Create a Digital Commonplace Book

Readers have collected their favorite literary lines for centuries. Now compiling a portable word scrapbook is easier than ever.

Creating a commonplace book is somewhat like marking your favorite lines in a novel with the Amazon Kindle highlights feature — except your personal one-stop knowledge repository can also include song lyrics, movie dialogue, poems, recipes, podcast transcripts, and any inspiring bits you find in your reading and listening. The commonplace book is not a new concept: Copying down your favorite lines from other people’s works into your own annotated notebook was a standard exercise in Renaissance Europe, and the idea can be traced to the Roman era.

But here in the modern world of digital connectivity, you don’t have to keep everything in one physical location. With the right app, you can use your smartphone, tablet or computer to collect and sync up new content for your collection — and use the search function later to find specific entries. Here’s how to get started making a digital commonplace book — or how to convert that battered notebook of thoughts and quotes you’ve been keeping all along...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/technology/personaltech/make-digital-commonplace-book.html?smid=em-share