_____________________[PRO] Paul Otlet: Forgotten Forefather of Information Architecture

[congeries]

Paul Otlet: Forgotten Forefather of Information Architecture

"...he simply believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional, 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."


"In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext," Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar's workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions (!) of 3x5 index cards.

This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, "the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book."


действительно, отлёт - супер дядечка был, судя по всему.