Friday - Sunday
Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Room 126
The University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign
Abstracts
TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF THE INFORMATION AGE: THE UNEASY RELATIONS BETWEEN SOCIOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE PECULIAR ABSENCE OF HISTORY
Frank Webster
Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology,
City University London
UKI have been thinking and writing about information trends and information and communications technologies (ICTs) for twenty-five years. I have done so as a Sociologist, located for the most part in universities in the United Kingdom. During this quarter century of course the discipline has developed in many ways, for instance coming to terms with Feminism, embracing and then spurning multiple shades of Marxism, trying to account for the tumultuous consequences of globalisation, and warming and cooling with regard to the relative importance of quantitative and qualitative approaches to research. Of the challenges for Sociology over these years few have been more consequential than having to come to terms with the emergence of Cultural Studies (and its close cousin Media Studies). Indeed, if bookshops are any guides, one may even suggest there has been a take-over of much Sociology by Cultural Studies, or at least the occupancy by Cultural Studies of territory towards which one might have supposed Sociology had a prior claim.
In this paper I shall reflect on approaches to, and issues about, information and ICTs - defining features of the world we inhabit - particularly in light of the tense relations between Sociology and Cultural Studies during this period. I shall argue that there has been a discernable shift away from interest in the Information Society (a term defined by and from Sociology) towards concern with the character of 'cyberspace' and 'virtuality' which in key ways reflects the rise of Cultural Studies and its impatience with Sociology and the latter's inability to keep pace with the dynamism of contemporary change.I shall also reflect on the marked absence of History in both Sociology and Cultural studies (save for the ‘ahistorical historicism’ observed by the late Phillip Abrams thirty years ago). Sociology and Cultural Studies are marked by presentism and chronocentrism. What might Historical Sociology do for our understanding of the Information Age?
THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF INFORMATION SCIENCE: HOW THE CHEMISTRY OF IDEAS MUTATED INTO THE SCIENCE CITATION INDEX.
Steve Fuller
Professor of Sociology
University of Warwick
UKIf there is a master narrative in the history of information science, it follows a thread that goes from Pythagoras and Plato through the various mathematically inspired schemes to develop what Leibniz and others called an ars combinatoria, from which all possible knowledge could be deduced. This idea animated the modern rediscovery of formal logic (Russell & Whitehead), the logical positivists, not to mention the various universalist schemes for information classification in the 20th century. However, there is also another, less well known narrative that runs virtually alongside it, every now and then intersecting with the master narrative. It too is combinatorial but it is more empirically, even inductively, informed. The model here is not mathematical but chemical combination, where one is less interested in mapping discrete possibilities than in following processes of transformation. In the modern era, interest in this alternative begins with associative psychology in the 18th century but comes into its own with 19th century with German idealism and Naturphilosophie, where there is a sustained discussion of the synthesis of new forms of knowledge from primitive elements. By the end of the century, this discussion comes to be associated with scientific materialism and leftist politics. Its leading spokespersons up to the recent past include Friedrich Engels, Wilhelm Ostwald, John Desmond Bernal, and Derek de Solla Price. Its most lasting and, to be sure, chequered legacy has been the Science Citation Index, and the associated field of scientometrics, championed most recently by the ex-chemist Eugene Garfield. The overall plot structure of this alternative master narrative is that some promising ideas have managed to go very bad. One such idea, which captures the spirit of this chemistry-driven tradition, is that enough quantitative differences can produce a qualitative change that, when it comes to information or knowledge, more is ultimately always better. This idea is harder to escape than we might think, and the purpose of recounting this genealogy is to provide some avenues for thinking ourselves out of it.
ON THE CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN DOCUMENTATION IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY.
Michael Buckland
Emeritus Professor of Information Management and Systems,
Co-Director, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative,
University of California, Berkeley
USA.The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was a renaissance period of prodigious innovation in Europe across the spectrum of arts, sciences, engineering, and social sciences, including major innovations in information and communications technologies. Studies in psychology and in the physiology of perception undermined the separation of body and mind that had dominated science since Descartes and a convergence of art, psychology and engineering emerged, notably in industrial design and graphics. Form should follow function by being ergonomically and aesthetically, as well as mechanically, suitable. Scientific management (“Taylorism”) promoting efficiency, standardization, and collaboration, was central to Documentation and manifest in standards for paper sizes, equipment, controlled documentary languages, and well-intentioned idealism. The industry concentration, corporate research laboratories, the mechanization of military activities, and more active governmental initiatives provided an environment for documentation centers. These developments also advanced the rise of totalitarian political regimes. (This paper draws on the author’s forthcoming biography Emanuel Goldberg and his Knowledge Machine.)
THE ROLE OF FACTS IN PAUL OTLETS MODERNIST PROJECT OF DOCUMENTATION
Bernd Frohmann,
Associate Professor
Faculty of Information & Media Studies
University of Western Ontario
CanadaAbstract: Facts play a central role in Paul Otlets documentalism. They are central to the dynamics of his modernist project, functioning much like the singularity that expresses the organization of a vector field. The vectors organized by Otlet’s concept of a fact are the familiar "characteristics" of modernism: classification, standardization, rationality, identity, and presence. Rather than interpreting Otlet’s modernist project of documentalism in terms of the presence or absence of modernist "characteristics," this paper addresses the dynamics of their organization by Otlet’s concept of a fact. A key idea is the importance Otlet gives to the fluidity of the documentation of facts, an idea at the root of his "monographic principle". This idea creates a conflict between the stability of what he calls the "full identity" of a fact and his documentary imperative of identifying, isolating, extracting and then reinscribing the signs of "social facts" in an idealized order in the Universal Book. But if the signs of facts, i.e. their signifiers, are able to be extracted from the signifying chains of their original documents that Otlet believes are contaminated by the authorial act of creation then they have the property of what Derrida calls the "iterability" of writing. Derridean arguments are invoked to show that the iterability of the language of facts conflict with Otlet’s ideal of "natural sequences" of facts in the Universal Book, i.e. those "sequences" produced by the classification, which lead "naturally" to social-scientific knowledge. Otlet’s mobilization of the massive apparatus of standardization, professional practices of documentalism guided by the monographic principle, strict rules for writing facts to reveal their "full identity," the regulation and stabilization of such practices in national and international institutions, i.e. all the resources of his modernist projectare organized by his imperative to stabilize "chains of signs" representing social facts. The argument of this paper is that this imperative derives from the instability they suffer due to their iterability.
BUILDING SOCIETY, CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE, WEAVING THE WEB:OTLET’S VISUALIZATIONS OF A GLOBAL INFORMATION SOCIETY
AND HIS CONCEPT OF A UNIVERSAL CIVILIZATIONDr. Charles van den Heuvel
Faculty of Arts and Culture
Technology and Society Studies (TSS)
University of Maastricht
NetherlandsMost historical studies of World Wide Web start of with the American roots of the Internet in ARPANET or follow a historiographical line of post war information revolutionaries, from Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Doug Engelbart to Ted Nelson. This paper explores the organisation, visualisation and dissemination of knowledge on a global level, seen from a European perspective. Various European scientists, like Patrick Geddes, Paul Otlet, Otto Neurath, Wilhelm Ostwald, at the end of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th Century tried to find new ways to unite the sciences and arts of the world. They were considered to be essential steps towards world peace and a civilised society. “La paix n’est pas seulement un sentiment, mais un vouloir de construction’’, wrote Otlet in his Atlas de la civilisation universelle (1929). Such attempts were rooted in 19th Century positivism and went hand in hand in 20th Century Modernist views expressed in architecture (and other art forms) that society can be created. As such there is a parallel between Le Corbusier’s famous manifest: “Vers une architecture moderne” and Paul Otlet’s visualisation “vers une civilisation universelle”.
These European pioneers developed ideas for world museums, world libraries, world archives and world universities. Well known was the attempt of Paul Otlet (1866-1944) to incorporate all these institutions in a Mundaneum to be situated in a World City at Geneva, designed by Le Corbusier. The activities of Paul Otlet in the field of bibliography, documentation and dissemination of knowledge (Boyd Rayward, Michael Buckland) on the one hand and his ideas on architecture/urbanism (Uyttenhove, Bosma, Courtiau, Füeg, Gresleri/Matteoni) on the other hand have been studied to a great extent. Most studies concentrate on his published texts. However the archives of the Mundaneum, nowadays at Mons (Belgium), also contain many visualisations for the greater part of unpublished encyclopaedias and atlases ideated by Otlet alone, or in cooperation with others, like Patrick Geddes. Several of these images can be read as architectural metaphors of knowledge organisation, or in wider sense, of society.
After a general introduction on Otlet’s meaning of his schemes and tableaux in the dissemiation of information, I will briefly discuss his images for the Atlas de la civilisation universelle. I will focus on his project for the Atlas Mundaneum, later to be continued in the unfinished Encyclopedia Mundaneum Universalis. Especially in this encyclopedia, Otlet not only visualized ideas described in his Traité de Documentation (1934) and his Monde -Essai d‘universalisme (1935) but developed until his death in 1944 new visions of a future information society based on new technological inventions. Some of these visions are still relevant for the technological and sociological key-issues of the internet and the world wide web.
FERDINAND VANDER HAEGHEN’S EPHEMERA
INSPIRING AND RESISTING OTLET’S MODERNISMPieter Uyttenhove
Associate Professor
And
Sylvia Van Peteghem
Chief Librarian
Ghent University
BelgiumFerdinand vander Haeghen (1830-1913) became chief librarian of the Ghent University library in 1869. The special and precious collections (c.1,000,000 ephemera) that he gathered are quite unique. They deal with the city of Ghent, Belgium, and even the whole world. He organised them in a clear keyword-system which is still used today.
Thanks to his personal network of writers, artists, musicians, historians, politicians and his professional network of societies, librarians and editors, he was widely held in high esteem and received through these contacts many archival donations for the university collections. Author of the well-known Bibliotheca Belgica or Bibliographie Générale des Pays-Bas (an inventory of all printed books published in the Netherlands before 1600), he proposed to the Royal Academy of Belgium the setting up of an International Bureau for Bibliography as early as 1893 and again in 1895, but without any result.
In 1895, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine started to establish, from their side, the Répertoire Bibliographique Universel (RBU) to be organized by an International Institute of Bibliography headquartered in an International Office of Bibliography in Brussels. The RBU constituted an attempt at developing a bibliography of the world’s accumulated knowledge. From this perspective Otlet’s major concern was the usefulness of a classification system, its conceptual software. His idea was that one had not only to catalogue books and to make them accessible to the reader, but to organise all knowledge for which books provided only one mode of access. While developing what would become the Universal Decimal Classification, Otlet had an intense correspondence with Ferdinand vander Haeghen on classification. Their exchange of letters and its context will be studied in depth in this paper. The study will reveal the confrontation of two conflicting world views, and more particularly of two visions on the organisation of documentation, archives, and knowledge. We will see that Vander Haeghen’s modern concept of the constitution of an ever growing memory of every day life is overthrown by Otlet’s modernistic ideas about the global organisation, development and diffusion of knowledge. A kind of internet ‘avant la lettre’.
TOWERS AND GLOBES: ARCHITECTURAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PATRICK GEDDES’S OUTLOOK TOWERS AND PAUL OTLET’S MUNDANEUMS
Dr. Pierre Chabard
l’Ecole d’architecture
Université de Paris VIII
Paris, FranceThis paper will to contribute to a critical history of “encyclopedisms” by confronting two connected projects of classification and exposition of knowledge: the “Outlook Tower” of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and the “Mundaneum” of Paul Otlet (1868-1944). These two encyclopedical projects, which was also scenographic and architectural, were both very long-term, quasi identified with their authors’s life, continually in evolution but finally never really achieved. This paper will compare them not only regarding to their theoretical construction but also to their architectural form. The point will not be to find identity, continuity and permanences between them but rather to seek differences, variations and even contradictions. Analysing these two architectures of knowledge, which were influencing each other without being able to join together, will give an opportunity to explore the paradoxical nature of encyclopedical thinking: though it seeks totality, it always remains in a kind of relativity, and even incompatibility; though it seeks universality, it often appears in a kind of institutional marginality; the nearer it comes to its own totalisation, the more distant it seems to be from concrete achievement
"A NECESSITY OF OUR TIME": DOCUMENTATION AND THE MEANINGS OF "CULTURE" IN SUZANNE BRIET'S QU'EST-CE QUE LA DOCUMENTATION?
Ron Day
Assistant Professor
Library and Information Science Program
Wayne State UniversitySuzanne Briet in her small, 1951 book, /Quest-ce que la documentation?/ (/What is Documentation?/), repeatedly stressed that documentation is both a necessity and a cultural technique for our (i.e., her) time. This is a loaded claim, but in developing it Briet articulates both a theory of documentation and a theory of the role of culture in documentation. Culture in her book has two senses: the cultures of scientific, scholarly, and, what we may generally call professional fields and what we may call the Culture of Western modernity as part of Western culture as a whole. Through Western modernity the professional fields are given their global manifestations within the historical unfolding of Western progress, and conversely, through the particular professional fields (comprising modern science as a whole) the concept of modern culture in the West is made concrete and materially viable. Documentation as a cultural technique, is, thus, an ambivalent term in Briets work, pointing toward two levels of events: particular socio-epistemological fields of vocabulary, methods, and techniques, and transcendental or superstructural historical and political drives of which these fields are said to be expressions. Documentation, for Briet, is not only an example of a technical culture, but as it stand at the forefront of the research and global expansion of technical cultures, it is an exemplar of the spirit of modernity, and thus in this sense, a necessity of our time.
First, the notion of professional culture in Briets work encompasses social networks and expressive cultural forms, such as discourse and vocabulary. Through these two aspects of culture, documentary materials gain their value and meaning. According to Briet, documentalists must attune themselves to professional cultures and they must also produce (through documentary prospecting and through the new arrangements of given materials) new types of documents for the advancement of those cultures. The second sense of culture that Briet works with in her book is the sense that suggests that documentary production, as well as documentation itself, is an expression of the modernist spirit of her time. Though the term modernist and its cognates are not directly used in Briets work, all those familiar tropes of productionist modernism are valorized within it: dynamism, efficiency, and a general productionist rhythm whose tempo is set by modern information and communication technologies.
In Briets book, the relationship between these two senses of culture, i.e., professional cultures and that of Western historical modernity, is rhetorically that of metonymy and historically that of a dialectic which, through institutions of development, such as the UN, develops toward world unity. However, unlike earlier visions of documentation and culture, such as Otlets, the notion of technique plays a central role in her understanding of the development of the spirit of Western culture. It is not merely an ingredient, in the form of rationality, of that spirit. This suggests then, contrary to Briets neat resolution of the tension between these two senses of culture, that the very global expansion (development) of professional-technical cultures that Briet celebrates in the third and last chapter of her book may lead to a dissemination and dissolution of that very cultural unity (Culture) that Briet premised as the historical spirit of which these cultures were said to be necessary expressions. Thus, the result for documentation in our day and age is that it might be seen as a material necessity of cultural practices, but its historical necessity -- i.e., its technical manifestation of a cultural spirit --is questionable. The post-War second generation of documentation (Briet), through a stress upon technique brings into doubt the historicist reading of culture (and thus, the historical necessity of documentation) of the first generation (i.e., Otlet).
IN THE LABORATORY OF MODERNITY: VISUALIZING SOCIAL FACTS.
FROM PICTORIAL STATISTICS TOWARDS AN INTERNATIONAL PICTURE LANGUAGE.Frank Hartmann
University of Vienna, AustriaVienna during the interwar period can be regarded as one laboratory of modernity: the ambitious socialist experiment to enhance housing and living conditions set an appropriate capstone within the making of modern man. Within this context, and in its distinctive combination of economics, sociology and its pictorial statistics, the visualization project Isotype, by Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and his team in Vienna (and later, in The Hague and Oxford) represented a remarkable push towards what nowadays is called media literacy and the problem of access. Isotype, the International system of picture education, was conceived as part of a unified scientific world conception (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung). It represented a continuation of the ideas of enlightenment in its struggle against metaphysics and took a practical turn to iconic forms of communication. This resulted in a new pictographic design system which provide the principles of modern information design. The aesthetics of encoding knowledge and the political implications of Isotype will be scrutinized in my contribution.
OTTO NEURATH, FACTS, ARTIFACTS AND THE MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE
Dr. Nader Vossoughian
Columbia University
New York,USAMost researchers trace the rise of the network society to the invention of the internet, the proliferation of personal computing, and the development of the cell phone. The assumption has been that technology drives social change, that distributed models of knowledge management information dissemination would be unthinkable were it not for the physical infrastructure that brought them to fruition. My paper will seek to dispute this view, arguing on the contrary that network-based models of knowledge production were already being theorized and conceptualized in the early 20th century prior to the era of digitalization. In 1913, Hendrik Christian Andersen theorized the creation of a world center of communication, one that anticipated the shift from industrialization to what Hardt and Negri have termed “informationization” (2000). In 1928, Paul Otlet and Le Corbusier drafted plans for the “cité mondiale” or “world city,” not only to consolidate and promote knowledge about the world, but also to systematize and render coherent the body of known scientific facts. In 1929, the sociologist Otto Neurath, working in tandem with Otlet, established the Orbis Institute, a center that radically reconceptualized the relationship between physical and representational space, anticipating the crisis of postmodernity characterized by Baudrillard.
The purpose of this presentation will be to map out Neurath’s informational conception of knowledge. Beginning with an analysis of his famed Vienna Method of Pictoral Statistics, I will continue with a discussion of his “museum of the future,” which was the product of his dialogues with Otlet. For Neurath, the production of facts was intrinsically related to the display of artifacts, and strategies of visual repetition and technological reproduction figured centrally in terms of guiding his thinking about the creation and organization of knowledge.
I hope to show how Neurath still holds sway today in that he recognized the “auratic” potential inherent to the display and dissemination of quantitative information. Although his Museum of Society and Economy (1925-1934) was created with the intention of promoting Austro-Marxian socialism, his greatest achievement was his recognition that the continued health of the capitalist system required not just the standardization of things, but also words. That is to say, Neurath understood that Fordist, assembly-line production methods could teach us a great deal about not just the factory place, but also language itself. Indeed, the greatest obstacles to frictionless capitalism continue to be communicational (and not necessarily political) in nature, and Neurath’s efforts to derive a universal signs system rooted in the language of pictures anticipated this reality.
GESELLSCHAFT UND WIRTSCHAFT. AN ATLAS IN PICTORIAL STATISTICS PRODUCED BY THE VIENNESE MUSEUM OF SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN 1930.
Sybilla Nikolow
Institute for Science and Technology Studies,
University of Bielefeld,
GermanyIt is well known that Paul Otlet and Otto Neurath did not realise more than a beginning of their collective Mundaneum idea. Among other collaborative projects, they envisioned an atlas of civilisation, but they never started working on it. Instead of considering the question why the project failed, the paper asks which ideas led them to co-operate. On the part of Neurath and the pictorial statistics he developed in Vienna’s Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum, a detailed study of the atlas Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft provides insight. The charts were produced in 1930, in commission for the Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig This work seems to take a crucial place in Neurath’s oeuvre. It was the first large publication of the museum, later the pictorial statistics became internationally standardised in the BASIC-English-Books and Neurath starts working on his philosophical idea of an international Encyclopaedia of unified science. In the atlas, one can study in detail how Neurath and his museum already started thinking about these later projects.
Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft is a collection of a 100 pictorial charts and 30 text tables. The scope on the theme was widely interpreted and different styles of representation were used to display and compare social, political and cultural aspects of different regions of the world. Being more than a conventional atlas, the collection of charts was at the same time an encyclopaedia and a reference book of statistics. From the history of science point of view the atlas follows three traditions: 1) it is a historical-statistical representation of the states and their populations, 2) it is a part of the thematic mapping tradition and 3) it represents an encyclopaedic order of knowledge. As the subtitle suggests, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft is a pictorial encyclopaedia, i.e. a basic reference work in which knowledge is presented and communicated by means of pictures.
Apart from a detailed analysis of the different types of pictorial statistics, the paper will address the various ways of arranging and presenting knowledge (e.g. word and picture, numbers and maps of quantities, museum and lexicon, encyclopaedia and cartography). This is necessary to define the place of Otto Neurath in the wider context of other projects, to facilitate the communication in the further democratic world order in which he believed. For Neurath himself, it can be shown how close his work on pictorial statistics, encyclopaedia and museums is connected in his overall oeuvre.
‘A NOTABLE NODE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY KNOWLEDGE NETWORK: THE NEW MANCHESTER CENTRAL LIBRARY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF L.S. JAST
Alistair Black,
Professor of Library and Information History,
Leeds Metropolitan UniversityAlthough the first town to open a public library under the Public Libraries Act (1850), Manchester did not possess a purpose-built central library until 1934, when the extant impressive and classical rotunda was opened by George V to the accompaniment of astonishing civic celebrations. The library was one of the largest public building projects of the inter-war period. It’s meaning went beyond the semiotics of its classical style, which paid homage to the civilizing value of culture and education, summed up by one architectural observer who declared that ‘The Romans have come to Manchester’. The library was also seen as an alternative to the dominant metropolitan culture of London and as an important additional node in the emergent library based knowledge network of the early twentieth century. It was planned at a time when increasing emphasis was being placed on schemes of library co-operation, or what L.S. Jast, Manchester’s chief librarian, called the ‘library grid’ – a term that not only mirrored the construction in the 1920s of a ‘national grid’ for the generation and distribution of electricity, but also anticipated, it might be suggested, the ‘gridism’ and networking of the internet. In attempting to identify the ‘causes’ and justification of the new Manchester Central Library, attention is paid, through an investigation of Jast’s personal papers, to his professional and modernist thinking, including his internationalism, his ideas on library networking and his novel emphasis on user-oriented service; as well as his social philosophy and personal beliefs founded on idealism and spiritualism, or as one of his obituaries put it in 1944, his attachment to oriental mysticism.
‘LAYING A FOUNDATION OF FACT’: THE FABIAN STORY
AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETYDr Alistair S. Duff
Senior Lecturer
School of Communication Arts
Napier UniversityThe paper explores affinities between the information society thesis and modes of thinking characteristic of the Fabian Society in the first half of the twentieth century. The information society thesis postulates the centrality of information and communications media in contemporary social formations, often as part of an optimistic or even utopian political prognosis. Interestingly, the Fabian Society, a British-based organisation influential in the development of democratic socialist policy, also foregrounded information in its advocacy of social justice. “Laying a foundation of fact,” according to one commentator, was a fundamental component of the Fabian approach. The paper argues that information, in an original sense of facts, figures, and news, should be construed as the essence of Fabianism. Texts are examined that demonstrate close conceptual links between information and social welfare, between facts and norms. A fascinating question then emerges: Given its informational basis, how might Fabianism illuminate the contemporary theory of the information society, particularly its normative dimensions? Critiques of Fabianism are also appraised, including those claiming that Fabianism’s preoccupation with data-gathering and filing constituted its major weakness. The paper maintains, however, that Fabianism can make significant contributions to the understanding of specific information age issues, such as the digital divide or the safeguarding of the public sphere. The paper also makes some comparisons between Fabianism and the European Modernist Knowledge Project, with special reference to the journalism of the Modernist and one-time Fabian, H. G. Wells
PUBLIC SCIENCE IN BRITAIN AND THE ORIGINS OF DOCUMENTATION AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, 1890-1950.
Dave Muddiman
Principal Lecturer
School of Information Management
Leeds Metropolitan University,
United KingdomIt is now becoming commonplace to trace the origins of the contemporary “information revolution” to the opening decades of the twentieth century, examining its links to scientific management, bureaucratic control and the second industrial revolution. This paper proposes that in Britain, in particular, an important additional impetus underpinning the new regime of information was the advent of “public science” between 1890 and 1950: the development of a professionally organised, intellectually confident and politically active scientific community in British public life. In the sphere of information, the paper argues, British public science manifested itself in three main ways:
* It stimulated a proliferation of plans and schemes (notably those of Lockyer, Wells, Pollard and Bernal) for a new and often utopian order of scientific communication, encompassing not only Britain but the world. These raised public and professional consciousness of information as a concept.
* It campaigned for and facilitated the construction of a new British information infrastructure for science and industry based on the model of welfare pluralism. This infrastructure was to support effectively British science, commerce and industry until (arguably) the 1970s.
* It fostered the emergence of a small number of scientific intellectuals (Bradford, Bernal, Price, Vickery and others) who established the foundations of a new science of documentation and information (what later became “Information Science”). This new discipline was grounded in the fundamentals of British science – methodological positivism, empiricism/naturalism and social relevance.
In its final section, the paper briefly contrasts these developments with the trajectory of early twentieth century information “revolution” in the USA, continental Europe and the USSR. It concludes that the emergence of public science provided an important impetus for the development of institutions, networks and sciences of information across the world, although nowhere, arguably, was the influence of an independent scientific establishment - the “science lobby” - as pervasive as in the case of Britain.
The march of the modern and the reconstitution of the world’s knowledge apparatus: H. G. Wells, encyclopedism and the World Brain
Dr. W Boyd Rayward, Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
H.G. Wells believed passionately in the ultimate social value of science and was fascinated by the scientific developments of his time. His Outline of History (1919 and 1940) suggested to him that despite its many setbacks, civilization was progressing towards a new kind of universal or world polity. The great study of evolution which he essentially directed, the Science of Life (1930), confirmed him in this belief for it seemed to suggest that the necessary social organization for the new world order was emerging as the expression of a kind of ultimate biological development. Everywhere scientists and engineers were triumphing in the quest for new knowledge that might accelerate this evolutionary process and realize that wealth and happiness the conditions for which Wells examined in the third of his great encyclopedic syntheses of contemporary knowledge (Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, 1931). Yet, in the midst of these possibilities, modern civilization, especially in that period of increasing uncertainty and anxiety of the inter-War years, seemed to be spiraling downwards to division, conflict, barbarism, dissolution, disaster. What to do? For Wells, ultimately the rational, disinterested, careful, methodical work of science will help define The Shape of Things to Come (1933). Thus one of the solutions to the calamities that everywhere impended was to mobilize knowledge more effectively in an encyclopedic World Brain (1938) organization that would allow science to achieve its potential for shaping a world mind (Science and the World Mind, 1942.) But was this possible? Having cursed the ubiquitous sycamore tree in The Happy Turning (published version February 1945) , his reflections on beauty suggest to him that mankind’s unceasing generation of knowledge continues to make a life devoted to the search for truth worth while. Eventually, he believes, mankind will reach a new stage of understanding and be able to see that “there shines a world ‘beyond good and evil,’ that there, in a universe completely conscious of itself, Being achieves its end.” In Mind at the End of Its Tether (published version November 1945), he expresses only nine months later a loss of faith in Mind and concludes with apparent finality that: “There is no way out or round or through.” Yet what might be considered a statement of ultimate existential despair is actually not final for Wells cannot help believing that a “a small minority…will succeed in seeing life out to the end.” Wells died in 1946. His last quiet words, following the feverish, repetitive, hectoring of so much of his literary output after the First World War, were ambiguous. Perhaps they may be considered to suggest, with typical Wellsian eloquence, one of the possible outcomes of the march of the modern.
PAPER PERSONA BY NUMBERS
NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS AND THEIR CREATIONSDr. Anke te Heesen
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
BerlinTowards the end of the 19th Century a specific paper-institution was created: In 1879 the first newspaper clipping office was founded in Paris. Newspapers by than had become a medium for mass communication as information was being spread throughout the whole world by hundreds of different newspapers. To oversee and take advantage of this mass of scattered information, clipping offices accepted orders for finding articles, for example, about a certain person. The relevant items were cut from the papers, sent to the customer and pasted in a new context. In this talk I seek to describe these transportation processes as well as to describe how the public persona of individuals was translated into a paper persona through these clippings. What had become the public appearance of scientists in a newspaper now went into a paper collage which echoed the work of the cubists and dadaists of the time. I will introduce the German physicist Ernst Gehrcke (1878-1960), who from 1919 to 1922 obsessively collected clippings about Albert Einstein. It was his goal to provide evidence by means of the clipping collection and its analysis, that relativity theory was merely a mass suggestion of the public and nothing breathtakingly new. He pasted these articles in several volumes and transformed them into a book that was published in 1924. My argument will be that Gehrcke generated with his cut-and-paste technique a second layer of public appearance for Einstein. The outcome was a paper-persona that never existed before and was a total product of the transformation process created by 5000 printed slips of paper.
PAPER PARASITE: FRANZ MARIA FELDHAUS AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TECHNOLOGY
Markus.Krajewski
Chair of History and Theory of Cultural Techniques
Bauhaus University Weimar
GermanyAround 1900 in Germany, the historiography of technology emerges as a professional discipline. Like every dawning scientific practice, it is necessarily developed by a small group of non-experts. These dilettantes try to form a yet unknown branch of knowledge, establishing their work as the main institution for the history of technology. Moreover, these centers of technological knowledge are supposed to serve as a non-academic market of information exchange. Even the slightest piece of information concerning technological achievements is meticulously collected and stored in what are in effect huge data bases. These private data bases, consisting of thousands of standardized index cards, serve to provide their owners with a living. Clients seeking information in the more and more diversified field of technology pay money for the answers hat can be supplied by the indexes.
The emergence of such public-private centers of history will be analyzed and exemplified by the case of Franz Maria Feldhaus (1874--1956). Starting in 1900, he is the first as well as the most ambitious constructor of these kinds of information systems. With the beginning of the century, he starts gathering every historical date, even the smallest hint or fragment, that “somehow applies to technical history” in order to collect and record it meticulously, piece by piece, on index cards. Fifty years later, this collection had grown to contain about 160,000 entries, neatly registered on index cards, differentiated systematically, and rubricated according to subjects (around 71,000 cards), persons (around 24,000 cards), and historical dates (15,000 cards). It also contained an index of technical proverbs (2,400 entries), the archive or index of Feldhaus' own publications (5,200 entries), and a collection of photographs and technical medals. In order to defend his kingdom of paper knowledge against competitors, he embarked upon a prolonged public paper warfare featuring him as the one and only expert in this field. However, the conditions of producing such enormous card indexes are by nature (in terms of Michel Serres) parasitic.
This case study is based on a broad selection of Feldhaus’ publications as well as on archive material in Feldhaus’s estate in the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin and in his daughter's home in Frankfurt. Additionally, I interviewed two of his daughters.
On the one hand, my talk will question the strategies of how the simple arrangement of card indexes can be so productive, i.e. serving as the decisive tool in shaping the new discipline “Historiography of Technology”. On the other hand, I will examine the methods by means of which Feldhaus guaranteed the steady growth of his collection, and how he secured the monopolistic state of his endeavours, in order to retrieve some epistemological understanding of such huge projects of historiography.
HIDDEN ROOTS OF MEDIATING INFORMATION:
ASPECTS OF THE HISTORY OF THE GERMAN INFORMATION MOVEMENTThomas Hapke
Subject Librarian for Chemical Engineering
Technical University Hamburg-Harburg
Hamburg, GermanyAccording to Capurro there are three ”fundamental characteristics of the phenomenon of information” in the age of modernity: fragmentation, commonality, and mediation. Information in a fragmented form ”becomes part and parcel of media, becomes a medium.” In the first part of the 20th century ideas and institutions appeared and vanished in Germany which attempted to cope with the information challenges of modernization. Through collecting, organizing and mediating information goods to their varying audiences and customers, those involved tried to overcome the fragmentation of information.
This paper describes some of these activities and concentrates on those connected with Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the predecessors of many later efforts to improve the communication of scholarly information. Ostwald along with other information pioneers of his time undertook activities in advertizing, popularization and education as forms of information mediation. His discussion of the language for scholarly communication can be seen as one aspect of this mediation. He formulated a rudimentary theory of media for communication ("Verkehrsmittel")that would help memory and intellectual work through organization. In his view a book can be seen as a "transformator for the creation of intellectual qualities", an “intellectual machine” or ”thinking machine”. Similar metaphors of the book as a "machine" to transform "thought-energy" were used by Paul Otlet. Ostwald was also aware that other kinds of information mediating activities were necessary such as teaching research methods and skills to enable effective use of libraries.
Newly founded institutions like the Bridge ("Brücke"), the "Institute for the Organization of Intellectual Work", or the ”Technisch-Wissenschaftliche Lehrmittelzentrale (TWL)” (Head Office for Technical and Scientific Teaching Materials) acted as intermediaries between the scholar and what was perceived as a growing information overload. The Bridge aimed to organize intellectual work through the introduction of standardized means of communication - the monographic principle, standardized formats, and uniform indexing using the Universal Decimal Classification. It sought to create a "comprehensive, illustrated world encyclopedia on sheets of standardized formats" (very much an Otletain objective). The main task of the TWL, which was the German contact institution for the "Institut Internationale de Bibliographie" in Brussels in the twenties, was to create visual teaching aids for engineering education especially by means of photographs or slides. Another institution founded in 1933 by Albert Predeek at the Technical University Library in Berlin to serve the needs of the industry was the ”Informationsstelle für technisches Schrifttum” (Information Center for Technical Literature”).
The examples of the TWL as well as of the ”Internationale Monogesellschaft”, a predecessor of the Bridge, show that there was early on a common ground for information and documentation and advertizing. The aim of the Monogesellschaft was to raise the artistic level of contemporary advertizing through publication of so-called "Monos", little cards or leaflets in a standardized format (advertising picture-cards). The "Mono-System" was planned so that the individual monos would complement each other and, collectively, form a well designed, comprehensive encyclopedia. Also TWL’s Georg von Hanffstengel proposed in addition to use standardized paper formats for advertising and to include in the advertising such valuable information that the advertisements could also be used as teaching aids which could be kept permanently. Even Ostwald gave a talk at the International Advertising Convention in 1929.
This paper will explore these ideas and the initiatives associated with them by Ostwald and TWL’s Oskar Lasche and Hanffstengel