Purpose -This paper seeks to outline the central role of concepts in the knowledge universe, and the intertwining roles of works, instantiations, and documents. In particular the authors are interested in ontological and epistemological aspects of concepts and in the question to which extent there is a need for natural languages to link concepts to create meaningful patterns. Design/methodology/approach -The authors describe the quest for the smallest elements of knowledge from a historical perspective. They focus on the metaphor of the universe of knowledge and its impact on classification and retrieval of concepts. They outline the major components of an elementary theory of knowledge interaction. Findings -The paper outlines the major components of an elementary theory of knowledge interaction that is based on the structure of knowledge rather than on the content of documents, in which semantics becomes not a matter of synonymous concepts, but rather of coordinating knowledge structures. The evidence is derived from existing empirical research. Originality/value -The paper shifts the bases for knowledge organization from a search for a universal order to an understanding of a universal structure within which many context-dependent orders are possible.
The arbitrary division into lines and pages of the book in its present format, does not correspond at all, with the presentation of ideas. (Otlet, 1911, p. 291) Most historical explanations of interfaces are technological and start with the computer age. We propose a different approach by focusing on the history of library and information sciences, particularly on the case of Paul Otlet (1868-1944). Otlet's attempts to integrate and distribute knowledge imply the need for interfaces, and his conceptualizations are reminiscent of modern versions of interfaces that are intended to facilitate manual and mechanical data integration and enrichment. Our discussion is based on a selection from the hundreds of images of what we may think of as "interfaces" that Otlet made or commissioned during his life. We examine his designs for interfaces that involve bibliographic cards, that allow data enrichment, his attempts to visualize interfaces between the sciences and between universal and personal classifications, and even his attempts to create interfaces to the world. In particular, we focus on the implications of Otlet's dissection of the organization of the book for the creation of interfaces to a new order of public knowledge. Our view is that the creative ways in which he faces tensions of scalability, representation, and perception of relationships between knowledge objects might be of interest today.
This paper discusses the development of digital intellectual and technological geographies showing spatial distributions of information and proposes to combine these with network representations of actors and documents relevant for the history knowledge exchange in Early ModernEurope. The amount of technical and fortification drawings that were copied throughout Europe and the New World and the different nature of networks in which they were exchanged raises the question whether they belonged to the Republic of Letters, as some authors claim. We argue that instead of trying to explain knowledge exchange in Early Modern Europe by focusing on The Republic of Letters as one entity consisting of scholars, it might be more useful to reconstruct the spatial distribution of actors and of (non-)textual documents in virtual networks of knowledge. Inspired by the term "deep maps" coined by David Bodenhamer, we will introduce the concept of "deep networks" and explore the requirements for their future development. Hereto, we focus on the representation of historical evidence and of uncertainties in analyses of intellectual and technological letters and drawings and hybrid combinations of these.
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