Alice Kober’s Index Cards
I wrote this for a writing assignment for Designlab on the topic of Information Architecture.
Unlike her predecessors, Alice Kober would make no assumptions and form no theories about the mysterious ancient writing system the world had been trying to decipher for over 50 years. Instead, she would meticulously plot out the signs and their patterns in notebooks and on handmade index cards. For hours, for years, sitting at her kitchen table in Brooklyn with a cigarette in hand, she organized only what she could know about the writing system to uncover its architecture. And in doing so, she would draw nearer to deciphering Linear B than anyone who had come before her.
Without the aid of computers or assistants, and during a wartime paper shortage, Kober plotted each instance where signs appeared next to each other (“sign groups”) on spare pieces of paper, which were cut into 2x3” cards and filed in empty cigarette cartons. She would then look for instances where that sign group appeared with other sign groups, or where it appeared followed by the same symbol. Each pattern was noted on a card and filed, then groups of cards were studied together to search for larger patterns. By the time she died suddenly at age 43, there were around 180,000 of these cards plus 40 notebooks, and she had made the breakthrough that Linear B is an inflected language.
The “information architecture” Alice Kober built for Linear B is “the methodological bridge that [Michael] Ventris triumphantly crossed” two years after Kober’s untimely death in 1950. Ventris was able to use Kober’s extensive library to test his hypothesis about what the symbols meant, which turned out to be right, and is credited as the decipherer of Linear B.
But one has to wonder if Kober would have cracked the code had she not died so young, or if Ventris would have been able to do so without Kober’s labor. In any case, Kober’s work on organizing Linear B shows that the information architecture, the “organizing, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way,” can not only make information more accessible and useable but has the potential to reshape how we understand our world and our history.
