Born out of a major international dialogue held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy, this collection of essays presents innovative and provocative arguments about the claims of universal knowledge schemes and the different aesthetic and material forms in which such claims have been made and executed. Contributors take a close look at everything from religious pilgrimages, museums, and maps of the world, to search engines and automated GPS. Current obsessions in information technology, communications theory, and digital culture often concern the value and possibility of a grand accumulation of universally accessible forms of knowledge: total libraries, open data bases, ubiquitous computing, and 'smart' technologies. These obsessions have important social and philosophical origins, and they raise profound questions about the very nature of knowledge and its organization. This volume's contributors draw on the histories of maps and of encyclopedias, worldviews and visionary collections, to make sense of the crucial relation between the way the world is known and how it might be displayed and transformed.

We all think we know Poe - the most popular American writer around the world, dissolute puzzle-maker, pioneer of detective fiction, and author of haunting, atmospheric verse. But what if there was another side to the man who wrote "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher"? What if Poe were as well known for his speculations about the birth of the universe or his "Sonnet - to Science"? In The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, John Tresch offers a bold new life of one of the nineteenth century's most iconic writers. By shining a spotlight on a time when the line between speculative endeavors and scientific inquiry was blurred, Tresch reveals Poe to have been much more than a practitioner of science fiction - in fact, he was an avid commentator on scientific developments, publishing and circulating in literary milieux that also played host to lectures and demonstrations by the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues. As one newspaper put it, "Mr. Poe is not merely a man of science - not merely a poet - not merely a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more." Beginning with his study of mathematics and engineering at West Point, and taking us through the tumultuous years leading up to publication of "The Raven," Tresch shows that Poe nurtured a fascination with science from his earliest days as a writer. In works such as "A Descent into the Maelstrom" and "Mesmeric Revelation," Poe explored subjects ranging from the physics of vortices to occult psychology, later turning his attention to the origins of the universe in a dazzling lecture that would win the admiration of Albert Einstein and other twentieth-century physicists. Throughout, he lived and suffered for his ideas, and remained a figure of brilliant contradiction: he gleefully exposed the hoaxes of the era's pseudo-scientific fraudsters even as he perpetrated hoaxes himself.

Born out of a major international dialogue held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy, this collection of essays presents innovative and provocative arguments about the claims of universal knowledge schemes and the different aesthetic and material forms in which such claims have been made and executed. Contributors take a close look at everything from religious pilgrimages, museums, and maps of the world, to search engines and automated GPS. Current obsessions in information technology, communications theory, and digital culture often concern the value and possibility of a grand accumulation of universally accessible forms of knowledge: total libraries, open data bases, ubiquitous computing, and 'smart' technologies. These obsessions have important social and philosophical origins, and they raise profound questions about the very nature of knowledge and its organization. This volume's contributors draw on the histories of maps and of encyclopedias, worldviews and visionary collections, to make sense of the crucial relation between the way the world is known and how it might be displayed and transformed.