English 212

Definition:   For this week’s blog post, it is revolving around books, specifically, how ideas and information are spread and how these have changed over time. First, I needed to find a definition of “book” from a long list, and I chose one by writer, designer, and book artist Warren Lehrer. He defined a book as “A book is a time-based medium made up of sequenced pages, bound together, composed to animate a reader with ideas, feelings, information, stories. An intimate and flexible medium, a book can take many forms, be large, small, physical, digital, produced as one-of-a-kind, in editions, and in hybrid platforms. It is usually portable, interactive and haptic. Most commonly, word-laden, a book’s contents can be composed of words, images, shapes, colors, symbols, pop-ups, cut-outs, sounds, smells, and any combination of these. ” Why I picked it and why I like this definition: This definition stood out to me in comparison to the rest as it covered so many aspects of the w...

  What a commonplace book is: These past two weeks I have been creating a collection of quotes in my commonplace book. A commonplace book is a tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages. The concept of these books is to place words worth remembering in a single home; these can be ideas, arguments or quotes typically by another individual. These books are an effective way to catalog pieces of information or inspiration that you may come across in one’s day to day life. There are multiple benefits to keeping a book close by dedicated to things you found interesting. The first is to remember what inspired you. In today’s day and age, there are so many things one sees and learns in a day that it becomes very difficult to remember it all. In an article about how the brain separates important and unimportant information, the authors Sabine Heim and Andreas Keil stated that “Scientists have measured the amount of data that enter the brain and found that an average person living today pr...