How the Index Card Cataloged the World
- One minute read - 67 wordsOnce, on Facebook I wrote:
This is completely my jam:
The index card was a product of the Enlightenment, conceived by one of its towering figures: Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, physician, and the father of modern taxonomy. But like all information systems, the index card had unexpected political implications, too: It helped set the stage for categorizing people, and for the prejudice and violence that comes along with such classification.