Classics

Otlet's Models of the World: A Historical Knowledge Space Lab

"I would like to draw attention to the scientific models of the Belgian information pioneer Paul Otlet who albeit that they are standing in positivist and Modernist tradition can still be relevant for mechanical and manual modelling of science within the Semantic Web and Web 2.0." (Charles van den Heuvel - Modelling Science)

Posted on December 16, 2009 | Permalink

Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in Research from a Historical Perspective

Pre-publication - The designs of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) for telecommunication and machine readable documentation to organize research and society - "At the end of the nineteenth and in the first decades of the twentieth century various European scholars, like Patrick Geddes, Paul Otlet, Otto Neurath, Wilhelm Ostwald explored the organisation, enrichment and dissemination of knowledge on a global level to come to a peaceful, universal society. We focus on Paul Otlet (1868-1944) who developed a knowledge infrastructure to update information mechanically and manually in collaboratories of scholars. First the Understanding Infrastructure (2007) report, that Paul N. Edwards et al. wrote on behalf of NSF, will be used to position Otlet’s knowledge organization in their sketched development from information systems to information internetworks or webs. Secondly, the relevance of Otlet’s knowledge infrastructure will be assessed for Web 2.0 and Semantic Web applications for research. The hypothesis will be put forward that the instruments and protocols envisioned by Otlet to enhance collaborative knowledge production, can still be relevant for current conceptualizations of ‘scientific authority’ in data sharing and annotation in Web 2.0 applications and the modeling of the Semantic Web." (Charles van den Heuvel in: Knowledge Organization, 36 (4) 214-226)

Posted on December 13, 2009 | Permalink

Building Society, Constructing Knowledge, Weaving the Web

Pre-publication - Otlet's Visualizations of a Global Information Society and His Concept of a Universal Civilization - "I have discussed at such length Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web in order to compare the US-oriented views of the history and future of the World Wide Web, as its proclaimed inventor expressed them toward the end of the twentieth century, with the ideas explored 50 years or more earlier by Paul Otlet and his colleagues about knowledge organization on a global level. My aim is to try to show how some of the issues that were important in explaining the origin of the World Wide Web and in predicting its future were already being explored at the beginning of the twentieth century by a number of European pioneers, who proposed similar solutions and encountered similar problems to Berners-Lee." (Charles van den Heuvel in W. Boy Rayward [ed.] European Modernism and the Information Society, pp 127-153)

Posted on December 13, 2009 | Permalink

Dec. 10, 1944: Web Visionary Passes Into Obscurity

"Some historians see in Otlet’s work a prototype of the World Wide Web and the hyperlink. Although unsuccessful, it was one of the first known attempts to provide a framework for connecting all recorded culture by creating flexible links that could rapidly lead researchers from one document to another — and perhaps make audible the previously unheard echoes between them. Anticipating postmodern literary theory, Otlet posited that documents have meaning not as individual texts, but only in relationship to each other." (Wired) - courtesy of lievenbaeten

Posted on December 10, 2009 | Permalink

Facts and Frameworks in Paul Otlet's and Julius Otto Kaiser's Theories of Knowledge Organization

"In this article, I sketch Otlet's and Kaiser's ideas about information analysis and compare the types of knowledge organization systems (KOSs) that they constructed on the basis of these ideas. As we shall see, Otlet and Kaiser held very similar views about the possibility – and desirability – of disaggregating documents into information units and organizing the latter into indexed information files. Both men also agreed on the technological means to implement their information-analytic approach." (Thomas M. Dousa - ASIS&T Bulletin Dec/Jan 2010)

Posted on December 04, 2009 | Permalink

How Xanadu Works: Technical Overview

"Pause for a moment and think about the history here. 1993 is 16 years ago as I write this, about the same span of time between Vannevar Bush's groundbreaking 1945 article 'As We May Think' and Nelson's initial work in 1960 on what would become the Xanadu project. As far as software projects go, this one has some serious history." (Micah Dubinko - Micahpedia) - courtesy of markbernstein

Posted on November 26, 2009 | Permalink

European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past

"Uniting a team of international and interdisciplinary scholars, this volume considers the views of early twentieth-century European thinkers on the creation, dissemination and management of publicly available information. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the volume reflects the nature of the thinkers discussed, including Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, the English Fabians, Paul Otlet, Wilhelm Ostwald and H. G. Wells. The work also charts the interest since the latter part of the nineteenth century in finding new ways to think about and to manage the growing body of available information in order to achieve aims such as the advancement of Western civilization, the alleviation of inequalities across classes and countries, and the promotion of peaceful coexistence between nations. In doing so, the contributors provide a novel historical context for assessing widely-held assumptions about today's globalized, 'post modern' information society. This volume will interest all who are curious about the creation of a modern networked information society." (W. Boyd Rayward) - Introduction chapter available for download

Posted on July 02, 2009 | Permalink

CHIstory

"If I have seen farther, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants...and then I looked down at those giants and saw the silly videos they made back in the day. CHI Video Showcase 2009."

Posted on April 14, 2009 | Permalink

Macintosh: 25 Years

"Although its individual features weren't new, the Mac offered integration, the expectation of a GUI, and interface consistency." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on February 02, 2009 | Permalink

In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates

"The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward." (John Markoff - NYT) - Chapter summaries available.

Posted on January 11, 2009 | Permalink

Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing

Event videos available - "On December 9, 2008 at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium, SRI International commemorated the 40th anniversary of the world debut of personal and interactive computing by Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the SRI Augmentation Research Center (...) Speakers at the 2008 event included original participants in the 1968 demo and presentations on Doug Engelbart's vision to use computing to augment society's collective intellect and ability to solve the complex issues of our time." (A 40th Anniversary Celebration)

Posted on January 01, 2009 | Permalink

Architectures of Global Knowledge 

"The Mundaneum, a series of museums, was meant to promote international understanding. The concept was conceived by Paul Otlet (1868-1944), an information theorist and librarian, who commissioned Le Corbusier to design a 'cité mondiale', an institution for all the world's knowledge. Charles van den Heuvel discusses how Otlet's thinking about distributive networks resonates in Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Wide." (Charles van den Heuvel)

Posted on October 15, 2008 | Permalink

Starfire

"The film, developed in 1992, predicted the explosive growth of the world wide web at a time before graphical web browsers even existed. Starfire: The Directors' Cut explores in candid detail a technological future based on industry cooperation, human-centered design, and the continued presence of bad guys." (AskTog - Starfire: A Vision of Future Computing)

Posted on June 19, 2008 | Permalink

One Dead Media

"It is hard to find an old technology that is not available in any form any where on earth. But today I may have found one. Alex Wright's story in the New York Times about Paul Otlet, the little-known Belgian who worked out an early version of hypertext (...) prompted a reader to point out a system similar to Otlet's that was once available commercially in the US." (Kevin Kelly - The Technium)

Posted on June 18, 2008 | Permalink

The Web Time Forgot

"On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet." (Alex Wright - The New York Times)

Posted on June 17, 2008 | Permalink

International organisation and dissemination of knowledge : Selected essays of Paul Otlet

Translated and edited with an introduction by W. Boyd Rayword (1990) - "We must bring together a collection of machines which simultaneously or sequentially can perform the following operations: (1) The transformation of sound into writing; (2) The reproduction of this writing in as many copies as are useful; (3) The creation of documents in such a way that each item of information has its own identity and, in its relationships with those items comprising any collection, can be retrieved as necessary; (4) A Classification number assigned to each item of information; the perforation of documents correlated with these numbers; (5) Automatic classification and filing of documents; (6) Automatic retrieval of documents for consultation and presented either direct to the enquirer or via machine enabling written additions to be made to them; (7) Mechanical manipulation at will of all the listed items of information in order to obtain new combinations of facts, new relationships of ideas, and new operations carried out with the help of numbers. The technology fulfilling these seven requirements would indeed be a mechanical, collective brain." (internet archive)

Posted on June 11, 2008 | Permalink

Traité de documentation

For those of you proficient in French - "His 1934 masterpiece, the Traité de documentation, was reprinted in 1989 by the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communauté française in Belgium. The original edition has recently been digitized (...)" (Paul Otlet 1934)

Posted on November 12, 2007 | Permalink

The Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet 

"32 years ago in 1975 I was one of several lucky Americans who were invited to Pisa to help celebrate 20 years of computer science in Italy. I presented a paper on the first fruits of our attempts to invent personal computing at Xerox PARC. Over the years I somehow lost that paper, but Porfessor Attardi, who was more organized than I, was able to locate his copy and it has been republished as part of our cderemonies today. It is tempting in this talk to go through that paper and see how this past work influenced today." (Alan Kay - VRI)

Posted on November 06, 2007 | Permalink

Stewart Brand Meets The Cybernetic Counterculture

Book excerpt - "Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller - all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community - and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics." (Fred Turner - EDGE)

Posted on October 05, 2006 | Permalink

Ted Nelson's Computer Paradigm, Expressed as One-Liners

"The purpose of computers is human freedom." (Theodor Holm Nelson)

Posted on June 22, 2006 | Permalink

Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush's Memex

"Vannevar Bush's famous paper 'As We May Think' (1945) described an imaginary information retrieval machine, the Memex. The Memex is usually viewed, unhistorically, in relation to subsequent developments using digital computers. This paper attempts to reconstruct the little-known background of information retrieval in and before 1939 when 'As We May Think' was originally written. The Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938-1940 developing an improved photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology pioneered by Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, in the 1920s. Visionary statements by Paul Otlet (1934) and Walter Schuermeyer (1935) and the development of electronic document retrieval technology before Bush are examined." (Michael K. Buckland)

Posted on April 10, 2006 | Permalink

The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organization 

by W. Boyd Rayward - University of Chicago, Published for International Federation for Documentation (IFID) by All-Union Institute for Scientific and technical Information (VINITY) Moscow 1975 - (courtesy of Michael Buckland)

Posted on April 09, 2006 | Permalink

It's the journey and the destination: Shape and the emergent property of genre in evaluating digital documents

"(...) this paper will extend the analysis of 'user navigation' to the evaluation of user behaviour in web environments. In so doing, the present authors will attempt to unify work in the area of structural representation of content with models of navigation based on physical movement." (Andrew Dillon and Misha W. Vaughan 1997) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted on March 04, 2006 | Permalink

What is Documentation?

"Suzanne Briet ('Madame Documentation') was an important French Documentalist just before and following the Second World War. Though others preceded her, Briet was unique in so strongly attributing to documentation and to documentary signs a cultural origin and function. In this she followed the founder of European Documentation, Paul Otlet, but she differed from Otlet in that she understood 'science', 'culture', and thus documentation more in the context of military-industrial post-war capitalist economies and in terms of the global 'development' of the time than in terms of the harmonious world of global 'knowledge' that Otlet had envisioned. In this way, Briet stands between Otlet's information utopia (reminiscent of the world industrial exhibitions of the 19th and early 20th centuries) and information theory and cybernetics in the United States which saw human culture and language as troublesome mediums for successful communication and information transmission." (Translated by Ron Day and Laurent Martinet)

Posted on March 01, 2006 | Permalink

The Business of Understanding

"(...) Richard Wurman explains how information architects can open themselves up to understanding, learning, and ultimately being able to explain information to others." (Richard Saul Wurman - informit.com)

Posted on February 23, 2006 | Permalink

The Attention Economy and the Net

"If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality." (Michael H. Goldhaber - First Monday 2.4)

Posted on January 16, 2006 | Permalink

Informing Ourselves To Death

"(...) there can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions." (Neil Postman) - courtesy of designobserver

Posted on December 15, 2005 | Permalink

Computing machinery and intelligence

"Propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine 'and 'think'. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words 'machine' and 'think 'are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, 'Can machines think?' is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words." (Alan Turing, 1950)

Posted on November 29, 2005 | Permalink

Tools for Thought

"(...) an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story." (Howard Rheingold) - courtesy of victor lombardi

Posted on November 21, 2005 | Permalink

Visualizing the Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge

"A pen and ink sketch of 1943, the year before Otlet died, brings together his ideas on a global networked world." (Envisioning a Path to the Future)

Posted on August 01, 2005 | Permalink

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

"Throughout thirteen succinct but thought-provoking chapters, Kuhn argues that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, science is 'a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions' [Nicholas Wade, writing for Science], which he described as 'the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.' After such revolutions, 'one conceptual world view is replaced by another.'" (Thomas Kuhn) - courtesy of anne galloway

Posted on May 16, 2005 | Permalink

The Historical Development of Information Infrastructures and the Dissemination of Knowledge: A Personal Reflection

"With the advent of the Internet and the Web, it has become clear how pioneering and important historically the work of Paul Otlet and his colleagues was. It seems yet even more relevant today with the recently announced agreement between Google and a number of research libraries to digitize and make their collections available through the Web." (W. Boyd Rayward - ASIS&T Bulletin April/May 2005)

Posted on April 28, 2005 | Permalink

Colon classification: An outline with examples

"Notation and examples are taken selectively from: Colon classification. Basic classification: 6th edition / S R Ranganathan -- Sarada Ranganathan endowment for library science: Bangalore: 1960. SRELS has been asked permission of reproducing." (S.R. Ranganathan) - courtesy of petervandijck

Posted on March 26, 2005 | Permalink

Architecture of Knowledge: The Mundaneum and European Antecedents of the World Wide Web

"Various European scholars and scientists considered at the end of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th Century new ways to unite science and art of the world. They sought for new ways to store and retrieve knowledge on a global level. They wanted to find ways of representing our knowledge of the world, of simplifying and visualizing it, of ordering it in new ways for universal access to it. They developed new comprehensive classification systems, new standards to store and organize data. They explored what were the new technologies of their time to try to overcome the inefficiencies of the book and to find substitutes for it. (...) Buildings and user are considered both transmitters and receivers of information that shapes continuously the architectural form. Architecture and knowledge are interrelated." (The Project - Maastricht McLuhan Institute)

Posted on August 23, 2004 | Permalink

A Framework for Representing Knowledge

"Here is the essence of the theory: When one encounters a new situation (or makes a substantial change in one's view of the present problem) one selects from memory a structure called a Frame. This is a remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as necessary. A frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation, like being in a certain kind of living room, or going to a child's birthday party. Attached to each frame are several kinds of information. Some of this information is about how to use the frame. Some is about what one can expect to happen next. Some is about what to do if these expectations are not confirmed." (Marvin Minksy - MIT CSAI Lab)

Posted on July 19, 2004 | Permalink

10 Classics from Cognitive Science

"The editorial board of Cognitive Science has identified several classic articles that appeared in our journal over the last couple of decades." (Cognitive Science Society) - courtesy of peter van dijck

Posted on April 24, 2004 | Permalink

Aristotle's Categories

Original text translated by E. M. Edghill (The Classical Library)

Posted on March 18, 2004 | Permalink

Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use

"Xanalogical literary structure is a unique symmetrical connective system for text (and other separable media elements), with two complementary forms of connection that achieve these functions -- survivable deep linkage (content links) and recognizable, visible re-use (transclusion). Both of these are easily implemented by a document model using content lists which reference stabilized media." (Theodor Holm Nelson - ACM Computing Surveys Hypertext and Hypermedia Symposium)

Posted on March 08, 2004 | Permalink

Computer Lib/Dream Machines Retrospective

"This astonishingly prescient book originally written and published by by Theodor H. Nelson in 1974 in a glorious oversized format is one of the 'tap roots' of the soon to be born microcomputer and "cyber" cultures. The following pages provide a retrospecitve of this work and Ted's current projects and vision. We will present excerpts from the 1975 (second?) edition, kindly provided to us by Dan Croghan." (DigiBarn Computer Museum) - courtesy of anne galloway

Posted on February 17, 2004 | Permalink

A New Kind of Science (online version)

Immediate access to the complete book (text and images, fully searchable, 30,000+ links, and many enhanced features) - "This book is the culmination of nearly twenty years of work that I have done to develop that new kind of science. I had never expected it would take anything like as long, but I have discovered vastly more than I ever thought possible, and in fact what I have done now touches almost every existing area of science, and quite a bit besides." (Stephen Wolfram - wolframscience) - Limited registration required

Posted on February 06, 2004 | Permalink

The 20th Anniversary of the Apple Macintosh Computer!

"On January 24, 1984 the personal computing movement was changed forever with the Superbowl launch of Apple's Macintosh computer. While the graphical user interface, mouse, and bitmapped display+printing had been around for more than a decade, the Mac represented the first combining of these key innovations into a beautifully crafted package that an ordinary consumer could pick up and use in daily life. The Mac went on to spawn several revolutions including the 'Desktop Publishing' phenomenon of the 80s. This site is a special project of the DigiBarn Computer Museum to bring together some of the rarest artifacts relating to the Mac (many never seen online or published in any way). We will also pull together many materials that will give you an idea of where the Mac came from, predecessor systems, people and organizations, and where the Mac fits today in our evolutionary tree of visual computing." (DigiBarn Computer Museum)

Posted on January 20, 2004 | Permalink

History of the Tube Map

"The striking symbol that is recognised across the globe was the brainchild of Underground electrical draughtsman, Harry Beck, who produced this imaginative yet stunningly simple design back in 1933." (London Underground)

Posted on January 06, 2004 | Permalink

A short history of structured flowcharts

"The fascinating history and evolution of structured flowcharts (usually called Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams or structograms) goes back to 1972. As a graduate student, I got the idea while attending an ACM organized talk in New York by Michael Jackson on structured programming. If GOTOs were to be avoided, then shouldn't the lines in old flowcharts be avoided as well. Fifteen minutes of sketching led to the first ideas of sequence, conditionals and iteration." (Ben Shneiderman)

Posted on November 12, 2003 | Permalink

Vitruvius Pollio

The Ten Books on Architecture - ed. Morris Hicky Morgan (The Perseus Digital Library- Tufts University)

Posted on June 09, 2003 | Permalink

Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge

"Media affect the evolution of knowledge in society. A suitable hypertext publishing medium can speed the evolution of knowledge by aiding the expression, transmission, and evaluation of ideas. If one aims, not to compete with the popular press, but to supplement journals and conferences, then the problems of hypertext publishing seem soluble in the near term. The direct benefits of using a hypertext publishing medium should bring emergent benefits, helping to form intellectual communities, to build consensus, and to extend the range and efficiency of intellectual effort. These benefits seem numerous, deep, and substantial, but are hard to quantify. Nonetheless, rough estimates of benefits suggest that development of an adequate hypertext publishing medium should be regarded as a goal of first-rank importance." (K. Eric Drexler - Foresight Institute)

Posted on May 07, 2003 | Permalink

Software Design Manifesto

"What is design? What makes something a design problem? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes and you try to bring the two together." (Mitch Kapor 1990)

Posted on April 04, 2003 | Permalink

The 1968 Demo of Demos

"(...) the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated (...) including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface." (Douglas Carl Engelbart - MouseSite)

Posted on December 05, 2002 | Permalink

Information Design: The Design and Evaluation of Signs and Printed Material

Table of Contents (Harm Zwaga and Ronald Easterby eds. 1984)

Posted on November 13, 2002 | Permalink

As We May Think

This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. (Vannevar Bush - The Atlantic Monthly)

Posted on August 15, 2002 | Permalink

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two

Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information (George A. Miller 1956)

Posted on January 15, 2002 | Permalink

Information Interaction Design

A Unified Field Theory of Design s(Nathan Shedroff 1994)

Posted on December 05, 2001 | Permalink

The Powers of Ten

Journey to the edge of the universe and back down to the quark (Charles and Ray Eames)

Posted on October 12, 2001 | Permalink

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

"One of the tools that shows the greatest immediate promise is the computer, when it can be harnessed for direct on-line assistance, integrated with new concepts and methods." (Douglas Engelbart 1962 - Bootstrap Institute)

Posted on September 11, 2001 | Permalink

The Computer 'Revolution' Hasn't Happened Yet!

"Alan Kay is best known for the idea of personal computing (...)" (EDUCOM'98)

Posted on July 11, 2001 | Permalink

'Seven Issues' Revisited

"(...) the slides from this landmark talk on the web." (HT'91 Keynote - Frank Halasz / RealVideoStream)

Posted on July 20, 2000 | Permalink