Clones? Cross-referencing?

Posted by 22111
Oct 7, 2013 at 01:27 PM

I beg your pardon also for all those typos above, “remaining 45” not seen, out of the 85 lot, etc.

I would like to add that Luhmann’s pagination stamp wasn’t something “idiotic”, as it might appear today at first sight, since all this referencing would have to be redone, manually, if he tried to constitute groups of cards, meaning if you put card number 2490 out of its context (if there is a context), into a new context 843, all those references to this card “2490” have to be changed to “843”, and you will probably not even know where they are, or you must put the references, “backwards”, onto the card itself, too: “this card has been referenced in the following contexts” - but then, you must do a lot of rewriting at numerous places whenever you re-assign some “group”-card to any other location… and there is the “xerox” problem quickly coming in, because it offers easy solutions to “shifting 1 card around, but having to update 322 index numbers in consequence”.

So my point is not that Luhmann did it wrong, but my point is, this paradigm shift to computers/software (where updating thousands of index entries is done in the fraction of a second) did not offer us enough from what Luhmann et al. could do with physical files: Technology would offer it, but software doesn’t follow.

Btw, the very first version of askSam was promoted as an electronic Zettelkasten version, as was HyperCard (and that’s why HyperCard was abandoned, and AS took many years to get its tree-on-the-fly: Before, it was all about remembering key words (whether in fields, or in body text, for AS), without a real “key word management” offered by the software: just tagging, and this made many users had left AS even before their intro of the tree-on-the-fly, which thus came too late.