Abstract
Paul Otlet's 1934 Traité de documentation is a landmark publication, but its considerable scope, complex structure and sheer volume make it a particularly challenging resource to use. This paper reports on an experiment in which visual methods and lexicometry are used to understand how the Traité is organized and what it is about. We describe the underlying logic of the experiment using the concepts of biblion and architext, then process the table of contents and full text of the book with several visualization methods, discussing their output. This allows us to confirm and expand on previous qualitative appraisal of the book, using quantitative methods. While primarily focused on the value of digital hermeneutics, the paper also touches on the heuristic potential of visualization when used as a methodology for data exploration.
Highlights
The Architect of BabelPaul Otlet (1868–1944), a well-known figure among document scholars, dedicated his life to an ideal: peace through knowledge—building a better society by improving access to information, in the hope of reducing ignorance and fear
A document is information recorded for transmission. He uses a unit as a way to handle information on multiple levels: theoretically, because the idea of information beyond media is quite abstract; mechanically, as documents are transformed into index cards which are the units of a file system; mathematically, as information is encoded into a decimal classification
Our results show that the Traité is a two-legged, if somewhat lopsided, piece of work, with an overgrown bibliographic section bookended by shorter but dense epistemological work
Summary
Paul Otlet (1868–1944), a well-known figure among document scholars, dedicated his life to an ideal: peace through knowledge—building a better society by improving access to information, in the hope of reducing ignorance and fear While he may be regarded by some as an idealist, the architect of a dream, there is much to be said about his intellectual legacy. It introduces the notion of biblion—a unit of information around which Otlet designs a framework for document theory (Robert, 2015) It is a fairly ambiguous term, referring to both media and meaning, the physical object (document or book) and the information it carries. The Traité contains a great number of fascinating statements, in the way it echoes our own preoccupation with infobesity and misinformation It had a role in the advent of documentation as a field of professional practice and research, with lasting impact on document theoreticians. We focus on the Traité itself, the way it can illustrate an intellectual lineage between the analog and digital environments, both conceptually and empirically
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