Editor’s Note: Occasionally in studying HCI history, I have stumbled upon large topics that I was unaware existed. Perhaps the most surprising has been the development of advanced information technologies, which preceded computers. In some ways, the constraints imposed by those technologies forced deeper thinking about information itself. In this column, Berkeley Professor Emeritus Michael Buckland describes the work of four dedicated creative pioneers.—Jonathan Grudin
University of California, Berkeley | buckland@ischool.berkeley.edu
November + December 2009
interactions
Why recall forgotten pioneers? Human-computer interaction is only one specific kind of mediating interface. If we want a broader understanding of interactions, we should be willing to think about other and earlier kinds of interfaces. Bibliographies are a kind of mediating interface between a reader and literature; there are “soft” technologies such as categorization schemes and indexing systems that mediate in both digital and non-digital technologies, and people as intermediaries are, in a sense, interfaces.
The following four pioneers—interested in interfaces, from this very broad definition—have been widely forgotten, until the recent revival of interest in the history of the organization of information.
Paul Otlet (1868-1944), along with Henri La Fontaine (1954-1943), was an idealistic Belgian lawyer. He was a pacifist, a feminist, and an internationalist. Otlet wanted to make the world a peaceful, prosperous place by democratizing information: He wanted to make all documents in all genres, formats, and languages available to everyone. Otlet had a vision of the Web long before digital computers were available; in 1895, he established an International Institute for Bibliography to make it happen.
A wealthy wife enabled Otlet to focus on this Institute, where he used the latest technology of his day: standard catalog cards bearing standardized descriptive metadata for each and every document. Published texts tend to be wordy, repetitive, and duplicative, so Otlet promoted a hypertextual approach whereby individual statements of fact (micro-documents known as “monographs”) were extracted from longer texts. A semantic “web” expressed the topic of each node, identified the documents relating to each topic as well as the relationships among all top-
ics and, thereby, all documents. For the semantic relationships, Otlet, La Fontaine, and others developed the Universal Decimal Classification—a more powerful version of Melvil Dewey’s Decimal Classification—that emphasized a faceted approach somewhat anticipating relational database design. The principal index had reached 11 million cards by 1914 and a commercial literature search service was established.
Otlet was very interested in new forms of the “book,” meaning new information and communication technologies that could enable us to escape the limitations of the printed codex. He and Robert Goldschmidt invented microfiche in 1906 (about 72 microfilmed pages on rectangular sheets of film, a format widely used later in the 20th century) and, later, a portable microfilm library. He had ideas about how telecommunications could be combined with workspaces and, already in 1925, foresaw that people would be reading texts in their own homes and on television screens instead of visiting a library.
Otlet’s increasingly visionary schemes were ultimately undermined by political changes, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and decreasing credibility. But as a pioneer, Otlet was ahead of his time: The Internet, in its present manifestation, bears a striking resemblance to his analog version.
Wilhelm Ostwald (1859-1932), a Nobel Laureate, is far from forgotten, but his work on information systems remains largely unknown. Born in Riga, Latvia (at that time Russia), he moved to Germany and became one of the founders of physical chemistry, receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909.
In 1910, visiting the World Fair in Brussels, he was inspired by Paul Otlet’s International
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