Imagine you have a recipe for a dish you like. You copied the ingredients and instructions from a magazine once, or your mother wrote it by hand decades ago. You decide to use the recipe, and from its list of ingredients you make a shopping list. Some things you already have at home, other items you need to get. You think of the one or two different shops you’d need to go to, and list the different items in a way that follows the order in which you will walk through the store. Would you describe the recipe as creative output? And the shopping list? Yes, no, neither, or both? Which one would you think qualifies for copyright?
The recipe (both the directions and the ingredient list) is seen as a mere statement of fact. Copyright is not applicable. That’s why cookbooks usually have a clear curated selection stated in their title (‘The 50 most cherished Indian recipes from around the UK diaspora’), photos (the dish with a sprig of herbs positioned just so), and anecdotal flourishes (‘Upon entering the village I saw an old grandmother make this in front of her house, and she shared the family secret of this incredible sauce with me’). Because those elements do carry copyright. Just not the recipe as such. Take 500 grams of chopped tomatoes and cook for 12 minutes on a low fire. Add half a tablespoon of powdered cayenne peppers and stir. Serve cold.
Your shopping list is a unique thing in comparison. It contains a curated list of ingredients (excluding the things you already have), and you ordered them to align with your actual physical path through one or more shops that you mentally selected to go to. Maybe you crossed something out, and added it in a different place after first making the list. Maybe you added one or two other things that you need, as you are going to the store anyway. This does clear the, deliberately very low, hurdle for creative effort recognised by copyright law. It’s just that you as author perhaps think of it as ephemeral, trivial, and something you may well leave at the bottom of the shopping cart as you exit the store.
Some lists are of course solely statements of fact, e.g. a list of all the heads of state and the years of their reign, the planets in our solar system in whichever order, a bibliography of an author. When you add a little bit of purpose to a list, moving it to an unique expression of an idea you had, then it quickly becomes something else.
A creative artefact.
A list that is the result of some internal process of yours with some internal logic, even if it eludes another person encountering the list, is more than the sum of its items. Curation, selection and exclusion, ordering, at one or more levels of hierarchy, are determined by and express the intention and purpose of the list maker.
List maker.
It’s something E calls me every now and then, list maker. Because quite often my first response to anything that requires planning, thinking, or writing is ‘I’ll make a little list’. Because sitting down and making a first list is beginning the work. Writing a list is not the result of thinking, but part of the process of thinking itself.
An Outliner tool is a key digital list making aid (even if they all have their limitations). A good Outliner allows you to put making lists ‘on rails’ as Dave Winer put it.
Moving an item up or down, to the top or the bottom. Nesting a thing under another, or deeper still. Moving a nested item up a level of hierarchy. Hide the subitems under a thing, or revealing them. Make a connection with an element elsewhere in an outline or with/in a different outline. Turn lines into bullets into numberings and back. Switch between different types of visualisation, one of which is the outline. All made seamless with keyboard shortcuts.
In the 1968 Mother of All Demoes Doug Engelbart, showing his vision of what computers should and can do, impresses the audience when he moves things in a list around in an outliner and switches between visualisations of the list, before using another outline for a presentation. The list he makes is of course a shopping list.
Many of the lists I use emerged over time from my notes and work, a type of emergent and earned structure. Some have both an outline structure and a more visualised networked one (a tool like Tinderbox allows you to switch between views, so does Obsidian with Excalidraw). Some have a bit more complicated inner structure or are partly dynamic or help with decision making, making them small knowledge machines.
There are many types of lists I regularly make and use.
- Checklists for various processes and events (like travel), and periodic reviews
- Dashboards, which are (check)lists in two dimensions, that ensure I take into account all aspects of something.
- Daylogs with links to appointment notes, listing events, links to things I found and interstitial journaling.
- Maps of Content (or elephant paths as I call them)
- Memory palace overviews (listing loci) of places I might use as mnemonic device
- Card decks for spaced repetition.
- Outlines of texts I’m writing, outlines of presentations, both with links to underlying notes and references.
- Interests I currently have (questions, examples) and how I might see them as elements of practice, knowledge fundament etc.
- Tasks lists, selected on context (train, home office, company office etc), effort, energy level and time needed.
- A spreadsheet that provides, yes, my shopping list for larger parties, based on the list of participants, their dietary requests etc., based on previous parties and amounts consumed.
- Book lists
Book lists are like any list in that they involve selection and ordering too. They are also a bit more than a creative artefact.
Book lists are libraries.
Any list of books you create is a library, even if it’s a library of the mind that you make tangible in a list.
The list of books that are in my home office book case for instance is a simple example describing that part of the actual collection of physical books in our home. But there are more book lists I work with.
All the books, whether I (still) own them or not, that I have read in a given year.
All the physical and electronic non-fiction books I own and have not read yet, by topic. Or don’t have yet but thought interesting enough to note. They form a reservoir of preselected books I thought might be of interest at some point, that can serve as a research tool. That list I call my anti-library.
Or a similar list for unread fiction books I have, to use when selecting a new book to start in.
A list of books I may want to acquire at some point (generated from what I come across online and in shops that looks interesting or fun, without buying it), a library of wishes of sorts.
A list of books I definitely do not want to own or read, which contains books I have regularly come across thinking they looked interesting, and then realising I had rejected them a few times in the past already, and also contains authors I want to avoid.
These lists overlap, interlink and morph. Most of my daily note making is in the shape of lists, where items may get extended into paragraphs. Using outliner functionality I move them around, extend, link and change them. Parts get shunted into their own notes, some becoming a note in my core personal knowledge notes, others ending up in more mundane notes. Most will remain where I wrote them. Some will become lists I use more frequently or have a structure that is a piece of personal knowledge in itself, such as the ones listed above.
Making lists is not a chore or something predefined, but key to the work of eliciting meaning from all the disparate things I encounter in a day. It allows manipulation of all the small bits of information, from which meaning and structure may emerge. It’s a way to locally reduce entropy in my notes where useful.
Make lists. As your creative artefacts, as your libraries.
State of the art list making, 1968. (Screenshot of the 1968 demo by Doug Engelbart of an outlining tool)
