The history of encyclopediagraphy: Past traditions, current trends, future directions

This paper draws on a simple language to introduce the history of the origins of encyclopedias, their diachronic developments, and the evolution of the science of encyclopediagraphy. Encyclopediagraphy, as a scholarly way of retaining human knowledge, has sought to collect, document, keep, and transfer human knowledge since ancient times. Its incremental evolution has continued through the dark ages, into the renaissance era, further into the age of the print technology, and still further into the age of electronics so that today we can consider encyclopedias as a unique genre. The paper argues that dictionaries, lexicons or encyclopedic dictionaries, as well as encyclopedias cannot be considered different entities, but that they are in an inclusional distribution of the type already well known in the algebra of sets. Ramifying human knowledge into the three categories of linguistic, conceptual and encyclopedic knowledge types, the paper suggests that clear borders can be drawn among dictionaries, lexicons, and encyclopedias. It is also argued that the term encyclopedia has come about as the result of the misreading of the phrase ‘enkyklios paedia’ on the part of scholars during the renaissance. A short description of Akashic Records has also been presented at the end of the paper.