Among the archival materials left behind by scholars and artists, mixed in with notes, manuscripts, and letters, we often find index cards. The cards are a curious artifact, for today, as a tool of research, they are largely obsolete. Extensive collections of tiny cards that once belonged to the great minds of the humanities are often displayed in museums (as in the exhibition on Roland Barthes at the Centre Pompidou) or on television programs (in the case of the collections of Niklas Luhmann and Tymoteusz Karpowicz).