MUNDANEUM
The Mundaneum Bibliographic Archive, now in Mons (Belgium), the 2015 European Capital of Culture, encouraged the establishment of international institutions dedicated to knowledge and general fraternity. His collection consists of a personal collection of his founders Henri La Fontaine and Paul Otlet, books, short documents, posters, postcards, glass plates, newspapers, photographs and archives on the themes of pacifism, feminism and anarchism. The first attempt at information virtualization, the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, was founded in 1895 and consisted of catalogue cabinets with several million index cards. In 2013, this huge heritage was registered in the UNESCO register “Memory of the World”, and as a Peace through Culture Centre, this institution was awarded the European Heritage Label in 2016.
As the World Wide Web is constantly replenished with an exponentially larger amount of information, a way is increasingly being sought to make it possible, by means of mapping techniques and visual representation, to view these ever-growing fields of knowledge in which it is easy to get lost. The same problem appeared already in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the industrialization of the printing press led to a similar information boom. Belgian encyclopedist and internationalist Paul Otlet (1868-1944) in his Mundaneum in Brussels began a utopian project of mapping the world of knowledge, not only in terms of cataloguing everything that has been published, but also literally, in terms of integrating all knowledge into visual synthesis. This digital exhibition at the Drenova Heritage Museum shows through four chapters a selection of illustrations made by Otlet and his team in Mundaneum, each chapter dedicated to one collection of illustrations. These collections differ from each other in their form, visual language, and the nature of the information they visualize (encyclopedic, bibliographic, social, and political).
ENCICLOPEDICAL KNOWLEDGE MAPING
Otlet founded his International Museum in 1910 at the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, which was later renamed Mundaneum or Palais Mondial between the two world wars. His work on the museological presentation of information resulted in the creation of the ‘Atlas of Civilisation’ in the 1920s, which was conceived as a museum of ideas summarized in a visual textbook. Like Leibniz’s concept “Atlas Universalis” (1678), this atlas was conceived as a collection of iconographic documents that together form an educational set of maps covering the whole world of knowledge. Unlike the English word ‘atlas’, the original French word ‘atlas’ does not refer to a set of geographical maps, but to a collection of illustrations, reproductions of artistic images or other iconographic documents that have been added to a work to make it more comprehensible.
In the context of the great congress of the World Federation of Educational Associations in 1929, Otlet began cooperation with the Austrian sociologist and political economist Otto Neurath (1882-1945) on a project called Nuovo orbis pictus, an encyclopedia of illustrations named after the first children's picture book Orbis sensualium pictus (1658) published by the father of modern education Johann Amos Comenius (1592). 1670). Although the project was never realized, we can see how Otlet began to adopt the method of displaying illustrated statistics published by Neurath in his atlas Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft (Society and Economics) 1930 Both Otlet and Neurath believed that visual education could offer an international and general form of education that could directly influence social and political structures.
As he wanted to make the International Museum more mobile by putting it in the form of an atlas, Otlet also explored to allow the atlas to be displayed in the form of multiple media, converting it into a media format of speech, toys, pictures, books, movies, audio discs, radio shows, and even as an excursion, depending on the age of the user and the type of knowledge to be conveyed.
In the 1930s Mundaneum He created several atlases that were to become part of an unpublished and unfinished work called Atlas Mundaneum or Enyclopaedia Universalis Mundaneum (EUM), which, according to Otlet, contained about 8,000 illustrations.
MAPING BIBLIOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE
Otlet drew thousands of sketches as he thought about how to organize knowledge. His papers are full of such sketches, and each of them is marked. Otlet became aware of certain concepts or thoughts through the process of schematization, or as Rudolf Arnheim called it, the process of “visual thinking”. In these sketches, he combined symbolic, iconographic and geometrical elements with textual notes in a metaphorical language that is difficult for a layperson to understand. Some figures – such as the sphere, the pyramid and the mesh – are so repetitive in these drawings that they have become "dead metaphors": metaphors that have assumed so many meanings and personal associations that they can no longer be associated with the original concept for which they were essentially used.
One of the figures featured in his sketches over and over again is ‘The Round of the World’ or ‘Sphaera Mundaneum“, which Otlet used as a symbol for his Mundaneum in Brussels. It is still a symbol today. Mundaneum, the Mons Archival and Exhibition Centre. The sphere represents Otlet's metaphysical view that the world is basically one ordered and indivisible system in which everything is connected to everything:
"We could also schematically represent the integrity of the world through an approximately concrete representation of the elements present within a sphere in which different large circles, divided into segments, are associated with different categories of elements and their subdivisions, circles and segments that are conceived as being projected into a single central point at which they intersect to reveal the sum of their mutual relationships. “
When I unlocked the EUM collection in the archives in 2007 Mundaneum, attracted my attention with an illustration called Mondothèque, which shows Otlet’s response to the problem of organising someone’s “personal documentation”. He imagined it as a kind of personal workstation that is in many ways similar to our today's personal desktop computer.
Like a personal computer, Mondothèque it had a “hardware” (on the side shelves there were “instruments” such as radios, telephones, microphones, microfilm screens, televisions and turntables); ‘Browser’ (UDC catalogue on the left-hand side of the reading backrest); and the personal collection “My Documents” (a personal library with books and an administrative archive), which also contained a special folder for storing the user’s music, films (“phono-ciné’ – sound cinema), image (archives encyclopaedium and photo collections); and even collections realiteca – a kind of collection of objects and scientific models.
MAPING SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
As a highly respected documentary filmmaker and internationalist, Paul Otlet also played a prominent role in the professionalization and institutionalization of urban and spatial planning. For the urban planning exhibition, curated during the 1913 Ghent World Expo, his team prepared a collection of visualizations of various utilities.
With the support of the International Alliance of CitiesUnion Internationale des Villes), co-founded by himself, together with Belgian urban planner Louis Van der Swaelmen (1883-1929) he also sought to create the Encyclopedia of Cities (Encyclopedia of Cities).Encyclopédie des Villes ) It would contain the most important examples of urban and spatial planning.
His constant collaboration with sociologists, social engineers and urban planners resulted in a series of municipal atlases: Atlas Ixelles (1936.), Atlas of Saint Gilles (1936.), Atlas of St. Jans Molenbeek (1937.), Atlas Etterbeek (1938) and Atlas of Antwerp. The size of these atlases varies from ten to fifty pages, and they mostly consist of thematic maps and illustrated statistics that show statistical data taken from official municipal reports. Many illustrations are simply copied from other sources. Atlas of Antwerp, for example, it contained illustrations copied from a brochure Antwerp 1930), a statistical booklet for the period 1918-1928 written by Jan Albert Goris (1899-1984), better known as the Flemish writer Marnix Gijsen, and designed by Belgian modernist graphic designer Jos Leonard.
In addition to his municipal atlases, in 1936 he also created Atlas of Belgique (Atlas of Belgium), consisting of a series of panels (64×67 cm) that could be hung as educational material in the classroom or on the walls of the museum.
Although Otlet used multiple graphical methods to visually present and compare quantitative data, many of his illustrations were made using the Otto Neurath isotype model, whose influence is also visible in many of his statistical maps. However, the methods Otlet used in his illustrations were eclectic, pragmatic and derived, and it was this multitude of techniques that used what sets him apart from others who worked much more systematically to create rigorous forms of statistical representation for urban mapping, such as for example Neurath or the Dutch architect Cornelis Van Eesteren. Otlet preferred encyclopedic systematization over graphic standardization.
POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE MAPING
Otlet used visual representations not only to express or express his ideas about documentation and encyclopedism, but also to propagate his internationalist ideas. Similar to the slide presentation technology we use today, he used projected images to explain and convince people of his ideas about international politics.
He also gave lectures on the problems of war and promoted the idea that war in the future could only be prevented or stopped by the League of Nations. During the First World War, he published a number of articles and books on the subject. One of the most innovative ideas he advocated was the recognition and inclusion of international NGOs as members of the League of Nations. In addition to the political and economic League of Nations, he also advocated the establishment of an intellectual League of Nations.
Another important idea Paul Otlet advocated was the centralization of international institutions. Like many other internationalists, he believed that centralization could save a lot of time and energy by reducing the distance between different places of work in the field of internationalism. In order to express these ideas spatially, he collaborated with many architects, and the plans that emerged from this cooperation helped him to advocate for the idea of a world capital. Based on Otlet's schematic sketches, world-renowned architects such as Ernest Hébrard, Le Corbusier and Victor Bourgeois created a visual representation of the idea of the World Center as a concrete reality.
In 1913 Otlet joined the plan for a World Communication Centre, designed by Hendrik Christian Andersen and Ernest Hébrard, based in Tervuren, a suburb of Brussels.
In the 1930s, Otlet increasingly used the term Cosmopolis to describe his concept of the city Cité Mondiale. It may have been inspired by the anarchist and pacifist Henri Léon Follin (1866-1935), who published his individualist ideology under the term ‘Cosmométapolis“. Despite many differences between them, both Otlet and Follin had similar political views in that they believed that more power had to be given to levels below or above the national level. And while Follin's Cosmo(méta)polis a metaphysical city of the human spirit, Otletov Cosmopolis or Cité Mondiale (World City) was a city that transformed the cosmopolitan spirit into a physical and institutionalized form.
ARTICLE OF CONCLUSION
What makes Otlet such a unique personality and an original thinker is his extraordinary organizational imagination with which he was endowed and with which he increasingly explored the issue of the organization of knowledge in its social and political dimensions. His continuous efforts to present his ideas in schematic form and his long-term engagement in the visualization of knowledge were part of what he considered the ultimate goal of organizing knowledge: Bringing knowledge into synthesis.
The last picture of this exhibition is taken from the collection Atlas Monde (1936) in which he made this visual synthesis to the extreme: “What would our notion of geography be today if we hadn’t discarded maps to correct some facts? That we didn't have Atlases that showed the entire surface of the Earth in a collection of maps; the correct coordinate system that accurately determined the position of each group or point (meridians and parallels)? The series of images depicted here [in Atlas Monde] tries to cover, like maps and atlases, the whole Universe viewed from the standpoint of various sciences. First of all, it is an enumeration of what exists; a categorized and interconnected inventory through which we discover the development of some of the great laws of existence through intuitive generalisation.’
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