Silviu Neguț (b. 1945), “a man not great in height”..., but
great, very great in achievement, if we were to paraphrase
the “old chronicler”, has accomplished more and more
than anyone could imagine, knowing or seeing him. He
had two successive careers of over a quarter of a century each,
one as editor/editor-in-chief at Encyclopaedic/Scientific and
Encyclopaedic Publishing House (1968-1993), followed by
another teaching career in university education (1991-present)
at the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest (“ASE”,
as it is known to the entire country), graduating the
University of Bucharest, as a geographer, but teaching
geography and geopolitics for economists. These were
doubled by two other careers run in parallel, one of soul,
informal, as long as a lifetime, and that of publicist,
enriching the spiritual life and the publishing market in
Romania with several good meters of bookstore/library shelf (first title in 1972, first book
in 1975 and he still writes today, accumulating dozens of specialized books, treatises,
reference encyclopedias, school textbooks and university courses, hundreds of articles,
etc.), with a talented style, clear, easy to understand, scientific, encyclopaedic and with
literary overtones, as fluent as a river, without any gaps and without tiring the reader, on
the contrary, making him feel awkward and regretful that the book is finished, and another,
a fourth, managerial, being consecutively scientific secretary (1991-1993), vice-dean
(1993-2008) and dean (a four-year term, 2008-2012) of the Faculty of International
Business and Economics, after 2012 becoming emeritus professor at the Faculty of
Commerce (now, Business and Tourism), where he still works today
The project report provides an overview of the preparatory stages leading up to the creation of the Literary Encyclopedia of Cherkasy and offers a detailed description of the structural components implemented in the first two volumes of this three-volume reference work, ensuring its thoroughness and comprehensiveness in documenting the region’s literary history. Using a combination of historical and literary analysis, systematization, and description, this project report offers a comprehensive exploration of the enduring importance and current applicability of the Literary Encyclopedia of Cherkasy. This Encyclopedia is highlighted as a significant contribution to the preservation and popularization of the Cherkasy region’s literary heritage.
The article briefly reviews the representatives of the Ukrainian community in Poland with an emphasis on the post-war period, when many Ukrainians ended up in a neighboring state due to the Second World War, and especially due to the deportation of a part of Ukrainians from their ethnic lands caused by the Operation Vistula. The author shows, Ukrainians in Poland did not undergo complete assimilation, on the contrary, Ukrainians have preserved their national identity. Figures who, thanks to their actions and works, contributed to the unification of Ukrainians, contributed to the unification of Ukrainians, the preservation of the Ukrainian language, education, culture, and traditions, can be considered prominent representatives of the Ukrainian people, and therefore should be the focus of attention of specialists in encyclopedia practice and biography studies. The state of academic studies of Ukrainian figures in Poland is outlined as well. The article content is presented by the chronological principle. The author also resorts to grouping personalities according to their social and political activities, belonging to this or that society or other Ukrainian minority groups.
The findings from a pilot study on specific historical aspects of botanical reference books indicate that dictionaries represent a subset of branch reference literature within the corresponding scientific field, essentially serving as systematized derivatives of research studies. Primarily encapsulating informative content, these botanical dictionaries succinctly document objective academic knowledge for distinct periods. The evolution of reference books (botanical dictionaries as well) involves not only quantitative expansion but also qualitative advancements. The development of botanical vocabulary is delineated into three distinct stages, elucidating the characteristics of chronological formation and structural nuances in compendiums. Examining various botanical dictionaries exemplifies the diverse and multidimensional nature of these scholarly reference publications and their integral role in the broader landscape of encyclopedic knowledge.
This academic paper delves into the concept of encyclopedia articles (entries), their defining characteristics, and, based on this, offers recommendations for creators focusing primarily on contributors (rather than editors of encyclopedias). These recommendations specifically elucidate the principles of composition, as well as the linguistic and stylistic aspects of a typical encyclopedia article. In this paper, the author underscores the importance of maintaining academic integrity in encyclopedic writing and illustrating. The study is presented in a manner that enables potential contributors of encyclopedic content to grasp not only what information to include and how to structure it but also to recognize what pitfalls to avoid, thereby mitigating common errors in article writing.
Initially designating a lesser evil, tolerance relieves itself of its negative charge to gain a positive dimension, acquired at the time of the crise de la conscience européenne, of which the men of the 18th century are heirs. Like happiness, it is one of the key words of the Enlightenment which encyclopedias do not fail to seize. However, the success of this notion does not overshadow the ambiguity it carries within it. Reading the entry “Tolerance” of the three major encyclopaedias of the time, those of Diderot and d'Alembert, De Felice and Panckoucke, testifies to this plural understanding. It appears sometimes as an essential virtue that the statesman must hasten to adopt, sometimes as a dangerous principle with subversive potential that the sovereign must beware of.
English Title: The Question of Civil Tolerance in the Encyclopedias of the 18th Century: A study of the "Tolerance" Articles by Jean-Edme Romilly, Élie Bertrand and Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier
Keywords: History of French Encyclopedism, History of Tolerance, Civil Tolerance, Enlightenment, History of State Knowledge
The author explores the historical development of Ukrainian linguistic terminology within the framework of national terminography, lexicography, encyclopediography. The article reviews and analyses the academic references encomprassing 1) nationally specific and borrowed terms as well as concepts in traditional and emerging linguistics branches (e.g., the Dictionary of Linguistic Terms by Ye. Krotevych and N. Rodzevytch; Dictionary of Linguistic Terms by D. Hanych and I. Oliinyk; Dictionary of Modern Linguistics: Concepts and Terms; Modern Linguistic Dictionary by A. Zahnitko; Ukrainian. Concise Dictionary of Linguistic Terms by S. Yermolenko, S. Bybyk, and O. Todor; Modern Linguistics: Terminological Encyclopedia by O. Selivanova; The Ukrainian Language. Encyclopaedia; etc.), and 2) personalities of Ukrainian linguists (e.g., Ukrainian Grammar in Names by A. Zahnitko, M. Balko; Nizhyn Linguistics by N. Boiko, S. Zinchenko, A. Kaidash; etc.). The author systemizes and classifies encyclopedic works based on different criteria in the classical way (according to nature of information: domain, subject-specific, biographical, personal works; according to target audience: professional linguistics, student philologists, applicants, pupils; according regional focus of linguistic conceptions: the Nizhyn region, the Poltava region; according to article structure: alphabetical, alphabetical-and-clustered), as well as in the new way (syncretism of linguistic and encyclopedic genres: subject-specific linguistic-and-encyclopedic-and-biographic works, domain regional-and-biographic ones, subject-specific regional-and-biographic ones). The universal and specific principles of forming the definitional part of both linguistic-encyclopedic and encyclopedic articles include interpretation by an author, macro- and mini-discursive cross-references, hyperlinks, scholarly inter-texts, novelty, debatable issues personal and bibliographic remarks, and global linguistic experience.
The communication is about the Second European and North American Encyclopedia Conference, which took place on October 6–8, 2022 at the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography (Zagreb, Croatia). The conference was attended by publishers of contemporary national encyclopedias from European and North American countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, and Ukraine). The communication outlines the main issues that were the focus of the discussion by participants as well as informs about main report thesis by speaker of the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine.
[Повідомлення присвячено Другій європейській та північноамериканській конференції з енциклопедистики, що відбулася 6–8 жовтня 2022 року в Інституті лексикографії імені Мирослава Крлежі (Загреб, Хорватія). У ній взяли участь видавці сучасних національних енциклопедій країн Європи й Північної Америки (Болгарії, Хорватії, Данії, Грузії, Латвії, Литви, Чорногорії, Норвегії, Словаччини, Швеції та України). Окреслено основну проблематику, що була у фокусі обговорення серед учасників, та основні тези доповіді представників редакції ЕСУ. ]
The rapid development and wide application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor technologies have produced good opportunities for the development of IoT-based smart home systems (SHSs). However, during the rapid market expansion of SHSs, security challenges associated with SHSs have become a primary concern of people because they are so closely related to people’s daily lives. These security problems may damage information assets and pose a serious threat to people’s health and life. This study investigates security issues in SHSs and provides a comprehensive overview of research to date. In this review, after analyzing the existing definition and concept of SHSs proposed by authoritative encyclopedias and academic literature, we propose a more accurate, elaborated definition of SHSs, analyze their architecture, extract six natural and contextual features, and summarize spears (cyber-attack means) vs. shields (countermeasures) in detail in the context of SHSs. Then, the security frameworks and evaluation technologies in SHSs are discussed. Different scenarios for technology integration and the practical research results in SHSs, such as blockchain, cloud computing, Internet of Vehicles, and AI are presented meticulously. After that, two special issues related to security are discussed. We believe that future research on SHS security should focus on four aspects: the unification of architecture, resource limitation, fragmentation, and code and firmware security. In addition, research on SHS security should be given priority over its commercialization process.
The paper is devoted to cultural heritage dictionaries with special reference to the oldest branch of English lexicography – author lexicography, comprising three hundred reference books of different types: concordances, glossaries, lexicons, indices, thesauri, etc. The article describes the main trends in developing author linguistic dictionaries for general and special purposes to single and complete works of G. Chaucer, W. Shakespeare, J. Milton, other famous English writers since the 16th c. up to the present days. The architecture of author encyclopedic dictionaries (guides, encyclopedias, companions) and onomasticons (dictionaries of characters and place names, who is who in … series) and their significant contribution to the English language, culture and society are discussed. The main accent is made on the digital era of English heritage lexicography, innovative features of modern printed and Internet author reference resources, aimed at certain target groups users’ needs and demands.
The article presents the experience of the Encyclopedia of Kolomyia’s compiling. The specialties of the structure this multivolume encyclopedic work as well as the editorial and publishing process are characterized. The historical preconditions of the appearance of this encyclopedia about Kolomyia region are described, the important information of this region and the necessity of their coverage in the encyclopedic format are highlighted.
The paper presents a study of reference publications on librarianship and related disciplines that give a description of the documentary resource of Ukrainian library science. For the period of Ukraine’s independence in domestic librarianship, book science, bibliography and the system of scientific information a powerful information array of publications has been accumulated. A significant part of it belongs to reference publications. Ukrainian encyclopedics has its own tradition at least from the end of the XIX to the beginning of the XX century. These universal encyclopedias: Ukrainian General Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies, Ukrainian Small Encyclopedia, Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia, Internet Encyclopedia of Ukrainian, Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Ukraine, Great UkrainianEncyclopedia contain terms and the notion of bibliographic affairs, but modern requirements for terminology require new interpretations. The dispersion of professional information, therefore the issue of providing library industry employees with a generalized and structured information intensified. It’s the industry’s encyclopedias that allow you to provide professional knowledge, generalize, systematize and popularize the achievement of bibliographic science created by the Yaroslav Mudryi National Library of Ukraine «Ukrainian Bibliographic Encyclopedia» is a convenient for us, informative as much as possible actualized scientific reference resource which is addressed to library specialists. Also in the article terminology dictionaries on library science and related sciences are presented. In Lviv Polytechnic in 1996 for the first time a translated dictionary of the modern terminology of the time was concluded. It was Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary of the Bibliography Terms. A notable event in the creation of interpretive terminology dictionaries became publications: Short Terminology Dictionary on Bibliographic Study and Social Informatics and Glossary of Main Terms on Library Information Activities. Study and research on the terminology of book science, publishing and informational activities as adjacent disciplines has been going on for many years and also presented in the form of reference journals. Thus, the formation of librarian terminology is an urgent and extremely important task for the further activities of scientists. To solve the terminological problem the specialists should be highly qualified. They need to be trained in higher education institutions by introducing special courses on the basics of terminology and professional language into the curriculum.
Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The Western view of the Balkans is, according to many researchers, synonymous with a stereotypical approach and ignorance regarding the history and culture of the nations inhabiting the Balkan Peninsula. The controversies could even refer to the names of individual Balkan communities that were and still are understood very differently. One example of such ambiguity is the name “Morlachs” i.e. “Black Vlachs”, which in reality was used to describe the Slavs of Dalmatia. This paper investigates the abovementioned issue on the example of the French encyclopedic sources, which are representative of the times in which they were created, as they were synthetic, and were intended for a wide audience. The form of the encyclopedic definition assumed synthesis, the gathering and summarizing the existing information. However, the French dictionaries and encyclopedias in the 18th and 19th century were not really able to synthesize known information about Dalmatian Slavs called by the name of Morlachs. Besides few exceptions, the explanations given by the dictionaries were imprecise, sometimes erroneous, referring to the past rather than to the present. In the light of the above, the statement that the French Enlightenment was one of the foundations on which the later stereotypical image of the Balkans emerged, seems justified.
Ali Bayat, Mohammad ali Kazembeygi, Habibollah Babaee
The investigation of historical changes through the modern civilization indexes can be helpful towards judgment in relation to the absence or presence, and in recent cases, the assessment of the amount and level of civilization progress in the different phases of history. This writing has analytically studied the properties and changes of Hillah city in time of Mongolians relying on these issues. The most important civilization indexes in the new studies include the broadness of knowledge, control of severity, prosperity, the position of women and lower classes as well as literature. The collection of evidences indicates that Hillah city was of civilization advancement in this critical era. This research has been done through the civilization approach, mixed historical and civilization method as well as the historical sources such as the local histories of Helle, lists of manuscripts, general histories, translations, encyclopedias and some new researches
Elias Muhanna’s The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Ency- clopedic Tradition is an erudite, scrupulously researched, and eminently readable book that marks a significant contribution to studies in Arabic lit- erature, Mamluk history, and the production and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world. Muhanna successfully analyzes—over the course of 232 pages with almost a dozen images and as many tables—the monumental, 31-volume encyclopedic compendium that consists of over two million words, titled Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition), composed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī, an Egyptian bureaucrat and scholar, during the early fourteenth century. Muhanna’s goals are to consider why al-Nuwayrī composed his ambi- tious work; to analyze the disciplines al-Nuwayrī’s work encompassed and the models, sources, and methods that guided its composition; and to trace its reception among al-Nuwayrī’s contemporaries as well as its later recep- tion in Europe and the Islamicate world. Centering these questions on The Ultimate Ambition, Muhanna analyzes Arabic encyclopedism, a phenom- enon that reached its zenith in Egypt and Syria during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Muhanna challenges the argument that the rise in encyclopedism re- flected anxiety about the Mongol invasions and fears about the obliteration of civilization’s knowledge and heritage. He instead argues that encyclope- dists such as al-Nuwayrī were motivated by various factors, “chief among them the feeling of an overcrowding of authoritative knowledge in Cairo and Damascus, the great school cities of the empire” (3) which, coupled with the expansion of higher education and the migration patterns of scholars in West and Central Asia, meant that there were “new texts available for study and prompting the formation of new genres and knowledge practices” (3). The story of al-Nuwayrī is, thus, a story about the production, reception, and transmission of knowledge. Muhanna’s primary raconteurs are schol- ars of Mamluk history and historiography, Islamicate literature, and studies in the transmission of knowledge, including T. Bauer, J. Berkey, A. Blair, M. Chamberlain, L. Guo, K. Hirschler, H. Kilpatrick, D. Little, L. Northrup, C. Petry, J. Schmidt, M. van Berkel, and G. van Gelder. The World in a Book is both sweeping and specific, and it considers al-Nuwayrī’s compendium directly—not merely as a source to reconstruct Mamluk history—and assesses why encyclopedism surged during the thir- teenth through fifteenth centuries. Amongst the genres of medieval Arabic Islamicate literature to which scholars have directed their attention during the past several decades—such as adab, poetry, mirrors for princes, histo- ries, chronicles, hadith collections, and pilgrimage manuals—relatively few have studied Arabic encyclopedism. Chapter 1, “Encyclopedism in the Mamluk Empire,” explores why al-Nuwayrī compiled his work. Muhanna offers a useful distinction be- tween “encyclopedism and encyclopedia” (pp. 11-13) and grounds his ap- proach in encyclopedism, which is the idea that there is a “spectrum…upon which we might situate a variety of works belonging to different premodern genres and possessing different principles of order, structure, focus, agen- da, audience, and modes of reading” (12). The merit of this approach is that it casts a wider, less restrictive net, since “reading these texts as tokens of a similar knowledge practice rather than members of a common genre per- mits us to see the continuities between strategies of knowledge-ordering that cut across different bibliographical categories” (12). Given the fluc- tuating and complex notions of genre—the genre of medieval Arabic and Persian tārīkh, for example, encompasses a heterogeneous variety of texts, from local histories, chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and often some combination of all of the above—encyclopedism is a compelling conceptual approach to this body of literatures. Muhanna argues that while al-Nuwayrī himself situated his work within the tradition of adab, his inspirations and sources belonged to other genres, which lead to the rise of this hybrid genre of encyclopedism. Al-Nuwayrī was an esteemed copyist who directly ad- dressed the scribal arts in The Ultimate Ambition, which “both described the expectations of the scribe and provided the content of his education: it styled itself as an encyclopedic guide for an encyclopedic education” (21). Chapter 2, “Structures of Knowledge,” offers a 30,000ft view of al-Nu- wayrī’s work, including its arrangement, structure, and overall composi- tion, and compares it to other Mamluk encyclopedic texts and to earlier adab works. This chapter is particularly useful to scholars who want an introduction into The Ultimate Ambition and Arabic encyclopedism, which Muhanna argues was itself a mélange of other extant genres: the work is “not recognizably a literary anthology, a cosmographical compendium, a chronicle, a pharmacopia, or a scribal manual, but an amalgam of all of these genres” (49). Chapter 3, “Sources of Knowledge,” contextualizes al-Nuwayrī’s com- pendium by situating it within the scholarly milieu of centers of learning within the Mamluk Empire, particularly Cairo and Damascus, during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. By situating al-Nuwayrī within the Nā- siriyya madrasa in Cairo and the intellectual, familial, and professional connections he cultivated and from which he benefitted, the author brings a granular depth to al-Nuwayrī and his work. This chapter is of particular interest to scholars of the production and circulation of knowledge. In Chapter 4, “Encyclopedism and Empire,” Muhanna turns to the im- perial and administrative scaffolding of the Mamluk Empire. The author argues that since compilers like al-Nuwayrī were part of the Mamluk bu- reaucracy, they “were particularly attuned to the processes of centralization and consolidation that transformed the politics of their time (4),” and wrote for an audience that reflected the nexus between literary encyclopedism and the imperial Mamluk state. Muhanna considers administrative knowl- edge and scholarly knowledge as separate but related spheres, arguing that “gathering vast quantities of information, collating sources, and synthe- sizing diverse types of knowledge represented the core activities of both the administrator and the large-scale compiler… a career in bureaucracy helped develop the skills of archiving and itemization that any compiler would have possessed…What set the two domains apart, however, was a difference in the types of knowledge that were valued. The world of admin- istration was one of contemporary, mutable information” (104). Muhanna’s more important argument in this chapter, however, is his claim about the unique position of Mamluk bureaucrats to be curators of knowledge and practices in the Mamluk Empire. He argues, “The common thread uniting the diverse professionals that comprised the administra- tion…was the importance attached to gathering data in the service of the state… By virtue of their access to demographic, financial, historical, and legal materials about the empire’s subjects, institutions, and communities, the bureaucratic class was in a unique position to shape the politics of their day in a manner that no other professional group could achieve” (104). As a bureaucrat-turned-scholar and an expert copyist, al-Nuwayrī embodied the related spheres of knowledge gathering, organization, and transmission in Mamluk Cairo. Chapter 5, “Working Methods,” delves into the manuscript tradition and reconstructs the composition history of al-Nuwayrī’s work. Muhanna addresses the strategies of collation, edition, and the management of sourc- es involved in the production of large compilations during the Mamluk period. The Chapter 6, “The Reception of the Ultimate Ambition,” addresses the literary afterlife of al-Nuwayrī’s work by discussing its reception in the Islamicate world and in Europe, with particular attention to the Dutch re- ception. By considering reception history of al-Nuwayrī’s work, Muhanna’s brief but engaging final chapter considers the impact of Mamluk encyclo- pedism in shaping the way Islamicate thought was perceived both within Europe and the Islamicate world. Muhanna’s appendices will prove valuable to scholars. “Appendix A: The Contents of the Ultimate Ambition” is extremely useful for those who do not share Muhanna’s patience to delve into the 31-volume work itself. In Appendix B, Muhanna compares the tables of contents of the two editions of The Ultimate Ambition: that of the standard Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya edition, which was begun in 1923 but only completed in 1997, which is dif- ficult to access; and the more recent Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya edition, pub- lished in Beirut in 2004, which is more widely available. The 11 figures that Muhanna intersperses throughout his book are attractive additions to his work, but it is the 13 tables that showcase Muhanna’s service to organize, divide, and categorize the sources, focusing primarily on al-Nuwayrī’s Ulti- mate Ambition itself. Some of these tables include: identifying The Ultimate Ambition’s chapter word counts for the Cairo and Beirut editions; outlining the arrangement of seven classical adab encyclopedias; and identifying and listing the sources of The Ultimate Ambition in its books 1, 3, and 4. These are valuable sources that the author has produced to help scholars and stu- dents make better sense and use of al-Nuwayrī’s massive tome. The World in a Book is a valuable contribution to studies in Arabic lit- erature, Mamluk history, and the production and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world. Specialists will benefit most from this work, but its excellent readability makes it a valuable volume for graduate and undergraduate students as well as those interested in the production of knowledge in the Middle East more broadly.
Mimi Hanaoka
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
University of Richmond
The launch and rapid domination of Wikipedia as a reference tool for the Internet was as dramatic as it was unexpected. Wikipedia broke so many of the rules of reference publishing, which, even if not formally codified, had been widely accepted for many years: the use of (usually named) authorities as expert contributors, and the presence of moderating editors to ensure balanced structure. All this appeared to have been swept away with Wikipedia, and, not least because Wikipedia content is given away rather than sold, the competition between Wikipedia and most general-purpose encyclopedias was a sad and rather one-sided affair. One by one the existing commercial print general encyclopedias admitted defeat; among the latest is Brockhaus, the leading German encyclopedia brand, which ended publication early in 2013.