Always curious and always hungry for knowledge, he devoured books like a starving boy, eager to learn from the great minds of the past and present. Wanting to understand the world and make sense of its mysteries and complexities, he wanted to be a philosopher and a great thinker.
But he knew that reading was not enough. He needed to write, record and organize his thoughts, so he started to write notes on loose sheets of paper, carefully labelling them with titles and keywords. He sorted them alphabetically, and by creating a simple index, he could easily find and retrieve any note he wanted, any time he needed. He could also combine and connect different notes, creating new insights and associations and gradually building his own knowledge, philosophy and worldview.
The boy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was only fifteen years old in 1785 when he invented his powerful technique for learning and thinking and would soon become one of the most influential philosophers in history.
200 years later, in a small town in Germany, another influential scholar nearing his 60s, Niklas Luhmann, was doing much the same.
“When I read a book, I do it in the following way: I always have a note card on hand, on which I note the ideas of certain pages. On the back side, I record the bibliographical information. When I have read through the book, I go through these notes and consider what could be useful for notes that have already been written. Thus, I always read with an eye toward the notability of books.”
Niklas Luhmann had a famous collection of notes and cards that he wrote by hand. His system connected the thoughts and information from the books he read, with his existing ideas, using note cards with short words and codes.
The start of a new memory regime
In the course of history, it is rare enough for a significant new regime of memory practices to develop. M.T. Clanchy explores one such in England a millenium or so ago, arguing that the shift from habitually memorizing things to writing them down and keeping records was necessarily prior to the shift from script to print, and was as profound a change in its effects on the individual intellect and on society. {Clanchy, 1993#1255: 3}Looking out from the year 1000, then, one can go back to the invention of writing and a subsequent uneven shift to organizational reliance on written records over several thousand years up to the turn of the first millenium after the Christian era. One can also look forward to the propagation of print culture some few hundred years further on{Eisenstein, 1979 #269} and then several centuries after that to the development of the Internet.
Ref: https://www.academia.edu/5020269/Memory_Practices_in_the_Sciences?email_work_card=view-paper