Encyclopdie Time Machine In reality every mutable thing

Encyclopédie Time Machine

In reality every mutable thing has its own inherent standard of time; this exists even if nothing else is there. There are two things in the world that have the same standard of time. My pulse, my step or the flight of my thoughts is not a temporal standard for others; the flow of a river, the growth of a tree is not a temporal standard for all rivers, trees and plants. Life times of elephants and of the most ephemeral are very different from each other, and how different aren't the temporal standards on all planets? In other words, there are (one can say it earnestly and courageously) in the universe at any time innumerable different times. Herder, Metakritik (1799)

The general system of the sciences and arts is sort of a labyrinth, a tortuous road which the intellect enters without quite knowing what direction to take. Impelled, first of all, by its needs and by those of the body to which it is united, the intelligence studies the first objects that present themselves to it. It delves as far as it can into the knowledge of these objects, soon meets difficulties that obstruct it, and whether through hope or even through despair of surmounting them, plunges on to a new route; now it retraces its footsteps, sometimes crosses the first barriers only to meet new ones; and passing rapidly from one object to another, it carries through a sequence of operations on each of them at different intervals, as if by jumps. The discontinuity of these operations is a necessary effect of the very generation of ideas. However philosophic this disorder may be on the part of the soul, an encyclopedic tree which attempted to portray it would be disfigured, indeed utterly destroyed. D’Alembert: Discours preliminaire, 1751

The Encyclopédie as a Network Articles connect through Renvois Heuser, Algee-Hewitt, Bender

Article Renvois ● In the renvois network: ○ nodes are objects (articles), ○ edges are principles of connection (renvois)

But what if we could reverse these connections? ● The network reinforces the object/connection hierarchy by virtue of the node/edge arrangement ● Creates a static network where objects are connected by the edges that they share: multiple timelines are impossible since there is no time ● Like La. Tour, we imagine a dynamic network where the edges are the objects that are constituted by their mediation in the nodes.

Timeline 2: reverse Renvois connecting the two at a point in time Timeline 1: forward

Articles representing the same timeline (moving the same direction) Bridging Renvois

How to detect these bridging nodes? ● Trace out thematically consistent pathways through the Encyclopédie ● Identify points of connection between otherwise unlike thematic pathways ● Use absolute dating to identify asynchronous pathways sharing the same bridging connection