As a kid in libraries, I wanted a table of contents for human knowledge.
Encyclopedias helped me look up a topic. What I wanted beyond that was a sense of the surrounding subject. Biology was a name I knew, but what were the fields inside it? Within one of those fields, which approaches mattered? Where could I begin, and what would I be leaving for later?
I wanted to see enough of the arrangement to make a choice. Looking something up works well once you have a name for it. The harder wish was to discover something I had no name for yet.
Noosaga grew out of that wish.
A table of contents, with a history
A table of contents gives you an arrangement. It tells you what sits beside what, and where a larger subject divides into smaller ones. But I also wanted to understand how people had arrived there. Why these questions? Why these distinctions? What had people tried before?
That is what the two parts of the name bring together. Noosaga combines nous, from the Greek for mind or intellect, with saga. For me, saga carries the sense of a story unfolding across generations. “The epic story of human thought” is the meaning I give the combined name.
The story matters because the subjects we encounter already contain other people's work. Someone posed a question, developed a method, challenged an explanation, or taught a way of seeing that others continued to use. I want room for that history alongside the arrangement of topics.
A field becomes more interesting when you can begin to see why its questions took the forms they did. Its unfamiliar vocabulary starts to have people and purposes behind it.
The game took the same root. A farer is one who journeys, so a Nousfarer is someone travelling through that story of thought: landing on a field, walking its history, and choosing where to go next.
What I still want to make possible
The wish now guides the atlas and Nousfarer, where exploring knowledge becomes a voyage. The form has grown beyond a table of contents, but I still care about that first moment of discovering there is somewhere else to look.
I want someone to encounter a subject they would never have typed into a search box, recognize a question they care about inside it, and find a way to begin. They might stay with it for a long time. They might learn just enough to understand why other people devote their lives to it.
That seems a worthwhile encounter in itself. A glimpse of a subject can give you a new interest, or simply a better sense of how much there is beyond the part you already know.
The ambition is still the one I had in the library: see enough of the whole to choose where to look more closely.
Read next: One Object, Several Views: The Noosaga Logo.