If by now you're feeling a little creeped out by index cards, let me temper that by also pointing out their capacity as a vehicle for creativity. And while surveillance is controversial, we rarely recognize its precedents in early technologies like the index card, or how a simple, seemingly innocent thing like a blank piece of paper can wield such analytic power. Today we think of surveillance as a digital and photographic phenomenon, performed by machines, but actually the practice precedes the computer, and was first possible because of index cards. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art and Creative Commons. Nineteenth-century French police cards for classifying physical attributes. ![]() But once divided on index cards and sorted like library card catalogs, police pioneered the first usable form of biometric surveillance. Early criminologists hoping to use physical appearance to identify suspects soon learned that height, weight, hair, eye color, nose shape, complexion, and scars were useless unless those facts could be quickly and effectively searched. Courtesy of Linnean Society, Library of the Linnean Society (London), and Creative Commons.īy the 1800s, index cards were combined with library card catalogs to aid police investigations. Two notecards prepared by Carl Linnaeus on different species of the Genus Urtica. The practice-possibly inspired by playing cards-worked because each observation was broken down to its most basic fact, and new findings and categories could be added and reorganized by simply shuffling and inserting new paper. ![]() In the 1700s, Swedish naturalist Carl Linneaus-now known as the "Father of Modern Taxonomy"-developed his theory of species categorization by dividing data onto identically sized pieces of paper. The history of index cards begins even before the mass manufacture of paper and printing. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.Ĭan a small, blank piece of cheap card stock count as technology? Yes, it can, when size and shape are standardized, and the card belongs to a system of information organization.
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