Executive Summary
A joint project of the Archdisciplinary Research Center and the Institute of Applied Metatheory, the Encyclopedia of Big Pictures (EBP) aims to be an accessible scholarly compendium of historical to contemporary “Big Picture” frameworks—a rare class of unification metatheories that attempt to integrate and systematize the breadth of human understanding into coherent, unified frameworks. The EBP Initiative will be co-led by Nick Hedlund, Cory David Barker, Michael Kleineberg, Brendan Graham Dempsey, and supported by dozens of unification metatheory scholars from around the world.
Big Picture challenges, like climate change, worldview fragmentation, global unrest, and existential alienation require solutions that go beyond traditional boundaries of knowledge. By highlighting and organizing these comprehensive metatheories and making them freely available online, the project seeks to support complex academic inquiries, foster a broader public engagement with concepts that transcend individual fields, promote transdisciplinary research, and preserve Big Pictures for future generations. The EBP is being designed to incorporate collaborative ethics and methodological pluralism in its research and development, and organize itself in both alphabetical and architectonic ways, with a focus on unifying themes and recurring patterns found in the frameworks.