The Cartographer's First Draft: On the Imperfect Maps of Early Modern Note-Taking
We often imagine our digital note-taking systems as pristine, interconnected networks—clean graphs of thought waiting to be traversed. We strive for accuracy, for the perfect link, the correct tag. But there is a profound, human comfort to be found in the flawed and earnest attempts of those who came before us, who mapped knowledge without the tools we take for granted. For a historical example, we need look no further than the commonplacing habits of the seventeenth century, and in particular, the fascinatingly messy notebooks of a young John Locke.
Long before he penned his essays on human understanding, Locke was a meticulous, if initially disorganized, note-taker. In 1652, while a student at Christ Church, Oxford, he began developing a method for indexing his commonplace book. This was not a novel idea; keeping a commonplace book was a standard practice for the learned, a central repository for quotes, observations, and ideas gleaned from reading. The prevailing method, however, was to assign notes to predetermined, rigid headings—Virtue, Vice, Death, Love—which often forced ideas into ill-fitting categories, making them difficult to retrieve later.
Locke’s innovation was a workaround for the fallibility of his own memory and the constraints of the medium. He devised a complex indexing system that allowed for emergent, bottom-up organization. Instead of deciding on categories upfront, he would tag each new entry with a keyword and then enter that keyword into an alphabetical index along with the page number. This seems utterly mundane to us now, a digital given, but for a paper-based system it was revolutionary. It allowed his entries to live under multiple headings simultaneously, to be connected laterally. His notebook was no longer a static ledger but a dynamic, personal map of his reading.
And what a messy map it was. His early indexes are filled with corrections, scratched-out words, and entries that lead to dead ends or circular references. He was literally learning how to think by learning how to index. This is the part we forget in our pursuit of digital perfection: the first draft of any system is a draft of the mind itself. Locke wasn’t building a flawless database; he was sketching a territory of thought, and the smudges and errors were essential to the process. The imperfection was not a failure but a feature of its authenticity—a record of intellectual exploration in real time.
There’s a lesson here for our own digital curation. In an age of effortless linking and infinite storage, we risk valuing the polished final product over the fertile chaos of the process. We are tempted to wait until we have the perfect, permanent category for a note before we write it down, or to avoid making connections for fear they might not be semantically pure. Locke’s method teaches us the value of the provisional link, the tentative category. It champions the courage to make a messy index today with the faith that its patterns will become clearer tomorrow. Our feeds and knowledge banks are not finished atlases; they are living cartographies, and their true value lies not in their flawless accuracy, but in the honest record of our journey through the text.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: