Stories by Alex Wright

This excerpt from Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages examines the contributions of Denis Diderot to the knowledge of Western societies and how Wikipedia’s rise echoes the rise of his Encyclopédie.

September 11th, 2007

The Encyclopedic Revolution

Book Excerpt

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In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a mechanical desk that would let users search, read, and write their way through a vast database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards.

November 10th, 2003

Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet

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Long before anyone was looking for “godfathers” of information architecture, our fellow species were wrestling with some of the same problems we face today. The real godfathers of information architecture, as it turns out, emerged a very long time ago with the earliest origins of life on this planet.

May 26th, 2003

The Sociobiology of Information Architecture

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