Lecture: Charles van den Heuvel

You are cordially invited to join us for the following Summer Talk.

May 26, 2009
3:00 p.m.
Wells Library 030

"Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in Research from a Historical Perspective: The designs of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) for telecommunication and machine readable documentation to organize research and society" will be presented by Charles van den Heuvel, Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Abstract:
Tim Berners-Lee describes in Weaving the Web (1999), his future vision of the World Wide Web in two parts. In the first one, nowadays called Web 2.0, people collaborate and enrich data together in a shared information space. In the second part, exchanges extend to computers, resulting in a “Semantic Web” (Berners-Lee 1999). Most historical studies of World Wide Web begin with the American roots of the Internet in ARPANET or follow a historiographical line of post war information revolutionaries, from Vannevar Bush to Tim Berners-Lee. This paper follows an alternative line. At the end of the nineteenth and in the first decades of the twentieth century various European scholars, like Patrick Geddes, Paul Otlet, Otto Neurath, Wilhelm Ostwald explored the organisation, enrichment and dissemination of knowledge on a global level to come to a peaceful, universal society. We focus on Paul Otlet (1868-1944) who developed a knowledge infrastructure to update information mechanically and manually in collaboratories of scholars. First the Understanding Infrastructure (2007) report, that Paul N. Edwards et al. wrote on behalf of NSF, will be used to position Otlet’s knowledge organization in their sketched development from information systems to information networks or webs. Secondly, the relevance of Otlet’s knowledge infrastructure will be assessed for Web 2.0 and Semantic Web applications for research. The hypothesis will be put forward that the instruments and protocols envisioned by Otlet to enhance collaborative knowledge production, can still be relevant for current conceptualizations of “scientific authority” in data sharing and annotation in Web 2.0 applications and the modeling of the Semantic Web.