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[35]More From Object Lessons

More From Object Lessons

  [36]Explore This Series
    * A monocle-wearing spectator looks on as Richard Smith, the former
      chairman and CEO of Equifax, testifies before the U.S. Senate
      Banking Committee.
   Monocles Were Never Cool[37]Austin Grossman
    * Robert F. Kennedy and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
      hiking through the woods wearing outdoors gear.
   The Military Origins of Layering[38]Rachel S. Gross
    * Candy Land Was Invented for Polio Wards[39]Alexander B. Joy
    * A black-and-white image of a woman sleeping next to a sound
      conditioner
   How a Bad Night’s Sleep Birthed the Sound Conditioner[40]Mack Hagood

  [41]Technology

How the Index Card Cataloged the World

  Carl Linnaeus, the father of biological taxonomy, also had a hand in
  inventing this tool for categorizing anything. An [42]Object Lesson.


   By [43]Daniela Blei

  A lined index card on a yellow background
  Daniel Sambraus / Getty
  December 1, 2017
  (BUTTON) Share

  Like every graduate student, I once holed up in the library cramming
  for my doctoral oral exams. This ritual hazing starts with a long
  reading list. Come exam day, the scholar must prove mastery of a field,
  whether it’s Islamic art or German history. The student sits before a
  panel of professors, answering questions drawn from the book list.

  To prepare for this initiation, I bought a lifetime supply of index
  cards. On each four-by-six rectangle, I distilled the major points of a
  book. My index cards—portable, visual, tactile, easily rearranged and
  reshuffled—got me through the exam.

  Yet it never occurred to me, as I rehearsed my talking points more than
  a decade ago, that my index cards belonged to the very European history
  I was studying. The index card was a product of the Enlightenment,
  conceived by one of its towering figures: Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish
  botanist, physician, and the father of modern taxonomy. But like all
  information systems, the index card had unexpected political
  implications, too: It helped set the stage for categorizing people, and
  for the prejudice and violence that comes along with such
  classification.

                                   * * *

  In 1767, near the end of his career, Linnaeus began to [44]use “little
  paper slips of a standard size” to record information about plants and
  animals. According to the historians Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan
  Müller-Wille, these paper slips offered “an expedient solution to an
  information-overload crisis” for the Swedish scientist. More than 1,000
  of them, measuring five by three inches, are housed at London’s
  [45]Linnean Society. Each contains notes about plants and material
  culled from books and other publications. While flimsier than heavy
  stock and cut by hand, they’re virtually indistinguishable from modern
  index cards.

  The Swedish scientist is more often credited with another invention:
  binomial nomenclature, the latinized two-part name assigned to every
  species. Before Linnaeus, rambling descriptions were used to identify
  plants and animals. A tomato, for example, was a mouthful: Solanum
  caule inermi herbaceo foliis pinnatis incisis. After Linnaeus, the
  round fruit became Solanum lycopersicum. Thanks to his landmark study,
  Systema Naturae, naturalists had a universal language, which organized
  the natural world into the nested hierarchies still used today—species,
  genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom.

  In 18th-century Europe, Linnaeus became a household name. “Tell him I
  know no greater man on earth,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau of his
  Swedish idol. Like other savants of his day, Rousseau saw the study of
  plants as a moral pursuit, a virtuous escape into nature. Germany’s man
  of letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, confessed that after
  Shakespeare and Spinoza, no one had influenced him more than Linnaeus.
  “God created—Linnaeus arranged,” went the adage.

  But despite his meteoric success, Linnaeus had a problem. The man who
  made order from nature’s chaos did not have a good management system
  for his own work. His methods for sorting and storing information about
  the natural world couldn’t keep up with the flood of it he was
  producing. Linnaeus’s appearance only added to an aura of disorder.
  Stunned visitors [46]described the prince of botany as a “markedly
  unshaven” man in “dusty shoes and stockings.” [47]Writing about
  himself, Linnaeus was even less charitable: “Brow furrowed. A low wart
  on the right cheek and another on the right side of the nose. Teeth
  bad, worm-eaten.”

  Worms aside, the real issue vexing Sweden’s top scientist was how to
  manage a data deluge. He had started out collecting plants in the woods
  of his native southern Sweden. But as his profile grew, so did his
  research and writing, and the number of students under his wing.
  Achieving scientific renown of their own, Linnaeus’s students sent him
  specimens from their travels in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, West
  Africa, and China. According to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, most
  botanists of the era employed a team to manage their affairs that would
  keep track of correspondence and categorize specimens. But not
  Linnaeus, “who preferred to work alone.” Starting in the 1750s, he
  complained in [48]letters to friends of feeling overworked and
  overwhelmed. Burnout, it turns out, isn’t a modern condition.

                                   * * *

  Linnaeus’s predicament wasn’t new, either. In her book Too Much to
  Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, the
  historian Ann Blair explains that since the Renaissance, “the discovery
  of new worlds, the recovery of ancient texts, and the proliferation of
  printed books” unleashed an avalanche of information. The rise of
  far-flung networks of correspondents only added to this circulation of
  knowledge. Summarizing, sorting, and searching new material wasn’t
  easy, especially given the available tools and technologies. Printed
  books needed buyers. And while notebooks kept information in one place,
  finding a detail buried inside one was another story. Finishing an
  academic dissertation wasn’t just a test of erudition or persistence;
  dealing with the material itself—recording, searching, retrieving
  it—was a logistical nightmare.

  Many scholars, like the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle, preferred to
  work on loose sheets of paper that could be collated, rearranged, and
  reshuffled, says Blair. But others came up with novel solutions. Thomas
  Harrison, a 17th-century English inventor, devised the “ark of
  studies,” a small cabinet that allowed scholars to excerpt books and
  file their notes in a specific order. Readers would attach pieces of
  paper to metal hooks labeled by subject heading. Gottfried Wilhelm
  Leibniz, the German polymath and coinventor of calculus (with Isaac
  Newton), relied on Harrison’s cumbersome contraption in at least some
  of his research.

  Linnaeus experimented with a few filing systems. In 1752, while
  cataloging [49]Queen Ludovica Ulrica’s collection of butterflies with
  his disciple Daniel Solander, he prepared small, uniform sheets of
  paper for the first time. “That cataloging experience was possibly
  where the idea for using slips came from,” Charmantier explained to me.
  Solander took this method with him to England, where he cataloged the
  [50]Sloane Collection of the British Museum and then Joseph Banks’s
  collections, using similar slips, Charmantier said. This became the
  cataloging system of a national collection.

  Linnaeus may have drawn inspiration from playing cards. Until the
  mid-19th century, the backs of playing cards were left blank by
  manufacturers, offering “a practical writing surface,” where scholars
  scribbled notes, says Blair. Playing cards “were frequently used as
  lottery tickets, marriage and death announcements, notepads, or
  business cards,” explains Markus Krajewski, the author of Paper
  Machines: About Cards and Catalogs. In 1791, France’s revolutionary
  government issued the world’s first national cataloging code, calling
  for playing cards to be used for bibliographical records. And according
  to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, playing cards were found under the
  floorboards of the Uppsala home Linnaeus shared with his wife Sara
  Lisa.

  In 1780, two years after Linnaeus’s death, Vienna’s Court Library
  introduced a card catalog, the first of its kind. Describing all the
  books on the library’s shelves in one ordered system, it relied on a
  simple, flexible tool: paper slips. Around the same time that the
  library catalog appeared, says Krajewski, Europeans adopted banknotes
  as a universal medium of exchange. He believes this wasn’t a historical
  coincidence. Banknotes, like bibliographical slips of paper and the
  books they referred to, were material, representational, and mobile.
  Perhaps Linnaeus took the same mental leap from “free-floating
  banknotes” to “little paper slips” (or vice versa). Sweden’s great
  botanist was also a participant in an emerging capitalist economy.

                                   * * *

  Linnaeus never grasped the full potential of his paper technology. Born
  of necessity, his paper slips were “idiosyncratic,” say Charmantier and
  Müller-Wille. “There is no sign he ever tried to rationalize or
  advertise the new practice.” Like his taxonomical system, paper slips
  were both an idea and a method, designed to bring order to the chaos of
  the world.

  The passion for classification, a hallmark of the Enlightenment, also
  had a dark side. From nature’s variety came an abiding preoccupation
  with the differences between people. As soon as anthropologists applied
  Linnaeus’s taxonomical system to humans, the category of race, together
  with the ideology of racism, was born.

  It’s fitting, then, that the index card would have a checkered history.
  To take one example, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover used skills he burnished
  as a cataloger at the Library of Congress to assemble his notorious
  “Editorial Card Index.” By 1920, he had cataloged 200,000 subversive
  individuals and organizations in detailed, cross-referenced entries.
  Nazi ideologues compiled a deadlier index-card database to classify
  500,000 Jewish Germans according to racial and genetic background.
  Other regimes have employed similar methods, relying on the index
  card’s simplicity and versatility to catalog enemies real and imagined.

  The act of organizing information—even notes about plants—is never
  neutral or objective. Anyone who has used index cards to plan a
  project, plot a story, or study for an exam knows that hierarchies are
  inevitable. Forty years ago, Michel Foucault observed in a footnote
  that, curiously, historians had neglected the invention of the index
  card. The book was Discipline and Punish, which explores the
  relationship between knowledge and power. The index card was a turning
  point, Foucault believed, in the relationship between power and
  technology. Like the categories they cataloged, Linnaeus’s paper slips
  belong to the history of politics as much as the history of science.

References

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 56. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/how-monocle-became-joke/599914/
 57. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/how-military-science-popularized-layered-clothing/597577/
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