I don’t know yet what to make of it, but a tiny piece of information on one of the Mark Dion exhibition wall panels caught my attention: Linnaeus was the first botanist to use herbarium sheets. Before, the dried plants destined to become type specimens were glued to a sheet of stiff card - often different specimens on a single sheet - and then bound into a book. Introducing loose sheets, however, allowed Linnaeus to gradually reorganise, reclassify and add to the collection as new species or new information about existing species were discovered.
Picture: Herbarium sheet that Carolus Linnaeus used to describe the plant Hyoscyamus physalodes (Species Plantarum, 1753).
August 15, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Hey Marion:
Check this out:
http://www.foaf-project.org/
“The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.”
It’s interesting.
August 16, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Thanks Greg, this looks interesting. Reminds me a little bit of the six-degrees-of-separation theory according to which everyone can be connected to every person in the world through a chain of six contacts. Good to know we’re not only being catalogued but linked as well!