Posts tagged as: categorization

"The use of the alphabet as a classificatory system was known some 250 years before the birth of Christ, and was deployed in the eighth-century Leiden Glossary, whilst (according to Jonathon Green) `the first three-letter ABC-order [glossary] has been traced to a 94-page tenth-century manuscript'. But it was still possible, in 1554, to produce a best-selling Latin-English dictionary (by John Withals) organized thematically. Alphabetization, Tom MacArthur has observed. 'must have seemed a perverse, disjointed and ultimately meaningless way of ordering material to men who were interested in neat frames for the containing of all knowledge'. Indeed, it was not until the seventeenth century that the arbitrary alphabet became the dominant means of storing and retrieving information within books." (p. 8-9)