Writer Kelsey McKinney treats Pinterest boards as a form of commonplacing, where one can look back at the posts and trace a timeline of ideas, interests, and personality. I really liked this perspective because I had a Pinterest as a 12-year-old in the age of the internet. Looking back at that account is extremely cringeworthy, but also enlightening. Just like McKinney says, it is a record of middle-school-me’s interests and humor and emotions. This prompt made me realize what an important role commonplace books can have in our personal lives, as well as our academic lives. At several points in writing our commonplace books, I felt like I was able to organize my thoughts on the book we were reading, and generate new ideas about the topics.
My commonplacing process starts with looking back at what I was thinking/asking questions about while reading. From there, I go about researching these questions using the provided resources and google, and then put what I find in my commonplace entry. The theme that occurred across my entries was the societal contexts surrounding the book, both inside the story and around the publication of the book.
My second entry is where I started to get the hand of commonplace books. I decided to use my bullet journal as a sort of brian dump collage. I used this format again in my third entry before going back to a digital format for simplicity. I liked this method of working a lot, because it feels okay to use broken sentences and physically separate different ideas. I eventually abandoned it because the media I wanted to incorporate into my writing was YouTube videos, which lend themselves to being embedded in posts. I did, however, use the format again in entry seven to illustrate my thoughts on the symbols of Dorian Gray.
In my fourth entry, I examined an artifact from the museum resources. The piece I chose, I found, was a political drawing making comment on the attacks on Ireland by the Catholic British Empire. Doing research on the conflict going on at the time the drawing was made informed me of world events I had never heard of before and went on to learn more about in my own time.
Similar to the fourth entry, I used the scholarly libraries to learn more about the author of Jekyll and Hyde. This was a really fun experiment with my commonplacing because I didn’t really have a specific question in mind, I just wanted to find something weird. Finding that Stevenson composed music was fascinating, and finding that someone out there compiled, transcribed, and uploaded what that music sounded like delighted me.
Aside from the scholarly exploration and bullet journaling styles, I wanted to incorporate something I enjoy into my commonplace book: video essays. Video essays are a genre on YouTube where the narrator choses a piece of media to analyze from a certain point of view and upload a video about it. These videos are usually over half an hour long and range in topics from tropes in kids tv shows to opinions on current events. I knew there would be content on at least some of the books we were reading because classical fiction is a popular topic of choice online. In entries ten and eleven, I looked at video essays about Dracula. I watched many more in search of something to write about, and this was possibly the most fun commonplace books I did. Considering I love watching these videos for no particular reason in my free time, it’s no surprise that I liked doing this, and I wish there was more content like this out there about books like The Beetle, Jekyll and Hyde, and Dorian Gray.
Overall, the theme of my writings was the contexts around what we were reading, and the style of commonplacing that I liked best was watching analytical video essays and taking notes on them. If I were to continue exploring literature through commonplace books, I would write reviews of video essays, or even write and produce a video essay of my own about the topic.
