In der Reihe ‚Konvergenzen‘ ein weiterer Blog-Eintrag mit zwei Aufsätzen, die das thematisieren, was mich persönlich regelmäßig fasziniert, der Zusammenhang zwischen historisch zu beobachtenden Entwicklungen und aktuellen Diskussionen im modernen Informationswesen.

• Beyond the legacy of the Enlightenment? Online encyclopaedias as digital heterotopias von Jutta Haider, Olof Sundin in First Monday, Volume 15, Number 1 – 4 January 2010.

  Aus dem Abstract:

  This article explores how we can understand contemporary participatory online encyclopaedic expressions, particularly Wikipedia, in their traditional role as continuation of the Enlightenment ideal, as well as in the distinctly different space of the Internet.

• The Politics of Organizing Information on the Web: Computing Centres and Natural Languages von Peter Jakobsson, Fredrik Stiernstedt mit ihrem Beitrag auf der Media in transition Conference 6 im April 2009 im Rahmen der Konferenzen des MIT Communications Forum

  Aus dem Abstract:

  This paper is an exploration of the methodologies, economics and politics of organizing information on the web, through a historical-comparative analysis of Google. The paper centres on two cases that reveal interesting tensions in contemporary attempts at organizing knowledge and information. The first case deals with natural and artificial languages as tools for knowledge, working with the historical case of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his interest in a universal language as well as his pioneering contributions to etymology. The second case looks at the dialectics of centralization and decentralization as illustrated by the early 20th-century project of bibliographer Paul Otlet. Together they are used to evaluate Google’s utilization of techniques from computer science to extract knowledge from search queries and unstructured web-data, both of which are stored and indexed in Google’s computing centres.