On keeping a commonplace book
Why this site is a collection rather than a portfolio.
A commonplace book is an old idea: a personal notebook where you copy out passages that matter, then return to them. Renaissance readers kept them. So did Locke, who wrote a whole indexing method for his.
The point was never the notebook. It was the return.
What this site is
Four collections, one index:
- Notes. Writing, at any length.
- Photography. Galleries, one folder per series.
- Projects. Things built, in flight, and abandoned.
- Library. References, with sources attached.
They share a single envelope of metadata, which means one tag can gather work from every collection: the photographs you took somewhere, the note you wrote about it, and the project it turned into. Nothing is siloed behind a section.
Why not a portfolio
A portfolio is a claim. A commonplace book is a record. The second one is more useful to me, and I suspect more interesting to read.