article
- Create notes that link directly to related thoughts, regardless of category
- Use and even create my own language, rather than forcing standardised terms
- Allow connections to form organically, mirroring how my mind actually works ( I mean, I think that’s how my mind works)
- Focus on relationships between ideas, not so much on their classification
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Leibniz, [no date], LH 41, 10 Bl. 2: “il me vient quelques fois tant de pensées le matin dans une heure, pendant que je suis encor au lit, que j’ay besois d’employer toute la matinée et par fois toute la journée et au de là, pour les mettre distinctement par ecrit.” Cited in Eduard Bodemann, Die Leibniz-Handschriften der Königlichen Öffentlichen Bibliothek zu Hannover 1895 (Hanover: Hahn, 1895), 338. Quoted in Kempe, 2025, ch 1. ↩︎
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loosely translated from Ulf von Rauchhaupt’s article, “Leibniz’s manuscripts: fair handwriting wasn’t his thing”. ↩︎
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quoted in Krajewski, p.188. ↩︎
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Ann Blair’s memorable phrase: Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven London: Yale University Press, 2010. ↩︎
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In-box
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Sleeping
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References
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Main
Daniel Wisser’s notecards as art and archive
Daniel Wisser’s exhibition in Vienna features 60 index cards with sketches of stories displayed in a note box (Zettelkasten).
What Tim Berners-Lee Has to Teach About Effective Notes
I stumbled across Tim Berners-Lee’s 1995 talk on “Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny” last month, and while it hasn’t exactly transformed how I think about writing notes, it has certainly confirmed the direction I’ve already been working slowly towards.
There’s a lot of discussion online about the best systems and apps for taking notes, and poeple keep devising new ones almost every day, but this is missing something revolutionary that’s hiding in plain sight. The inventor of the World Wide Web wasn’t just solving how computers share information—he was creating a blueprint for how our minds should work.
This got me reflecting how I’ve been looking to create/adapt/bodge together a method for writing that suits the strange way I think, rather than just accepting someone else’s off-the-shelf offering, however flashy. My own bespoke creative working environment.
So, according to Berners-Lee, how should our minds work?
Categorical Thinking Is a Trap
Traditional note-taking systems lock us into categories that limit rather than liberate our thinking. This is exactly the problem that Vannevar Bush, one of Berners-Lee’s intellectual heroes, identified decades ago. In Berners-Lee’s words:
“The problem Bush was addressing, or the problem of the individual researcher, was one of system topology. The poor person has successively narrowed and narrowed his or her field of interest in order to cope with the information overload, and soon is connected only to things of very local interest.”
In the past I’ve certainly experienced this. Notes tucked away in separate categories create knowledge silos. According to Berners-Lee the uncomfortable truth is that these systems fail us when we need them most:
“The topology clearly doesn’t work, because there is no path for the transfer of knowledge from one discipline and the next.”
Every category we create essentially generates another silo — isolated and cut off from the cross-pollination that creates genuine insight.
I’ve previously written about Gottfried Leibniz, one of the last great polymaths, who was able to make innovations in several different fields partly because he didn’t keep his wide-ranging thought in neat compartments, but in thousands of pages of unruly notes which he had no compunction to cut up and rearrarange. It’s hard to imagine what a person like this would have been able to do with the World Wide Web.
The Web Structure Liberates Knowledge
Berners-Lee offered a solution that applies perfectly to personal notes:
“In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes.”
His revolutionary insight?
“For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”
Traditional note-taking is like navigating with only predetermined routes. Web-structured notes give you the entire network, plus spontaneous shortcuts you never knew existed.
Keywords Restrict Natural Connections
Even our keywords and tagging systems can be too restrictive. In his 2006 paper on “Linked data - Design issues”), Berners-Lee warns about conceptual centralisation:
“If we make a knowledge representation system which requires anyone who uses the concept of ‘automobile’ to use the term ‘www.kr.org/stds/indu… then we restrict the set of uses of the system to those for whom this particular formulation of what an automobile is works.”
This seemingly technical point has deep implications for me as I’m writing and organising my notes. When I force myself to use rigid terminology or standardised keywords, I’m limiting the very connections my mind naturally wants to make. I’m not totally against using keywords, but Berners-Lee appears to be sounding a warning that has made me think a little more reflectively about what they entail.
Photo by Valeria Hutter at Unsplash.
Connected Notes Mirror Your Mind (OK, my mind)
The future of note-taking, in my humble opinion, isn’t about better folders or fancier apps, nor is it about succumbing to AI to write it all for us — it’s about reimagining how ideas connect. Taking a little bit of inspiration from Berners-Lee here’s what works for me:
I’m trying to make it so my notes aren’t just a neat archive of what I’ve learned. Instead I want them be a dynamic reflection of how my thoughts work, so my writing process stays generative rather than restrictive. And my mind doesn’t work in folders and subfolders. It works in connections and associations that span domains and categories. The rhizome not the tree.
I expect there are people whose minds really do work in categories and who prefer to keep their notes in clear and fairly rigid folders. That might well work for someone else, but it’s not the only way to do things, and I found it interesting that the founder of the World Wide Web didn’t especially admire this approach.
And it might not just be about how my individual mind works. Perhaps it’s about how the world works too. Maybe the World Wide Web has been successful in part because it facilitates the expression of the web-wide world. One of the things I’ve appreciated from re-reading Berners-Lee is his vision of a Web that rather than constraining us, helps us to network both knowledge and people.
“The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world.”— Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web
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Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn't fit in his Zettelschrank
Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (1646-1717), that complex polymath who (probably) invented calculus, used to write down all his thoughts then cut up the pieces and attempt to rearrange them. He once admitted this had resulted in “one big chaos”.
Leibniz said he had so many thoughts in a single hour that it took him more than a day to write them all down.
“Sometimes in the morning, in the hour that I spend still lying in bed, so many thoughts come to me that I need the whole morning, indeed sometimes the whole day or even longer, to set them down clearly in writing.”1
These are just a couple of the intriguing facts I learned from reading Michael Kempe’s excellent biography, The Best of All Possible Worlds. A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days (Pushkin Press).
Image source: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsiche Landesbibliothek.
Though he wrote and cut up and rearranged mountains of notes, he didn’t publish much in his lifetime.
“I wrote countless things about countless things,” he wrote to the Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli in 1697, “but only published a few about few.” And he told the Hamburg lawyer Vincent Placcius: “If you only know me from my publications, you don’t know me.” 2
All this sounds quite dismal, but on the other hand Leibniz was a genius in several disciplines, who left behind “one of the largest literary legacies of any scholar in world history” (Kempe).
Furthermore, Markus Krajewski, scholar of media history, claims “any history of ‘assisted thinking’ with artificial intelligences finds a worthy starting point in Leibniz.”
Perhaps then his seemingly disorganised notes were just part of the genius.
Krajewski’s recent chapter “Intellectual Furniture: Elements of a Deep History of Artificial Intelligence.” sets Leibniz’s endeavours in the context of an intellectual history that stretches from the specialised furniture Leibniz acquired to arrange his notes, via the dawn of the computer age, all the way to the recent rise of artificial intelligence. Heady stuff!
In Hanover Leibniz kept a special cabinet for his notes, where he hung up the notes he had cut up in various combinations. This was his Zettelschrank, modelled on Thomas Harrison’s scrinium litteratum. After his death Johann Friedrich Blumenbach inspected this contraption and called it “the most fearsome and cumbersome machine that one could imagine”3. Well, I don’t know about that. Perhaps he didn’t have a particularly strong imagination.
Image source: Krajewski, p.186
This sense of being almost overwhelmed by information is really the prehistory of the situation we’re in now, where not only is there ‘too much to know’4, but AI is making more and more of it every second. Our information machines aren’t so much helping us to get the chaos under control as simply creating more and more chaos, faster than we can comprehend it, much less organise it.
Yes, we’re drowning in data, but it may be comforting to know that this is nothing new, and that despite the mounds of ‘stuff to know about’, some remarkable breakthroughs were still possible, and may be still. In 2013 Stephen Wolfram visited the Leibniz archives in an attempt to understand how Leibniz had achieved so much so early - and how he had also missed so much of what we now take for granted in the computational perspective on science.
With the utmost presumption, I’ve previously claimed that Leonardo, that other great polymath, might have benefited from a more coherent approach to making notes than his zibaldone. Dare I make the same claim for Leibniz?
Oh look, I just did.
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References
Kempe, Michael. The Best of All Possible Worlds. A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days. Translated by Marshall Yarbrough. London: Pushkin Press. 2025.
Krajewski, Markus. “Intellectual Furniture: Elements of a Deep History of Artificial Intelligence.” Chapter 8 in Bajohr, Hannes, ed. Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities. First edition. London: Open Humanities Press, 2025. PDF.
‘Leibniz, LLull and the computational imagination’ Public Domain Review.
von Rauchhaupt, Ulf. “Leibniz’ Manuskripte: Schönschrift war nicht seine Sache”. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2016.
Wolfram, Stephen (2013), “Dropping In on Gottfried Leibniz,” Stephen Wolfram Writings.
Sinister Zettelkasten?
The 2025 Sydney Film Festival program features Jodie Foster’s new film, “Vie privée,” accompanied by a marketing image that evokes mystery with index card boxes in the background.
I found a way to create order from my jumbled ideas
From a single idea to many, to networks of linked ideas to reconfigured networks of knowledge.
This is a model of how students learn, devised by educational psychologist John B. Biggs and presented in his co-authored book, Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does.
The key concept here, ‘structure of observed learning outcomes’ (SOLO), is summarised quite well in Wikipedia.
(Image source: Biggs and Tang, 2011: 91.)
To me this diagram clearly relates to the process of writing and developing short, clear notes.
From a single note to many, to networks of linked notes, to reconfigured networks of knowledge.
The first, prestructural stage, though, isn’t simply empty in my experience. Instead I begin from a whole heap of ideas and thoughts jumbled together like pick-up sticks.
Image source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File…
The problem is it’s too easy to stay in this prestructural stage, where thoughts and ideas are plenty, but they’re a jumbled mess. That’s because even when we make notes, our notes remain either poorly organised, or else well-organised, but set up according to some pre-established schema that hinders further conceptual development.
This metaphor of straightening and sorting a convoluted mess is also key for computer programming. For example, it’s evident on the cover of a well-known book, A Philosophy of Software Design, by John K. Ousterhout.
The first stage proper, the unistructural stage, in my estimation, relates to the capacity to create an atomic note, that is, a note that identifies, isolates and deals with just one thought, idea or concept. This is the key move, and the reason I like to refer to ‘atomic notes’ as the leading idea.
The second, multistructural stage refers to the ability to do this repeatedly, reliably, and systemically.
According to Biggs and Tang, these early stages involve increasing the quantity of knowledge. In my adaptation, this simply means making more atomic notes.
The third, relational stage involves the process of making meaningful links, which is at the heart of the Zettelkasten methodology, and is also crucial for wikis.
The fourth, extended abstract stage relates to the ability to reconfigure networks of concepts to create new knowledge and insight.
According to Biggs and Tang, these stages move beyond the quantitive acquisition of knowledge and towards the qualitative:
“This distinction between knowing more and restructuring parallels two major curriculum aims: to increase knowledge (quantitative: unistructural becoming increasingly multistructural); and to deepen understanding (qualitative: relational, then extended abstract). Teaching and assessment that focus only on the quantitative aspects of learning will miss the more important higher level aspects. Quantitative, Level 1, theories of teaching and learning address the first aim only, increasing knowledge.” (Biggs and Tang, 2011: 90)
This is how I move: from jumbled thoughts to clearer single notes, from single notes to many, from many to meaningful links, and then—if I keep going—to something new.
The SOLO taxonomy shows why this progression matters. It’s not just about gaining more knowledge, but about transforming it. Make modular notes, link them, and let new insights emerge. This isn’t just a way for me to remember what I’ve learned—it’s a way to learn what I didn’t know I knew.
And if it still feels like pick-up-sticks in your head, don’t worry, there’s time—the game is just beginning.
Now read: Atomic notes and the unit record principle.
Reference:
Biggs, J and Tang, C. (2011): Teaching for Quality Learning at University, (4th Edition. McGraw-Hill and Open University Press, Maidenhead). ISBN: 78-0-33-524275-7. PDF
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From tiny drops of writing, great rivers will flow
In his book, 📖 Writing Tools, veteran journalist Roy Peter Clark teaches that writers should break long projects into parts. In fact, that’s how he wrote his book. It started life as a year-long series of online posts, one per week, until finally he’d written fifty of them (I guess he took a couple of weeks off 😁).
It’s an obvious piece of advice that’s surprisingly hard to remember. Conversely it’s easy to feel daunted by big projects, forgetting that they are always made out of smaller pieces.
My working philosophy of creativity is that from fragments you can build a greater whole.
One small part joins up with another and another until soon, like rain, a trickle grows to become a flood. Clark says:
Tiny drops of writing become puddles that become rivulets that become streams that become deep ponds.
This is why I make short notes and join them together to create longer pieces of writing. I’m daunted by the larger task but not at all daunted by the quiet joy of writing one short note followed by another, and another.
This is what I call the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.
It may be short, but it’s endlessly repeatable. And the results can be quite impressive.
Clark also mentions that he sometimes asks his new writing students to indicate how many of them have run a marathon. Usually only a couple have, but when he asks how many think they could do it, if they were given a much longer period, nearly everyone raises their hands.
This reminded me of the rather lovely short film about the Australian farmer who ran his own marathon, one piece at a time. In this case he did just one mile every hour until the whole distance was run. And he did a whole lot of other work too. Improbably, this guy’s name is Beau Miles.
OK, that’s great and all, but how exactly do you do it, one drop at a time?
Here’s my take on how to write an article from your notes.
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Education will defeat autocracy
The painful and wrenching demise of entire academic departments opens up opportunities for a more radical understanding and practice of higher education, beyond and despite the confines of university funding.
In France, for example, there’s Le Collège international de philosophie, co-founded by philosopher Jacques Derrida, and Le Université populaire de Caen, founded by Michel Onfray, another maverick philosopher.
In the US, meanwhile, there’s Vital Thought, and The Reading Room, sponsored by Pluto Press, in the UK.
I’ve suggested the future of the humanities is wide open. But in these times it’s much more political than that:
Now Karen Attiah says Columbia Canceled My Course on Race and Media. I’m Going to Teach It Anyway.
You might want to support her summer school: Race, Media, and International Affairs 101.
As she says:
They can cancel us all they want, but we will create community and share knowledge anyway!
Willful ignorance, of the kind supported by the extremists running the US Government, has a fatal flaw.
Can you guess what it is?
Have you ever read a book by mistake?
Revisiting a backup file of my old notes reminded me of the time I was reading what I assumed to be a novel by Ruth Ozeki, but it turned out to be a novel by Cynthia Ozick, published in 1987, called The Messiah of Stockholm.
Anyone could have made that mistake, I submit.
At least, anyone who, like me, failed to read the cover properly.
And every single page with the author’s name in the footer.
In any case I loved the book, even though it wasn’t written by Ruth Ozeki, which I didn’t realise at the time.
It’s about a man who believes he is the son of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, who was murdered by Nazis and his magnum opus, The Messiah lost. Although it’s (fairly) clear he can’t really be the great writer’s son, a bookseller, Mrs Eklund, goes along with the man’s story. They strike up a relationship in which she ‘believes’ his paternity claims while he believes, or at least doesn’t question, her repeated claim that her husband, Dr Eklund is inside the flat above the shop.
Is he? Is he really?
And then Adela turns up, claiming to be the daughter of Bruno Schultz, carrying with her the manuscript of the lost book. Are they going to ‘believe’ this too?
So in a way it was appropriate that I should have mistaken Ozick for Ozeki. Displaced identity was the theme. I did wonder, though, why the Ozeki writing style about which I had read was not much in evidence in the novel actually in front of me.
So there is still the genuine Ozeki to be read. Let’s hope I don’t pick up by mistake a novel by Julie Otsuka. Unless that too proves to be excellent, in which case I’ll be happy.
Over to you. Have you ever read a book by mistake? And was it an unforeseen calamity, or an unexpected joy?
The future of the humanities is wide open
The humanities within universities are facing decline and financial prioritization, yet interest in liberal arts thrives outside academic institutions.
To understand the future of AI, look to the past
The hype about AI isn’t new. In his day, Victor Hugo was breathless about the book.
Why not publish all your notes online?
Contemplating whether to publish personal notes online reveals both the potential benefits of motivation and community engagement and the drawbacks of self-doubt and privacy concerns.
Time to concede nothing
A reflection on the enduring legacy of thinkers like Erasmus and Castellio, emphasizing the importance of perseverance in upholding values of civility and humanism amid modern strife and polarization.
Legendary computer game Myst started life as an interconnected network of cards in the equally legendary app HyperCard. To be precise, 1,355 cards in 6 HyperCard stacks.
Now, through graph analysis the last secrets of that network are finally being ‘deMystified’.
Five solutions to link rot in my personal note collection
Have you noticed that the problem of link rot on the Web is very real? Just writing a link to a separate page, without comment or annotation, assumes permanence and depends on that link persisting through time. But links don’t really work that way. They become obsolete far faster than feels comfortable. Because I didn’t like to acknowledge this, I now have a whole heap of old notes consisting of little more than broken links. Here are five possible solutions to this problem. Which ones make sense to you?
1. Write notes in your own words
It would have been better if my notes said what the link is about, and what interests me about it. Since realising the extent of this problem, and recognising that link rot is so prevalent, I try these days to be more careful in describing for myself the content or salient aspects of each source as and when I record the link.
Action: when referring to a web resource, summarise it just well enough that if and when it disappears, my reference to it will still make sense and be useful.
2. Refer to the Internet Archive
Apparently, many articles on Wikipedia now have broken links. That’s annoying, to say the least. One potential remedy might be to link directly to the archived version of the source on The Internet Archive, or maybe another archive site like archive.is
Action: where I doubt the longevity of the source, also link to the Internet Archive’s version.
Unfortunately online archive sites are themselves quite brittle and they’re vulnerable to hostile actions like being sued for breach of copyright, or even just running out of funding. Dependence on a single small charity as the memory keeper of the entire Web obviously creates a potential point of failure and sets us up for a big problem if and when the archive site itself disappears with a 401 error or worse.
3. Create your own personal archive
A heavy-duty solution would be to create my own archive of websites I’ve referred to. Bookmarking services such as Pinboard enable this. So does micro.blog, which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of the indie-web. These services don’t just store the link to a web page. They also create and store a snapshot of the page. But these services store the archival data in the cloud, which may present a problem in some circumstances. And both the services I’ve mentioned are tiny one-person enterprises which suffer from the risk of that one person shutting up shop. On the other hand, individuals have a greater longevity than massive corporations, ironically, and I’m writing this in the year after Google shut down Google Podcasts without any consultation.
Alternatively, self-archiving on your own computer is possible by using an application such as archive box. A reference application such as Zotero, whose primary function is to manage academic references, can also create a personal archive of pdf articles and other sources. I use this and find it very helpful. It also enables saving and cataloguing of web page snapshots.
Action: Consider subscribing to a bookmarking service, or even using an app like archivebox. Check out the archiving features of Zotero that I’m not already familiar with.
With an archive of all the sources you’ve ever referred to, there’s no danger of link rot in your own references. But this just defers the problem one level further from you. It hasn’t gone away. All the articles and sources you archive are still susceptible to their own link rot. You can only realistically archive a couple of levels of hyperlinks before the task is too massive to handle.
4. Don’t worry, be happy
Another more philosophical ‘solution’ to the problem of link rot would be to stop worrying and accept that everything changes. Going slightly further, one could recognise that forgetting is an essential aspect of remembering, and that memory systems also need a mechanism for forgetting information. The Internet’s main forgetting system is for addresses to change or disappear without notice. This is inelegant and has unfortunate side effects, yet it works, I suppose. If I imagined the Internet to be a stable repository of collective knowledge, I simply imagined it wrongly. I thought we were building a new Pyramid of Cheops, but our blueprints were those of the Tower of Babel. It turns out the Web is no more permanent than a dog breed. It’s the river you don’t step into twice. If we think we’re gazing up at the night sky we’re fooling ourselves. The web isn’t the night sky, it’s just a cave wall studded with fireflies. And so on. I told you this was philosophical.
More generally, human knowledge isn’t really like gold bars in a bank vault, which you can store indefinitely and retrieve when you like. Culture, of which the Web is one aspect, is a machine for remembering, yet it also fabricates and forgets. How this happens remains a mystery. By attempting to memorialise himself for his achievements, King Ozymandius became a byword for failure. The art historian Aby Warburg saw Memosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, as a sphinx holding a riddle. What does culture forget and what does it remember? And how does it do it?
Action: Err, none? Radical acceptance of impermanence? Just go with the flow?
5. Sow and then reap
The term ‘link rot’ has stuck because the organic process it implies seems nearer to the reality. Perhaps a better model of human knowledge would be that it’s like seeds in a seed bank. A seed bank can last a long time, provided you plant the seeds each season to grow new seeds to store over winter. This metaphor suggests that knowledge persists not through storage but through use. And this thought brings me right back around to my first solution to link rot: make notes in my own words. By writing my own version of the knowledge I’ve found, I’m passing it on to the next reader, who might just choose to do the same.
Action: Don’t try to store knowledge. Share, teach, discuss. Pass it on.
None of these solutions are perfect, or even workable. Nevertheless, just because the Internet forgot some information doesn’t mean I have to forget it too.
I wonder if there are any other solutions to this problem of the Web degrading over time. Please let me know.
Now read: Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget too
Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes
Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing (my review) suggests setting up a Zettelkasten (a flexible collection of notes) with a small handful of folders.
These folders aren’t merely places to put notes, though. They suggest a specific workflow - a system for writing.
Here’s a very brief summary of the process:
The In-box
Put your fleeting notes in the in-box so you know where they all are.
Make a regular time to process them into more permanent, polished main notes and move them to that folder.
The Sleeping folder
The ‘sleeping’ folder is a kind of in-box overflow. It’s for notes you just never seem to get round to processing. Put them in the sleeping folder and they’ll still be there when you finally feel like working on them (or you can just let sleeping notes lie). This keeps the In-box relatively small so you don’t get overwhelmed with unprocessed notes. Everyone has more thoughts than they can handle and probably makes more notes than they can handle too. It’s not a big problem - you just work on what you feel like working on and leave the rest. With this system you’ll at least be able to pick up where you left off.
The Reference folder
The reference folder is for reference notes. Let’s say you watched a movie and you want to make notes on it. Create a reference note with the name and all the details of the movie, then any notes you make can link to the reference note. This way you’ll never lose track of where a thought or idea or quote or image came from. You’ll have the details in the reference folder.
The Main folder
Main notes are a bit more polished than fleeting notes. They have a single clear idea, a title, a few links, and a unique ID.
Taming the chaos
That’s it.
Oh, and plenty of people think you need category folders or tags, like subject sections in a library. I admit this is a dominant way of thinking about knowledge. What else would you do, other than put it in categories? But this way of thinking is pretty much contrary to the spirit of the Zettelkasten. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was fertile because it broke down the established categories in sociology and re-constructed a major theory of society from the ground up. And art Historian Aby Warburg organised his Zettelkasten, a library and a whole institute against preconceived categories in his discipline.
Yes, chaos reigns, in a sense - but it’s structured, rhizomatic chaos.
Lord Acton took too many notes, but that doesn't mean you have to
It’s intriguing to discover a prolific author with a working collection of 148,000 notes, but it begs the question: can you make too many notes?
I mean, surely there comes a point where your note-making gets in the way of the outcomes you’re looking for, and the endless writing of notes starts to defeat its very purpose.
Well, maybe. Here’s a little cautionary tale from the Nineteenth Century, a time when both empire and facial hair were unrestrained by decency.
John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) was a significant British political figure of the Victorian era. Did he have one of those massive walrus mustaches that they all seemed to go in for back then? Well sort of, but he also had the type of beard that make it look like its owner has just swallowed a beaver, so frankly it’s hard to tell.
He was also an important historian who nevertheless published very little in his lifetime. The consensus seems to be that he took too many notes.
Acton’s Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Edn) entry reads in part:
“Lord Acton has left too little completed original work to rank among the great historians; his very learning seems to have stood in his way; he knew too much and his literary conscience was too acute for him to write easily, and his copiousness of information overloads his literary style. But he was one of the most deeply learned men of his time, and he will certainly be remembered for his influence on others.”
By the way, it’s topical to talk about Lord Acton. He has indeed been remembered, but chiefly for his prescient aphorisms:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
No prizes for guessing which Scofflaw-in-Chief this is a reminder of. Too many notes? Sad! But I digress.
That’s not all. Here’s Keith Thomas in an entertaining London Review of Books piece.
“It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with penciled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’’
According to Oman, in his book, On the Writing of History (1939), Lord Acton left behind only one good book, some lectures, and several essays scattered in hard-to-find journals. He also created a plan for a large history project that others would write after his death, but not in the way he had intended.
In 1998 the historian Timothy Messer-Kruse drew entirely the wrong conclusion from all this. He seemed to point the blame for Lord Acton’s little problem on the fact that all he had to work with was compartments full of paper notes:
“What may have been accomplished had Acton possessed more than a row of dusty pigeon-holes to store his notes and musings?”
Would perhaps a computer have helped him out, by any chance? Yes indeed:
“The advances in computing and communication technologies over the past thirty years have laid the material basis for overcoming the Lord Acton syndrome that continues to plague the historical profession. It is now possible for the Lord Actons of today to share an unlimited number of their notes, ideas, and annotations with the entire world of interested scholars with minimal cost. Paperless publishing through the Internet theoretically offers the means for transcending a centuries-old model of historical scholarship and breaking down the barriers between academic and amateur historians.”
Well, we’ve had another 27 years of the digital era since then, and it’s probably safe to say that while there’s certainly a ‘Lord Acton Syndrome’, the cure is not more computers.
If anything, the situation is even worse now, made so by the massive expansion of available information. Imagine what Acton would have done with all the many terabytes of historical data that’s now available at the click of a button.
That’s right: he’d have made notes on it.
In fact, Charles Oman had already understood the poor man’s real problem much earlier.
Oman saw that this limited output from such a capable scholar happened because Lord Acton tried to master everything before finishing anything. Apparently he had a great book in mind, but gathering all the necessary information became overwhelming for one person.
The lesson, for Oman at least, is clear:
“In short the ideal complete and perfect book that is never written may be the enemy of the good book that might have been written. Ars longa, vita brevis— one must remember the fleeting years, or one’s magnum opus may never take shape, if one is too meticulous in polishing it up to supreme excellence.”
Being too focused on perfection might mean our greatest work (or indeed any work) never materializes at all.
So take look in the mirror. Are you a walrus? Have you swallowed a beaver? No? Then you don’t need to copy Lord Acton’s note-taking excesses either. Make some notes, sure, but please don’t ‘do an Acton’ and die before you make something from them.
Footnote:
Oman complained about the seemingly hopeless diversity of Lord Acton’s interests, as evidenced from the wide range of his notes - from pets, to stepmothers to totems. Well, I’m not convinced this is a problem in itself. In the right hands it might even be an advantage. The real problem was that Acton doesn’t seem to have developed a system for writing, beyond the publication of his lectures.
“There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section. I turned over one or two from curiosity—one was on early instances of a sympathetic feeling for animals, from Ulysses' old dog in Homer downward. Another seemed to be devoted to a collection of hard words about stepmothers in all national literatures, a third seemed to be about tribal totems.” See also: The mastery of knowledge is an illusion
Acknowledgement
Ched Spellman posted about Lord Acton’s problem 15 years ago. Now I’m just commenting on Spellman’s commentary on Thomas’s commentary on Oman’s commentary. Yes, this is the Internet. What did you expect?
References
Hugh Chisolm (1910) ‘Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg’, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Vol 1, pp. 159ff. Internet Archive.
Timothy Messer-Kruse (1998) ‘Scholarly publication in the electronic age’, in Dennis A. Trinkle. Writing, Teaching and Researching History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers. London: Routledge. p. 41.
Charles Oman (1939), On the Writing of History. 1st Edition, London: Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9…
Keith Thomas (2010), ‘Diary: Working Methods’. London Review of Books. Vol. 32 No. 11 · 10 June 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary
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