Fascinating find. Syntopical reading was obviously discussed by Mortimer J. Adler in his book on reading. I’m sure there was likely more earlier work on this from the 1920’s when we began moving from index cards to Hollerinth and other forms of punched cards for computing. I’ve not come across it, but I’m sure a lot of this also influenced folks like Claude Shannon, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Weiner in the early days of information theory. I suspect there may be even more earlier research on some of that space, but a lot of related work in those spaces was classified by various governments for use in World War II and, if released, much of it hasn’t been reviewed carefully or thoroughly. I wish I could go back and query some of my old professors about some of this time period including Solomon Golomb, Willis Gore, and Frederick Jelinek.

I’ve gotten a copy of the English version of Jacqueline Léon’s book and hope to at least skim through some of the relevant parts soon.

I’m noticing that it looks like you use interesting aliased email addresses the same way I do on blogs and other websites. Are you tying responses back into your broader knowledge system using that as well?