8 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2022
    1. This imposing cabinetof curiosities

      Is it appropriate to call a zettelkasten of 70,000 a "cabinet of curiosities"? They really are dramatically different forms of media, though a less discerning modern viewer might conflate the two to make a comparison.

  2. Jun 2022
    1. It’s not the only answer, of course. Maurice Sendak has a room that’s theequivalent of my boxes, a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pulloutdrawers in which he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, articles. He works onseveral projects at a time, and he likes to keep the overlapping materials out of sightwhen he’s tackling any one of them. Other people rely on carefully arranged indexcards. The more technological among us put it all on a computer. There’s no singlecorrect system. Anything can work, so long as it lets you store and retrieve yourideas—and never lose them.

      Regardless of what sort of physical instantiation one's notes may take, a workable storage option for them is necessary whether it is a simple box, a shelving system, a curiosity cabinet, a flat file, or even an entire room itself.

  3. Apr 2022
    1. On William Webster, An essay on book-keeping (1719) and on Lichtenberg’s com-parison, see Te Heesen (2005). Te Heesen also notes a case of influence in the oppo-site direction, in a cabinet of commercial samples modeled on cabinets of curiosities;see Te Heesen, (2002), 147. Zedelmaier argues that scholarly methods of informa-tion management inspired bureaucratic information management; see Zedelmaier(2004), 203. On Lichtenberg, see von Arburg (2003)

      references worth peeling apart here!! :)

  4. Aug 2021
    1. Although it is difficult at present to know the precise impact of such filing systems, it is clear thatLinnaeus’s design mirrored the ways in which he arranged heads in his notes and books. The inte-rior space of his cabinet was divided into two open-faced columns, which meant that it was a phys-ical instantiation of a bilateral table.

      The design of Carl Linnaeus' specimen cabinets mirrored that of the bilateral tables and the ways he arranged his heads in his notes and books.

    2. Figure 10. ‘Pharmacopoea”, frontispiece in Carolus Linnaeus, Materia Medica(1749). Wellcome Library,London.

      Note the similarity of this filing cabinet system to the similar ideas of library card catalogs.

      Where does this fit into the timeline with respect to the publication date of 1749 on Pharmacopoea and Linnaeus' use of it?

    3. Lauren-tius Normann (Lars Norman), the professor of logic and metaphysics at the University ofUppsala, used a kind of commonplace cabinet a full three decades before Linnaeus matriculatedthere as a student.

      Laurentius Normann (Lars Norman) had a commonplace cabinet that predated Carl Linnaeus.

    4. Like the spatial hierarchies presented in the Philosophia botanica, he wanted asimple form of linear order that allowed him to access his sheets quickly. Such a desire led himto reject the spatial divisions featured in many contemporary curiosity and medical cabinets, thatis, closed drawers that were stacked in multiple columns. This rejection was probably linked tothe fact that he had already seen a better way forward in the form of filing systems that werephysical instantiations of commonplace divisions used so often in books.

      Linnaeus used the logic of topical headings in commonplace books as an intellectual framework for designing a better filing system for his physical plant specimens. This was in marked contrast to the sorts of contemporary curiosity and medical cabinets that others were using at the time.