Lists and Knowledge

Abstract

This chapter takes a closer look at the character Sherlock Holmes in both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the BBC show Sherlock (2010–2017). Both versions of Sherlock Holmes capitalize on the affordances of visibility and comprehensiveness inherent in the form of the list. These affordances of the list allow the characters to make the mere reference to the bodies of knowledge they draw on stand in for the knowledge itself. Doyle’s detective uses the list-like paper technologies of sorting, selecting, and summarizing and the frequent mentioning of reference works to create the illusion that his deductions are based on a sound method. The BBC’s Sherlock makes use of the Internet in a similar list-based manner. Since visualization, simplification, and spatialization are central elements of this strategy of replacing tangible evidence with mere references, the chapter examines similarities between the cognitive processes at work when we read lists and maps—two forms that share these affordances.

Sherlock Holmes and the (Victorian) Dream of Total Knowledge

[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (Sign, 51)¹

This statement voices the belief that an explanation must be true because other explanations are considered impossible. The conclusion, however, is logically invalid because finding and correctly disproving all possible alternative explanations would require omniscience.² I have argued before that the fascination of the Holmes stories does not so much rest on the (sometimes non-existent) crimes committed in them but rather on how the mysteries they present are explained away with observations that at least seem rational. The character of Sherlock Holmes embodies what Stephen Knight calls the “Victorian romance of knowledge” (1980, 79), the idea that total knowledge is attainable through rational thought. Sherlock Holmes’s exceptional success at what he labels as the science of deduction is inextricably linked with the vast body of knowledge he commands. This knowledge enables him to identify patterns in his cases which, by implication, are also valid across society as a whole.

In “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” Holmes states that “[i]t is my business to know things. That is my trade” (59) and thus suggests that the trade of detection relies on exhaustive background knowledge. When Knight speaks of the “Victorian romance of knowledge,” he refers to the idea that advances in science and technology can open up wells of knowledge that will enable an individual to gain total understanding of their surroundings. The character Sherlock Holmes is a projection surface for the idea that Truth—“not just the truth behind this or that mystery, but Truth as a conceptual abstraction, an intellectual and ethical ideal” (Smajić 2010, 71)—is attainable through acute observation and the sorting of perceptions into previously established categories of knowledge.

When Holmes claims that his “simple art, […] is but systematized common sense” (“Soldier”, 64), he suggests that the capacity to meaningfully structure knowledge is not the preserve of the Romantic genius but accessible to anyone who knows the correct method of systematization. Perhaps surprisingly, the systematizations Holmes performs heavily rely on paper technologies. These are made prominent throughout the stories in the frequent appearance of a case index Holmes has compiled, as well as in his habitual consultation (and creation) of reference works and print-based sources of knowledge. Such reference works visualize knowledge in both detail and scope, and depend on lists and listing techniques for their visual presentation. The unifying impulse that comes with the presentation of systematized lists is not restricted to the level of textual representation. Eva von Contzen has argued that “lists are instances of cultural coherence and cultural identity; they are indicative of a particular view on the world” (2021, 35); in this case, they are indicative of a tendency in Victorian culture to imagine knowledge as comprehensive and controllable.

In addition to providing a structure for the assembled knowledge on the layout level, lists also afford a degree of abstraction that makes pattern recognition easier. This chapter aims to show how lists, through structuring the reference works that are so important to Sherlock Holmes’s investigative method, are at the very basis of the impressive feats of knowledge and detection he performs. The mere reference to listing techniques in absentia suffices to flesh out the body of knowledge that Holmes commands in the reader’s mind, even if that body of knowledge has no counterpart outside the story world. Holmes’s knowledge and feats of detection appear so impressive to readers not only because they are proof of his striking intelligence but also because of the underlying structuring system they imply. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories contain numerous references to written works and paper technologies that have proven successful strategies of information management outside the story world. These references award the ungraspable and vague body of expert knowledge to which Sherlock Holmes lays claim to unquestioned validity.

Too Much to Know: Knowledge and Paper Technologies

Before I turn my attention to the representation of knowledge in the Sherlock Holmes stories themselves, I would like to briefly discuss the interconnection between knowledge and the paper technologies that are essential to its transmission (in both real-world contexts and the Sherlock Holmes stories). As the title of a recent monograph by Ann Blair indicates, there is simply Too Much to Know (2010) for any individual to achieve a comprehensive overview of all there is to know. Reference books such as encyclopedias, Blair explains, have functioned to store, sort, select, and summarize information for their readers for centuries (see 2010, 3) and “typically offered a larger collection of excerpts than most individuals could amass in a lifetime” (ibid., 63). Information provided in encyclopedias has been preselected and efficiently summarized by editors, whose editorial decisions are no longer visible in the texts that readers consult. However multifaceted the information presented in an encyclopedia entry may be, encyclopedic texts always contain value and relevance judgments made by the work’s editors. The in- or exclusion of any particular entry alone constitutes an evaluation of its relevance. The task of considering various sources to make those judgments is thus taken out of the reader’s hands and saves them significant amounts of time. At the same time, the invisibility of the editors’ decisions creates an aura of objectivity and authority that is further supported by the label encyclopedia. The term originates in the Greek phrase enkuklios paideia, which translates as “common knowledge” or “general education” (see ibid., 12), and thus promises universality in its scope of representation.³

Such promises of comprehensiveness and authority made indices, the paper technology which made all this knowledge accessible and served as a finding aid, a highly valued asset of encyclopedias. A continuation of the selection and summarizing processes at work in an encyclopedia, indices could save readers even more time, and they were appreciated to a degree where (early modern) “printers boasted of them on title pages or apologized when they were missing” (ibid., 143). Indices make the knowledge stored in reference works searchable and visually highlight relevant key terms,⁴ just like they render invisible those terms that compilers consider less relevant. An index sorts and presents its work’s knowledge in neatly separate units and signals to its readers the immediate availability of this knowledge. This way, indices produce “an imaginary of control” (Stäheli 2016, 23) that suggests to readers that encyclopedias put at their command any piece of relevant knowledge at any time.

Such “totalizing proclivities” are typical of the Victorian and Edwardian worldview, and they are clearly reflected in the reference works of the period (Saint-Amour 2015, 202). Paul K. Saint-Amour draws attention to the “epistemological arrogance” (ibid.) of the Victorian and Edwardian worldview that he sees reflected in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910–1911). This arrogance is founded in an aspiration for comprehensiveness—and hence, control—that encyclopedias lead their readers to believe they have to offer.

According to Urs Stäheli, encyclopedias and similar reference works reflect the “dream of a Universal Index” (2016, 23) that stems from a human desire for wholeness and unity. The idea behind dreaming of such a comprehensive text is based around “the reduction of complexity of the world in order to produce a new controllable complexity” (ibid.).⁵ This entanglement of unity and control, which will prove highly important to the Sherlock Holmes stories and their Victorian context, can already be observed much earlier in Denis Diderot’s 1755 Encyclopédie. Diderot’s entry for “encyclopedia” reads:

encyclopedia, noun, feminine gender. (Philosophy.) This word signifies unity of knowledge […] In truth, the aim of an encyclopedia is to collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the earth, to make known its general structure to the men among whom we live, and to transmit it to those who will come after us. (Diderot 1964, 277, emphasis in original)

The ideas of unity and complexity that can be rendered controllable through specific techniques and technologies are at the center of the myth that has developed around the figure of Sherlock Holmes. The four basic ordering techniques of “storing, sorting, selecting and summarizing,” which Blair describes as crucial to the function of reference works (2010, 3),⁶ play a major role in the context of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. They expound how Sherlock Holmes manages information and determine how knowledge is represented.

This unifying impulse is closely connected to a second major affordance of paper technologies that features centrally in the Holmes stories: the power to extrapolate general laws from an assortment of particular examples. With regard to the production of medical knowledge, Volker Hess and J. Andrew Mendelsohn have demonstrated that paper technologies adapted from scholarly work, such as “keeping registers, tabular formatting, and […] extracting,” made it possible to view formerly isolated case material in conjunction and to extrapolate general laws from individual patient histories (2010, 296). These are the very techniques that Doyle’s detective claims to have mastered and that are repeatedly referred to in order to justify Holmes’s vast knowledge.⁷ Hess and Mendelsohn focus their attention on the production of medical knowledge from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and name “[c]ollecting, formatting, selecting, reducing, comparing [and] sorting” as key techniques “of mastering on and by paper” (ibid., 287). They thus stress the importance of the very same ordering techniques that Ann Blair discusses in the context of reference works. This is only one way in which this ordering and classifying impulse interlocks with a “wider history of ordering the world on and through paper” (ibid., 287).

In their exploration of the history of Objectivity (2007), Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison point out how the written collection of knowledge in reference works serves as calibrating and learning tool for scholars new to a subject area (see 2007, 26). Reference works (such as the ones Blair, Hess, and Mendelsohn, and Daston and Galison discuss) centrally rely on a unified form of representation to convey expertise to their readers and to make apparent the kind of order that lies at their heart. Daston and Galison, for example, examine the images printed in scientific atlases to reveal changing conceptions of knowledge and objectivity over time. The brevity that the depiction of information in reference works necessitates both makes information easily visible and condenses it. Abstraction and condensation award reference works additional legitimacy because they make it possible to assemble a broad range of (potentially contradictory) topics under the unified material shape and layout of a printed volume. The mediality of printed objects thus endows them with an “aura of epistemic unity” (Starre 2017, 250, my translation)⁸—with the impression that information assembled in the same material shape shares a common source. The materiality of a reference work fuses disparate items and thus feeds into the claims to authority that are always an undercurrent in those works. The following sections will elaborate on how the interconnection of knowledge and paper technologies discussed above serves as a backdrop for the representation of knowledge in Doyle’s detective fiction.

Listing Knowledge and the Encyclopedic Impulse

The paper technology of listing as a tool of understanding features at the very beginning of A Study in Scarlet (1887), in which Sherlock Holmes makes his first appearance. This opening foreshadows the importance of listing as a categorizing instrument for the novel and the stories that are to follow. Already in chapter two of the novel, John Watson pens down a list of Sherlock Holmes’s various areas of knowledge and expertise in order to come to an understanding of Holmes’s character (for both himself and the reader):

Sherlock Holmes—his limits

1 Knowledge of Literature: Nil.

2 Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.

3 Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.

4 Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.

5 Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows Nothing of practical gardening.

6 Knowledge of Geology: Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.

7 Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.

8 Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate, but unsystematic.

9 Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.

10 Plays the violin well.

11 Is as expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.

12 Has a good practical knowledge of British law. (15–16)

This list illustrates a number of categorization and sense-making strategies that are at work throughout the entire Sherlock Holmes canon. First and foremost, it features knowledge as a central category around which Holmes’s skill as a detective is based. Holmes’s expertise in subjects as different as chemistry and sensation fiction, as well as his ignorance in areas that Watson considers common knowledge—the first items in his enumeration—makes up a considerable part of the fascination the character elicits. Especially Holmes’s lack of knowledge in areas Watson considers to be part of general education seems at odds with his reputation as a successful detective.⁹ Even though Holmes’s physical prowess is an important part of his heroic appeal, Watson’s qualification of some of Holmes’s skills as “practical” has a derogatory ring to it that implies practical skills are less desirable or at least easier to achieve than intellectual understanding.

The neat numbering that structures Watson’s list furthermore implies comprehensiveness by presenting a countable and hence manageable set of knowledge categories that seem worth considering. The ninefold repetition of the word “knowledge” itself partly accounts for this effect and moreover leaves the reader with the impression that they have received information about Holmes’s areas of expertise even though most of Watson’s categories point out Sherlock Holmes’s lack of knowledge in them. Through his list, Watson defines a scope of possible knowledge categories that is portrayed as a fixed and “finite set” with stable relations that “always produce the same effect” (Moretti 1988, 145).¹⁰ At the same time, the objective appearance of the list conceals its ideological biases. In a similarly prescriptive way, many of the Holmes stories propagate the idea that any set of observations or clues can only have one correct meaning that can be apprehended and comprehended by the expert (see ibid.). The appeal of the character Sherlock Holmes is firmly anchored in the idea of control that stands behind such assumptions of a world that follows a clear, sortable structure.

Watson’s list sets out to systematically enumerate and rank the subject areas in his list from “nil” to “immense” knowledge. This act of categorization will also prove typical to the way in which Sherlock Holmes perceives and classifies his surroundings. Enumerative structures feature centrally in classifications that work with defining features (see Mainberger 2003, 73). In the Holmes stories, they can be found, for example, when Sherlock Holmes analyzes the appearance of potential clients or describes the content of rooms. Both actions usually result in a remarkably clear and coherent picture of the respective person or surroundings. That picture is drawn together from details that initially appear isolated and, by themselves, unremarkable. This act of definition is exactly what Watson’s list-making tries to achieve with Sherlock Holmes: Watson attempts to draw a clear picture of who Holmes is by enumerating a set of defining features.

Watson’s list, however, does not keep up its initially clear systematization. The last three items on the list appear like afterthoughts and no longer fit into the ascending order of proficiency. A closer look, furthermore, reveals that the categories Watson chooses to describe Holmes’s areas of expertise appear themselves rather random and follow no established cataloging or referencing system.¹¹ Even this arbitrariness emerges over and over again in Doyle’s stories running through the Holmes canon and its aspirations to order like a Sinfieldian faultline.¹² Missing explanations tend to materialize out of thin air, and references that are necessary to fill plot holes tend to have no referent in the contemporary scientific methods that Holmes seemingly values so highly.¹³ Frequently, paper technologies are used to strengthen the reliability of made-up and often implausible referents.

The Adventure of the Reference Works

The reference works Sherlock Holmes both consults and compiles are as much a trademark of Sherlock Holmes as Holmes’s violin, his pipe, and John Watson. Watson himself remarks at the beginning of “Creeping Man” that “[a]s an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books” (191). The index books, or rather the listing and categorizing strategies that they stand for, are used as a tool for understanding as much as the method of close observation of details Holmes so frequently and prominently propagates, yet they do not feature in Holmes’s description of his methods.

In The Sign of Four (1890), Sherlock Holmes names three criteria that, in his eyes, make a good detective. He remarks about a colleague that “[h]e possesses two out of the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the power of observation and that of deduction. He is only wanting in knowledge, and that may come in time” (4). Deductions¹⁴ can be made on the basis of close observation that allows one to detect patterns and anomalies in them. In order to correctly classify the information thus obtained and place it within the relevant context, however, knowledge is required, and knowledge is inseparable from reference works in Doyle’s detective stories. In his study Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, Srdjan Smajić points out the connection between seeing and knowing in detective fiction. According to Smajić, a detective’s powers of observation are not only related to seeing but also to reading, “or rather seeing as reading. The visible world is a text, the detective its astute observer and expert reader” (2010, 71). Smajić argues that Holmes’s ability to read clues, and thus his seemingly superior vision, is based on the encyclopedic stock of knowledge he can draw on. This knowledge is what enables him to instantly collate and categorize the observations and deductions he makes: “[i]f seeing for Holmes means instantaneous knowing, this is because he makes sure (and Doyle makes sure to remind his readers) that in the work of detection, knowing comes before seeing” (ibid., 123). The superior vision ascribed to detectives would thus depend upon the power of relating what is seen to knowledge previously gained,¹⁵ and seeing, on which the power of observation hinges, becomes a matter of knowing what to look for.¹⁶ Smajić thus ascribes to the detective the powers of selecting and sorting that Ann Blair considers as affordances of reference works.

Stephen Knight calls Holmes an “expert in the use of reference works” (2004, 56) and argues that this quality complements the character’s aura of scientificity. Though true, Knight’s statement lacks precision. The way in which reference works are used in Sherlock Holmes not only complements but in fact crucially contributes to creating this aura of science and precision. The classificatory, encyclopedic impulse that dominated scientific thinking in the nineteenth century is reflected in the way Doyle’s stories represent knowledge through reference works and the classifications contained therein. Textual forms such as lists, tables, and precise definitions can transport scientific connotations and authority to new contexts, including detective fiction, because they are frequently used in scientific environments.¹⁷ The frequent occurrence of reference works in Sherlock Holmes, consequently, fulfills a legitimizing function: the knowledge Holmes commands is the foundation of and backdrop to his success, and is solidified in the material shape of the printed books he has authored. “Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science” (Sign, 3), Holmes claims, and few things, apparently, can be more exact than a set of definitions made visible in print.

Several Holmes stories feature enumerations of alphabetical entries from reference works. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” for instance, Holmes consults the “Continental Gazetteer,” that is, a geographical dictionary, and reads out the entries that precede the one he is looking for: “Eglow, Eglonitz—here we are, Egria. It is a German-speaking country—in Bohemia, not far from Carlsbad” (5). Such insertions of alphabetical enumerations help to define what counts as knowledge and implicitly guarantee that knowledge is stable—upon opening the volume, readers will always find the same information in the same order. More importantly, whenever Holmes consults a reference work, the entries seem to tell him everything he needs to know about any conceivable subject.¹⁸ The entries are presented as exhaustive in their depth, and the variety of subjects that can be included in an alphabetical enumeration expands this exhaustiveness to breadth as well as depth.¹⁹

Even more volatile sources of intelligence, such as the oral information Holmes receives from his contact Langdale Pyke, are described in terms of printed and more durable sources to award them additional reliability. Pyke is referred to as Holmes’s “human book of reference upon all matters of social scandal” (”Gables”, 101). Knowledge, in Doyle’s detective stories, seems to be defined by what can be found in reference books, often in those supposedly written by Holmes himself.²⁰

The idea that knowledge is stable, traceable, and manageable frames how Holmes investigates any particular case or set of circumstances he is confronted with. Holmes’s way of conducting investigations presupposes that he knows quasi everything there is to know about his field of expertise. Claims that “[t]here is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first” (Scarlet, 19)²¹ estify to an encyclopedic approach to knowledge that is list-like to the core: seemingly unknown or inexplicable occurrences are correlated with lists of existing phenomena and can thus be broken down to their constituent parts and fully explained through their resemblance to items that have already been listed. For Holmes, thus, “[t]here is nothing new under the sun” (ibid., 29); he only encounters variations on previously known circumstances.

The close connection between knowledge and memory implies that the structure through which knowledge is portrayed in the Holmes stories is also applicable to Holmes’s memory, which he consults in a similar manner as one would an encyclopedia. Holmes’s knowledge appears to come sorted into distinct categories that remain accessible independently from one another and can be searched if the correct keyword is available.²² Gerhard van der Linde and Els Wouters, in their paper on various bodies of knowledge in detective fiction, also make explicit the connection between knowledge, memory, and the way reference works are consulted:

Confronted with a set of events for which he has to find a rational explanation, the detective could use this body of knowledge [of facts previously known] as basis for a kind of encyclopedia, in which phenomena are grouped, annotated, and contextualized, and for a “dictionary” which enables him to interpret certain gestures and other observable phenomena. (2003, 76)

A view of knowledge and experience, in which everything can be fitted into an already existing referencing system, Paul K. Saint-Amour remarks, tends to subject everything it encounters to a “descriptive rationalism” and runs risk of “bullying the world into compliance with its organizational grids and drives, of typifying Enlightenment arrogance in its claim to encompass the known” (2015, 186). Such “Enlightenment arrogance” assumes that there is a fixed set of relevant items to know, which can be meaningfully assembled and made accessible to the expert. This is defining for the worldview propagated in the Holmes stories.

Holmes, however, goes even further and claims that:

[t]he ideal reasoner, […] would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. […] [T]he observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. (“Pips”, 109)

Similar to the way in which knowledge is portrayed in terms of the clear definitions provided in reference works, this idea promises that not only the present but also the past and the future can be compartmentalized into neatly separable categories that maintain a linear relation to one another.²³ The fantasy of control and mastery that Holmes’s idea of the ideal reasoner projects is rooted in Enlightenment philosophies about science; thus, Neil Sargent argues, “the analytical detective story adopts a teleological view of history,” in which past and present stand in a fixed and stable relation to one another, which allows the detective to follow back a clear trail of evidence that leads from present results to past events and enables them to “explain the hidden causal principles behind the mystery” (2010, 288). In conjunction, Holmes’s knowledge and keen observational skills allow him to detect “a natural and transcendent order whose determinism is so all-embracing that even the smallest details signify the whole” (Jann 1990, 690). According to Holmes’s logic, access to any one piece of evidence, however small, should thus enable him to unravel the entire case.

Holmes’s near omniscience, of course, poses practical problems of implementation for Doyle, who has to convincingly represent Holmes’s limitless expertise and ingenuity in his stories. For this reason, Holmes seems to have at his disposal a quasi-infinite assortment of reference works, few of which have equivalents outside the story world. This allows Holmes (and Doyle) to rely on the mere mechanics of referencing rather than on concrete references themselves to legitimize claims he makes. Without having to provide actual proof, Holmes can thus refer to his self-authored monograph on different types of tobacco ash to support his claims about a piece of evidence, and readers will (have to) accept this reference as a credible validation of his statement without being able to consult its source (see, e.g., Sign, 4; “Identity”, 66). Replacing actual references with the more abstract mechanics of referencing thus makes it possible to fill in plot holes and logical blanks that could otherwise threaten to undermine the neat, orderly worldview the stories try to convey. The following section will examine how the referencing techniques Holmes uses to display the encyclopedic scope of his knowledge award legitimacy and an aura of scientific precision to absent or entirely imaginary referents.

The Case of the Case Index: On Absent Referents

Holmes makes frequent use of reference works, but rarely mentions concrete titles save those of his self-authored works. The reference works he uses usually remain vague, as in the passages “[h]e picked a red-covered volume from a line of books of reference on the mantelpiece” (“Bachelor”, 217) or “[m]ake a long arm, Watson, and see what V has to say” whereupon Watson reaches for “the great index volume to which he referred” (“Vampire”, 114). Thus, it is the mechanics of referencing rather than any concrete source of references that fulfills a function in the stories.

In a number of short stories and novels, Holmes refers to an indexed list of cases and general knowledge he has compiled. This index frequently serves to explain where Holmes has obtained a piece of information that seems to appear almost miraculously, and it symbolizes the tremendous scope of experience and knowledge he can draw on. Just by awarding his compilation of case notes the label index, Holmes claims for himself not only possession of but also mastery over a vast body of knowledge. Urs Stäheli has pointed out how “[t]he index is—through its very existence—a witness for mastery,” how it “creates the impression of total understanding” (2016, 23) and conjures up “dreams of total knowledge” (ibid., 19).²⁴ Holmes’s index thus allows him to claim for himself absolute control over the knowledge assembled in his index without him ever having to reveal the criteria for creating an ordering system that enables such mastery. Holmes’s index is thus more than a simple finding aid; the act of indexing becomes “a tool for understanding and acting in the world. Indexing [is] […] demonstrating and discovering something” (Hess and Mendelsohn 2010, 289). The mere use of the term index thus suggests that Holmes has not only collected a lot of information but that he also has total command over the contents of his index and understands all the implications that the information contained therein bears.

The reliability of statements that Holmes makes on the basis of the fictive information in his index is substantiated by the mentioning of real-world place names and concrete temporal references. Statements such as “[y]ou will find parallel cases, if you consult my index, in Andover in ‘77” (”Identity”, 61–62), or “[t]here was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some years back, and something on very much the same lines at Munich the year after the Franco-Prussian War” (“Bachelor”, 227–228), let Holmes spontaneously create facts that fit the current case. The references to places such as Andover or Munich that readers would be familiar with from real-world contexts serve to corroborate and legitimate the information that comes attached to them.

The system behind what kind of information is entered in Holmes’s index is only hinted at in the vaguest of terms, but never clearly explained or displayed. Watson informs the reader that “[f]or many years [Holmes] had adopted a system of docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to name a subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish information” (“Bohemia”, 8). He thus points out both the scope and instant retrievability of the indexed information. The rather vague reference to “men and things” as subjects of Holmes’s interest metonymically stands in for everything and only superficially evokes the impression of delineating clear areas of interest. Moreover, when Holmes reads out the index entry he made on Irene Adler, frequent interjections and exclamations such as “hum!”, “ha!”, “yes!”, and “quite so!” (“Bohemia”, 9), that signify satisfaction, even complacency, with the information he has collected, highlight his information management skills. Every bit of information Holmes reads seems to prove relevant to his current case, and the impression is evoked that his brilliant note-taking system at times even surprises Sherlock Holmes himself. Although the stories mention Holmes working on his index, for example, “cross-indexing his records of crime” (“Pips”, 98)—which, again, hints at a sophisticated ordering system behind the index—concrete statements about the underlying principle of organization remain absent.

In the same way, actual content of the index is, with few exceptions, only referred to rather than represented in its concrete wording. This strategy of representation opens up an infinite referencing potential that makes it possible to insert new addenda whenever and wherever they are needed. Listing strategies as they occur in an index “make it possible not only to link but perhaps more importantly to de-link the spaces they generate from other spaces” (de Goede et al. 2016, 8) and thus invoke an infinity of possibilities without raising questions about how new additions fit into the established system. Holmes can make countless additions to the information supposedly contained in his index without running risk of disturbing the causal or sequential relations between individual index items. The mere existence of an index, catalog, or other directory, Sabine Mainberger argues, sets up expectations of a well thought-out structure and convincing categorization (see 2003, 3). Holmes’s index leans on that assumption, and the authority the term alone carries functions like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Holmes stories, however, feature not only the often mentioned case index to provide an invisible background structure and inexhaustible source of information, but also flaunt a number of monographs and scientific articles, written by Holmes himself, that are frequently quoted and drawn upon to back up his claims. This might be attributable to:

one of the characteristic features of the analytical detective story, namely, the assumption that material circumstances are presumed to be more disinterested, and thus more reliable, witnesses to the truth of a factual assertion than witnesses who provide direct testimony. (Sargent 2010, 293)

A statement that is written down and can be accessed in printed form may thus appear to have greater argumentative force than the very same statement made orally. This holds true for oral and written statements made within the fictional world, even though both kinds of statements are represented to readers on the same level, that is, through printed words. The mere reference to something that exists in the material form of a printed volume awards its contents authority. In Sign, Holmes states:

I have been guilty of several monographs. They are all upon technical subjects. Here, for example, is one “Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos”. In it I enumerate a hundred and forty forms of cigar, cigarette, and pipe tobacco, with coloured plates illustrating the difference in the ash. (4)²⁵

The reference to “technical subjects” suffices as a marker for scientific validity and makes it unnecessary to mention methodological approaches or specific areas of expertise; the fact that these works exist in print is enough to vouch for their legitimacy. The enumeration of three different classes of tobacco—cigar, cigarette, pipe—promises a classificatory system in which the sorting and selecting operations Ann Blair considers central functions of paper technologies (see 2010, 3) have already been performed. These operations implicitly guarantee the reliability of the information presented. Additionally, the word “enumerate” and the concrete number of specific entries mentioned signify both specificity and comprehensiveness. This conjures up contexts of objectivity and scientific methodology that are further supported by the reference to “coloured plates” which function as material evidence for Holmes’s claims.

When Holmes makes classifications such as:

[t]he fish you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. (“League”, 29)

it is not the statement itself that convinces readers of his ingenuity, but rather the method that seems to stand behind it. In this particular case, Holmes’s statement conveys the idea that there is a homogeneous category that could be labeled Chinese tattoo art and that a thorough study thereof might enable one to easily identify all its constituent members. Furthermore, the level of detail given is so striking that it renders the statement immediately convincing. Ben Parker has cleverly argued that “the methodological material and references in the Sherlock Holmes stories produce only a ‘method effect,’ akin to Roland Barthes’s effet de réel,” and that this “method effect ‘produces’ a scientific or logical procedure that is nowhere carried out in the narrative form” (Parker 2016, 449).²⁶ The central element of the Holmes stories is thus “not the presence […] but the aura of decodable clues” (ibid., 450). Parker, however, does not elaborate on the fact that such a “method effect” would not be possible without the frequent reference to ordering and referencing systems that award Holmes’s explications credibility through their formal properties alone.

The enjoyment that readers gain from reading stories about Sherlock Holmes, Parker suggests, “is not in being shown the answer to a brain teaser” but rather relies on the pleasure of witnessing “an impressive and nonduplicable feat” (2016, 453). The explanation that is provided for any mysterious set of circumstances is much less important to such a reading experience than the idea of a structured and knowable world that underlies even the most absurd of Holmes’s deductions. The framework of indexing and referencing through which Holmes legitimates his claims to knowledge turns potentially random statements into hard facts that are made visible (and thus also replicable) through their material existence as printed product.²⁷ The tight interlacement of knowledge and visibility is not only kept up but expanded on in modern adaptions of the Sherlock Holmes material, as will be discussed in the remainder of this chapter.

Knowledge and Visibility: The BBC’s Sherlock

In his article “Drawing Things Together,” Bruno Latour states that “we can hardly think of what it is to know something without indexes, bibliographies, dictionaries, papers with references, tables, columns, photographs, peaks, spots, bands” (1990, 36). All these practices of conveying knowledge bear close resemblance to the phenomena that this book has described as list-like. Another shared feature of these practices is that they all, in varying degrees, constitute instruments of visualizing a certain (predetermined) kind of order. The following sections are dedicated to an examination of this entanglement between knowledge and visibility.

In order to illustrate this connection, I examine the two closely related forms of lists and maps with respect to their capability to convey, compartmentalize, and visually represent knowledge. Lists and maps share a number of affordances. They are frequently mentioned together, but the nature of their relation is rarely commented upon. Latour, for example, even though he makes abundant use of the form of the list in his argument, does not reflect upon the properties of the form he employs. Eva von Contzen, in her analysis of “Experience, Affect and Literary Lists,” refers to both listing and mapping as practices that are non-narrative but frequently appear in narrative texts (see 2018, 325), but does not investigate how these two practices interrelate. Even in the specific context of detective fiction, the conjunct appearance of lists and maps has been remarked but not reflected upon. In his account of the history of crime fiction, Julian Symons names maps of crime scenes and the appearance of listed information (e.g., in the form of printed timetables) as two phenomena that both became popular in crime fiction during the Golden Age (see 1985, 103–104). This contemporaneity implies a close proximity between the two phenomena that Symons, however, does not elaborate upon.

Drawing on Latour’s observations on the importance of imaging and visualization techniques for scientific change, this section of the chapter will first take a close look at the nature of the relations between lists and maps and the affordances those forms share and then demonstrate by the example of the BBC show Sherlock (2010–2017) how the detective fiction genre conjunctly uses lists and maps as tools to visualize, spatialize, and compartmentalize thought processes. The specialized knowledge that marks a detective’s particular power and appeal rests on a combination of those aspects, which prove central to the show’s rendering of the detective’s comprehensive gaze as universally accessible.

Making Meaning Visible: Shared Affordances of Lists and Maps

In 1986, Bruno Latour first published his article “Drawing Things Together,” in which he describes visualization techniques as a key element to scientific development. Rather than seeing changing economic circumstances or the emergence of some sort of new mindset as the cause for scientific change, Latour emphasizes the interconnection of visualization and cognition and examines writing and imaging techniques as possible elementary causes for scientific innovation. Latour poses the order that such practices of inscribing can afford as the focal point around and through which change can originate.

This kind of order, Latour emphasizes, is not created invisibly in the brain of some genius but is constituted in how we put down observations in writing. According to Latour, writing and visualization techniques are a necessary (but not sufficient) element of scientific revolution: the final result of any scientific practice is always rendered in writing or visually on paper (see 1990, 22).²⁸ Gaining support for a new theory, thus, is the direct consequence of a clearly organized, visualized presentation of ideas and results. Diagrams, maps, columns, and so on are all concise and clearly recognizable visualization strategies that afford the kind of order, structure, and visual clarity that Latour deems necessary for the efficient transmission of information.

In order to foster scientific change and render results convincing, Latour argues, visualization techniques need to exhibit a number of affordances that condition their cogency and universal applicability: they must be “superimposable” (ibid., 22), and as textual objects, they need to “have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another” (ibid., 26). Relations between writing and cognition often express themselves through such “immutable mobiles” (ibid.), which can be transported into new contexts without losing their essential qualities. These “immutable mobiles” thus provide a “two-way connection […] that allow[s] translation without corruption” between an object of investigation and an audience (ibid., 28).

Maps (as well as lists) are prime examples of textual objects that feature the affordances Latour mentions. They both condense and simplify information and thus “mobilize larger and larger numbers of events in one spot” (ibid., 41); half a page of a map or diagram can replace pages and pages of description.²⁹ In addition to providing such succinct overviews over information, maps remain instantly recognizable as forms (in the sense of Caroline Levine) that can perform the same kind of operation across an infinite variety of contexts. They are, thus, both immutable and mobile.³⁰ Since maps show only the abstracted bare bones of what they represent, they lend themselves to superimposing different sets of data: a map of a certain area can show altitude differences, population density, climate diagrams, or roads, or it can superimpose a combination of these sets of information over one another and, for instance, combine information on roads and altitudes. Their high degree of abstraction renders maps an ideal tool to present an abundance of data in a relatively small and accessible space. As meeting places between word and image, maps (and other visualization tools) are capable of both mobilization and immutability and, thus, according to Latour, possess the two key aspects of generating scientific impact (see ibid., 31). Additionally, the recognizability of the form itself, independent of the content it conveys, carries connotations from the context of its use, such as associations with objectivity and facticity, that are difficult to disentangle from the message it transmits.

Most of the affordances that Latour ascribes to maps and other tools of inscription also apply to the form of the list. In fact, Latour himself makes copious use of lists to support his arguments.³¹ Lists and maps are intimately related in the way they shape processes of meaning-making and share a number of affordances that play key roles in the transmission (and representation) of knowledge:

1. Visibility: Lists and maps both appear as distinct and recognizable (immutable) forms that remain instantly visible amid masses of other data or text, and through this visibility and recognizability, they draw immediate attention. Their visual nature awards both lists and maps spatial qualities. Media scholar Liam Cole Young points this out when he writes that “[a] paper list is a series of marks that materializes a technique of spatial data organization” (2017, 37). Similarly, in his investigation of lists, Jack Goody implicitly acknowledges the connection between thought processes, visibility, and spatialization when he chooses the curiously spatial example of the itinerary to illustrate one of his three list categories (see 1978, 80).³²

2. Simplicity: A key aspect that helps to render lists and maps instantly visible is their tendency to compress large quantities of information into relatively small spaces. Maintaining clarity when rendering data in such abstracted and condensed form demands a certain simplicity of representation. Latour points out how the “flat” quality of inscriptions, which is responsible for their clarity and the impression that nothing remains hidden in them, “enables mastery” through the very simplicity it projects (1990, 44). He even uses the form of the list as one possible example of such a “flat surface that enables mastery” (ibid.).

3. Facticity: The reduction of complexity that lists and maps share often leaves implicit the connections and relations between the items represented. At the same time, these forms suggest that the combinations they present make inherent sense. In leaving connections implicit and stripping items of their descriptive contexts, lists and maps create gaps which can hide the personal or ideological bias of the list- or map-maker, and create the illusion that they depict objective facts rather than representations. This aspect has particular relevance for lists and maps in detective fiction. In Crime Fiction, John Scaggs discusses the significance of realist spatial settings, which can be seen in “[t]he use of maps, along with the use of titles that fix a particular event in spatial terms” in Golden Age crime fiction (2005, 51). He even implicitly connects this phenomenon to the abundant appearance of lists in these novels. Scaggs argues that the “objectified sense of place” that is created through the inclusion of crime scene maps in Golden Age novels is usually accompanied by an equally “objectified sense of time in the proliferation of times, clocks, timetables, and alibis” (ibid.), which is often used to conjure up an air of facticity in detective novels and tends to be represented in the form of the list.

4. Comprehensiveness: The impression of facticity is supported by the degree of compression these forms afford. Compressed accounts usually consist of the essentials of an argument or depiction that are representative of larger contexts; thus, such accounts appear comprehensive by implication. Maps and lists appear as what Latour calls the “final stage of a whole process of mobilization” that constitutes the result of an entire “cascade of ever simplified inscriptions that allow harder facts to be produced at greater cost” (1990, 40), and that render complex issues in simple forms. The simpler the inscription, Latour suggests, the harder the fact appears, not least because information condensed and coded into an image is considerably harder to disprove than a statement (before one could do this, the process of condensation would have to be reversed to lay bare the information that resulted in the image). This brevity and conciseness makes lists, maps, and other inscriptions appear as both objective and comprehensive: whatever details remain visible in a compressed depiction of data are automatically considered as important and representative of what has been left out. In detective fiction, this list-based comprehensiveness frequently serves to epitomize the detective’s all-encompassing gaze.

5. Flexibility: The property of being mobile (as Latour terms it) or, in Caroline Levine’s words, of being able to travel across a wide variety of contexts (see 2015, 7) renders the forms of the list and the map infinitely adaptable to new contexts without changing their basic functionality: a decorative map functions according to the same principles as a strategic one.

Both lists and maps constitute powerful tools through which knowledge can be created, transmitted, negotiated, and reorganized. The remainder of this chapter will use the BBC series Sherlock as an example to demonstrate how lists and maps can be used to direct the audience’s perception and conception of knowledge.

Knowledge, Lists, and Maps in the BBC’s Sherlock

In 2010, the BBC aired the first episode of Sherlock (2010–2017), a show that adapts the material of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to a contemporary setting.³³ Over the four seasons of the show, its protagonist Sherlock is presented as “a millennial thinker” whose “youthful technological expertise” enables him to handle digital information with exceptional speed and efficiency (Stein and Busse 2012b, 10). Just like with Doyle’s nineteenth-century model of the famous detective, knowledge and observation are portrayed as the foundation of Sherlock’s exceptional skills. Contrary to Doyle’s original stories, however, Sherlock tries to give its audience direct access to the detective’s thoughts as he is having them rather than explain his conclusions after the fact. In this manner, Sherlock tries to portray the, at first glance, almost magical skill set of its protagonist as potentially accessible to anyone. Sherlock’s expertise and skills, so the show suggests, are not the result of innate genius but rather a matter of finding the right access points to information and navigating an overwhelming supply of data efficiently. To promote this idea of universal accessibility, Sherlock takes a strongly visualized approach to representing knowledge that allows viewers access to Sherlock’s thought processes.³⁴ The show uses lists, maps, and other visualization tools in order to portray knowledge as spatialized field, the successful maneuvering of which requires navigational rather than interpretative skills.

Spatialization and Accessibility

Whenever the BBC’s version of Sherlock Holmes analyzes a situation, the show chooses to display typed words as a screen overlay floating next to clues that draw Sherlock’s attention. These overlays often appear as lists of keywords, mapped out around suspects or clues, that visualize Sherlock’s cognitive activity and give the audience direct access to his perception. Sherlock’s first episode, “A Study in Pink” (S1, E1),³⁵ introduces the audience to many of the devices the show employs to provide access to Sherlock’s mind and therefore offers itself particularly well as a case study. In this episode, the screen overlays are meant to help the audience comprehend Sherlock’s thought processes as he deduces information from the dead body of a woman found at a crime scene. The audience is first presented with a close-up shot of a detail that draws Sherlock’s attention, such as the dead woman’s hands and fingernails. Subsequently, Sherlock’s thoughts or conclusions (in this case, that the woman is “left handed”) appear next to the details.

The fact that the audience is invited to watch Sherlock think becomes clear at the latest when he observes a detail and the screen overlay writing changes as Sherlock considers different options. The audience can see that the woman has scratched the letters “RACHE” into the floorboards with her fingernails. The screen overlay first displays a German dictionary entry that tells the audience “Rache” is the German word for “revenge.” This screen overlay, however, is followed by a reverse shot back to Sherlock’s face, in front of which the dictionary entry is still displayed in mirror writing within Sherlock’s direct line of sight [24:40].

This suggests that the words the audience can read on screen are what Sherlock sees when he looks at a clue: if we look back at him, the words are mirrored because from the character’s point of view, they are still there and displayed in regular writing. Furthermore, when Sherlock moves the victim’s hand, the words that float next to it also move along the screen. This shows that the words are part of Sherlock’s perspective and perception, and it also serves to emphasize the visual approach that Sherlock takes to knowledge: the protagonist’s conclusions are literally spelled out before his face, displayed in written letters next to his object(s) of observation.³⁶ The audience is not only presented with the result of Sherlock’s conclusions but becomes witness to his actual thought processes. This becomes clear when the dictionary entry in mirror writing shatters underneath his gaze and the camera cuts back to a close-up of the clue. The image of the scratched letters is now overlayed with the letters “RACHE” and permutations of letters that could be added to form a different word.

Allowing the audience this kind of access to Sherlock’s cognitive processes serves a twofold purpose. First, it demystifies the miraculous conclusions the audience might be used to from Doyle’s Holmes stories and thus presents Sherlock’s deductions and the knowledge he draws on as an accessible and objective tool that can potentially help anyone to map out a path from an observation to its one and only correct interpretation.³⁷ Secondly, as Louisa Stein and Kristina Busse remark, the thought processes visualized in the show “serve doubly to tie the viewer to Sherlock’s unique subjectivity” (2012b, 12)³⁸ and render the character more accessible to the audience despite his impressive and seemingly unreachable skill set. The show’s deliberate shift from the character’s last to first name even further contributes to rendering him more accessible (see ibid., 12).

Sherlock uses both visual and sound effects to support its portrayal of Sherlock’s cognitive activity, but the key to providing this kind of accessibility is the visualization of his knowledge and thoughts. The words that appear as lists of observations on screen are dynamic, like Sherlock’s thoughts, and visually represent how one thought inevitably triggers another. In the scene from “A Study in Pink,” for example, a close-up of the woman’s right hand and the ring she is wearing is overlayed with the word “married,” and then the word “unhappily” is added above the original thought. This is followed by a set of rotating numbers that represent how Sherlock calculates the period of time for which the woman has been married. As the numbers settle on “10+,” the word “years” fades in and is added to the list of bullet point thoughts [25:18]. This shows how each of Sherlock’s deductions serves as the basis for the logical next step on an inevitable path to the correct solution and thus suggests that there is a linear path from making an observation to arriving at the correct conclusion.

In “Drawing Things Together,” Latour emphasizes the importance of both visualization and spatialization to achieve such an effect:

What is so important in the images and in the inscriptions scientists and engineers are busy obtaining, drawing, inspecting, calculating, and discussing? It is, first of all, the unique advantage they give in the rhetorical or polemical situation. ‘You doubt what I say? I’ll show you’. (1990, 35–36)

The visualization of Sherlock’s cognitive processes serves as demonstration and affirmation of his methods at the same time. Through visualizing Sherlock’s thought processes, the show not only awards them credibility but also makes them appear falsifiable and thus scientific. In Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories, the reader is only presented with Holmes’s fantastical conclusions and some explanations in hindsight, which corroborate Holmes’s status as genius and are aimed at inspiring awe. Sherlock’s protagonist, on the other hand, presents the audience not only with the result but also with the cognitive process that maps out the way by which Sherlock arrives at his conclusions. Sherlock’s observations are shown on screen rather than just summarized. The audience shares his perspective and can see for themselves how he forms conclusions from his observations.

The show anchors Sherlock’s thoughts in space by having the words float next to or, in some cases, even through³⁹ the physical object an observation is made about. This is central to the show’s rhetoric and its portrayal of knowledge. Latour has pointed out that the greatest advantage of inscriptions in a scientific context is that “[t]he two-dimensional character of inscriptions allow [sic] them to merge with geometry” and thus to make paper (or, in the case of Sherlock, screen-) space congruent with real space, that is, three-dimensional, observable reality (ibid., 46). Through its visualization techniques, Sherlock renders its protagonist’s thoughts as both mobile and immutable in the sense of Bruno Latour. The spatialized inscriptions make his thoughts appear mobile—and thus valid because they remain reproducible in a variety of contexts—and immutable because of their anchoring in physical space and the mapped-out path to a definite and correct solution they portray.

This representation of knowledge as spatialized pathways is not unique to the show’s protagonist but is also adopted by the other characters in the show. In “A Study in Pink” the perpetrator explains how he manipulated his victims, remarking “I know what people think. I know what people think I think. I can see it all like a map inside my head” [1:13:30]. Statements like this support the show’s spatialized way of portraying knowledge. In order to get where you want to go, Sherlock suggests, all you have to do is to read the map of possibilities right and take the correct route. Detection, and, by implication, knowledge, the audience is told, requires navigational rather than interpretative skills.

Navigating and Interpreting Knowledge

In their introduction to the volume Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom, Louisa Stein and Kristina Busse discuss how Sherlock’s digital know-how is based around the two basic operations of searching and filtering (see 2012b, 11). The show makes these two processes visible through screen overlays whenever Sherlock contemplates a problem or analyzes a clue, and allows the audience to follow along his path of thought through words and images that float over the screen. From these screen overlays it becomes clear that Sherlock uses his phone (as a metonymical extension of the Internet) and his memory almost interchangeably. In “A Study in Pink,” for example, Sherlock examines a victim’s wet coat and then uses his smartphone to check the weather conditions in the vicinity of London. The screen overlay shows the keywords displayed on Sherlock’s phone and highlights the search path he selects through the menu (see [25:56]), which inevitably leads him to a single possible location where the victim could have come from. Visually, Sherlock’s (external) search with his smartphone is represented in the same way as his internal thought processes: arriving at the correct solution is displayed as a matter of choosing the correct path through a number of options, some of which must be filtered out. The parallel the show draws between cognitive processes and an Internet browser’s search function implies that finding the correct solution to any given problem is a matter of selecting the appropriate route from a readily available menu.

The processes of searching and filtering impact the way we as a culture understand our relationship to both information and visibility. Search and filter convey the rendering of insight through the sorting of information and the making visible of preferred or more relevant findings. Sherlock’s dependence on the protocols of search and filter in his deductive processes highlights the way in which, according to Lev Manovich (2001), digital logics become cultural logics become personal logics. (Stein and Busse 2012b, 11)⁴⁰

Similarly, information that does not appear to be worth consideration according to these digital logics can be easily edited out. As becomes evident from the rotating, shattering, and disappearing screen overlays discussed in the previous section, Sherlock discards thoughts with the swipe of a hand or the blink of an eye, as if they could simply be deleted once he has rated them as irrelevant to the current endeavor.

Visibility, or the mastery thereof, is closely related to power in the context of detective fiction.⁴¹ Seeing, as the above quote hints, is portrayed as insight. Two fundamentally different processes, one related to perception and the other to cognition, are equated here (as they are, too, in Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories) to foreground clarity over complexity and render the cognitive operations Sherlock performs as “flat” in Latour’s sense (see 1990, 44). This flatness not only awards Sherlock the power to make visible what information he needs, whenever he needs it, but also enables the show to present his thought processes as linear and easily traceable. The flat inscription surface of the map lends itself to this very operation and is frequently used in Sherlock to provide clarity and accessibility when displaying how Sherlock thinks.

In “A Study in Pink,” for example, Sherlock, on foot, pursues a suspect in a taxi through Soho. He compensates for the taxi’s superior speed with his detailed knowledge of the city, and “[m]uch like a computer calculates a route from point A to B, Sherlock visualizes the fastest way to catch up with the taxi” (Kustritz and Kohnen 2012, 95). Following a shot in which Sherlock puts his hands to his head as a signal that he is thinking, the audience is shown a map of London, zooming in on Soho. On the map of Soho, a red line appears across the streets, making visible the most likely route for the taxi to take (see [53:23]). The scene is presented in cross-cuts between this map and images of street signs, traffic lights, and construction sites supposedly flashing through Sherlock’s mind and serving as explanations why he can predict where the taxi will turn. This not only demonstrates Sherlock’s enormous and incredibly detailed knowledge of London but, as Kustritz and Kohnen remark, portrays the city of London itself as a “map of visual information that can be reproduced, organized, and accessed” by Sherlock (ibid.). In Sherlock’s mind, the complex events that occur in a city are simplified into a flat representation that becomes predictable and controllable. To succeed in his pursuit, all Sherlock needs is the skill to navigate his mental map of London more efficiently than the taxi navigates the streets of London.

Once Sherlock has calculated the best route to take, the audience sees shots of him and John Watson sprinting along narrow alleys and up stairwells, intercut with the map of Soho, on which a second, green line now makes visible the route Sherlock has chosen for his pursuit. The green line does not keep to the official streets marked on the map but cuts through building blocks and unmapped back alleys, and thus demonstrates that Sherlock’s knowledge of London surpasses even the computational power of a navigational algorithm such as Google Maps (see ibid.). This scene epitomizes the show’s portrayal of knowledge as visualizable and spatialized, accessible, listable, and easily navigable.

One striking instance which illustrates the navigational logic of Sherlock’s knowledge occurs toward the end of the episode “A Study in Pink,” when Sherlock uses the GPS signal of the victim’s (missing) phone to track its location through a website (see [1:00:56]). Once the phone is located, a flashing dot on a map and a bleeping sound indicate the completion of the search. When Sherlock looks at the screen that displays the phone’s location, he starts reassembling clues in his head to identify who the killer might be, and the audience can follow the process through questions he voices in his mind and corresponding images of clues and key situations displayed on screen. While Sherlock reviews his memories of facts of the case, the bleeping sound, by which the website indicates the phone has been located, continues and becomes integrated into Sherlock’s thoughtscape displayed on screen. The continuation of this sound shows that Sherlock is busy locating who and where the killer might be, and—since the bleeping signals the completion of the GPS localization of the phone—that the solution is already hovering at the edge of his perception. This draws yet another parallel between Sherlock’s cognitive processes and digital navigation and calculation of data points, and implies Sherlock’s mind works like a computer. Moreover, it expands on the spatialized representation and visual approach to knowledge the show engages in. What makes the BBC’s Sherlock exceptional is his instinctive command over navigational processes, which renders him able to control (digital) information through the operations of searching, filtering, and visualization.

Memory as Objective Data

Already in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the process of organizing knowledge is portrayed as stunningly spatial. Even when leaving aside the inherently spatial organization of the books and encyclopedias Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes resorts to so often, the prevalence given to space in the organization and description of memories is striking in both Doyle’s original and the BBC adaption.

In A Study in Scarlet (1887), Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes introduces the image of the “brain attic” to describe how he processes and remembers information:

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. (14)

In this quote, knowledge and memory are described in terms of physical space and material items. The location of the attic at the top of a house equals the position of a person’s head (and hence brain) on top of the body and functions to anchor the analogy in physical space. The degree of detail to which Holmes’s elaborations are taken is striking: as storage space, the attic of a house allows its owner perfect control not only over what is to be stored there but also over how and according to which ordering system the “furniture” is to be arranged. A successful arrangement allows the attic’s owner to “lay[...] [their] hands upon” and thus retrieve the items they seek at any time. At a closer inspection, the degree of control over one’s memory that Holmes’s analogy suggests, of course, turns out to be illusory, but in the context of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, it functions to portray human memory as an array of objective data that can be stored or deleted at will and that can be retrieved in the exact same condition in which it was stored.

In the episode “The Great Game” (S1, E3), the BBC’s Sherlock echoes Holmes’s statement about his brain attic when Sherlock tells John Watson: “[l]isten. This is my hard drive and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful. Really useful. Ordinary people fill their heads with all kinds of rubbish. And that makes it hard to get at the stuff that matters. Do you see?” [4:50]. This metaphor takes up Doyle’s idea that memories can be stored, arranged, and deleted at will, and additionally emphasizes the machine-like efficiency of organizing data this way by having Sherlock compare his brain to a part of a computer. Sherlock’s proficiency with and constant use of technology also feeds into this idea.

The notion of “technology as an extension of [our] physical body” has already been proposed by Marshall McLuhan (1994, 47), and the so-called extended mind thesis suggests that “cognition is often […] continuous with processes in the environment” (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 10), that is, that our cognitive processes can become coupled with external resources that are at our regular disposal (see ibid., 11). Clark and Chalmers take the calculator as their example to explain what they term “active externalism” (ibid., 9), in which external features come to play an “ineliminable role” in our cognitive processes (ibid.). New technologies foster such active externalism to an unprecedented degree.⁴² Sherlock’s phone as metonymical extension of the Internet functions as seamless extension of his “mental database” (Kustritz and Kohnen 2012, 97), which suggests that Sherlock’s memory has an equally objective quality and machine-like efficiency.

In “The Hounds of Baskerville” (S2 E2), Holmes’s brain attic idea is taken up again and expanded according to the characteristics discussed above. Holmes’s brain attic in this episode becomes Sherlock’s “mind palace.”⁴³ The change of terminology reflects the increase of proportions that comes with the inclusion of the Internet into the well of knowledge Sherlock can draw on. Additionally, the inflated size functions to flaunt Sherlock’s habitual arrogance: by labeling his own mind a palace, he points out its extraordinary size and contrasts it with an ordinary person’s mind, which might perhaps be compared to a house rather than a palace.⁴⁴

The episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” has Sherlock investigate a secret research facility, from which, allegedly, a giant genetically engineered hound has escaped. When trying to draw a connection between seemingly disparate clues, Sherlock retreats to the aforementioned mind palace. The show’s trademark floating words then allow the audience to follow Sherlock into his mind palace. The scene starts with a blurry image of the word “hound,” displayed within a circle of orange light. The image triples and fades as Sherlock proceeds to the next thought. The way the word is displayed is reminiscent of the image of a research object as it appears when looking through a microscope that is out of focus. This implies that Sherlock’s mind works like a scientific instrument that, if properly used, will yield a clear image of his object of research.

This microscope reference can be seen as an updated version of the traditional Holmesian magnifying glass, which already symbolizes the detective’s insight and attention to detail in Doyle’s stories. Furthermore, the visual metaphor of Sherlock’s mind as a microscope suggests that reaching the correct solution is a process of mechanical adjustment that is both repeatable and calculable, and thus that the kind of analysis Sherlock is performing can be reproduced by anyone who has been instructed in how to do so. By analogy, this manner of representation also suggests that the object of Sherlock’s investigation—his memories, in this particular scene—can be handled like any material object examined under a microscope: it can be viewed from different angles, but will essentially remain unchanged. The memories that Sherlock reviews in this scene, thus, are portrayed as objective data, which remains accessible and unchanged indefinitely.

As the scene proceeds, this impression is further strengthened by the way Sherlock navigates his thoughts. As the words and clues he is trying to connect appear in print before his closed eyes, Sherlock makes swiping motions with his hands to navigate his associations, which is reminiscent of the way information can be reviewed on electronic devices with a touchscreen.

Sherlock, for example, pins the word “liberty” to the side of his mental screen and moves it around as he goes through different associations, and he swipes through information he retrieves from his memories in a way that is reminiscent of scrolling through a website. He uses his hands to sort through memories and swipe aside associations he rejects as being unimportant to his current objective. Furthermore, the mise-en-scène has words appear between Sherlock’s outstretched hands and at times suggests that he is holding them as one would hold a material object (see [1:10:51]). The way Sherlock uses his hands further reinforces the impression that his thoughts and memories are as graspable as material objects, retrievable with the touch of a hand, and as unchangeable and thus objective as data stored on a digital device. Sherlock thus portrays “[m]ind, body, and data [as] part of an overtly integrated information system” (Taylor 2012, 139) and highlights the physical level involved in cognition that is also a prominent focus of the extended mind thesis. Sherlock brings into prominence not only the huge amount of data that Sherlock constantly has at the tip of his fingers, but also his ability to access any piece of information that is part of this network as easily as one would retrieve a physical object from its storage space.

The mind palace metaphor, through which this scene is framed, illustrates how Sherlock is able to “mobilize larger and larger numbers of events in one spot” through the very techniques that Latour describes as central to scientific innovation (1990, 41). By mapping Sherlock’s cognitive activity onto the imaginary yet concrete mental space of his mind palace, the show portrays Sherlock’s abstract mental map as reproducible and objective. Sherlock’s knowledge seems firmly anchored in physical and digital space, which creates the impression of order and accessibility. In the mind palace scene, John Watson explicitly draws attention to this spatial aspects of Sherlock’s thought process when he explains to a scientist that Sherlock’s mind palace is “a memory technique. A sort of mental map. You plot a map with a location, doesn’t have to be a real place, and then you deposit memories there” [1:10:16]. Watson’s portrayal of knowledge as mappable and of memories as something that can be deposited like a physical object reinforces the idea that knowledge requires navigational rather than interpretative skill. Both maps and lists, in the show, become tools to visualize cognitive processes and turn personal observations and memories into scientifically graspable data.

Compartmentalization

The strong spatial aspect of how Sherlock represents knowledge foregrounds issues of compartmentalization and classification that connects the show back to its origins in Doyle’s stories. The brain attic metaphor, which compares pieces of knowledge to furniture that can be arranged and retrieved at will (see Scarlet, 14), suggests that different aspects of knowledge are as clearly distinguishable as individual pieces of furniture and that they remain independent from one another. The view of “physicality as information” (Taylor 2012, 134), that is, the idea that material objects carry traces of their history that can be observed and unambiguously correlated with an interpretation, is closely linked to a view of knowledge as compartmentalized that can be found in both Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the BBC’s Sherlock.

The idea of easily distinguishable and neatly separable units is central to the portrayal of knowledge and order in both texts. The list Watson makes to categorize Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet presents a range of categories that appear to be separate and clearly discriminable because they are rendered in a consecutively numbered column in a layout that visually disconnects the list items from one another. Such a presentation glosses over discontinuities and unintuitive classificatory choices Watson makes, such as listing literature (item 1) and sensational literature (item 9) as separate categories (see Scarlet, 15). Watson’s list presents the story world as based on a clearly identifiable (and hence, reproducible) order.

The word lists of Sherlock’s observations that Sherlock uses to display its protagonist’s deductions and make them accessible to the audience fulfill a similar function. Each word or prompt appears attached to a concrete physical object or aspect of a person and thus has a fixed place in the story world. The words are anchored in observable space in a similar way to how Watson’s list in A Study in Scarlet relies on its concrete layout to achieve its effect. Both strategies of representation order the world they comment upon and use physical space to evoke the impression that the conceptual space and cognitive processes they stand in for can be as easily separated from one another as can the physical locations of the concrete list items.

Another parallel compartmentalizing and classifying strategy can be found in Sherlock Holmes’s use of (frequently fictional) reference works and the way in which the BBC’s Sherlock uses the Internet as a source of information. The way in which Sherlock harnesses the Internet to come up with pieces of information that miraculously propel his investigation forward is equally stunning to the audience as the way in which Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes retrieves pieces of information that perfectly match the current case when he consults reference works. Both versions of the famous detective remain credible when they perform such feats because they can lay claims to specialized knowledge the other characters (and the audience or the readers) lack. Sherlock’s digital proficiency is portrayed as exceptional and as far surpassing that of an average human being and is “key to presenting his rationalist intelligence in the BBC series” (Bochman 2012, 148). Similarly, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes lays claims to knowledge acquired during past investigations as well as to the ability to know which pieces of information may be relevant to his profession. Holmes points out that his brain attic only comprises “the tools which may help him in doing his work” (Scarlet, 14) and thus presents his ability to efficiently compartmentalize information as the key to his success as a detective.

Yet, neither Holmes’s reference works nor the websites Sherlock consults are sources that Doyle’s readers and the audience of the BBC show can verify. Many of Holmes’s reference works are simply fictional, and though the audience of the BBC’s Sherlock will likely have access to the Internet, the Internet itself is such a vast and entangled mesh of content that the origin of any particular piece of information is as untraceable as the source of Sherlock Holmes’s information in Doyle’s stories. The premise upon which such unlimited and yet untraceable knowledge can appear believable is that this knowledge derives from an identifiable source of information that presupposes some kind of classificatory system the detective knows how to apply and that this source of information is potentially, but not actually, accessible by others than the detective himself. Both Holmes’s reference works and Sherlock’s use of the Internet fulfill those conditions and consequently grant these detectives near omniscience without the taint of supernatural powers. Holmes relies on the mechanics of referencing that Doyle’s readers would be familiar with, and Sherlock emphasizes how its protagonist’s proficiency is a matter of navigational skill.

Even though the two detectives are more than a century apart, both are based around the idea that knowledge and reason are central tools in ordering an otherwise chaotic world. Both characters in particular and both story worlds in general employ lists and list-based referencing systems and categorization strategies to create an appearance of order that ultimately remains inaccessible to Doyle’s readers and Sherlock’s audience. Lists and reference works in both story worlds appear as a way of portraying the detective’s reasoning as based on a replicable step-by-step method, yet at the same time their fragmentary nature guarantees that only the detective can perform those steps and thus appears as an exceptional rational genius.

Toward the end of “Drawing Things Together,” Latour concludes that “[i]f you want to understand what draws things together, then look at what draws things together” (1990, 60, emphasis in original). This chapter has been an attempt to do exactly that and show how aspects of visibility and representation influence what kind of information we conceive of as knowledge and how we depict and evaluate it in any given context. Both Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the BBC show Sherlock choose a take on knowledge that focuses on its representation over delineating the exact kind of knowledge content that enables a detective to conduct a successful investigation. Both texts use listing and referencing tools to create a plausible (and visible) backdrop for their detective’s expertise and thus make it possible for a mere reference to a thing to stand in for the thing itself. The figuration of knowledge that stands behind that strategy is decidedly different from the interconnections of knowledge and listing techniques that have been discussed in the previous chapters. My conclusion is going to situate these different approaches to representing knowledge in the larger context of detective fiction and tie them to the different kinds of implied readers that the texts I have discussed imagine as their audience.