We’re so used to alphabetical lists that its underlying organizational ideas are all but invisible. But it was not so for most of human history since the invention of writing. The ubiquity of alphabetization is a rather modern phenomenon – the twists and turns of its history are well-document in Judith Flanders’ book A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.
There are many interesting factoids. For example, Seoul 1998 was the first time countries marched out on opening night not according to the Western “Romanized” alphabetical order. (Prior to this, host countries that didn't use a similar alphabet followed the A to Z sequence just for that event anyway.) This confused media around the world televising the events live because they didn’t know when to cut to commercial breaks without missing the entrance of their home country! I also learned that glossaries first appeared in alphabetical order in 8th century monasteries, and that the first Western encyclopedia was compiled by Isidore of Seville in the 6th century.
I loved reading encyclopedias as a kid whenever I could get my hands on them! A one-stop place to learn about all the important things one should know – what could be better? Honestly, I don’t remember how they were organized, but after reading Flanders’ book I find myself paying more attention to the organizational aspects of… well, everything! The information explosion we’re experiencing today is not new. It’s an old problem – I’ve briefly blogged about this after reading a different book. Flanders discusses this problem, focusing on the organizational aspects, for example in how the popularity of encyclopedias evolved historically. Chapter 8 (“H is for History”) begins with a quote by C.S. Lewis, very appropriate to Flanders’ book.
Mediaeval man was not a dreamer… He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted a “place for everything and everything in its place.” Distinction, definition, and tabulation were his delight… There was nothing mediaeval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions, I suspect they would have most admired the card index.
Flanders narrates that interesting invention in the next chapter (“I” is for Index Cards) but I won’t dwell on it here, other than to say I use index cards as a low-tech way to administer my five-minute pop quizzes at the beginning of class. You’ll have to read her book for the interesting backstory of the index card. Today’s post will focus on how the meaning of information has changed as organizing it took center stage. The information explosion was aided by the invention of the printing press and the availability of (accessible and affordable) paper. The metal letters of the Gutenberg press were stored in cases, not alphabetically but by usage frequency.
But breaking words down into separate physical tangible objects is a profound shift in how one thinks about information. Meaning is lost when semantics has been transformed into syntax. It’s a reductionist approach. For utilitarian purposes, of course, but sometimes we forget what we’ve stripped out in the process of reductionism. I’m reminded of an old C.S. Lewis essay (“The Language of Religion”) that compares three ways of using language: Ordinary, Scientific, Poetic. It’s a marvelous essay that I won’t pretend to understand, but there’s a haunting part I will quote.
Now it seems to me a mistake to think that our experience in general can be communicated by precise and literal language and that there is a special class of experiences (say, emotions) which cannot. The truth seems to me the opposite: there is a special region of experiences which can be communicated without poetic language, namely, its ‘common measurable features’, but most experience cannot. To be incommunicable by Scientific language is, so far as I can judge, the normal state of experience. All our sensuous experience is in this condition, though this is somewhat veiled from us by the fact that much of it is very common and therefore everyone will understand our references to it at a hint. But if you have to describe to a doctor any unusual sensation, you will soon be driven to use of the same (essential) nature as Asia’s enchanted boat [from Prometheus Unbound, a poem by Shelley]. An army doctor who suspected you of malingering would soon reduce you to halting and contradictory statements; but if by chance you had not been malingering he would have cut himself off from all knowledge of what might have turned out an interesting case.
For context, the entire essay is worth reading. The polemic is, in my possibly ignorant opinion, directed mainly at how theology has evolved to incorporate more Scientific language, thereby making it more abstract, obtuse, and likely impoverished. I wonder if we scientists do the same thing. I’ve been pondering the notion of reducing semantics to syntax in how to think about chemical information. Our methods thus far have been utilitarian, but likely impoverished, and in trying to define what distinguishes life from non-life, we may have stripped out what’s most important. I have a few dense academic books on my desk to tackle this summer on that topic.
But let’s get back to Flanders’ book. She chronicles how many of the ‘learned’ in 17th century Europe were coming up with their own methods to keep track of what they had read so they could find it when needed. Yes, many slips of paper are involved. But how should one then organize those slips? The famous Malpighi would glue tiny labels to his notebooks, a forerunner of the post-it note. The not-so-famous but strange Harrison Ark was furniture built with the purpose of helping you store and retrieve, a forerunner to the filing cabinet with tabbed hanging folders perhaps? It was even rumored that Leibniz, co-inventor of calculus, but also a librarian of famed classification skills, owned such an Ark.
As written materials became commonplace in the so-called Middle Ages, the weight of educational training began to shift from memorization to organization. This shift required search tools and the index was born. (I wonder how many of my students still use the index at the back of their textbooks.) These began as “commonplace” books where as a part of learning you made your own notes to organize the information you had learned. (If only students did this today!) The philosopher John Locke’s alphabetical method of organization increased in popularity, but there was a backlash among the literati who “balked at the notion of one entry following another without any structure or order other than the happenstance of the sequence of the alphabet”.
Locke’s fellow philosopher, Francis Bacon, planned to “capture all the learning in the world” thus fueling a rush of encyclopedia-mania. These were organized in various ways, depending on how one classified knowledge. Is one classification better than another? That’s unclear. Perhaps it depends on one’s perspective or purpose; whereas the “use of alphabetical order… marks a transition in worldview”: that there isn’t one privileged point of view or hierarchy. And for this, we have to thank the philosopher Pierre Bayle who was keeping track of errors in an encyclopedia, and created his own “critique” alphabetically. There’s a certain efficiency to being able to find things in a “neutral” alphabetic system without having to understand the idiosyncratic choices of any topical classification system. The atomization of knowledge was now in full swing.
Flanders juxtaposes two interesting works, a play and a book. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1592) “told the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for universal knowledge, contained in a single magic book that included everything that it was possible to know… an encyclopedia. Thomas Peacock’s Headlong Hall (1816) satirized a character named “Mr. Panscope, the chemical, botanical, geological, astronomical, [long list]… who hard run through the circle of the sciences, and understood them all equally well; that is, not at all.” And not too long after, the famous scientist Helmholtz (1873) “remarked proudly on the splendors of the mechanical utility of catalogs, lexicons, registers, indexes, digests… which has freed mankind from its reliance on memory, something he saw as an unquestioned good.”
Memory has been supplanted by resources for looking things up. Today we have the World Wide Web. You don’t even need savvy. Just type in what you’re looking for, and thousands of answers and resources await you. And for the less savory, there’s also the companion Dark Web. No longer is there a single path to knowledge. Choose your own knowledge adventure! As an educator, it may sound like I’m mocking this approach; I think that while knowledge may now be at anyone’s fingertips, understanding and wisdom are not so easily acquired. I teach chemistry; it’s difficult and abstract – and my students would agree. They could try to learn it on their own, but few have the gumption to do so. I’m not sure I would have – and I’m grateful to good teachers who helped me learn it and love it.
I worry about the atomization of knowledge even as my general field, the natural sciences, has made tremendous progress through its reductionist lens. The way I look at the world is tinted, both as a scientist and as an educator. Flanders’ book reminds me of the importance of enlarging my scope, and I’ve tried to read more widely and broadly. And how do I organize what I’m learning? I’m not sure I do this well at all – but my “commonplace book” is this blog – a cyborgian offload of my general thoughts. Thanks to the search function, I’ve not had to work to organize it in some fashion. It’s an alphabet soup broth, perhaps a sign of incoherence and swirl, in need of some stronger organizing principles.
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