Encyclopedic knowledge

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Hildegard von Bingen, who is frequently used as an example of a walking encyclopedia.

To have encyclopedic knowledge is to have "vast and complete"[1] knowledge about a large number of diverse subjects. A person having such knowledge might, sometimes humorously[2] be referred as "a human encyclopedia" or "a walking encyclopedia".[3][4]

The concept of encyclopedic knowledge was once attributed to exceptionally well-read or knowledgeable persons such as

Renaissance man
."

References in popular culture

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has evolved from a fiction to a crowd-sourced web site (see External Sources below).

The idea of encyclopedic knowledge has made many appearances in popular culture, being especially widespread in detective fiction. In 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced his fictional master sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, who applied his keen deductive acumen and prodigious range of knowledge to solve his cases. Encyclopedia Brown is a series of books by Donald J. Sobol featuring the adventures of boy detective Leroy Brown, nicknamed "Encyclopedia" for his intelligence and range of knowledge that was first published in 1963.

One of the most celebrated is the fictional Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the late Douglas Adams which began its evolution through numerous mediums as a British radio program in 1978.[6] In 2004, NPR contributor A. J. Jacobs published The Know-It-All, about his experience reading the entire Encyclopædia Britannica from start to finish.[7]

Domain-specific

While deep encyclopedic knowledge across numerous fields of inquiry by a single person is no longer feasible, encyclopedic knowledge within a field of inquiry or topic has great historical precedent and is still often ascribed to individuals. For example, it has been said of Raphael Lemkin that "his knowledge of the logic behind the Nazi war machine was encyclopedic."[8]

In 1900, Alexander Graham Bell, who set out to read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica himself,[9] served as the second president of the National Geographic Society and declared the Society should cover "the world and all that is in it."[10] While this goal sounds all-encompassing, it is in fact a statement towards comprehensive geographic knowledge, meaning the scope of the National Geographic Society's enterprise should attempt to be terrestrially unbounded.

In an era of specialization, be it

which has been argued to limit the knowledge of workers
compelled to perform repetitive tasks for the sake of an overall increase in economic productivity.)

Views

Edward Said, in his seminal postcolonial work, Orientalism, examines the encyclopedic endeavor in great detail, saying it is an historically hegemonic enterprise. Orientalists' "unremitting ambition was to master all of a world, not some easily delimited part of it such as an author or a collection of texts."[11]

References

  1. ^ Encyclopedic on vocabulary.com
  2. ^ "Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English".
  3. ^ Walking encyclopedia on The Free Dictionary
  4. ^ Walking encyclopedia on vocabulary.com
  5. OCLC 37282048
    .
  6. ISBN 1400052920
    .
  7. ISBN 0743250605
    .
  8. ^ Winter, Jay (June 7, 2013). "Prophet Without Honors". The Chronicle Review: B14. Retrieved 10 June 2013.
  9. JSTOR 2712270
    .
  10. ^ "National Geographic Image Collection". National Geographic Magazine. NationalGeographic.com. Archived from the original on October 15, 2009. Retrieved 20 June 2013.
  11. OCLC 4831769
    .

External links
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