Otlet’s writing is marked by
its extraordinary energy. His muscular and tireless prose powers a huge machine,
a vast assemblage of interconnected parts operating on multiple strata according
to precisely articulated scales.
hyper-modernist energy that provokes the question of this chapter: how are we to understand the co-ordination and organization of the vectors assembled and animated in Otlet’s project of documentation? To use a mathematical trope, what is the singularity that organizes this vector field?
To understand Otlet on facts, it is useful to start with his distinction between natural and social science. The former builds a ‘great monument’ through disciplined,collective work. For natural scientists, ‘speculation and interpretation are secondary’, whereas ‘the social sciences are seen ... not as one discipline ... but as a gathering of personal opinions’ (11).
science is built upon facts: ‘The results of the natural sciences are grounded in millions of carefully observed, analysed, and catalogued facts. These facts have subsequently been integrated into sequences and the combination of these sequences has naturally led to the enunciation of laws, partial at first, general later, from which the most powerful and indestructible synthesis that has ever been made now seems possible’ (11).
The creation of documents in such a way that each item of information has its own identity
A fact can be fully revealed to the consciousness of a reader only when the ‘item of information’ that refers to that fact is constructed and organized in such a way, as Rayward put it, ‘that each item of information has its own identity.’ If the identity of the item of information is somehow compromised, so is the revelation of the fact.
hyper-modernist energy that provokes the question of this chapter: how are we to understand the co-ordination and organization of the vectors assembled and animated in Otlet’s project of documentation? To use a mathematical trope, what is the singularity that organizes this vector field?
To understand Otlet on facts, it is useful to start with his distinction between natural and social science. The former builds a ‘great monument’ through disciplined,collective work. For natural scientists, ‘speculation and interpretation are secondary’, whereas ‘the social sciences are seen ... not as one discipline ... but as a gathering of personal opinions’ (11).
science is built upon facts: ‘The results of the natural sciences are grounded in millions of carefully observed, analysed, and catalogued facts. These facts have subsequently been integrated into sequences and the combination of these sequences has naturally led to the enunciation of laws, partial at first, general later, from which the most powerful and indestructible synthesis that has ever been made now seems possible’ (11).
The creation of documents in such a way that each item of information has its own identity
A fact can be fully revealed to the consciousness of a reader only when the ‘item of information’ that refers to that fact is constructed and organized in such a way, as Rayward put it, ‘that each item of information has its own identity.’ If the identity of the item of information is somehow compromised, so is the revelation of the fact.
The application of the monographic principle does not complete the documentation
of facts
The results of the natural sciences are grounded in millions of carefully observed,
analysed, and catalogued facts. These facts have subsequently been integrated into
sequences and the combination of these sequences has naturally led to the enunciation
of laws
trimmed stone
trimmed stone
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