Making your own personal compendium in a paper notebook is one of the best methods for learning new topics and mastering your favorite subjects. Hey, welcome to ParkNotes. I'm Parker. I'm a philosopher and theologian. And this is a channel where I help you study, think, and read more deeply. This video is all about compendiums, or if we're being accurate to the Latin compendia, but I'm probably going to say compendiums because I'm an American swine. but it's all about this one style of keeping a notebook to help yourself learn new topics and master your favorite subjects. So, in this video, I'll describe the four different kinds of compendiums that you could keep. I'll show you three ways to find information for your compendiums, and then I'll explain how to actually use your compendium to learn and master the information that you collect for it. Now, I recently wrote up the information from this video in a blog post. So, if you want to read along, you can find that linked in the description. It is a paid post over there partially because it's a part of the research and writing I'm doing for my forthcoming book journal like a philosopher. So consider supporting me over there if you want to read the full thing. Otherwise keep watching this video to get the gist of all the info. So first things first, what is a compendium? A compendium is a collection of information and analysis about a body of knowledge. The information is usually meant to be comprehensive in its scope and systematically presented. These are related to encyclopedias in that an encyclopedia is meant to be a compendium of all human knowledge and these are usually organized alphabetically. So all encyclopedias are compendiums but not all compendiums are encyclopedias. So a good example of a compendium is this Peterson's field guide to reptiles and amphibians. It's a concise field guide to nearly 200 reptiles and amphibians of North America. When you open up this book, you find concise information on each animal on the left side of the page. And then on the right side, you find beautiful naturalistic art of the animal in view. And you'll see this is just a collection of information. This is not a commonplace book. A commonplace book is a collection of quotations, usually organized according to a particular scope and for a particular purpose, often according to common places or common headings or tags. Now, if you know me at all, you know that I am obsessed with commonplace books. I love them. If you want to learn more about those, you can find an entire playlist right here in the description. But let's get back to compendiums. In a compendium, you're not going to find quotations. You're just going to find the pertinent information. Another good example of a compendium would be the bullet journal compendium that comes with the official loyster 1917 bullet journal. This is a collection of information about how to go about keeping your bullet journal. It's just the information you need to get started and keep going with the system. So, it's comprehensive in its scope. It's everything you need to know about bullet journals. And it's systematically presented, so it's easy to reference. Again, it's not a commonplace book. It doesn't care about quotations. You're not going to find Ryder Carol's quotations in here. It's just about the information needed to keep your own bullet journal. So what I'm suggesting is that you start creating your own compendiums kind of like these examples that I've given in order to organize and collect information on topics you want to learn and master. Okay. So a question that you may be asking right now is if someone else has already made a compendium about the topics that I want to research and study and master, then why should I go about all the trouble of finding a notebook and creating my own compendiums? Well, the process of actually researching the information for your compendium and putting it in your own words instead of just quoting it verbatim will help you encode that information better and recall it better later on as well. Writing longhand notes in your own words helps you metabolize that information as you go. It helps you make the information your own. There's at least one psychological study that I found which backs this up. It's called the pen is mightier than the keyboard. advantages of longhand over laptop note-taking. The study has to do with taking lecture notes and it suggests that the students who took their notes by hand were actually forced to take more active notes since they couldn't write fast enough to copy the professor's words verbatim. This actually ended up helping them recall the information later on. So in your own compendiums, don't just copy over quotations from books that you read or journal articles, but instead try to analyze that information and put it in your own words while being as accurate as possible. The act of putting the information in your own words will help acquaint you with this information and will help you store it and make it easier to retrieve later on, which can eventually help you master it. Now, a second question you may be asking yourself is, why do I need a paper notebook? Well, there's another study which suggests that people who write down information in paper notebooks experienced better information acquisition, deeper encoding of information, and better retrieval of that information than those who used a tablet or a smartphone. All this suggests that the use of a paper notebook for information collection affects higher order brain functions and may have something to do with the spatial dimensions of a notebook and the tactile nature of it. So, I linked both of those studies below. So you guys can check those out for yourselves. Now, I'm a philosopher. I am an armchair philosopher, so I don't want to lean on those studies too heavily. I'm not a research psychologist, but I will say that the results of those two studies do cohhere with my own experience as a grad student for 11 semesters. I have a very hard time remembering information from courses where I took down lecture notes verbatim and on my laptop. And I have a much easier time remembering information from courses where I took notes with pen and paper. I have a hard time remembering information from books I read on Kindle, even on my Kindle Paperwhite, which does allow me to annotate. And I have a much easier time remembering information from physical books and papers I printed out and annotated. There seems to be something about the spatial dimensions of physical books and notebooks that help you encode information better and retrieve it more easily. And this fact bears out in my own experience. Likewise, there's something about struggling to put information in your own words that helps you store it better and recall it faster and more easily. So, all that to say, I think you should start your compendium in a paper notebook. And if you hate it, at least you have some kind of evidence that it doesn't work for you. And when a paper pusher like me comes along, you can say, "Look, I already tried that. I like digital better." So, at least give paper notebooks a shot. Now, how do you actually go about starting your own compendium? Well, first get yourself a notebook. I like lost term 1917 A5s, but maybe those are too big for your first compendium. You may like a B6 plus or one of the Fieldnotes 64page notebooks instead. It doesn't really matter all that much. Just get yourself a notebook. Next, determine the topic of your compendium. What do you want to study? What do you need to learn? Just ask yourself two questions. Is my compendium meant to be general or topic specific? If it's general, then maybe we'll call this an encyclopedia. And if it's topic specific, we'll call it a topic specific compendium. Next, we'll determine the intended use of your compendium. Is your compendium a collection of information for personal use like using for writing papers or for studying for tests or for writing your blogs or book reviews or for referencing on your YouTube videos? Or is your compendium a collection of information that you intend to pass along to others? Maybe your child or your friend or your subscribers. Are you going to publish your compendium online somewhere or have it printed up for mass production? How you answer those two questions will determine which of the four kinds of compendiums you want to keep. So, what's the topic? Is it meant to be general? If it's general, maybe we'll call that an encyclopedia because encyclopedias are compendiums of all human knowledge. And your personal encyclopedia, which is just general information, is like a collection of all your personal knowledge. If it's meant to be topic specific, if it's just about one particular topic, then we'll call that a topic specific compendium. And then what is the intended use of your compendium? Is it just for you to study and master topics that you want to learn about or do you intend to share it with someone else like your daughter or like your subscribers? If it's just for you, then we'll call them personal compendiums or encyclopedias. And if it's intended to share information with others, we'll call it public or communal compendiums or encyclopedias. Man, that is a mouthful. I'm getting sick of saying compendium. But we're almost done. So, now we have the four kinds of compendiums that you could keep. A personal encyclopedia. This is a collection of information on all sorts of topics that you find interesting or want to remember, but which is just meant for your own personal use. We have a public encyclopedia. This is a collection of information on all sorts of topics that you find interesting or want to remember which you publish for others to use or which you pass on to your own kids or someone else. Then we have a personal topic specific compendium. This is a collection of information on one particular topic to help you personally learn, remember and master the topic. And finally, we have a public or communal topic specific compendium, which is a collection of information on one particular topic to help others learn, remember, and master the topic as you've learned it. Now, I think that the personal topic specific compendium is the very best tool that you can use to learn a new topic and to master that topic. But I do kind of keep some of these other styles of compendiums as well. I have a kind of personal encyclopedia which I've called my contemplatio. This is just a collection of a bunch of information that I want to master and remember, but there's no specific theme to it. It's just a bunch of information I want to personally remember. Things like the difference between Cartisian minds and Kant's transcendental ego or Luciano Fluid's life cycle of information or a quick look at the history of artificial intelligence. I also keep something like a public encyclopedia. This is my good idea holocron. It's a collection of all the good ideas that I write down in my pocket notebooks. I abstract them out when I'm done and I put them in here to be worked on and published on my blog or make it into a video on one of my various YouTube channels. I don't really keep a public topic specific compendium, but you can look at something like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for something like that. Yes, it's called an encyclopedia, but it kind of is a topic specific compendium because it's about philosophy. Now, philosophy is such a broad and huge topic that I guess it does make sense to call it the encyclopedia of philosophy because philosophy touches on so many different things. There's so many different subfields, but I guess we don't really need to split hairs this much. That's the kind of thing I'm thinking of as a public topic specific compendium. And I don't really keep one of these. But I have been starting to keep a lot of personal topic specific compendiums. things like my philosophy of time compendium. My own personal philosophy compendium, which is a collection of information that I often forget but don't want to forget anymore. My philosophy of mind compendium. My personal handbook, which is a compendium of my goals and my resolutions, which is meant for reflection and habituation. This helps me know myself and rule myself. And then I've started some others, but you don't care about all of my compendiums. Let's talk about how to find the entries for your compendium. So, first off, the scope will determine what entries go in your compendium. What's the theme or topic of your compendium? Okay. Now, go out and find that kind of information. Go read books and blogs and listen to podcasts and email professors and take courses online or in person on those topics you want to learn and on those subjects you want to master. Now, I've come up with three ways that you can go about collecting the information for your entries in your compendium. The first way I'm just calling ad hoc entries. These are entries as you go. So as you find interesting or important information, you add the information into the proper compendium. Maybe you find an article on the philosophy of time. Add that information to your philosophy of time compendium. This is an ad hoc process. You're adding as you go and as you find the information, but you don't have particular entries in mind beforehand. Next up is post hawk entries. These are entries after the fact. So you keep a personal encyclopedia of all the information you want to remember or master. You create headings for each entry so you can come back and find the information you want to study. At a later time you go through your personal encyclopedia and create new entries based on the information you've already collected. Now you may find a pattern in the kinds of information that you're drawn to. Maybe like a third of the information is on distinctions between a republic and a democracy. If that's the case and it's taking up so much of your general encyclopedia, then it looks like you have the topic for a new topic specific compendium and you can just roll that off and create a new one. And then finally, we have ant hawk entries, entries beforehand. In this mode of creating entries for your compendium, you'll come up with the kinds of entries you want beforehand. And then you go out and you find the information needed to complete them. So, how do you do this? Well, you come up with a list and create an index for yourself in the back of your notebook. I've come to love the upside down and backwards method of creating an index. You just flip the notebook upside down and then you turn it backwards and you start the index upside down and backwards and you're going this way while the information in your compendium is going that way. So eventually the two will meet up but you have as much space as you need for your index. You can keep going. The whole thing could be an index if you want. It's not going to be because the content will take up more space than the actual index itself. But this way you can have the two meet in the middle and you don't run out of space. One of the really hard things about coming up with categories and entries beforehand is you don't really know the topic all that well. You're using your compendium to learn the topic and to master it. So you do a little bit of preliminary research and you come up with some things you want to research, but as you study and learn, you're going to realize there's a whole lot of other categories and topics that you want to study. So just flip your notebook upside down and backwards and add in those new topics you want to go out and study. So that's how we can make our compendiums. But how do we actually use them for studying? Well, first up, you flip through it often. The act of making your compendium notebook will already help you encode and recall the information you collect, but bringing it with you to a coffee shop or on your commute, and reading back through it will also help you remember the information as well. Also, you can put it on your nightstand and flip through it before bed in order to get that information deep into your mind for encoding as you sleep. The second way is to use it for active recall. So, read through an entry from your compendium, close the notebook, then try to reproduce that information from memory on a scratch piece of paper. If it's super easy to do, then it looks like you have that information in your head. If not, then you need to do some more work with that entry. Open up to that entry and reread it and try again. You can also try active recall by speaking it out loud by yourself. So you open up to an entry, you read it over, you close the notebook, and then you try to actively recall that information by speaking it out and trying to reproduce that entry out loud by yourself. This is a way to activate different parts of your brain, different parts of your cognitive system and your senses. And then another way to use active recall is trying to explain the information from your entries to someone else. teaching someone else will help you process and store the information better. Now, a really important thing to remember is this is like a first draft. This is not a final product. You don't have to turn this in. This is not going to be mass- prodduced. This is your first draft compendium. You're using it as a tool to help you learn. So, if you have to scribble things out or maybe tear out an entire entry or scribble out the whole thing, that's okay. This is a first draft. Maybe you have to make two or three in order to get the final one, but you're probably not going to ever have a final compendium unless you are under contract and publishing it. If it's a personal use at all, then it's for your personal use. It's a tool. Don't get all stressed out about making it perfect and writing perfect and getting all the information exactly perfectly right every single time. It's a work in progress and that's actually a good thing. Okay, so that's that. This video was kind of a compendium on compendiums and now I am done saying that word maybe forever. I hope you guys found this video helpful. If you did then leave me your thoughts in a comment and make sure you leave me a little thinking emoji. Make sure to like this video and share it with a friend. And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any tips and tricks in the notebook space and a bunch of weird random philosophy stuff. All right, that's going to do it for now. I'll catch you guys next time.