Meaning of ‘set up the axes’

The passage below is from A History of the Index by Dennis Duncan.

Necessity, then, is the mother of invention. But it would be wrong to treat Grosseteste as a man out of time, isolated from his culture. The necessity which gives rise to the Tabula is not uniquely felt by Grosseteste; rather, it is a version of a need that is coming into focus throughout the sphere in which he operates. By the thirteenth century, the tools for index-making – the codex and alphabetical order – have long been available. The spark that will bring them together will come from two forms of speaking well: teaching and preaching. Both take on renewed importance in the late Middle Ages thanks to the arrival of two new institutions: the universities and the mendicant orders, the friars – Dominicans and Franciscans – who lived and preached among the wider population. In these institutions there is a growing demand for new, more efficient ways of reading – of using books – to drive their respective vehicles for orderly speech, the lecture and the sermon. We are about to witness the birth of the index, or rather the births of the index, two versions of the same idea, arising simultaneously, one in Oxford, one in Paris. Taken together, both can tell us something about the index in our present, twenty-first-century moment, the Age of Search. Between them, they set up the axes by which we think about indexing: word versus concept; concordance versus subject index; specific versus universal.

I cannot figure the meaning of the underlined ‘set up the axes’ in this context.

My guessing based on ‘by which we think about indexing’ leads me to the meaning that perhaps ‘axes’ means ‘opposite views’. But I’m not so sure about my speculation.

Thanks in advance.