Clones? Cross-referencing?

Posted by 22111
Oct 7, 2013 at 01:01 PM

I cannot resist to give this citation:

from http://takingnotenow.blogspot.be/ from “Blumenberg on Luhmann, Part II”:

“Blumenberg had to re-order his cards several times, depending on the purposes he had at a certain time. Luhmann never did. Whether that was an advantage may be doubted because repeated interaction with the material is more like to stimulate revisions and growth over time. While Luhmann’s work often is repetitious and not very elegantly formulated, Blumenberg’s work is much more polished. However, both their texts reveal how they were put together, i.e. that they are accretions of more basic units.”

You must know that Luhmann did his index cards the same way most library archives are stored: chronologically, meaning books/cards 3, 105, 2058 and 19386 belong together, in a certain way, but you would never know without the index, and then, no “natural context”, but gathering one-by-one. For books delivered to a counter, that’s the right system, but I assume if you have 85 such index cards, “held together” just by an index, and spread over thousands of physical cards, you will probably not gather all them but do some triage, hoping you have the content of the remaining 45 sufficiently memorized, taking out 40, and having to restore them all afterwards, one by one, being lots of work in itself, even without those other 85 you judge (from memory) “not so important here”.

The same applies to gathering material to work on/with within your computer: If it’s too cumbersome to “gather it all”, you will probably not do it, by this leaving out important elements. So the computer/software should help you in gathering all important / probably relevant material in every instance, instead of your having to do “real work” for this “secondary activity”.

I know there is “search”, but the more you write with an extended vocabulary, the less you’ll be able to find relevant things, since “manually”, you simply don’t think of all possible variants of terminology, and today’s search tool will not be of big help to find them either.

So this means, Luhmann probable too much relied on his memory since “calling up” his carded knowledge was simply too much effort for him and/or his secretary, and what we get from today’s outliners and from today’s file system (in Windows), is a little the same phenomenon, that we often have to make do with what we immediately get, since digging further is too much effort and thus not justified - better software could be of big help here to include more relevant things, as for Luhmann would have some categorization instead of just using an automatted pagination stamp.