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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

My mother had a zettelkasten slide-cabinet. My father produced over 60,000 slides for her, over the course of their academic careers, by copying illustrations in art and architecture books (and by street photography on their many trips abroad)

She could walk up to the slide cabinet, and ask "give me a theme" and we'd say "animals" and she'd say "give me a period" and we'd say "modern" and she'd select slides about the history of representative art about animals, in modern times.

When she'd put the slides back, she could re-enter the cabinet and select slides about Michaelangelo and followers, or about the role of the pediment in architectural design, and select from the same slides, but for a different context.

Amazing stuff. Totally indexed by herself, operated for a lifetime of academic teaching.

I think she "invented" hypermedia in the 1960s basically.

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This is stunning. I've never heard of another example of an offline zettelkasten before other than the original. I would love to peruse it!

But if someone asked for a theme or period that wasn't pre-coded, it wouldn't work.

thanks for sharing

Its true. You could do a talk on primitive art influence in modernist sculpture and find African tribal art, and cave painting from france so implicitly could do a talk on African tribal art, but without reference to south America or Asia or Inuit art, it was plainly incapable of doing a wide ranging talk on folk art in pre modern times.

You could do a talk on images of x in medium y, but only indirectly do a talk on x itself and no context not captured in images of x in medium y. Thats a fundamental limit.

If however there was no index to x in y, it relied on personal knowledge x in y existed. So there was a lot of path casting inside her head, to recall states to determine if the effort of an exhaustive search was justified.

Isn't that true of any pre index scheme?

Do you know what happened to it? That sounds amazing, I would love to see a video showing it off.

It was donated to the edinburgh college of art in the 1990s when she died. I suspect by now, its toast: The slide film process might be good for 50+ years if archival storage is used, but the university library probably had this out as a teaching resource before the web was big, and afterward, the digitization simply invited massive IPR complaints. Even the labour cost of separating out her own photos from the copies would have been massive.

I know a lot of the mounted slides had 'newtons rings' which are signs of the medium touching the glass carrier, which is not net beneficial to the slide ageing well.

I had a look in the catalog, It is not listed as available when her written work is, so I think its gone.

The slides hung in sheets from suspensors, about 5 rows of eight columns per sheet. You would stand at the cabinet (it was a couple of 4 or 5 draw filing cabinet) with a normal projector carousel, and then select slides from the sheets. The sheets had keys like "french baroque architecture" or "corbusier" or "golden mean" or whatever to her was a primary collation key, and then she would use her own head to eyeball the slides and select the stuff by 'secondary key' given what she knew. I think the hyperthreading here is mostly notional the primary keying, was the sufficient vehicle to find anything given "I know I have a slide of this, it was when i was researching post modern industrial design in iron" and then she'd strike out into the stack...

From 40x40x5 I get to more like 10,000 to 20,000 slides. I think you might get as many as 100 sheets to a drawer but even noting exaggeration it was a huge collection, wide ranging.

Regardless, it would be fascinating if you ever found the time to write more about your mother's system, how she used it, how you experienced it, etc!

Maybe she was inspired by Vannevar Bush's Memex concept?

Maybe she was. We used to talk sometimes about the value of a library catalogue as a research tool, and she'd worked in publishing so the concept of an index as a key value store was pretty apparent. The memex talk is maybe a stretch?

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