The early 20th century World-wide Web
The New York Times recently ran this feature on Paul Otlet, the Belgian information scientist and utopianist. You can also view a short documentary on Otlet that was made for Dutch television here. The article is a helpful overview, cribbing primarily from Françoise Lévy’s essential, detailed, but very hard-to-find film, The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World. It doesn’t, however, clarify what has always seemed to me the primary difficulty of Otlet’s project: the often confusing distinction between collecting original documents (in the form of paper or evidentiary objects) and cataloging them. Otlet’s Mundaneum did both.
The Informational Built Environment
I taught this upper-division architectural history and theory seminar at UCLA in 2008. Focusing on case studies between the early 19th century and the postwar period, it examined ideas, models, and metaphors shared by the architectural culture of modernity and the information society. [More...]