Keywords In and Out of Context

Thinking a little further about Niklas Luhmann and his card index file (which is available online here, though mostly in German, and here is an excellent article about it by project director Johannes F.K. Schmidt), I am reminded of Alberto Cevolini’s work on indexing, which continues to intrigue me.

I briefly cited his 2014 “Indexing as Preadaptive Advance: A Socio-Evolutionary Perspective ” in my chapter 6, but I didn’t have occasion there to mention his 2018 chapter on Luhmann (“Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?“) which seems even more relevant right now. (Though I should point out that his latest (2024) publication, “The Relevance of Relevance: Forgetting Strategies and Contingency in Postmodern Memory,” would probably argue that my observation is irrelevant, since “relevance” today is considered more a matter of exigencies and contingencies specific to a particular user, not a property of the document itself.)

Cevolini also cites the great Don Swanson, particularly his 1977 critique of relevance measures: “Information Retrieval as a Trial and Error Process.” This is particularly interesting, as Swanson is best-known in LIS for his “Undiscovered Public Knowledge“, a classic work on the generation of serendipitous discoveries through associative keywording applied to a public corpus (such as a medical database, in Swanson’s examples) rather than to an individual’s corpus (such as Luhmann’s card index) as discussed by Cevolini.

Cevolini does not, in fact, explain where Luhmann’s card index “came from” as a specific phenomenon, instead taking a much more general approach. He observes, “To understand where Niklas Luhmann’s card index comes from, we first have to recall the Renaissance revival of the art of note-taking, that is, the art of making excerpts from readings (the old ars excerpendi). Luhmann, for sure, had little (if any) awareness of this long tradition. His excerpting habits should not be regarded as a result of cultural inheritance. A direct contact with early modern excerpting systems is not demonstrable, and Luhmann himself never
once mentioned them in his publications (page 395).”

The specific origins of Luhmann’s card index system don’t seem terribly obscure to me. Although he may not have been familiar with the historical antecedents of scholarly note-taking, it is almost inconceivable that in his long university career, he wouldn’t have adopted this common practice to manage his academic work (and, indeed, I couldn’t have finished my own dissertation without the use of such cards, since I started work on it well before the introduction of reference management software for the individual researcher), though clearly he took it to a vastly higher level, by adding his own thoughts and interpretations of various readings (and clearly he was a voracious reader, both in English and in German) to his cards and adding his own “key words,” allowing him to construct and reconstruct very sophisticated intellectual frameworks in order to support his systems theorizing. (I see that other well-known systems theorists, Americans Ackoff and Churchman, appear on his cards, unsurprisingly, since both were philosophers, though not sociologists.)

[Update 7/24/24]: Since I don’t read German, I wasn’t aware that there is a specific term in that language for what Luhmann was doing: zettelkasten (which translates into “slip notes” in English) and which has a Wikipedia entry (though clearly Luhmann didn’t invent the method, he can be said to have perfected it, in terms of prolific and productive publications from its use!)

As an aside, Luhmann’s real American counterpart, Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, deposited over 66 cubic feet of archival material in the Harvard Library, and no one to my knowledge has suggested putting all of his papers online, let alone his working notes. Though, in fairness, Parsons’ recent reputation as being overly conservative in his thinking is undergoing re-examination, and Luhmann himself was obviously very engaged in critiquing Parson’s theoretical approach.

After discussing some of the specifics of Luhmann’s card index and connecting it both to medieval traditions of scholarly memorization as a form of primary memory and early modern traditions of note-taking as a form of secondary memory, Ceveloni compares this to the contemporary use of hypertext linkages (page 420):

This point about Google and its increasingly deleterious effects on academe is very well-taken, especially when one realizes that almost all of Luhmann’s theorizing centered around society and communication. The more one knows about Google’s use and misuse of keywords, the more one appreciates how far society has allowed Google to “complicate” semantic computations to the point where “collective collaboration” involving such natural language processing “tools” as Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are rapidly removing traces of original authorship of ideas, and some academic librarians are actually promoting this. One wonders what Luhmann might make of that.