IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB200451751

Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of the Dictionary of National Biography (2022)

Victorian Literature and Culture
Volume: 50
Issue: 1
Pages: 87-116

URI: http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/victorian-literature-and-culture/article/cultivating-chaos-entropy-information-and-the-making-of-the-dictionary-of-national-biography/481F9F13A03F7FF44D4BA40588BF9A6C

DOI: 10.1017/S1060150320000121

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Information technology Science and culture Science and economics Entropy Encyclopedias and dictionaries 20th century, early 19th century Great Britain

The Dictionary of National Biography, published between 1885 and 1900, was one of Britain's biggest cyclopedia projects. The rampant expansion of the nation's archives, private collections, and museums produced an abundance of materials that frustrated the dictionary's editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, especially because methodologies for making order of such materials were underdeveloped. Adding to their frustration was the sense of impending doom felt generally in Britain after the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics in 1859. Entropy put an end to the presiding belief in the infinite energy that fueled Britain's economic development and therefore challenged Victorian biography's premise that the capacity for self-development was boundless. Like the physicists of the era, these dictionary makers searched for ways to circumvent entropy's deadening force and reenergize their world. This project would not actually be achieved, however, until the twentieth century when Claude Shannon published his “Information Theory” in 1948. I argue that in an attempt to get out from under the chaos of information overload, the editors of the DNB invented new methods to organize information that anticipated Shannon's revolutionary theory and changed the way that we think, write, and work.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB200451751/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Alexander, Sarah C.; (2013)
The Residuum, Victorian Naturalism, and the Entropic Narrative (/isis/citation/CBB001200837/)

Article Neswald, Elizabeth; (2009)
Ansätze zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Entropie (/isis/citation/CBB001023440/)

Article Kistner, Kelly; (2013)
“A Word Factory Was Wanted”: Organizational Objectivity in the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (/isis/citation/CBB001320556/)

Book Thurtle, Phillip; (2007)
Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB000830502/)

Book Brock, William H.; (2008)
William Crookes (1832--1919) and the Commercialization of Science (/isis/citation/CBB000850355/)

Chapter Francesco Ghelli; (2003)
Dalla 'morte termica' al 'rumore bianco'. Lettartura e entropia tra termodinamica, teoria dell'informazione e moderna apocalisse (/isis/citation/CBB096872924/)

Article MacLeod, Christine; (2012)
Reluctant Entrepreneurs: Patents and State Patronage in New Technosciences, circa 1870--1930 (/isis/citation/CBB001250839/)

Book Alexander, Sarah C.; (2015)
Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (/isis/citation/CBB001422481/)

Thesis Tondre, Michael L.; (2010)
Diffusive Energies: Fictions of Non-Productivity in Victorian Science and Culture (/isis/citation/CBB001562750/)

Article Jones, Anna Maria; (2011)
Conservation of Energy, Individual Agency, and Gothic Terror in Richard Marsh's The Beetle, or, What's Scarier Than an Ancient, Evil, Shape-Shifting Bug? (/isis/citation/CBB001213085/)

Article Wisniak, Jaime; (2001)
Frederick Thomas Trouton: The Man, the Rule, and the Ratio (/isis/citation/CBB001252524/)

Book Neswald, Elisabeth R.; (2006)
Thermodynamik als kultureller Kampfplatz: Zur Faszinationsgeschichteder Entropie, 1850--1915 (/isis/citation/CBB000740241/)

Book Roger Smith; (2013)
Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870-1910 (/isis/citation/CBB728787091/)

Article Strong, Michele M.; (2012)
Class Trips and the Meaning of British Citizenship: Travel, Educational Reform, and the Regent Street Polytechnic at Home and Abroad, 1871--1903 (/isis/citation/CBB001214680/)

Book Smith, Roger; (2013)
Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870--1910 (/isis/citation/CBB001420025/)

Book Page, Michael R.; (2012)
The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (/isis/citation/CBB001320100/)

Article Wolloch, Nathaniel; (2013)
Adam Smith's Economic and Ethical Consideration of Animals (/isis/citation/CBB001320316/)

Book McCorristine, Shane; (2010)
Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB001214688/)

Book Lightman, Bernard; Dawson, Gowan; (2014)
Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity (/isis/citation/CBB001422041/)

Book Longair, Sarah; McAleer, John; (2012)
Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (/isis/citation/CBB001201464/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}