Indexing Nature: Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and His Fact-Gathering Strategies Authors: Staffan Müller-Wille & Sara Scharf (Working Papers on The Nature of Evidence: How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel? No. 36/08)
Interesting article that traces the strategies used by Linnaeus when confronted with the “first bio-information crisis” as the authors term it.
Questions:
- In what ways do ontologies resemble the bound library catalogs of the early 18th century?
- Do computers make ontologies any less like those bound library catalogs?
- Short report (3-5 pages, with citations) on transition of libraries from bound catalogs to index cards.
- Linnaeus’s colleagues weren’t idle. What other strategies, successful or otherwise, were in use? (project)