Register for a CSMC workshop
Accumulating Notes
Notebooks, Diaries and Related Examples of Everyday Writing as Multilayered Written Artefacts
When: Friday, 1 December 2023, 2:00 pm CET – Saturday, 2 December 2023, 2:45 pm CET
Where: Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg, and online
Recent scholarship has proposed to approach written artefacts as ‘evolving entities’ (Friedrich and Schwarke 2016) and suggested frameworks for the analysis of their development over the course of time (Gumbert 2004). Such a stratigraphic analysis, aiming to identify the multiple ‘layers’ of written artefacts, has been successfully applied to artefacts produced in the course of a more or less clearly identifiable and planned ‘project’. However, the potential of the stratigraphic approach remains largely untapped for written artefacts that are designed or expected to accumulate notes over a given period of time such as diaries, notebooks, or logs and in which their production and development 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 visualization, organization, and transmission of knowledge, the present workshop invites scholars working on written artefacts involved in practices of note-taking to address them as multilayered objects. Taking into account not only the development of collections of notes over time, but also the different origins and (possibly) further uses of notes, it aims to uncover patterns in the practice(s) of note-taking and the artefacts resulting from such practices.
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