Le nouvel esprit scientifique
The New Scientific Mind (trans.)
Art as Experience
New York: G.P.Putnam, Capricorn Books.
The Rock
Traité de Documentation: le livre sur le livre. Théorie et pratique.
Editiones Mundaneum, [IIB Publication No. 197]; Bruxelles: Palais Mondial, 1934. 431[+ 19] pp.
  • Excerpts from "Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet" by Alex Wright 2003/11/10 [1]
... the Traite posited a universal "law of organization" declaring that no document could be properly understood by itself, but that its meaning becomes clarified through its influence on other documents, and vice versa. "[A]ll bibliological creation," he said, "no matter how original and how powerful, implies redistribution, combination and new amalgamations."8
... he simply believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional,9 with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, other readers, writers and topics. Otlet believed in the possibility of empirical truth, or what he called "facticity" -- a property that emerged over time, through the ongoing collaboration between readers and writers. In Otlet's world, each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document.
Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson would later voice strikingly similar ideas about the notion of associative "trails" between documents. Distinguishing Otlet's vision from the Bush-Nelson (and Berners-Lee) model is the conviction -- long since fallen out of favor -- in the possibility of a universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable social forces of scholarship.
Otlet's vision suggests an intellectual cosmos illuminated both by objective classification and by the direct influence of readers and writers: a system simultaneously ordered and self-organizing, and endlessly re-configurable by the individual reader or writer.

References

edit


Navigate 1900's
'00 '01 '02 '03 '04 '05 '06 '07 '08 '09
'10 '11 '12 '13 '14 '15 '16 '17 '18 '19
'20 '21 '22 '23 '24 '25 '26 '27 '28 '29
'30 '31 '32 '33 '34 '35 '36 '37 '38 '39
'40 '41 '42 '43 '44 '45 '46 '47 '48 '49
'50 '51 '52 '53 '54 '55 '56 '57 '58 '59
'60 '61 '62 '63 '64 '65 '66 '67 '68 '69
'70 '71 '72 '73 '74 '75 '76 '77 '78 '79
'80 '81 '82 '83 '84 '85 '86 '87 '88 '89
'90 '91 '92 '93 '94 '95 '96 '97 '98 '99
Navigate 2000's
'00 '01 '02 '03 '04 '05 '06 '07 '08 '09
'10 '11 '12 '13 '14 '15 '16 '17 '18 '19