Locke's Commonplace Book Method

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.