Replied to a thread (Twitter)

How did research even happen before the internet? It seems like there was a lot more mnemonic discipline involved. Especially in botany etc: how would you intuit whether you found a new species (of any sort of artifact)?

cc @Meaningness @andy_matuschak
— Max Krieger (@maxkriegers) May 11, 2020

A researcher told me when I was ~12 that on Fridays, he collects all the elementary functions from his papers (like cos(30deg)) so he doesn't have to wait until Monday to go to the library to check the books containing the values. It might not have been cos but you get it.
— adjoint +/- norm (@adamnemecek1) May 11, 2020

incredible. I hope someone did an ethnography/photo archive of this kind of thing pre internet. I wonder what his workspace looked like, I'm picturing something like this:https://t.co/EJE6rg7e5H
— Max Krieger (@maxkriegers) May 11, 2020

Yeah, I grew up with 5x8 index cards and spent much of my undergraduate time in windowless basement rooms of libraries trying to find books that had been mis-shelved.

They got seriously creepy at night.
— David Chapman (@Meaningness) May 11, 2020

Niklas Luhmann’s idea of Zettelkasten impinges on some of this, but for a deep dive on how indigenous cultures all over the world did this in a pre-industrial setting look at Dr. Lynne Kelly‘s work. Specifically: Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and When knowledge was power (2012, Latrobe University, PhD thesis). She’s got a fantastic bibliography on her website as well.

Her TED talk shows quickly how she did something similar, but with birds and bird identification. Her work has examples of how many other cultures did this as well.