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Object 1:
Scraping culture (21.845 image tiles)
Out of frustrati on by their incorrect licensing and the ungenerous way they had been published (Public Domain, no download), one night we decided to scrape all images from the Mundaneum section on the Google Cultural Institute website. We ended up with a perplexing mass of 21.845 image tiles, each 512x512 pixels. Trying to make sense of this fractured "collection", we grew fascinated by the way these images were algorithmically treated. How does one look at images on the fly?

Object 2:
Meeting Madame C.
A story about the consequences of a life intersecting with the universe of the archive. There are two cats involved, or rather: inventorized, as well. I want to include the account of this meet i ng with Madame Canon ne (widow of Andre Canonne) to bring to the table/discuss the extensive care networks involved in maintaining knowledge, even if we consider them ambiguous. [The story still needs work as the visit is fresh and I need to hear back from the protagonist to what extend she wants it told]

Object 3:
Mining the Traité
On the fly, it is s uggestive to draw a line from Otlet's statement that "Once one read; today one refers to, checks through, skims" to the the practice of full-text search, so successfully branded by the Alphabet companies. But even a superficial browsing of his book, Traité de documentation, shows that t he shortcut can be misleading. Otlet suggests several n ovel forms of reading, writing (including a pen with integrated eraser!) and disseminati on of knowledge, but the book i tself is entirely committed to the intellectual work of selecting and indexing skimmable snippets. By turning The 'book on the book' into a bag of words and submitting it to several crude forms of text-mining, I'd like to see if we can find out what emerges between these two very different approaches of knowledge indexing , rather than showing how the one pre-thinks the other.



Biography
Femke Snelting is an artist/designer developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software. She is a core member of Constant, an association for arts and media active in Brussels since 1997. The collective work of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine daily life. Constant generates amongst others performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational experiments. Since 2013 she is involved in Mondotheque, a collaborative project that grew out of the shared concern with the mesh of institutional narratives, local politics and corporate interests that coagulate around the heritage of Paul Otlet. Femke co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and coordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit. She teaches at The Piet Zwart Institute (Media Design and Communication, Rotterdam, NL), a.pass and erg (Brussels, BE).


21.845 images scraped from the Google Cultural Institute site

A visit to Madame C, widow of the last caretaker of the Mundaneum in Brussels

online libraries, search engines and classification of knowledge.
individual practises of resituating and repurposing

/////////////////

KNOWING ON THE FLY 

"Once one read; today one refers to, checks through, skims." – Paul  Otlet, 1903 

Full-text search has turned whole libraries into a single document. Its  cover consists of search interface, its volume equals the scope of  machine-indexed content, its index contains all occurring expressions.  Given this context, it can be argued that today compiling a collection of electronic documents and providing it with search function is  parallel to the work of editing a single publication. The librarian  turns an editor. Such a publication also produces specific modes of  navigating, viewing and reading. Among these stands out the skimming  through search results, in which the reader follows the logic of the  ambiguous ordering by relevance. Limited to the format of randomly  ordered one-dimensional list, search-reading is still a rather narrow  experience. It might be indeed in structuring such arbitrary bits of  content where classification schemes are to regain their lost guiding  potential. This situation is however far removed from the model of  knowledge adhering to a handful of fixed categories. One is left with  the question: what does it take to allow for, situate and model  *emergent* classification schemes of knowledge? 


Context 

The aim of this symposium is to reflect upon the legacy of Paul Otlet  and his work from the perspective of today's knowledge archives. 

The Mundaneum, an archive and museum devoted to Otlet and the host of  this event, is an important milestone in the lineage of documentation  science, spanning from the work of Melvil Dewey and Charles Cutter in  the United States, through Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in Belgium,  to the post-WWII efforts of Suzanne Briet and other documentalists in  France and elsewhere. In the 1950s-60s it gave way to the emergence of  new fields of information retrieval and information science. Besides its  lasting discussions about classification systems and the question of  what constitutes the document, the part of its legacy which gained  strong resonance today is a vision of the universal catalogue of  knowledge. This figure laid the foundation, before the turn of the  millennium, of a company which has fundamentally changed the ways of how  knowledge is produced, accessed and distributed. Ever since its  inception, full-text search has been the core service dominating the  rest of Google's ever-expanding range of products. Its simplicity and  straightforwardness became so habituated that it began transforming  research practices as well as digital libraries. Today the search  function is featured prominently on the home pages of German, Norwegian,  Polish and many other national digital libraries. But despite its  omnipresence, its working mechanisms, the actual ways of use and the  ways it transforms research are hardly investigated.

The present event brings together a number of digital librarians, media  theorists, designers, researchers and artists to discuss novel ways of  reading and writing research in the digital networked environment. It is  to investigate the poetics, aesthetics and politics of information and  knowledge in relation to digital libraries (containing, connecting,  reading, writing), search engines (ordering, wandering) and the legacy  of library/documentation science (classifying, structuring). It is to bring attention to the individual practises of resituating and repurposing knowledge today. 


Participation 

To accommodate a thought-provoking discussion emphasising a variety of  backgrounds of the speakers, rather than consisting of paper  presentations the symposium is to explore a hopefully more interactive  model. Participants are asked to submit *three* artefacts to be  presented and discussed in several thematic blocks. The artefacts can  take various forms, including concepts, stories, software prototypes,  texts, videos, websites, tangible objects, own work. Very much preferred are less known phenomena, with potential to spark a debate, to question,  defamiliarise, criticise, speculate upon contemporary practices related  to online libraries, search engines and classification of knowledge. 

Before the event, the submitted artefacts are to be grouped into  thematic blocks/sessions which will in turn structure the debate. Each  session will then consist of short presentations/introductions of the  artefacts by their selectors (~5 minutes each) and in turn discussed.  Each session is to be moderated by one of the guests. Altogether, 5 or 6  sessions are projected, each focusing on 5 or 6 objects. 

It is indeed an experimental format, to be tried here for the first time  and we hope it will help making the setting both fun and productive. The  role of the moderator will be to keep us focused on the theme of a  session, while the fluctuance of guests between the roles of a  moderator, presenter and debater should bring in more play. 

By Sunday, 6 September, we expect the following from you: 
* titles of 3 artefacts, each with 1-2 sentences explaining motivation  for the selection and/or description that would help us to group it  thematically with other contributions. 
* short bio (up to 200 words), possibly with URLs. 


Guests 

Matthew Fuller, London (Goldsmiths U), http://www.spc.org/fuller
Geraldine Juárez, Gothenburg, http://geraldine.juarez.se
Stéphanie Manfroid, Mons (Mundaneum), http://archives.mundaneum.org
Marcell Mars, Zagreb/Lüneburg (Mama/Lüneburg U),  http://memoryoftheworld.org
Nikita Mazurov, Malmö 
Tomislav Medak, Zagreb (Mama), http://monoskop.org/Tomi_Medak
Michael Murtaugh, Brussels/Rotterdam (Constant/Piet Zwart Institute),  http://automatist.org
Rob Ochshorn, San Francisco, http://rmozone.com
Femke Snelting, Brussels (Constant), http://snelting.domainepublic.net
Mat?j Strnad, Prague (CAS-FAMU) 


Schedule 

Friday, 2 October 
Arrival in Brussels. Mondotheque meeting at Constant, WTC (ca.  14:00-18:00). Lunch served on the spot. Dinner in town. Evening train to  Mons. 

Saturday, 3 October 
All-day symposium at the space called Utopia at Mundaneum. Cold lunch served. 
Dinner and drinks in town.

Sunday/Monday, 4/5 October 
Possible follow-up with those staying during the day. 
Departures.


References, triggers, inspiration 

Compact introduction to the work and legacy of Paul Otlet, a brochure produced by the archivists at Mundaneum and translated into English by Otlet's biographer W. Boyd Rayward: 
http://ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/15431

Brief page about Suzanne Briet, her "Qu'est-ce que la documentation?"  (1951; later translated into English) is recommended: 
http://monoskop.org/Suzanne_Briet

Newly collected page on the recent debates about digital libraries,  including a selection of texts and an overview of meetings so far: 
http://monoskop.org/Digital_libraries

Arbitrary collection of illustrations of classification schemes, from  the 8th century through 1980s: 
http://monoskop.org/Classification_of_knowledge