Last weekend, I afforded myself some relief from the arduous processes of dissertation-writing and job-hunting with a short trip into deepest Wallonia. The pleasant Belgian town of Mons, a European Capital of Culture this year, is host to a number of museums, galleries and historic buildings, including the Mundaneum—the remains of Paul Otlet’s utopian project to create a world city underpinned by the free and direct access to, and dissemination of, information presented in a museum that showcases his life’s work. Although this visit was not strictly necessary to support my dissertation, as the resources that I require are all available either online or through the British Library, it was nevertheless fascinating to see original copies of many of Otlet’s explanatory posters and graphics, and of course numerous sections of the Répertoire bibliographique universel—Otlet’s enormous card-catalogue index of bibliographic references. I also had some productive discussions on a number of subjects with three like-minded individuals who were also visiting the museum.
The Mundaneum’s central atrium; the universality of the project is indicated by the prominent globe.
The Mundaneum’s exhibits are spread across three floors, illuminated just to the level of hushed reverence. The displays consist of sections of the catalogue and selections of Otlet’s drawings on various subjects (which are also available online through the Google Cultural Institute; Google operates one of its data centres nearby), not just limited to library and information science, but also including works on network theory, the nature of international associations, pacifism, and utopian visions of his never-realised World City.
A large section of the Répertoire bibliographique universel.
Perhaps surprisingly, each individual drawer can be opened to reveal its original contents.
Sections of the RBU are juxtaposed with examples of Otlet’s graphical output.
Of particular interest to my research into predictions of future information technology was a full-scale realisation of Otlet’s Mondothèque, an analogue anticipation of the digital desktop computer.
Otlet’s original drawing is framed above the modern construction.
Otlet’s work is also placed in its historical context by the display of previous attempts to organise human knowledge—some of which I referred to in this previous blog post on the history of encyclopaedias—in addition to a timeline that charts advances in statistics and abstract forms of data visualisation, as people have sort to record knowledge in ever-more accurate, intuitive ways.
The museum’s exhibits, furthermore, extend beyond Otlet’s lifetime, and include a plethora of examples of subsequent data visualisation enabled by the development of computer network technology in the form of the Internet—arguably the modern realisation of Otlet’s dreams. These later displays include visualisations on serious subjects such as global inequality and climate change, but also art inspired by data visualisation. I was particularly taken by this French-produced music video for the song “Remind Me” (2002) by the Norwegian group Röyksopp, which breaks down the events of a single person’s normal working day into its constituent quantitative data through a unrelenting procession of infographics:
Another information-inspired artwork demonstrates the exponential growth in digital information that has been caused by the development and increasing global ubiquity of the Internet. The (practically invisible) black grain in the centre of the white square of this exhibit represents the total amount of digital information produced by humanity from its beginnings to the year 2003. The white square itself extends that time period to 2014, and the larger black square is a prediction of the continued rapid expansion of digital information production that will continue up to 2020:
Can you see the central black grain?
This exhibit reminded me greatly of scale models of the Solar System, and in my experience the vast emptiness of space is as similarly difficult to comprehend as the current information explosion, which philosopher of information Luciano Floridi has characterised as “The Fourth Revolution“, comparable to the advances in human understanding achieved by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud.
All in all, the Mundaneum was an extremely interesting place to visit, and I would thoroughly recommend a trip to Mons to anyone interested in the subject.
Paul Otlet lives on, almost literally, through his work and writings.
…as does his close friend and long-term collaborator, Henri La Fontaine.
Yesterday I attended the inaugural #citymash, a “Mashed Library unconference event” on various issues associated with libraries and technology at City University London. The event took place over a full day, with five slots featuring a choice of lectures, demonstrations and discussion sessions. I enjoyed the day immensely, and I feel that I gained new knowledge from each session that I attended. Perhaps what was most impressive was that some of them were led by my Library or Information Science coursemates, in addition to research students, academics and professional librarians. What follows is a brief review of each of the sessions that I attended.
UX for the WIN! (Andrew Preater and Karine Larose) Andrew and Karine, who both work at Imperial College London, gave a presentation on an ongoing project to improve the user experience (UX) of their library’s Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). Imperial uses Primo, a widely-adopted discovery tool produced by Ex Libris, a company that specialises in library technology. For this project, they conducted interviews of a sample of Imperial students, and used the principles of grounded theory to undertake open coding of the transcipts (supported by video recordings and screen captures of user interaction with the catalogue), in order to identify underlying and pertinent themes. The results of the research have indicated (unsurprisingly) that students prefer a library catalogue searching experience that is as quick and as “painless” (for example, that typographical errors are recognised and corrected, instead of returning no results) as possible, and that users prioritise information when selecting results from a multitude of options. The library team at Imperial are therefore redeveloping their OPAC over the summer to include an auto-complete function within the search bar, and to simplify its overall presentation. In the second half of the session, we were given the opportunity to put what we had been told into practice ourselves by listening to two of the student interviews and attempting our own open coding of their responses. For me, what emerged was that although the two students selected were extremely different in many ways in terms of an overall search strategy, their underlying information needs remained the same, and accommodating a wide range of user preferences whilst retaining a simple, elegant front-end design must be a major challenge for any systems librarian.
Using Markdown and plain text(Daniel van Strien) For the second session of the event, my coursemate Daniel van Strien gave a presentation on text file formats—proprietary, plain and FOSS (free and open-source software). In day-to-day life, most people (including librarians) will probably use a proprietary file type such as a Microsoft Word document (doc) for word processing and text entry. The problem with these is that they are heavily encoded, and that the nature of the encoding tends to be altered with each new release of Microsoft Office, giving rise to the unwelcome situation whereby a old Word file that has not been opened for many years will become unopenable, as the encoding used to display it correctly rapidly becomes incompatible with later versions of the same programme. This problem can be avoided using plain text within an application such as Notepad, but then the text cannot be formatted at all, making it unsuitable for all but the most basic of uses. Forms of text encoding which are directly visible to the user, such as HTML and LaTeX, are more open to advanced typesetting and formatting, but are often too complicated for quick, general use. Daniel argued that we need documents that are sustainable, portable, translatable, human-readable, and gives the user version control, before presenting Markdown, developed by John Gruber with assistance from Aaron Swartz, as a potential solution. Markdown is a syntax for formatting plain text and also a software tool that automatically converts the formatted plain text into HTML, as the Dillinger Markdown online editor demonstrates. It is relatively simple to learn, yet allows for a range of formatting and typesetting options. When combined with a powerful conversion tool such as Pandoc, this allows the Markdown text file to be automatically converted into a huge variety of formats, including doc, pdf, epub, and LaTeX, potentially saving the time of people such as academic journal editors, who often receive submitted articles in one format and have to convert them manually into another. This session was particularly interesting to me as it highlighted a potential area of technical librarianship of which I was previously unaware. Further resources:
What about the Future?(James Atkinson) My third session of the day saw James Atkinson, another coursemate (and colleague at City University’s library), deliver a presentation on the futurology of the book and of libraries in general. As he covered such topics as Paul Otlet and the Memex, I even had a slight feeling of déjà-vu!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyfZkVgasI Aside from a slightly different perspective on some familiar topics, James also went further back in time to discuss “The Victorian Walkman”, sharing a number of contemporary suggestions (many of them quite humorous) for what the recently-invented phonograph would be used for in the far-off days of the twentieth century. Going back further still, it is worth remembering that the book itself (codex) was also once a new technology that replaced the previous scroll format. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ For me, the highlight of the session was our division into groups to discuss our own thoughts on what could happen to libraries and information provision in the future. This produced a variety of stimulating responses, although many of them did tend towards the stranger areas of dystopian science-fiction! https://twitter.com/rddave/status/609722231812411392
Open-source implementation(Simon Barron) My choice for fourth session of the day was hosted by Simon Barron, an Analyst Programmer for the SOAS Library, which has recently made waves in the LIS world by becoming only the third university in the world (and the first in the United Kingdom) to implement an open-source Library Management System (LMS): Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment). He gave a detailed overview of how the system had been implemented, followed by the adrenaline-fuelled thrill of a live demo (as he joked on a number of occasions, “what could possibly go wrong?”). As the appearance system’s front-end OPAC implies, Kuali OLE has the same functionality as any proprietary LMS, but without the cost. Simon made the point, however, that choosing an open-source system was not due to cost savings, as the money saved was reinvested in hiring highly-skilled IT staff who could implement it well. I must admit that, with my arts and humanities background, most of the technical material in this session went over my head, but it was interesting to see the back-end of a LMS, going beyond the parts which I normally have access to as a library employee.
NSFW: Fanworks in the library(Ludi Price) My #citymash experience ended with a talk by City University PhD student, Ludi Price, on the information behaviour of fan communities, and how the lessons learned from researching these communities could influence library practices. She showed us fan-fiction websites such as Archive of Our Own to indicate that the dedicated fans of books, films, TV shows, games and so on who write their own creative works in the “universe” of the original are extremely organised, using highly granular levels of category to create a folksonomy—a collaborative creation and maintenance of tags to categorise content. Moreover, repositories of fan fiction habitually display statistics indicating how many times a particular work has been read, downloaded, voted on etc.—the equivalent of a library catalogue publicly displaying its circulation statistics for each item, and allowing users to rate and comment on every bibliographic record. Indeed, many public libraries now feature ratings, recommendations and reviews in their own catalogue records, and the “world’s largest book club”, LibraryThing is a social media platform based on the same principles.
As should be clear from these summaries, the sessions were diverse in nature, covering technical, historical, social and conceptual themes. The other sessions that took place during the event were as follows:
Now that the taught part of my MSc in Library Science is complete (final grades permitting), there is nothing between me and the qualification save for the small matter of the dissertation—an extended piece of original research, ideally spanning between 15,000 and 20,000 words. Looking through the course’s repository of past projects (and that of the sister MSc in Information Science) has been an enjoyable and illuminating experience, with extreme diversity in evidence. Previous studies—and the ideas that I have discussed with my current coursemates—cover every conceivable aspect of the subject, from explorations of the theory of information itself, information provision in certain periods and locations in history, the social and political roles of libraries in modern society, through to practical studies into a particular aspect of the contemporary library service. (Literally as I have been writing this blog post, David Bawden, who oversees the dissertations, has helpfully provided a fuller list of examples, including my own!) I have decided upon my topic by the simple expedient of expanding upon the aspect of the course which I have enjoyed the most (in an effort to keep myself sane until the hand-in time of late September!): the predictions of future library and information service technologies made by pioneering figures in the profession’s past, an interest which was first sparked by reading Charles Ammi Cutter’s essay, The Buffalo Public Library in 1983 during the year before I embarked upon the course.
After initially thinking about an extremely wide-ranging project, including aspects such as science fiction and popular perceptions of libraries, I came across the article The Future of the Web is 100 Years Old by Alex Wright, author of a recent biography of Paul Otlet, the Belgian documentalist and bibliographer who is probably best-known for devising the Universal Decimal Classification system, which contrasted how the ideas of Otlet and Vannevar Bush, the American computer engineer and scientific administrator, famous for his seminal essay As We May Think, have influenced the development of the modern Internet. Searching the literature, I discovered a sizable (but not overwhelming!) body of research that has been conducted into the work of these two men—and also that of the writer and political activist, H.G. Wells—and how their predictions of future information technology, featuring many extremely perceptive and accurate observations, can collectively be defined as a sort of “proto-” or “analogue” Internet, and have experienced something of a revival of late as the Digital Internet itself has become ubiquitous over the last twenty years, and perhaps also because of the contemporaneous development of the steampunk genre in literature.
A current revival of interest in historic ICT predictions may be symptomatic of a wider fascination with the “steampunk” genre, which habitually blends the contemporary with the antiquated.
The working title of my dissertation is therefore “Anticipating the Internet: how the predictions of Paul Otlet, H.G. Wells and Vannevar Bush have shaped the Digital Information Age”.
Paul Otlet
A happy Paul Otlet doing what he did best.
Paul Otlet (1868–1944) was a Belgian visionary who believed that controlled, standardised bibliography was the key to the advancement of human knowledge. His drawing below illustrates his theory of knowledge: facts and observances about the universe are parsed through human brains to create academic disciplines and fields of study which are then codified in books and other written information sources, ultimately forming a library of information.
Paul Otlet’s conceptual model of how human knowledge is recorded. The universal catalogue transcends the limitations of individual books and other physical “carriers” of information.
However, the book itself as a repository or “carrier” of information is only as effective as the bibliographic tools that are used to locate the information therein: hence the additional stages of creating a bibliographic index and control, a universal encyclopedia (based on a card-catalogue index), and a classification system (UDC) to organise and map the knowledge produced in this way.
A section of the Mundaneum—Otlet’s Universal Bibliographic Repertory based on the catalogue-card index format. Otlet’s efforts produced over 12 million of these index cards and other documents during his lifetime
Otlet’s goal of building a fully-functional Mundaneum transcended the “mere” creation of a comprehensive world encyclopaedia, however, and extended towards creating a new “World City” with a complex of libraries and museums at its heart, all of which would be disseminated by networked technology created by the development and synthesis of then-current technology, and facilitated through the efforts of international organisations such as Otlet’s own International Institute of Bibliography (IIB)—now The International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID)—sadly stymied in turn by the successive outbreaks of two World Wars and the associated tension in between, which destroyed the Belle Époque ideals with which Otlet grew up. He also envisioned ICTs that foreshadow real devices that were currently developed, whilst his organising ideals have been preserved in current projects such as the Semantic Web. However, the comparatively anarchic and free-form nature of Wikipedia, perhaps the nearest thing to a spiritual successor of the Mundaneum, would likely have horrified Otlet, who favoured a top-down approach to information controlled by renowned experts.
Otlet envisaged the synthesis of different forms of (at the time) emergent technology, anticipating the conference call and the potential for the networked dissemination of information.
He also sketched the Mondothèque—a “scholar’s workstation” with multimedia capabilities.
H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells, probably thinking about aliens, time travel, or…information retrieval?
Herbert George (H.G.) Wells (1866—1946) was a contemporary of Otlet, and the two were certainly aware of each other’s work. Wells was a prolific writer of non-fiction works and political activist in addition to authoring his bestselling science-fiction novels. Something of an idealist like Otlet, he too became aware and frustrated with the limitations of existing technology, and envisaged a “World Brain” of knowledge to fulfil the same function as Otlet’s Mundaneum.
Cover of the first edition of World Brain, a collection of essays by Wells on the subject.
Wells was a passionate believer in the progression of scientific and academic knowledge as a means of improving society, viewing—in a continuation of his biological analogy—that existing political and economic structures were “diseased”, and that a new “network of nerves” of knowledge must be constructed to remodel society. In contrast to Otlet, his overtly political stance and apparent acceptance of a high degree of authoritarianism in order to achieve a functioning World Brain has resulted in his ideas attracting attention for what one might call the “wrong” reasons: government collection and control of information, surveillance, and, latterly, comparisons to the growth of technical monoliths such as Google. His advocacy of a single user authentication for the system has also influenced debates on the subject of individual privacy and security on the modern Internet, which notoriously lacks such a feature.
Wells’s schema for education using the World Brain.
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush—hard at work, but also a talented self-publicist.
Vannevar Bush (1890—1974) was a generation younger than Otlet or Wells, and his predictions benefit from both their work (and that of other contemporary figures) and the fact that digital computers and the forerunner of the modern Internet were becoming practical realities during his time of writing (As We May Think was published in 1945). He was also a qualified engineer and experienced scientific administrator within the United States—serving as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and playing a leading role in the National Science Foundation, giving him the strongest practical background for envisioning what future information technology might come to be like.
In his essay, Bush introduced his pet project, the Memex (short for Memory Extender): a personalised cabinet that could produce personalised “memory trails” of related information using an array of microfilm. It has often referred to as the conceptual forerunner of hypertext, which allows modern Internet users to do much the same thing.
A diagram of Bush’s Memex. Note the conceptual similarity to Otlet’s earlier work.
The main conceptual difference between the Memex and the similar ideas proposed by Otlet and Wells is that it was intended to be a highly personal form of technology, for use by the advanced research scholar or professional, as opposed to the latter pair’s grandiose schemes of improving universal knowledge through the creation of an all-encompassing information infrastructure. Perhaps surprisingly, the utopian ideals of Otlet and Wells require a rigid imposition of top-down control over what the “true” information actually is, whereas Bush, despite his government position during an era marked by the freezing over of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, disregards this entire question in favour of focussing upon the practicalities of creating a workable technology for the individual user.
The video below shows an animation of the Memex in action:
This research project
Briefly, my dissertation aims to:
identify the predictions about future ICTs made by Otlet, Wells and Bush in turn and analyse them within their broader contexts to determine why they were made;
compare and contrast these predictions with one another, determining to what extent each man’s ideas influenced the others and answering the question: “are they fundamentally the same with superficial differences, or are they in fact significantly different and have been grouped together arbitrarily?”; and
ascertain what role their ideas, in both a conceptual and technical sense, influenced the development of the Internet and its associated technology and infrastructure in reality, and whether their importance in this respect in relation to one another has changed as the Internet itself has evolved, such as the recent transition from “Web 1.0” to “Web 2.0” and debates over issues including the Semantic Web and its ownership.
The dissertation will consist of an extended literature review conducted through desk research; in other words, I will be living in the British Library for most of this summer! I also hope to visit the Mundaneum itself, now a museum in Mons dedicated to preserving Otlet’s legacy.
All in all, I’m looking forward to starting this project, conducting a sizeable amount of original research and producing a valid piece of academic scholarship at the end of it. As I also need to find a full-time job and a new place to live by the end of summer, it should prove to be a hectic, although I hope enjoyable, few months.