HistoriographicaIntroducing the history of visual information

historiographica.netMark Rickerby, 2008

HOW OLD IS THE INTERNET?

JANUARY 1ST 1970

Dawn of the Unix Epoch

“Information architecture”

Computing comes of age

OR IS IT?

Few “new” ideas are as new

as we may think...

Who invented hypertext?Tim Berners Lee?Ted Nelson?Douglas Engelbart?

Changing Metaphors

Discovery or invention?

1700s : universe as a clock

1800s : universe as a heat engine

1900s : universe as an information processor

Logic Machines

Gottfried Leibniz, 1679“An Introduction to a Secret Encyclopedia”

Resolving human ideas into a primitive set of (easily transferable) symbols

Freeing information from the bounds of the book

The Victorian Information Age

Babbage designs the first programmable computers

Telegraph and electricity grids

Discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum

The Modernist Convergence

1910's to 1930's

Creative media experimentation

Social consequences of design

Transfer of ideas between Europe and America

The Visual Information Age

1933, Harry Beck designs map of London Underground

1934, Paul Otlet describes the Radiated Library

1936, Otto Neurath forms Isotype

WORDS MAKE DIVISIONPICTURES MAKE CONNECTION- Otto Neurath

The Radiated LibraryCINEMA, PHONOGRAPHS, RADIO, TELEVISION: these instruments, taken as substitutes for the book, will in fact become the new book, the most powerful works for the diffusion of human thought. This will be the radiated library and the televised book.

- Paul Otlet

The information age is a mythA cultural fabrication

If we donʻt document the REAL history of design are we doomed to repeat past mistakes?