SOME NOTES AND DEFINITIONS

METHOD; Penguin English Dictionary ; a systematic procedure for doing something; an orderly arrangement or system; a habitual practice of orderliness and regularity.

Shorter Oxford Dictionary ; Procedure for obtaining an object; a special form of procedure adopted in any branch of mental activity, whether for exposition or for investigation.

SYSTEM ;Penguin English Dictionary ; an organised set of doctrines or principles usually intended to explain the arrangements or working of a systematic whole.

Shorter Oxford Dictionary ;

1. an organised or connected group of objects. A set or assemblage of things connected, associated or interdependent, so as to form a complex unity.

2. A group of bodies moving about one another in space under some particular dynamical law.

3. A set of organs or parts in an animal body of the same or similar structure. In scientific terms, a group, set, or aggregate of things, natural or artificial, forming a connected or complex whole.

Roget.'s Thesaurus; Order; uniformity, symmetry, harmony, music of the spheres. Subordination, course, even tenor, routine, method, disposition, arrangement, array, system, economy, discipline, ordiliness. Method; way, manner, wise, gait, form, mode, fashion, tone, guise, modus operandi, procedure. Path, road, route, course, trajectory, orbit, track, beat.

PONDER THEN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN METHOD AND SYSTEM.

METHOD
"There's method in her madness"
"Thought his be madness, yet there is method in it." W.Shakespeare, Hamlet.
""Rod Steiger is a Method actor"

SYSTEM
"They were creatures of the System."

1. PIONEERING METHODS AND SYSTEMS. ; WORDS AND CONCEPTS.

1.1 Diderot and D'Alembert, Encyclopédie, 1764; founded as a French answer to Ephraim Chambers general work, the British Cyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728). The Encyclopédie is arranged alphabetically but also with some dividing up of the branches of knowledge. Diderot wrote the article on Encyclopaedias that he and his friends wanted a plan or design that would

1.2 Roget's Thesaurus, "was, for Roget at least, not a literary tour de force, but the culminating effort of a lifetime devoted to discovering a way of presenting the unity of man's existence. .... Thus organisation - and particularly classification, with all its attendant problems of establishing relationships, recognising correlations, distinguishing between large and small orders of things , and rendering visible the spatial, chronological, numerical causal, and constituent relations among all the things and happenings of existence - became early and remained late Roget's primary intellectual challenge and joy and frustration." D.L.Emblen, Peter Mark Roget, The Word and the Man , Longman London 1970, p.259. Roget set up six major classes of ideas;

Abstract Relations;

Space; Matter;

Intellect;

Volition;

Sentient and

Moral Powers.

1.3 Dr.Johnson's Dictionary

2. PIONEERING METHODS AND SYSTEMS. ; SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS.

2.1 Buffon's Natural History ; that nature was Animal (15 vols for quadrupeds, 9 vols on birds, 5 for fish), Vegetable (never appeared) or Mineral (6 vols).

2.2 Linnaeus System of Nature, Systema Naturae , 1735, categorising plants not by shape and colour, function or growing characteristic but by their sexual organs (their fruit and their flower).

2.2 Tycho Brahe and the Heavens ; an attempt to count and categorise the stars.

2.3 Taylorism ; a systematic study of all the human actions entailed in physical work, used to maximise the workers on the assembly line (Time and Motion) see also Chaplin, Modern Times .

3. SYSTEMS ON FILM

3.1 Chaplin, Modern Times. the assembly line
3.2 Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising, dressing
3.3 Jacques Tati, Mon Oncle, the automatic house
3.4 Buster Keaton, The Electric House
3.5 James Cameron, The Abyss. Submarining
3.6 Kurosawa, The Seven Samurai, defending the village