“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)

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)

“(…) 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

“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)

“(…) 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)

“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)

“(…) 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

“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)

“(…) 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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

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

“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)

“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

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