I was sufficiently nerdish in my youth to enjoy reading the World Book Encyclopedia that my parents got us back in the 1960s. I now have to take care not to get lost too deeply in the hyperlinked maelstrom of information in the current version of Wikipedia (67+ million articles in 345 languages) or its AI-souped-up progeny serving up pre-digested info (most of which is actually true). As I started my history studies 20 years ago, I stumbled into the principal precedent for all modern compendia of information: the great French Encylopédie of the 18C.
This era of scientific “revolution,” “Enlightenment,” and global exploration brought a deluge of new discoveries, inventions, and analyses. We may talk about the accumulation of petabytes of data, but we have the language and a couple of centuries of experience in digesting ever-increasing accumulation of information (with similar—but trailing—growth of knowledge and wisdom) to acclimate ourselves to the constantly growing mass. For the (relatively few) intelligentsia of this period, the 18C was a bewildering and breath-taking time.
One of the essential challenges was therefore to figure out how to compile and organize all this stuff. While there was a smattering of attempts at comprehensive collections of knowledge stretching back to Pliny in the 1C, therefore, the field didn’t really blossom until the 18C. (Unsurprisingly, there is parallel development of dictionaries/lexicons.) Still, less than a dozen came out before mid-century.
The French project started out as an adaptation of the English “Chambers’ Cyclopaedia” (1735), but it stumbled until it was rebooted by Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert in 1748. They envisioned a new concept and a vastly expanded scope. Its goal was to compile, in an organized form, all "the parts of human knowledge", as based upon sensory input and reason. Diderot (with typical modesty) said that its purpose was “to change the general way of thinking.” They did so by covering both concepts and practical issues, in how they organized their articles, and the critical attitude they adopted towards superstition and other traditional epistemologies (and the Catholic Church in particular).
They corralled scores of contributors and, in the end produced over 72,000 articles comprising over 20 million words in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of pictures. They called it the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers,
par une Société de Gens de letters” (“The Encyclopedia, or comprehensive dictionary of sciences, arts and methods, by a group of men of letters”). The articles ranged from Magic to Shakespeare to agricultural tools, with drawings of individuals, machinery, and landscapes. The contributors included Voltaire, Rousseau, and my favorite, the Chevalier de Jaucourt, an aristocratic scholar who employed a team of research assistants and produced almost a quarter of the total number of articles in the entire set.
One of my first projects in grad school was to write a paper on the Encyclopédie. I researched all the articles that talked about magic, sorcery, prophecy and related topics; trying to get a handle on how this epitome of Enlightenment rationalism coped with the supernatural and superstition. It was a fun project, although perhaps a bit too ambitious for a novice scholar.
From start to finish, it took about 27 years to publish the entire set, delayed by financial challenges, censorship, printing issues, and the generally overwhelming scope of the project. Editing was often haphazard, with different authors overlapping and taking different points of view. Afterwards, Diderot said it was “a pit in which the miserable rag pickers [his contributors] threw pell-mell all kinds of things—badly digested, good, bad, detestable, true, false, uncertain, and always both incoherent and disparate.”
Eventually, thousands of copies in several editions were published through the end of the 18C, so it received widespread readership (at least among intellectuals and wannabes). It spawned many imitators, most notably the Encyclopedia Britanica which started publication just as the Encyclopédie was completing its work. Britanica carried the torch into the 21C, with competitors (such as the World Book I read as a boy) flourishing in the mid-20C. There’s a copy online of course (en Francais) and a project at the University of Michigan has been using volunteers to produce an online English translation (I did about twenty articles when I was doing my research)
The basic purpose of encyclopedias remains the same: to encompass and distribute useful knowledge—both practical and cultural. At the time of the Encyclopédie, this was a new kind of thing, reflecting the (then) rapidly expanding scope of information, discovery, and critical reflection on the world and society. Diderot et al. made a good stab at it in the mid-18C with about 20M words. Even if that would be a veritable drop in the bucket for today’s multi-lingual Wikipedia (about 10B words!), we live in a world with far more information at hand; so, in a sense, encyclopedias are increasingly falling behind.
At the dawn of the AI era, we may be moving to a new mode of access to information, one which allows us to automate the “look-up” and integrating functions that were necessary in both paper and electronic encyclopedias to date. This will make more useful information available, but will require more thoughtful questions to access it effectively.
Nonetheless, for those who use encyclopedias (as I did as a boy) to swim in the pond of knowledge (not quite sure where I was headed), AI won’t help so much. A certain amount of randomness is helpful; especially to help us realize how little we actually know. While the Encyclopédie included a fair number of cross-references between articles, the deployment of hypertext links in Wikipedia makes it far easier to splash about and end up (hours later?) in distant and obscure corners of the infoverse. AI can’t (yet) do this sort of thing; so, there’s still room for human curiosity.
This era of scientific “revolution,” “Enlightenment,” and global exploration brought a deluge of new discoveries, inventions, and analyses. We may talk about the accumulation of petabytes of data, but we have the language and a couple of centuries of experience in digesting ever-increasing accumulation of information (with similar—but trailing—growth of knowledge and wisdom) to acclimate ourselves to the constantly growing mass. For the (relatively few) intelligentsia of this period, the 18C was a bewildering and breath-taking time.
One of the essential challenges was therefore to figure out how to compile and organize all this stuff. While there was a smattering of attempts at comprehensive collections of knowledge stretching back to Pliny in the 1C, therefore, the field didn’t really blossom until the 18C. (Unsurprisingly, there is parallel development of dictionaries/lexicons.) Still, less than a dozen came out before mid-century.
The French project started out as an adaptation of the English “Chambers’ Cyclopaedia” (1735), but it stumbled until it was rebooted by Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert in 1748. They envisioned a new concept and a vastly expanded scope. Its goal was to compile, in an organized form, all "the parts of human knowledge", as based upon sensory input and reason. Diderot (with typical modesty) said that its purpose was “to change the general way of thinking.” They did so by covering both concepts and practical issues, in how they organized their articles, and the critical attitude they adopted towards superstition and other traditional epistemologies (and the Catholic Church in particular).
They corralled scores of contributors and, in the end produced over 72,000 articles comprising over 20 million words in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of pictures. They called it the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers,
par une Société de Gens de letters” (“The Encyclopedia, or comprehensive dictionary of sciences, arts and methods, by a group of men of letters”). The articles ranged from Magic to Shakespeare to agricultural tools, with drawings of individuals, machinery, and landscapes. The contributors included Voltaire, Rousseau, and my favorite, the Chevalier de Jaucourt, an aristocratic scholar who employed a team of research assistants and produced almost a quarter of the total number of articles in the entire set.
One of my first projects in grad school was to write a paper on the Encyclopédie. I researched all the articles that talked about magic, sorcery, prophecy and related topics; trying to get a handle on how this epitome of Enlightenment rationalism coped with the supernatural and superstition. It was a fun project, although perhaps a bit too ambitious for a novice scholar.
From start to finish, it took about 27 years to publish the entire set, delayed by financial challenges, censorship, printing issues, and the generally overwhelming scope of the project. Editing was often haphazard, with different authors overlapping and taking different points of view. Afterwards, Diderot said it was “a pit in which the miserable rag pickers [his contributors] threw pell-mell all kinds of things—badly digested, good, bad, detestable, true, false, uncertain, and always both incoherent and disparate.”
Eventually, thousands of copies in several editions were published through the end of the 18C, so it received widespread readership (at least among intellectuals and wannabes). It spawned many imitators, most notably the Encyclopedia Britanica which started publication just as the Encyclopédie was completing its work. Britanica carried the torch into the 21C, with competitors (such as the World Book I read as a boy) flourishing in the mid-20C. There’s a copy online of course (en Francais) and a project at the University of Michigan has been using volunteers to produce an online English translation (I did about twenty articles when I was doing my research)
The basic purpose of encyclopedias remains the same: to encompass and distribute useful knowledge—both practical and cultural. At the time of the Encyclopédie, this was a new kind of thing, reflecting the (then) rapidly expanding scope of information, discovery, and critical reflection on the world and society. Diderot et al. made a good stab at it in the mid-18C with about 20M words. Even if that would be a veritable drop in the bucket for today’s multi-lingual Wikipedia (about 10B words!), we live in a world with far more information at hand; so, in a sense, encyclopedias are increasingly falling behind.
At the dawn of the AI era, we may be moving to a new mode of access to information, one which allows us to automate the “look-up” and integrating functions that were necessary in both paper and electronic encyclopedias to date. This will make more useful information available, but will require more thoughtful questions to access it effectively.
Nonetheless, for those who use encyclopedias (as I did as a boy) to swim in the pond of knowledge (not quite sure where I was headed), AI won’t help so much. A certain amount of randomness is helpful; especially to help us realize how little we actually know. While the Encyclopédie included a fair number of cross-references between articles, the deployment of hypertext links in Wikipedia makes it far easier to splash about and end up (hours later?) in distant and obscure corners of the infoverse. AI can’t (yet) do this sort of thing; so, there’s still room for human curiosity.
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