| Innovative sixteenth-century information
technologies developed as a response to an increase in information bandwidth
and a changing notion of what constituted the cosmos and knowledge of it.
The system of rhetorical places, especially the commonplaces, provided one
of the most widely used models for gathering, storing and redeploying large
and heterogeneous bodies of data in a fluid, associative and efficient manner.
Such knowledge interfaces as memory palaces, commonplace books and the newly
created bibliographic index all reveal a common origin in the rhetorical
places. |