notebook, kept by habitual readers, for hand-copying quotations from their reading. Such quotations are entered under headings -- the "common places" (the word comes from locis communis in Latin, or topos koinos in Greek, and the technique descends from the copybooks used in studying those languages) -- that in Renaissance/Enlightenment practice were governed in part by the