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Today we take for granted the easy availability of dictionaries, catalogues,
and other reference works. Their origins are ancient, but the notion of
how a vast body of ideas should be organized is directly linked to how a
culture records the written word. Such compilations are only useful because
their organization is readily comprehensible. An alphabetical arrangement
may be suited to a list of words, but it offers little advantage to a system
of ideas that is built on general themes, such as diderot's encyclopŽdie,
or to a linguistic system based on word characters, such as chinese. A complicated
structure for the organization of ideas requires a sophisticated technology
to produce it. The two works shown here represent critical developments
in the collecting and organization of large bodies of knowledge.
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