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Locke's Commonplace Book Method
John Locke's 1685 treatise on indexing a commonplace book — a vowel-based retrieval system so important to its author that he published it as a standalone work, and a monument to the early modern seriousness about curatorial technology.
The Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils, published by John Locke in French in 1685 and translated into English in 1706 as A New Method of a Common-Place-Book, laid out an indexing system of extraordinary specificity. Locke's method assigned each entry to a heading based on the first letter of the keyword and the first vowel that followed it, creating a two-dimensional index that allowed rapid retrieval from a commonplace book of any size. Locke considered the method important enough to publish as a freestanding treatise — a detail that reveals how seriously the early modern intellectual tradition took curatorial technology. The work is now cited by Blair as a paradigm case of the kind of deliberate, technical response to information abundance that the AI era needs but has barely begun to develop.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The method was a response to a practical problem. Locke had