For the love of notecards
About the little rectangles that foreshadowed my fondness for little yellow squares
Before sticky notes, notecards won my heart.
Imagining my hometown’s public library still brings a smile to my face. Back when I was in grade school, the library stood in a brick building on State Street. I gazed at its mounted four-faced clock as my mom lead me through the library’s glass door.
We were there so I could complete my first ever research paper assignment. I feel like I was in third grade, but it could have been fourth. The topic, I cannot recall. But the notecards, and the way we used them, are held fondly in my mind.
Our teacher had instructed us to make two kinds of cards after we chose our sources. First, we made a notecard for each source. We wrote the title, and probably the author, on the thick pink line at the top, and then we wrote other information about the source on the thinner, blue lines that filled the card.
Then, as we found information in the books about our topic, we wrote each quote on its own card, along with its page number and just enough information—maybe the last name of the author, maybe a word or two of the title—to tie it back to its source card.
Perhaps you're starting to notice something about how I recall this memory: It wasn't the details of the note taking system that stuck with me. Instead, I became enamored with the chunking of information and the links between those chunks of information.
Soon, I had a dozen cards laying before me, and I could arrange them as I liked. I could use them to think outside my brain.
And so I wrote that first research paper, and I became forever delighted and at home using small, rectangular office supplies to make connections.
I have returned to these small and mighty pieces of paper as I work on a poster for the IA Conference next month. I'm creating a concept map about how emotions relate to each other, largely informed by Brené Brown's book Atlas of the Heart.
That’s where y’all come in. Something I’m planning to include are connections between emotions written by other authors, including artists. Poet Andrea Gibson, for instance, says, “Joy is just easier / to carry than sorrow.”
I'm particularly interested in perspectives from people of color, non-binary and trans folks, folks with learning differences or disabilities, and all the other diverse and beautiful identities that often get ignored.
If you happen upon (or already hold dear) any connections between emotions in your own wanderings through “sources,” please send them my way. I'll be sure to credit you on the poster.
Mentioned in this issue: My hometown library, then housed in a 1904 First National Bank building; “chunking” information, a phrase I learned from my mentor Thom Haller; Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown; and poet Andrea Gibson and her beautiful and hopeful poem about an impossibly difficult way to live.