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)

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)

“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

“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.

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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

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)

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)

“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)

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)

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