DThe most important topics for first-year students at the university: dealing with literature, scientific citation, bibliography and creating bibliographies for homework. In the past, generations of students used note boxes and index cards for this purpose. The work was torture and you had to search for everything manually without any helpful electronics. Established scientists had huge Zettelkasten collections, and probably the most famous one in the pre-digital era belonged to the Bielefeld systems theorist Niklas Luhmann. His wooden boxes with around 90,000 handwritten notes were his “second memory”, and when asked how his immense publication output could be explained, Luhmann replied in 1987: “I don’t think so alone, but it largely happens in the note box. The note box takes me more time than writing books.”
Luhmann’s Zettelkasten had a referencing technique whereby the same topic could be found in different places in the box. Although he used analogue storage technology, he was ahead of his time when it came to referencing. “Without the pieces of paper, just by thinking,” said Luhmann, he wouldn’t even come up with many ideas.
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