The New Everyday, a MediaCommons Project, invites proposals for a special cluster on

Notes, Lists, and Everyday Inscriptions

The grocery list: scribbled on the back of last month’s electricity bill, or stored on the Treo, where it’s conveniently organized by supermarket aisle number. The to-do list: filling the pages of a breast-pocket notepad, or scrawled in bleeding ink on the back of your hand. That minor epiphany that struck on the subway: transcribed to a Moleskin, or translated into a Voice Memo on the iPhone.

Notes, lists, and everyday inscriptions take on a variety of formats, the choices among which are often dictated by function, by occasion, and by personal preference. These quotidian writings - typically unselfconscious and short, both in form and in lifespan - can serve a variety of purposes: as quick aides to memory, as casual means of communicating with others, or, according to historian Ann Blair, more generally as a means of “storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting.” Blair notes that there has been a good deal of recent research addressing the history of scholarly note-taking, “ut there has been little so far that addresses how note taking is changing as new tools have become and continue to become available, from the Post-it and the highlighter to software programs and the Palm Pilot” (“Note Taking as an Act of Transmission” Critical Inquiry 31:1 (Autumn 2004): 89). The iPad incunabula seems an especially ripe period to consider the state of the note.

This cluster of contributions to The New Everyday will consider how different processes of or platforms for everyday note-taking - either for formal research or for more mundane purposes - shape the ways we think, record, and remember; influence how we conceive of the relationships between writing/recording, memory, and self-reflection; and help us to cultivate our own everyday systems of “storing, sorting,…and selecting” information.

The New Everyday seeks 1500- to 2000-word “middle-state” contributions (i.e., pieces that lie somewhere between a blog post and a journal article) in any of a variety of formats: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/the-new-everyday/about. The “Notes, Lists and Everyday Inscriptions” cluster especially welcomes essays with multimedia content and proposals for theoretically informed creative work (to be accompanied by a short critical commentary).

Contributions might address…
*Historical note formats and collections - clay tablets, quipu, 15th century commonplace books, 19th century scrapbooks - in relation to their modern-day counterparts: blogs, personal databases (e.g., DEVONthink, Leap, FileMaker), note-taking and -organization programs (e.g., Evernote, OneNote, Springpad, etc.)
*Famous note collections and archives, like Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Chronofile
*Famous hand crib notes, à la Sarah Palin
*Marginalia in texts ranging from manuscripts to iBooks
*Refrigerators, computer monitors, and other places where notes commonly collect
*The recent emergence of several “found notes” collections, e.g., AnthroPosts’ (http://anthroposts.com/) collection of found Post-its; Found Magazine’s (http://www.foundmagazine.com/) and Things Magazine’s (http://www.thingsmagazine.net/projects/009/index.htm) collections of found notes
*Voice notes, video notes

For the first issue of The New Everyday: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/the-new-everyday/mercado

For more on MediaCommons: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/about-mediacommons


Please send brief (~150-word) proposals, links to relevant work, and a brief bio or c.v. to Shannon Mattern (matterns@newschool.edu ), “Notes” Cluster Curator, by April 23, 2010. Selected contributors will be contacted by April 27, and final submissions will be due by May 24. The cluster will go live on The New Everyday in early June.

Shannon Mattern, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Media Studies and Film
The New School
matterns@newschool.edu