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John Locke was famous in his day for his method of indexing journals.[1] It has been discussed here before.[2] [1] https://fs.blog/2014/07/john-locke-common-pl

• kragen 6y ago
  That's very similar to my address-book approach! It seems like he was allocating his linked-list nodes in page granularity, thus substantially improving locality of reference — I should probably try that the next time I do an address-book in this style, though maybe for an address-book a quarter-page or so would be a better granularity. Thank you for the reference! I find that for notes that often grow to multiple pages, the table of contents at the end serves well enough to find them; I might have some 256 items in there at the end of a notebook, and I often remember more or less what date I wrote about something, allowing me to find it fairly quickly in the table of contents. I also include a little icon next to each one, about the size of two letters, which helps somewhat. It's interesting to note in https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685 https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method... that not only didn't Locke have separate entries for I/J and U/V/W (which were two letters at the time rather than five) but also omitted K and Y. (Also, he seems to have listed all the page numbers in the table rather than just the first one — perhaps he wasn't making a linked list at all? Perhaps with linking he could have gotten some advantage out of my two-dimensional approach.)