Walking through lists: libraries as linguistic instrumentation spaces

Abstract

In this article, crossed by materialistic Discourse Analysis and by History of Linguistic Ideias – intending to collaboratively build a research project known as Discursive History of Books –, we intend to reflect upon libraries not only as institutions but as spaces of potential linguistic instrumentation, bringing them closer to artefacts such as grammar books, dictionaries, language(s) textbooks. To do so, we analyse (a) the encyclopedic discourse over human knowledge categorization; (b) Dewey Decimal Classification as one of the main (sometimes mandatory) methods of book cataloguing, which leads to a numeric codification at the catalographic card of publishing objects and to a specific organization of libraries; (c) the concrete physical place of a variety of libraries, with photo registers and also remarks of memory. Thus, this investigation organizes itself as an attempt to contribute to think beyond the types of materializing linguistic instruments, in the relation stablished with the division of institutional (urban?) space and, why not, with body itself.