Indexing Nature: Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and his Fact-Gathering Strategies

Early modern naturalists were faced with what has been termedthe ‘first bio-information crisis’. A key figure in resolving this crisiswas the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1788). Thispaper will focus on Linnaeus’s day-to-day working routines on thebasis of manuscript material held at the Linnean Society(London). What this material shows is that Linnaeus had tomanage a conflict between the need to bring factual informationinto a fixed order for purposes of retrieval, and the need tointegrate new information into that order. A way out of thisdilemma was to keep information on particular subjects onseparate sheets, which could be reshuffled and complemented byadditional sheets. It is only very late in his life, however, thatLinnaeus realized the full potential of this technique, by inventingwhat look like index cards. What we thus hope to show in thispaper is that one of the main cognitive advantages commonlyassigned to writing – the possibility to abstract words andstatements from their context and rearrange them freely in lists,tables and filing systems – had to prevail over considerablepractical and psychological obstacles. What seems an obviousthing to do in hindsight, e.g. to work with something like indexcards, had to be learned through an incessant, painstakingprocess of experimentation, fact-gathering, and reorganization.[...]