Culture Making Articles items tagged taxonomies Culture Making Articles:Writing on Christianity and culture from Andy Crouch 2025-01-03T22:54:05Z Copyright (c) 2025, Andy Crouch ExpressionEngine tag:culture-makers.com,2025:01:02 Blogs as ‘Cabinets of Wonder’ tag:culture-makers.com,2025:author/1.1105 2025-01-02T22:53:00Z 2025-01-03T22:54:05Z Andy Crouch andy@culture-making.com

Nate

: ?I'd have to say, all but the very best blogs probably fall way short of the Wunderkammer standard. Certainly the millions of abandoned Blogger accounts don't amount to much in the way of personal taxonomy. Nor does "a style and order specific to his or her own vision" explain the standardized utility of reading posts in plain old reverse chronological order.?
a NYTimes.com Ideas blog post, 17 November 2008

Internet | Get up to speed with the view of blogs as descended from Renaissance “cabinets of wonder,” or Wunderkammern. Back then, they were encyclopedic, idiosyncratic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined by modern science. Bloggers, too, “present a collection of images, ideas, and objects in a style and order specific to his or her own vision: a personal taxonomy.” [Cabinet of Wonder, Julian Dibbell]

]]> Edge-notched cards tag:culture-makers.com,2025:author/1.469 2025-01-02T22:53:00Z 2025-01-03T22:54:05Z Andy Crouch andy@culture-making.com

Nate

: ?That great lover of paper ephemera Nicholson Baker would likely note all the extraneous, but scrutinizable data left on the edges of these cards in their handling and sorting—an unrecorded search history in the sections of card-edge gone dark and felty with repeated sorts.?



Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index cards with holes on their edges, which can be selectively slotted to indicate traits or categories, or in our language today, to act as a field. Before the advent of computers were one of the few ways you could sort large databases for more than one term at once.

a more than 95 theses post by Alan Jacobs
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