{"id":19358,"date":"2022-04-25T23:38:06","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T06:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19358"},"modified":"2022-04-25T23:40:02","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T06:40:02","slug":"on-the-uses-of-encyclopedias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2022\/04\/25\/on-the-uses-of-encyclopedias\/","title":{"rendered":"On the uses of encyclopedias"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I\u2019ve finally finished reading Andrew Brown\u2019s A Brief History of Encyclopaedias<\/cite>. I continued to find it both interesting and annoying all the way through. (It\u2019s less than 120 pages long, but it took me a few days to read it because I kept falling asleep. That\u2019s not the book\u2019s fault; I was inexplicably sleepy all weekend.)<\/p>\r\n

Here\u2019s one particular thing that it left me thinking about:<\/p>\r\n

Brown repeatedly talks about alphabetical order as if it were a sort of fragmentation method, a way to disconnect related topics from each other, a kind of randomization system. As if you start out with a coherently structured set of articles and then you fragment them by putting them in alphabetical order.<\/p>\r\n

Which baffled me. To me, the entire point of alphabetical order is to make it easier for readers to find the material that they\u2019re looking for. It certainly results in some things that are semantically related to each other not being anywhere near each other in the encyclopedia, but I feel like that\u2019s not a major problem if you\u2019re using the encyclopedia as a reference work, looking up specific topics (and following cross-references) rather than trying to read the whole encyclopedia front to back.<\/p>\r\n

But Brown quoted various people who\u2019ve been involved with making encyclopedias who seemed to share his idea about the evils (albeit possibly necessary ones) of alphabetical order.<\/p>\r\n

So I\u2019m left in the probably untenable position of feeling that some creators of encyclopedias didn\u2019t understand what encyclopedias were for. Which probably means that I\u2019m wrong.<\/p>\r\n

But I think I can retreat to a safer position by making a more general statement:<\/p>\r\n

When you\u2019re writing something, it\u2019s a good idea to consider who your audience is and what modes of interaction with your work you want to make easier.<\/p>\r\n

(A bunch of the works that Brown describes in this book are not things that I would consider to be encyclopedias at all. Several of them were (if I understand right) designed to teach rulers how to rule well. Some of them were vast compendia of quotations. One of them was a sort of thesaurus\u2014a collection of phrases that you could use as synonyms for each other so as not to repeat yourself when writing. Those are all interesting kinds of works, but they\u2019re not collections of general-interest articles on a wide range of topics, written for ordinary people to look stuff up in.<\/p>\r\n

But here again, some encyclopedia makers have disagreed with me about what an encyclopedia is or should be. In the first edition of Britannica<\/cite>, for example, there was a 39-page article on \u201cFarriery,\u201d apparently intended to teach farriers how to do their jobs. That seems to me to be at odds with the purposes of an encyclopedia, but its presence in what I would have considered the canonical example of an English-language encyclopedia suggests that I\u2019m wrong.)<\/p>\r\n

Anyway, there are also other aspects of the problem that I feel like Brown ignores. For example:<\/p>\r\n