Ars Excerpendi

September 6, 2024 9:55 AM

"It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written. Only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead, they suggest that histories are concocted by error-prone human beings who patch together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence." Working Methods, an LRB essay by historian Keith Thomas on the joys and horrors of note-taking. (h/t Gavin Jacobson)

From the essay: "When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. If the notes on a particular topic are especially voluminous, I put them in a box file or a cardboard container or a drawer in a desk. I also keep an index of the topics on which I have an envelope or a file. The envelopes run into thousands."

posted by mittens (11 comments total)

copy the bibliographical details - alphabeticised index boo - sliced-up pieces of paper - a separate envelope to each topic - newspaper cuttings - cardboard container

I clicked on the link just to see if he explained why he didn't take a photo of the page and the cover, and run it through OCR.

The truth is that I have become something of a dinosaur. Nowadays, researchers don’t need to read early printed books laboriously from cover to cover. They have only to type a chosen word into the appropriate database to discover all the references to the topic they are pursuing. I try to console myself with the reflection that they will be less sensitive to the context of what they find and that they will certainly not make the unexpected discoveries which come from serendipity. But the sad truth is that much of what it has taken me a lifetime to build up by painful accumulation can now be achieved by a moderately diligent student in the course of a morning.

Oof. Yeah, this is just making me appreciate the value of information technology for managing historical information.

And even though he says people searching the database won't have as much of a sense of context as he does, having hunted through the original paper book, he also says:

It is only too easy to misapply excerpted passages by taking them out of their original context. Ideally, I should have followed the technique, recommended as long ago as 1615 by the learned Jesuit Francesco Sacchini, of always making two sets of notes, one to be sliced up and filed, the other to be kept in its original form.

The researcher who finds a passage containing a search term can at least scroll up and scroll down from that passage, and can read the whole book if they choose. If he's relying on little excerpts on sliced up pieces of paper, any context that he may not recall from when he did read the book is lost to him. Whereas the person doing it electronically has as much context as they want, right in front of them.

I'm doing a bit of a "historical research project" for work right now (creating technical documentation, but having to look back through a bunch of design and test data to understand why certain decisions were made.) My own method is to paste screenshots into a power point, but also paste in a link to the original document, so the context is just a click away.

The sliced-up-pieces of paper method sounds super frustrating!
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:36 AM on September 6, 2024 [2 favorites]

[applying self-censorship. Sorry]
posted by Artful Codger at 10:56 AM on September 6, 2024

The most primitive way of absorbing a text is to write on the book itself.*

This is a wonderful essay. I feel that technology has essentially solved the problem of omnium gatherum but even still the manual methods can bring great satisfaction, if only to oneself. I use google keep to collect great wadges of material, easily retrieved and sorted and searchable yadda yadda yadda (and still miss del.icio.us!) but also maintain a physical commonplace book as described in the article (or maybe it's a zibaldone) because when you write something down you tend to remember it. Or at least I used to.

*Of course I do this too.
posted by chavenet at 11:17 AM on September 6, 2024 [3 favorites]

Little pieces of paper stuffed into envelopes feels so romantic.

My goal for this weekend is to find a new system--my notebook are a mess, but that can be solved by going through and updating the indexes and that will probably be fun. The real issue is links and digital info. Since quitting Evernote a couple of years ago... I can't even describe what I've been doing because it is chaotic and unproductive and weird.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:39 PM on September 6, 2024

I clicked on the link just to see if he explained why he didn't take a photo of the page and the cover, and run it through OCR.

Because Religion and the Decline of Magic (which was, btw, the first serious work of academic history I can remember reading) was published in 1971, that's why.
posted by praemunire at 6:25 PM on September 6, 2024

In my professional practice, not so different from historical research & analysis, we have modernized and use a lot computer search methods. And I have started relying a bit more on paper sources lately precisely because of context. A computer program can pin point a whole bunch of obscure but relevant references in a huge document or documents. But for some reason the digital format disables me from 'looking around' the pin point reference. Sometimes I miss important caveats or important second steps because they are a few paragraphs or pages away from the pin point reference. So now I use computer programs to identify relevant bits of information, and then consult the paper copy to ensure that I can see the entire context.
posted by SnowRottie at 7:15 PM on September 6, 2024 [4 favorites]

I oofed too. I can see you'd feel you had a greater understanding of the text this way than those who are able to study it online; whether that's true or not I don't know, but certainly the feeling that effort in archives has made one's work more meaningful than others is seductive. But it's hard to regret the effect of technology on research.

I like the description of the metal plate and hook system of 1638. I found a longer account of it online in a book by Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age:

As Noel Malcolm has brought to light, Harrison described his "booke-invention" or "index" in a manuscript he composed while in prison in the 1640s, in the hope of eliciting a large reward. Parliament voted to publish Harrison’s "tables," including a description of his device and some 100,000 observations that Harrison had accumulated in it, but no money was budgeted for the project and all that survived of the venture was Harrison’s manuscript describing the "arca studiorum".

It sounds as if Harrison never actually created the system, but fantasised about it in prison.

Here is the Colvin portrait Thomas mentions.
posted by paduasoy at 7:45 PM on September 6, 2024

But for some reason the digital format disables me from 'looking around' the pin point reference.

It absolutely has this intellectual effect, on a lot of people. I'd argue it's one of the great dangers of modern knowledge technologies.
posted by praemunire at 10:22 PM on September 6, 2024

I think modern digital search is miraculous, but the affordances of paper volumes are real, as is the memory effect of writing a note on paper by hand. In the ideal world you would ask the magic library to find the reference you have in mind and then hey presto the book would materialise in your hand, open to the right page, ready for you to make a note.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:22 PM on September 6, 2024 [1 favorite]

This is key to my interests, thank you for posting it. I am currently trying to wrangle all of my digital files, and I am working on envisioneering a way to keep track of everything so that I can grab it / refer to it later. I am going to use Chatgpt to help me devise a tool for this.

Another thing I want to do is to bubble up things I haven't looked at in awhile, because they bring me joy (webcomics and memes and funny quotes and the like), and because periodically it's good to reassess. I may find something I tucked away years ago is relevant to me now. I'm constantly slurping data from electronic sources, and I'm a bit of a digital pack-rat.
posted by cats are weird at 6:24 PM on September 13, 2024

Finally got around to reading this and it's one that I am going to "clip" for my archives. I often have insecurity about my various amateur research methods--storing too many things, not having a good organization system, not having a clear goal--and this article cleanly erased all of that anxiety.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:54 AM on September 20, 2024