Latest revision as of 11:59, 5 November 2015

-- Dickreckard (talk) 02:15, 31 October 2015 (CET)

mondotheque.be

starting from the reaction of FS, who shocked by the complexity and in a way grimness of the story, basically asked herself what to do. fathers. then documenting the story, collecting materials, searching for accomplices, it continued this year with the creation of mondotheque.be

the ambition is for it to work as a platform to complexify the story. the narrative is so slick, the way it's spectacularized from the politicians, the corporation. it's problematic how history is so ideologically treated and flattened. so mondotheque is a place to develop parallel minor histories of this entanglement. a platform made of a group of people, a website.

for now it's a collection of documents, material from the archives, links, semantic mess!

the website itself is also a meta-research, as it is a wiki.

as such it is a way to research semantic tools, (otlet really went into the meaning not keywords etc. blibion) what you can do? category, part-of, subject, similar-to, set relation to horizontal elements.__

also meta-research as it confronts the idea of a NPOV. without entering in the wikipedia discussion, it is clear that minor histories need non-neutral povs.

contrary to otlet times, when positivism and trust in science was driving us without possibility of doubt.. now he ave NPOV which is somehow the working surrogate of objectivity and universality that the encyclopedia represented before..

can an encyclopedia that is minor / non neutral / particular exist?

the desire is to formalize some contributions that would use the structure in interesting ways. as in how they cross, surprise with connections, contaminate each other's story by just being on the same infrastrucutre..

Google en papier?

is such a trick to establish comparisons that are completely a-historical..

why try to debunk such continuities. it's the same world, obviously there are relations.

focus on cheeky elements, foolishness, utopianism, visionary.. power of information to change the world..

but then maybe try to look at some other more material elements of comparison.

echoes, similarities, consonances and dissonances...

this is made possible especially thanks to mondotheque, network and site, finding archive materials, etc..

invisible workforce

nice group picture. who else worked at mundaneum, except otlet and lafontainet?

http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/File:Mundaneumteam.png

like all magic repetitive machinic tasks that 'technique' can do for us, they are based on an invisible workforce.

"In an actual drawing, titled ‘Laboratorium Mundaneum’, Otlet illustrates his project by mountains of raw material – information – tapped into a factory building with smoking chimneys and transformed from the disorderly mass of ‘journaux, revues, lois, livres, brevets, statistiques, correspondence’ to the end product of properly packed and categorised rolling out from the factory on a train of box cars (driven by a locomotive named UDC). It was, however, not only in drawings and on a metaphorical level that the Mundaneum was conceptualised as a factory. It was also highly dependent on infrastructures and technologies developed through industrialist mass-production and modes of organising labour."

and still nowadays, for how much automation and ocr and computational linguistics..

Automation didn't really free us from labour. data is based on big groups of people performing repetitive operations.. Mechanical turks, annotators... in western world following this pattern: female, lower income, ethnic minorities. unless outsourced to english speaking countries (india)

in general hidden, more hidden then the women in the group picture..

Artist andrew norman wilson represented one element of this hidden class that he found out was really next to him, the scanops.

http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/WorkersGoogleplex.html

he just noticed apart from the normal hired google workers, at mountain view, the yellow badges, didnt have the same usage of hte campus as him *contracted or *hired people. with different schedules to not cross the rest of workers, no access. mostly ethnic minorities. after being kicked for filming, he made it as a work of art.

later on, finding stuff around collected by people for curiosity, he started collecting their traces on the infrastructure itself.

http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/ScanOps.html

the final product keeps the traces of the workforce involved.

the technical infrastructure can never hide completely the human role in it.

In the same way, so many traces in the mundaneum archive...

http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/File:Archives_MundaneumDSC04638.jpg

fill in the gap. the archive is full of traces of such unnamed workers.

bettering of equation/algorhitm/system

the systemic comparison.. cybernetic hypothesis..

UDC is the most successful of Otlet's projects (if we exclude the internet and Google).

Its influence is still very present today. From Dewey.. 1899-1905: Manuel du répertoire bibliographique universel

http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/File:Wright_classification.jpg

so arbitrary, but so working... based on quantity over quality. also negotiable.

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UDC it self had continuous modifications: a tray in UDC, in decimal obviously, to collect the bug reports. A meta UDC.

http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/File:Archives_MundaneumDSC04619.jpg

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Decimal thinking: Going through the archive, the obsession with decimal systems becomes clear..

makes it feel very holistic (and mad) as a project.

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division of documentation into the elements = analysis! that's the role of documentation.

synthesis, or the role of science, is instead analyzed in a later work, Monde..

Here again we find a decimal algorithm of the world.

suggested that it is for synthesis of knowledges, what UDC is for classification of documents.

one day they will be unified, so one tool for science and documentation.

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Related to this, the struggle have a universal formula to communicate, a unique language / system of communication, analysis, action.

It is a recurring pattern, we could draw an ideal line in logic from Leibtniz with his ars combinatoria (to solve a conflict, just sit and calculate!) and calculating machines, to cybernetics..

fe Van foerster proposed equations to represent life and ecosystems.. What about Google's algorithm then..

Originally The pagerank algorithm is the equation

PR(a)=PR(b)/L(b)+PR(c)/L(c)+PR(d)/L(d)

with such a myth built around unjustified, a bit like the coca-cola formula.

In fact it is a continuous updating work, an assemblage of algorithms:

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

for SEO to keep up to date.

painstaking refinement of a system, again.

but the feedback mechanism comes from conflict rather than collaboration.

so you could have express feedback mechanism on content vs feedback of black SEO.

• similar continous refinement of a system that needs to organize, hyerarchize the existing knowledge outside.
• similar relational truth, universal from the fact that they can be used. not intrinsically true or scientific.

but

• power from usage and secrecy vs power from conscious adoption and collaboration
• oh yes.. a parallel algorithm about clicks.. adsense=$$$

the feedback loop here is also to transform the knowledge of distributed users into value, via a quantitative analysis.

capture the flows of attention given and this network knowledge becomes the currency of attention, not meaning.

easy then to monetize with adwords. suggested (pasquinelli) that it is rent, not profit. no production, just governance of flows.

centralization vs distribution..

http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/File:L%27action_du_centre_mondial.jpg

lenses to focalize or illuminate? probably both..

another key element to look at today's relevance of otlet is researching the tension between centralization and distribution.

?the udc is a decentralized format?. now with a center that ratifies changes. pagerank is highly centralized, only the knowledge is collected in a distributed way and centralied to be processed..

the notion of reseau(network) is really big in otlet, as part of his internationalist vision. [reseau]

on the other hand he pressed for centralization, as more efficient way to internationalize. this also generated problem of space though.. mundaneum database, 16 million entries, 150 rooms..

this in turn pushed him towards the city planning projects for a real world centre. collaborating with corbusier, who else. [mondiale]

this locality that can't be escaped debunks certain narratives of decentralization that are with the internet since its inception.

the promise of the protocol tcp/ip, network-agnostic etc.. different phases and forces, but still period of centralization.

centralized infrastructure (ocean cables); mega datacenters.. actually WSC warehouse scale computers. energy efficience!

decentralization + centralization of control. parallel computing..

http://www.ivarveermae.com/CRYSTAL-COMPUTING/

another type of distribution in relation to google's international distribution, is the double irish with dutch sandwich..

dutch sandwich http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/images/c/c3/Double_Irish_with_a_Dutch_Sandwich.svg

with financial stuff always difficult to understand.. key idea is to leverage discrepancies in local legislations to cut costs. for schmidt, google CEO, nothing wrong. that's capitalism!

it is globalization vs internationalism.. which is not based on the market, but on ideas of social progress.