Article:

Serialität und die Suche nach Ordnung. Der wissenschaftliche Druck und seine Probleme während des späten 19. Jahrhunderts

This article sketches elements of a history of late nineteenth-century literature search practices and technologies in Britih and French science. It proposes taking a «Tocquevillian perspective» in the history of scientific information, according to which actors who have demanded changes did not necessarily do so as a response to increasingly desperate circumstances, but precisely when piecemeal reforms had made available a partial vision of what a potential ideal future might look like. Only when scientific knowledge, increasingly figured as a landscape of scientific papers, lurched into fractional visibility, did demands for a comprehensive view of this paper landscape take on meaning and urgency.