More Metadata Monday: The Notebooks

In my blog post last Monday, I speculated a bit that I wrote fewer words on my blog because I shifted some of my writing to a notebook. Here I’m following a recent trend toward using handwriting as an escape from our digitally mediated world, as a way to slow down and think more carefully, and as a place to write about situations on campus and in my research that perhaps are not appropriate or best suited for the ole blog.

To make matters more complicated, I also kept three notebooks. A small yellow notebook where I wrote … quick notes. I used it for writing notes on lectures, while traveling, and in the library. It generally was not a place for complete sentences, much less paragraphs. I only wrote in this notebook using a ballpoint pen.

I also kept a larger A4 size notebook for writing my class notes. This was the first time since graduate school that I hand-wrote my class notes. Again, I used a ballpoint pen for these. To be clear, these weren’t detailed lecture notes, but more “order of ceremonies” as Tom Isern calls them (here are some of his musings on hand writing and teaching).

My third notebook which was black, A5 and lined, was where business took place. Over the course of the year, I wrote 63 pages in the notebook. I used a range of relatively inexpensive fountain pens before settling on a LAMY Safari and Kaweco Sport (fine) as my go to pens (and for Christmas, my wife gave me a Kaweco Sport Brass (fine)). I wrote around 150 words per page over 65 numbered and dated entries (with two duplicate numbers because apparently I can’t count). Over the course of these entries, I referred to over 30 publications (allaying a fear that I might not cite as fully in handwritten text). In total, this notebook accounted for around 9000 words that did not appear in my blog. These words and the handful of posts written since last Monday nudged my informal writing total over 140,000 words and closer to my 150k annual average.

These entries focused on a number of themes including my book project, some observations on recent books and articles, some work on teaching, and some work on “academic life.” Re-reading my entries, I think I’ve developed a bit of a voice for my notebook that is a bit more reflective, more raw, and perhaps even more animated than in my blog. It’s more private writing in the end, while still being boring and broadly professional. I don’t drop all my standards and have started to develop a way to cite other works.

The big question for me is whether handwriting successfully calmed my thoughts, slowed me down, and got me thinking in productive (or at least new or interesting) ways. My answer comes at the risk of further abusing the quintessential undergraduate word: somewhat. I have come to look forward to writing in my notebook, and it has become as much part of my habit as my blog.

That said, I find it harder to compose longer essays, thoughts, and narratives in the notebook. Perhaps some of this is simply physical (or as we say now, “embodied”). The discipline of holding the pen and scratching out words is just distracting enough and difficult enough to make me think in shorter and more fragmentary bursts. This has tempered my silly idea of handwriting a book on slow archaeology. I wonder whether by limiting my tendency to “go on” (and my own discursive writing style), the notebook offers a useful counterweight to my usual writing style. Maybe this is its benefit?

Appendix

Index of Key Words in my 2025 Notebook Entries Includes only entries written in 2025 from #59 to #105 (December 15, 2025)

Keyword	Notebook Page Numbers	Entry Number(s)
Anthropocene	40, 82	#65, #98
Archaeology	40, 41, 44, 53, 54, 62, 66, 82, 83, 86	#65, #66, #69, #76, #77, #85, #88, #98, #99, #102
Assemblage	52, 53, 61, 64, 65	#76, #83, #85, #88
Bakken (Oil Patch)	67, 68, 71, 83, 90	#88, #90, #98, #104
Bataille, Georges	45, 46	#71
Blavatsky, Helena	77, 78	#95
Blog / Blog Post	48, 70, 71	#74, #89, #90
Boom / Bust	67, 68, 69	#88, #89
Bureaucracy	66, 67	#87
Capitalism	34, 35, 47, 52, 53, 86	#59, #60, #73 bis, #76, #102
Chair (Departmental)	67, 85, 87	#87, #101
Collaboration	34, 36, 54	#59, #61, #77
Conviviality	34, 36, 54	#59, #61, #77
Consumer / Consumerism	43, 44, 52, 53	#69, #76
Contemporary	40, 44, 68, 82, 83	#65, #69, #88, #98, #99
Cosmopolitanism	90, 91, 92	#104, #105
Disaster	35, 65, 66	#60, #86
Energy	36, 45, 47, 53	#61, #71, #73, #76
Fear	37, 38	#62
Fire	34, 35	#59, #60
Flows	61, 62, 68, 82	#83, #85, #88, #98
Fragment / Fragmentation	39, 41, 42, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68	#64, #67, #83, #85, #86, #88
Hope	37, 42, 43, 46	#62, #67, #68, #72
Korea / Korean	47, 50, 51, 53, 54	#73, #75, #77
Little Magazines	76, 84, 92	#94, #100, #105
McGeough, Kevin	57, 69, 87	#80, #89, #102
Minneapolis	57, 58, 85	#80
Modernity	41, 43, 44, 51, 61, 65, 76, 86	#66, #69, #75, #83, #85, #88, #94, #102
Morale	36, 85, 86, 87	#61, #101
Narrative	38, 39, 59, 60, 66, 67, 68, 86	#63, #64, #82, #83, #87, #88, #102
New Topographics	61, 64, 65	#83, #85, #86
NDQ / North Dakota Quarterly	76, 79, 84, 91, 92	#94, #96, #100, #104, #105
Oil	44, 47, 60, 61, 67, 82, 83, 86	#69, #73, #83, #84, #88, #98, #99, #102
Photography	48, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 82	#74, #83, #84, #85, #86, #88, #98
Polis (Cyprus)	73, 74	#91, #92
Pseudoarchaeology	35, 46, 77, 87, 88	#60, #72, #95, #102
Regionalism	77, 90, 91, 92	#95, #104, #105
Schedule / Time	39, 41, 42	#64