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Mapping the two cultures

How long a road is it from physical chemistry to philosophy? Michelle Francl tries to find her way using charts of the intellectual world, old and new.

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Figure 1: An early 'mapping' of scholarly fields taken from the Hortus Deliciarum, an eleventh-century encyclopaedia of general knowledge compiled by Abbess Herrad of Landsberg, circa 1185.

'SEPTEM ARTES LIBERALES' FROM HORTUS DELICIARUM/HERRAD VON LANDSBERG

Figure 2: A map of the connectivity between groups of journals created from the aggregated clickstreams of users through a set of databases.

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Francl, M. Mapping the two cultures. Nature Chem 1, 591–592 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.425

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