The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

Pieve San Stefano, a small town near Florence, declared itself the ‘Città del diario’ in 1984, opening a museum – the charmingly named Piccolo Museo del Diario – to which any diary may be donated. France’s Association pour l’autobiographie followed in 1992, Germany’s Tagebucharchiv in 1998, London’s Great Diary Project in 2007, and the Nederlands Dagboekarchief in 2009. All of these collections offer to preserve and catalogue any personal diaries they are sent, giving historians a new kind of resource, less systematic than a traditional library yet wonderfully idiosyncratic, and presenting – as the Piccolo Museo puts it – ‘history told from below’. Like the Old Weather Project, the archives use volunteer readers to decipher, describe and catalogue the diaries and journals in their possession. At some point, no doubt, some of this work will be assigned to AI, allowing millions of handwritten pages to be transcribed and indexed for digital search. Who knows what stories that process will unearth?