Cabinet of Curiousities

Wunderkammer - Cabinet of Wonders
. . . holy relics from a Spanish ship; earthen pitchers and porcelain from China; a Madonna made of feathers, a chain made of monkey teeth, stone shears, a back-scratcher, and a canoe with paddles, all from "India"; a Javanese costume, Arabian coats; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros, the horn of a bull seal, a round horn that had grown on an Englishwoman's forehead, a unicorn's tail; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII's fool, the Turkish emperor's golden seal . . .

Historical Analogy
The Cabinet seems to be an ideal symbol for 'Romantic understanding' - Egan's term for the stage at which children are 'commonly obsessed with the extremes of human achievement and qualities' and 'while trying to master notational systems of alphabets and numbers, they are also becoming avid collectors, sorters and rankers of things'. This stage precedes the philosophic/scientific stage of understanding where children develop systematic and theoretical forms of inquiry.

Analogy with the brain
How the brain works often elicits metaphors of drawers, cupboards and 'tool-sheds'. Analogies with a cabinet that has different shelves and drawers for different kinds of thinking and for storing different kinds of memories could well be useful for discussing 'knowledge'. The variety and eccentricity of the way that objects were arranged within a cabinet according to their owner's personal notions of 'importance', similarity, historical and geographical connections, aesthetic appeal - make the cabinet of curiosities a far more interesting and useful analogy for the storage of knowledge and ideas than say the 'folk-wisdom' view of the mind as a filing-cabinet.

Analogies of loss of wonder
The dismantling of Cabinets of Curiosities or their assimilation into curated museums was a result of the rise of scientific/logical thinking as the accepted way of describing the world. The sense of a loss of wonder as 'scientific' thinking became the dominant way of looking at the world is expressed in Keats' lines on Newton 'unweaving the rainbow'.

Analogy with the Internet
In some ways, the Internet functions like a modern Cabinet of Curiosities - as a repository of curious, half-formed and extreme ideas - just as the vast new lands of the Americas inspired the senses of wonder and acquisitiveness in Cabinet owners, the sense of the vast amount of information stretching out over the Internet can provoke a similar delight at the possibilities of unearthing new and interesting things, and a desire to make collections/displays of links to favourite web sites through constructing personal websites and blogs. The recently defunct 'Nanohomes' system provided a close analogy with a collection of cabinets - with an on-line community where each user was able to place objects within a 3D room space and attach links to each of these.

http://www.curiosity.org.uk/whatisa.htm

Corner of a Cabinet of Curiousities, painted by Frans II Francken in 1636