User:KYPark/1934

Gaston Bachelard

 * Le nouvel esprit scientifique
 * The New Scientific Mind (trans.)

John Dewey

 * Art as Experience
 * New York: G.P.Putnam, Capricorn Books.

T. S. Eliot

 * The Rock

Paul Otlet

 * ''Traité de Documentation&#58; 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


 * ... 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.


 * cf. Herbert Wells (1938) World Brain