Author: Adam Breckler
Original: Mar 21, 2019 · 4 min read
Quick! What do you know about Leonardo da Vinci? He painted the Mona Lisa! He also wrote his notes backwards. He designed supercool bridges and flying machines. He was a genius about, um… a lot of other… things…
It turns out, in addition to all of that, Leonardo was also a copious note taker.
Leonardo’s notebooks are a fascinating insight into his mind. Now the British Library has published its collection online, it’s even easier to study them — with or without translation
His notebooks, writes Jonathan Jones at *The Guardian,* represent:
“the living record of a universal mind.” And yet, though a “technophile” himself, “when it came to publication, Leonardo was a luddite…. He made no effort to get his notes published.”
Why? Was he secretive, or just waiting for the right moment, a moment that never came?
Instead, his writings and drawings survived as notes, which he left to his loyal pupil Francesco Melzi. Some of these were in small bound books — the V&A in London has one on permanent display that fits in the palm of an adult hand — while others were on larger sheets that were bound or rebound after Leonardo’s death giving us a glimpse into the mind of one of the greatest thinkers and knowledge harvestors in history.
The Internet is the greatest forest of information and collective knowledge ever known. How can we better navigate its pathways?
Valentin Perez showcases his Notion board dedicated to organizing notes by topic called a Topic forest, along with his own ‘Digital Brain’ page
Many tools like Evernote, Pocket and countless others have attempted to put a modern spin on the concept of notebooking, which has evolved into bookmarking in a digital context.
However, none of these tools are quite suited towards building a collection of links alongside providing a way of annotating notes, together.
Thankfully Notion provides a flexible enough tool to combine the best of notes and bookmarks together in a single place, allowing for new creative forms of note-taking and note/taxonomy classification than previously available.
