Locus Communis: Twitter as Digital Commonplace

“Each commonplace will be very short: how pleasant it would be to feel copious as well as fluid!
the modern mind takes such small flights.” ~E.M. Forster, Commonplace Book

Commonplace Book of Francis Grosvenor, circa 1620.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Beinecke Flickr Laboratory, licensed by Creative Commons.

Commonplace books are staples of western thought; in and through their pages many of the
world's most renowned writers and thinkers cobbled together bits of information gleaned from
their studies and observations, from literary quotes to tables and measures. Maintaining a
commonplace book was an inventional and creative learning endeavor, a means by which an
individual could make sense of the world around her. Through the cobbling, information gained
new meaning by juxtaposition and alternate contextualization, so that connections could be made
upon a theme or themes. In terms more congruent with our contemporary, digitally-networked
society, the commonplace book was an analog aggregator of external content.
While blogging activities have been loosely related to the practice of commonplacing, the
proliferation of microblogging services—most notably Twitter—has fomented writing activity
which bears a striking resemblance to the rapid, variegated, and brief entries typical of the
commonplace book. This presentation and paper considers the pedagogical import and
application of the digital commonplace book, looking to Twitter in particular as an inventional
writing practice which is aggregable, searchable, persistent, and collaborative in ways that the
analog commonplace book never could be.

Drawing specifically from research in computer-supported collaborative work, rhetoric and

writing studies, and pedagogical case-studies which leveraged Twitter to support student-led
thematic inquiry, this presentation and paper applies long-standing norms of literate meaning-
making to a radically misunderstood and emerging platform. As the commonplace book for the
early twenty-first century, Twitter enables something that analog commonplacing could do only
marginally: the addition of overlapping publics, a self-selected, real-time, mobile, and constantly
shifting integration of thoughts and ideas from distributed participants. The sociotechnical
infrastructure of Twitter as digital commonplace can support inventional and learning activities
from individuals around the world, in real-time, giving students an entirely new understanding of
“places in common.”

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Brian J. McNely
Ball State University

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Prepared in advance of iDMAa 2009, the International Digital Media and Art Association's 7 th
annual conference, November 5-7, 2009.