Around 1956: "My next task was to prepare my course. Since none of the textbooks known to me was satisfactory, I resorted to the maieutic method that Plato had attributed to Socrates. My lectures consisted essentially in questions that I distributed beforehand to the students, and an abstract of the research that they had prompted. I wrote each question on a 6 × 8 card. I had adopted this procedure a few years earlier for my own work, so I did not start from scratch. Eventually I filled several hundreds of such cards, classed them by subject, and placed them in boxes. When a box filled up, it was time to write an article or a book chapter. The boxes complemented my hanging-files cabinet, containing sketches of papers, some of them aborted, as well as some letters." (p. 129)

Chris, this is a great take, thanks! Visiting the origins of the system doesn't fit into my current interests, but I'm very happy to know more about them.I gave a mini-lecture to my students last night about this system; really it's more about the idea of networking your ideas over anything else, isn't it? My students, who are all working on creative nonfiction projects, were so relieved to have someplace to put and process all the things they inevitably flag in the books they read.