Description
Uniting a team of international and interdisciplinary scholars, this volume considers the views of early twentieth-century European thinkers on the creation, dissemination and management of publicly available information. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the volume reflects the nature of the thinkers discussed, including Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, the English Fabians, Paul Otlet, Wilhelm Ostwald and H. G. Wells. The work also charts the interest since the latter part of the nineteenth century in finding new ways to think about and to manage the growing body of available information in order to achieve aims such as the advancement of Western civilization, the alleviation of inequalities across classes and countries, and the promotion of peaceful coexistence between nations. In doing so, the contributors provide a novel historical context for assessing widely-held assumptions about today's globalized, 'post modern' information society. This volume will interest all who are curious about the creation of a modern networked information society.
Table of Contents
Contents: European modernism and the information society: conceptual interdependence: introduction, W. Boyd Rayward; Understanding the information domain: the uneasy relations between sociology and cultural studies and the peculiar absence of history, Frank Webster; On the cultural and intellectual context of European documentation in the early 20th century, Michael Buckland; A tale of 2 narratives: prolegomena to an alternative history of library and information science, Steve Fuller; The role of facts in Paul Otlet's modernist project of documentation, Bernd Frohmann; Ferdinand van der Haeghen's shadow on Otlet: European resistance to the Americanized modernism of the Office International de Bibliographie, Pieter Uyttenhove and Sylvia van Peteghem; Towers and globes: architectural and epistemological differences between Patrick Geddes's outlook towers and Paul Otlet's mundaneums, Pierre Chabard; Building society, constructing knowledge, weaving the web: Otlet's visualizations of a global information society and his concept of a universal civilization, Charles van den Heuvel; ' A necessity of our time': documents and culture in Suzanne Briet's Qu'est-ce que la documentation?, Ronald E. Day; Networking knowledge before the information society: the Manchester Central Library (1934) and the metaphysical-professional philosophy of L.S. Jast, Alistair Black; Documentation and Utopia: Fabian anticipations of the information society, Alistair S. Duff; Public science in Britain and the origins of documentation and information science, 1890-1950, Dave Muddiman; The march of the modern and the reconstitution of the world's knowledge apparatus: H.G. Wells, encylopedism and the world brain, W. Boyd Rayward; The modern museum in the age of its mechanical reproducibility: Otto Neurath and the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna, Nader Vossoughian; Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: an encyclopedia in Otto Neurath's pictorial statistics from 1930, Sybilla Nikolow; Visualizing so
