I'll assume you've run into Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works of the Western World and are familiar with the selection. For those not in the know, the 60 volume set was done by a somewhat sparse group that included many people like Isaac Asimov and William F. Buckley Jr. (what a spread there).
The thing that always made GWWW a killer collection was Adler's syntopicon to the 58 other volumes.
The term 'syntopicon' was coined for this effort and is essentially a way of indexing information. Like how a dictionary uses words to sort the data, and an encyclopedia uses a subject, a syntopicon uses a topic. Think 'jurisprudence of judges' and not 'African elephants'.
I've always thought that more book collections should include a syntopicon to them. With the modern AI revolution, I'd suppose that it's a lot easier to do so now, but it's still a lot of work and effort to edit the 'link table' for these things. More enjoyable though and great for giving the collector a really good grasp on the books.
Try putting in your list of books and then ask your AI of choice the help put together a syntopicon for it. Here's a (poor) example:
Interesting, I have a facsimile version of the first edition of _Roget's Thesaurus_ which orders concepts numerically, and I always wished for a reference list to match.
Agree modern indexing is great for researching terminology, and wish it could be more easily extended to concepts, but not sure modern Large Language Models with their compression/hallucinations/outright-errors are workable yet.
The thing that always made GWWW a killer collection was Adler's syntopicon to the 58 other volumes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Syntopicon
The term 'syntopicon' was coined for this effort and is essentially a way of indexing information. Like how a dictionary uses words to sort the data, and an encyclopedia uses a subject, a syntopicon uses a topic. Think 'jurisprudence of judges' and not 'African elephants'.
I've always thought that more book collections should include a syntopicon to them. With the modern AI revolution, I'd suppose that it's a lot easier to do so now, but it's still a lot of work and effort to edit the 'link table' for these things. More enjoyable though and great for giving the collector a really good grasp on the books.
Try putting in your list of books and then ask your AI of choice the help put together a syntopicon for it. Here's a (poor) example:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6815ad20-9d54-800a-853e-2517d64a15...