“There is no ‘top’ to the World-Wide Web,” declared a 1992 foundational document from the World Wide Web Consortium—meaning that there is no central server or organizational authority to determine what does or does not get published. It is, like Borges’ famous Library of Babel, theoretically infinite, stitched together with hyperlinks rather than top-down, Dewey Decimal-style categories.1 It is also famously open—built atop a set of publicly available industry standards.
While these features have connected untold millions and created new forms of social organization, they also come at a cost. Material seems to vanish almost as quickly as it is created, disappearing amid broken links or into the constant flow of the social media “stream.” It can be hard to distinguish fact from falsehood. Corporations have stepped into this confusion, organizing our browsing and data in decidedly closed, non-transparent ways. Did it really have to turn out this way?
The web has played such a powerful role in shaping our world that it can sometimes seem like a fait accompli—the inevitable result of progress and enlightened thinking. A deeper look into the historical record, though, reveals a different story: The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web.
By the late 19th century, the modern information age had already begun. The industrialization of the printing press, coupled with the introduction of cheap rag paper, had dramatically altered the economics of publishing. Much of Europe and North America was awash in data. Daily newspapers, cheap magazines, and mass-market novels all emerged during this period, along with a flurry of institutional reports, memos, and all kinds of other printed ephemera.
Meanwhile, new communications technologies like the telegraph and telephone were cropping up. Tram and railway lines were proliferating. An increasingly internationalized postal service sped the flow of data around the globe. By 1900, a global information network had already started to take shape.
The industrial information explosion triggered waves of concern about how to manage all that data. Accomplished librarians like Melvil Dewey (of Decimal System fame), Sir Anthony Panizzi of the British Library, and Charles Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum all began devising new systems to cope with the complexity of their burgeoning collections. In the fast-growing corporate world, company archivists started to develop complex filing systems to accommodate the sudden deluge of typewritten documents.
While these features have connected untold millions and created new forms of social organization, they also come at a cost. Material seems to vanish almost as quickly as it is created, disappearing amid broken links or into the constant flow of the social media “stream.” It can be hard to distinguish fact from falsehood. Corporations have stepped into this confusion, organizing our browsing and data in decidedly closed, non-transparent ways. Did it really have to turn out this way?
The web has played such a powerful role in shaping our world that it can sometimes seem like a fait accompli—the inevitable result of progress and enlightened thinking. A deeper look into the historical record, though, reveals a different story: The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web.
By the late 19th century, the modern information age had already begun. The industrialization of the printing press, coupled with the introduction of cheap rag paper, had dramatically altered the economics of publishing. Much of Europe and North America was awash in data. Daily newspapers, cheap magazines, and mass-market novels all emerged during this period, along with a flurry of institutional reports, memos, and all kinds of other printed ephemera.Meanwhile, new communications technologies like the telegraph and telephone were cropping up. Tram and railway lines were proliferating. An increasingly internationalized postal service sped the flow of data around the globe. By 1900, a global information network had already started to take shape.
The industrial information explosion triggered waves of concern about how to manage all that data. Accomplished librarians like Melvil Dewey (of Decimal System fame), Sir Anthony Panizzi of the British Library, and Charles Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum all began devising new systems to cope with the complexity of their burgeoning collections. In the fast-growing corporate world, company archivists started to develop complex filing systems to accommodate the sudden deluge of typewritten documents.
Among these efforts, one stood out. In 1893, a young Belgian lawyer named Paul Otlet wrote an essay expressing his concern over the rapid proliferation of books, pamphlets, and periodicals. The problem, he argued, should be “alarming to those who are concerned about quality rather than quantity,” and he worried about how anyone would ever make sense of it all. An ardent bibliophile with an entrepreneurial streak, he began working on a solution with his partner, a fellow lawyer named Henri La Fontaine (who would later go on to join the Belgian Senate and win the Nobel Peace Prize): a “Universal Bibliography” (Repertoire bibliographique universel) that would catalog all the world’s published information and make it freely accessible.
The project won Otlet and La Fontaine a Grand Prize at the Paris World Expo of 1900, and attracted funding from the Belgian government. It would eventually encompass more than 16 million entries ranging from books and periodicals to newspapers, photographs, posters, and audio and video recordings, all painstakingly recorded on individual index cards. Otlet even established an international network of associations and a vast museum called the World Palace (Palais Mondial) or Mundaneum, which at one point occupied more than 100 rooms in a government building.
Otlet’s Mundaneum presented an alternative vision to today’s (nominally) flat and open web by relying on a high degree of bibliographical control. He envisioned a group of trained indexers managing the flow of information in and out of the system, making sure that every incoming piece of data would be properly categorized and synthesized into a coherent body of knowledge. To this end, he and La Fontaine developed a sophisticated cataloging system that they dubbed the Universal Decimal Classification. Using the Dewey Decimal System as its starting point, it started with a few top-level domains (like Philosophy, Social Sciences, and The Arts), which could then be further divided into a theoretically infinite number of sub-topics. This in itself was nothing new, but Otlet introduced an important new twist: a set of so-called “auxiliary tables” that allowed indexers to connect one topic to another by using a combination of numeric codes and familiar marks like the equal sign, plus sign, colon, and quotation marks. So, for example, the code 339.5 (410/44) denoted “Trade relations between the United Kingdom and France,” while 311:[622+669](485) meant “Statistics of mining and metallurgy in Sweden.”
Otlet hoped that this new system would allow for a grand unification of human knowledge, and entirely new forms of information. But neither he nor his Mundaneum survived the ravages of World War II. After invading Brussels, the Nazis destroyed much of his life’s work, removing more than 70 tons worth of material and repurposing the World Palace site for an exhibition of Third Reich art. Otlet died in 1944, and has remained largely forgotten ever since. (...)
All of these proposals were, first and foremost, managed systems, closely curated collections of knowledge that would have required a high degree of systematic control. And for the most part, they were situated squarely in the public sector, with little role for private enterprise. They emerged in an era of industrialization, when many writers saw great hope in the possibilities of scientific management to improve the human condition; and in a time of war, when many thinkers hoped that a more orderly system would serve as a bulwark against the possibility of international conflict.
In other words, the dream of organizing the world’s information stemmed not from an authoritarian impulse, but from a deeply utopian one. In the United States, though, a very different kind of utopia was being imagined.
The project won Otlet and La Fontaine a Grand Prize at the Paris World Expo of 1900, and attracted funding from the Belgian government. It would eventually encompass more than 16 million entries ranging from books and periodicals to newspapers, photographs, posters, and audio and video recordings, all painstakingly recorded on individual index cards. Otlet even established an international network of associations and a vast museum called the World Palace (Palais Mondial) or Mundaneum, which at one point occupied more than 100 rooms in a government building.
Otlet’s Mundaneum presented an alternative vision to today’s (nominally) flat and open web by relying on a high degree of bibliographical control. He envisioned a group of trained indexers managing the flow of information in and out of the system, making sure that every incoming piece of data would be properly categorized and synthesized into a coherent body of knowledge. To this end, he and La Fontaine developed a sophisticated cataloging system that they dubbed the Universal Decimal Classification. Using the Dewey Decimal System as its starting point, it started with a few top-level domains (like Philosophy, Social Sciences, and The Arts), which could then be further divided into a theoretically infinite number of sub-topics. This in itself was nothing new, but Otlet introduced an important new twist: a set of so-called “auxiliary tables” that allowed indexers to connect one topic to another by using a combination of numeric codes and familiar marks like the equal sign, plus sign, colon, and quotation marks. So, for example, the code 339.5 (410/44) denoted “Trade relations between the United Kingdom and France,” while 311:[622+669](485) meant “Statistics of mining and metallurgy in Sweden.”
Otlet hoped that this new system would allow for a grand unification of human knowledge, and entirely new forms of information. But neither he nor his Mundaneum survived the ravages of World War II. After invading Brussels, the Nazis destroyed much of his life’s work, removing more than 70 tons worth of material and repurposing the World Palace site for an exhibition of Third Reich art. Otlet died in 1944, and has remained largely forgotten ever since. (...)
All of these proposals were, first and foremost, managed systems, closely curated collections of knowledge that would have required a high degree of systematic control. And for the most part, they were situated squarely in the public sector, with little role for private enterprise. They emerged in an era of industrialization, when many writers saw great hope in the possibilities of scientific management to improve the human condition; and in a time of war, when many thinkers hoped that a more orderly system would serve as a bulwark against the possibility of international conflict.
In other words, the dream of organizing the world’s information stemmed not from an authoritarian impulse, but from a deeply utopian one. In the United States, though, a very different kind of utopia was being imagined.
by Alex Wright, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Pete Ryan
