Accumulating Notes: Note-Taking and Multilayered Written Artefacts

People take notes in different contexts of their daily lives and for various purposes. While brief handwritten notes can occur individually, for example, as a Post-it note, they are also collected over the course of time in notebooks, diaries, or logs. Recent scholarship has proposed to approach written artefacts as ’evolving entities’ and suggested frameworks to analyse the layers of material and/or content that they acquire over time. Such a stratigraphic analysis has been fruitfully applied to many types of written artefacts, especially those produced during a clearly identifiable and planned project. However, the potential of this approach remained largely untapped for written artefacts whose production does not follow a predefined plan or necessarily proceed in an orderly fashion. Focusing on the multifarious manifestations of notes as material tools for the visualisation, organisation, and transmission of knowledge, this volume aims to fill this gap. The present volume sheds light on how practices of note-taking and knowledge organisation (re)shape written artefacts and vice-versa by dissecting the processes in which notes accumulate in a variety of multilayered written artefacts from different cultures and periods.

José Maksimczuk, University of Hamburg, CSMC, Hamburg; Thies Staack, University of Hamburg, CSMC, Hamburg, Germany.