The System of Cross-References in the Encyclopédie: Mapping Knowledge in the 18th Century

The Encyclopédie’s system of cross-references. The authors of the Encyclopédie explicitly present three structures of intemal organisation : alphabetic order, a classification of the articles in a table of human knowledge and cross-references to other articles in order to indicate the link between the subjects. In this article we have tried to explore, using the electronic version of the Encyclopédie developed by the ARTFL laboratory at the University of Chicago, this third structure which is, by its very nature, more secret and resistant to an overall view. A simple statistical tool has allowed us to draw up the first ‘road map’ of the structure of these references. Although it is necessarily imperfect and subject to caution, this map reveals a great coherence in the structure created by these references which is, as we demonstrate, relatively different from that of the Table. Our analysis also brings out the particular ambiguous status of the category of ‘Grammar’.