So, I’m thinking about the concept of digital gardens, the ideas behind Zettelkasten, and my own interpretation of that I am currently calling ” Grok ”. I was reading on another digital garden about this historic concept called ” commonplace books ” or “commonplaces”. The idea goes back further to this Latin term called locus communis, and it goes back even further to the Greek idea of “τόπος κοινός” (topos koinos) or ” literary topos ”. John Locke even wrote a book on this idea called A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books . I’m interested in this for a couple reasons; first it’s interesting to see that my desire to have some place to store my ideas is shared with many in antiquity, and second as I am refining this concept and building on it and how I want to treat it conceptually as well as in practice, it’s handy to see how others, both present and past, have treated this same sort of concept. I think I ultimately dislike the Zettelkasten, at least for me because it is too fine-grained and too keyed into specfic topics. I am not a researcher, I just like a broad array of things and I enjoy seeing their interconnectedness.

This commonplacing (not sure if that’s a coined term or not) idea is something I find really attractive because instead of being a repository for specfic, well crafted, and atomic thoughts, it is instead a repository for a myriad of thoughts, quotes, ideas, and excerpts on a whole array of topics.

Likely, at some future time I will update the name of my digital garden to be more in tune with this historic concept. We’ll see…