The relatively new (ten-year-old) field of Information Visualization explores how people construct and then navigate through “coginitive maps” (Chen 22). For each person, there is an “internalized analogy,” visualization experts argue, “in the human mind to the physical layout of the environment” (Chen 21). That environment includes, obviously, physical books and pages, what Lev Manovich calls “the printed word interface” which provides a “rich set of metaphors, ways of navigating through content, ways of accessing and storing data” (73). According to Chaomei Chen, cognitive maps are built in stages:

We can see how the cognitive map of the field of literature was built up by printed poetry collections in these stages: A. landmark knowledge is provided by miscellanies; B. Route Knoweldge by historical collections; C. survey knowledge by anthologies.

    Robert Southey published The Annual Anthology for two years, in 1799 and 1800, but he had planned to publish it continuously. On the one hand, the volume looks forward to the first literary annual published in 1823, the Forget Me Not edited by William Coombe (subsequent Forget Me Nots were edited by Frederic Shoberl), although the first literary annual is unlike its successors insofar as it is a kind of combination of a poetry collection and an Annual Register, a news journal. Southey’s 1799 and 1800 volumes are a misnomer: they are not like disciplinary anthologies at all, but are instead miscellaneous in structure: they offer, as the “Advertisement” to the first volume claims, poems that have never been printed or printed only recently in The Morning Post, thus otherwise destined to die the death of printed ephemera. Like editors of the literary annuals to come, Southey asks potential authors to send him work. But Southey’s tables of contents for the two volumes differ from the nineteenth-century annuals where the author of almost every piece is named, if not fully then through initials or by mention of previous works. Southey’s Annual Anthology resembles more closely Richard Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies of 1714 than Shoberl’s Forget Me Not of 1824 insofar as it lists only some poems as by authors, and those authors are recognized names: Coleridge, Robinson, Lamb, Southey himself, in the 1800 collection, Pope, Swift, etc., in the 1714. These author names are landmarks; the table of contents provides landmark knowledge.

    In the preface to his three-volume poetry collection Specimens of the Later English Poets (1807), Southey plainly acknowledges that his ambition is to present works of historical interest rather than providing anthological knowledge of the canon: "My business was to collect specimens as for a hortus siccus; not to cull flowers as for an anthology" (iv). Here he uses the term anthology properly, in a way he had not used it in 1799. Anthologies contain poems comparable to living flowers precisely because canonical and thus their immortality assured. But in this 1807 collection, Southey chooses rather to gratify curiosity: the reader's desire to know the peculiarities of the age, the manners and customs of the time. Southey sees his collection as coinciding with the intentions of George Ellis’s: "I wished, as Mr. Ellis has done in the earlier ages, to exhibit specimens of every writer, whose verses appear in a substantive form, and find their place upon the shelves of the collector" (iv). Southey and Ellis do not attempt, as does Henry Headley and later Hazlitt, to present "legitimate and established Poets" (Headley xxxii) but rather excerpts from "the cabinets of literary collectors" in order to gratify "the curiosity of the public" (Ellis ii).

    This 1807 collection is for historians, antiquarians, and philologists:

This kind of collection will give students of great literature Route Knowledge: you can drive through the time, distinguishing brush (history) from landmarks (great works) based on which kind of book gathers them, which one physically holds them. You know the route without having an overall picture in your mind of the landscape.

    Something major happens in the movement from Route to Survey Knowledge achieved via the disciplinary anthology. In introducing his 1807 collection of curiosities, Southey splits literary knowledge in two: "The taste of the publick may be better estimated from indifferent Poets than from good ones; because the former write for their contemporaries, the latter for posterity" (iv). “The latter” are precisely those who will appear on a different table than history: they will inhabit rather a field of immortals divided up by literary period.