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Memory, Repetition, and the Commonplace Book

Undergraduate thesis 2025-12-01 2 min read

Tracing a seventeenth-century note-taking practice into modern spaced-repetition tools.

Abstract. This thesis traces a line from the early-modern commonplace book to the spaced-repetition software of the present, arguing that both are technologies of repetition under headings — systems for making a sentence return to you at the right moment. I read the two practices as answers to the same problem, separated by three centuries and a scheduling algorithm.1

1. The problem both practices solve

The problem is forgetting. A reader encounters more than they can hold, and needs a way to bring the useful fragment back at the moment it is useful. The commonplace book solved this spatially, by sorting excerpts under topical headings the reader would later consult.2 Spaced repetition solves it temporally, by scheduling the fragment to reappear just before it would be forgotten.3

2. Repetition under headings

What unites them is not the notebook or the flashcard but the heading — the claim that memory is improved by structured return rather than raw rereading.4 The early-modern student copied a passage under “Friendship” so it could be found; the modern student tags a card so it can be scheduled. Both convert reading into a retrievable object.

A note you cannot find again is not a note. It is a feeling you once had.

3. What is lost in the translation

The algorithm gains precision and loses the hand. The commonplace book’s friction — the copying, the second reading — was not a bug but part of the encoding.5 Software that removes the transcription may schedule the return perfectly and weaken the trace it is returning to. This is the thesis’s central worry, and its open question.

Bibliography

  • Ebbinghaus, Hermann. Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. 1885. Translated by Henry A. Ruger and Clara E. Bussenius. Teachers College, 1913.
  • Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Roediger, Henry L., and Jeffrey D. Karpicke. “Test-Enhanced Learning.” Psychological Science 17, no. 3 (2006): 249–255.

Footnotes

  1. The thesis is historical and conceptual, not experimental; claims about modern software are interpretive. ↩

  2. Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford University Press, 1996), 1–15. ↩

  3. Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory (1885; Teachers College, 1913), on the forgetting curve. ↩

  4. Henry L. Roediger and Jeffrey D. Karpicke, “Test-Enhanced Learning,” Psychological Science 17, no. 3 (2006): 249–255. ↩

  5. I develop the “friction as encoding” point less formally in A Commonplace Book, Six Months In. ↩