text:
User:KYPark/Encyclopaedism/Timeline

1704

 * Wikipedia
 * In his preface, Harris stated that he got less help from previous dictionaries than one would expect. While acknowledging some borrowing, Harris insisted that "much the greater part of what [the reader] will find here is collected from no Dictionaries, but from the best Original Authors I could procure."

1728

 * The 1728 subtitle gives a summary of the aims of the author: Cyclopaedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: [very long subtitle]: The Whole Intended as a Course of Ancient and Modern Learning.
 * Wikipedia
 * The first edition included numerous cross-references, meant to connect articles scattered by the use of alphabetical order; a dedication to the King, George II; and an insightful, philosophical preface at the beginning of volume 1. Among other things, the preface gives an analysis of forty-seven divisions of knowledge with classed lists of the articles belonging to each, intended to serve as a table of contents and also as a directory indicating the order in which the articles should be read.
 * Chambers's Cyclopaedia in turn became the inspiration for the landmark Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, which owed its inception to a proposed French translation of Chambers' work begun in 1743 by John Mills....

1751

 * Published in France between 1751 and 1772.
 * Wikipedia
 * The Encyclopédie was an innovative encyclopedia in several respects. Among other things, it was the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors, and it was the first general encyclopedia to lavish attention on the mechanical arts. Still, the Encyclopédie is famous above all for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article "Encyclopédie", the Encyclopédie's aim was "to change the way people think".
 * See also
 * French Encyclopédistes

1901

 * Wikipedia
 * With the advent of cheap, widely available digital storage, the ideal of universality, although still impossible to attain, has become closer to the feasible. Many projects are now attempting to collect a section of human knowledge into one database. These projects vary in breadth and scope, and none are complete. Examples include digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg and Carnegie-Mellon's Universal library, digital libraries which are using book scanning to collect public domain works; The European Library, an integrated catalog for Europe's national libraries; and the Wikimedia Foundation, which, using the Wiki system, is attempting to collect the breadth of important human knowledge under various open content projects such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary. However, many technical and legal problems remain for the dissemination of all possible knowledge on the Internet.

1923

 * Excerpts
 * Throughout almost all our life we are treating things as signs. All experience, using the word in the widest possible sense, is either enjoyed or interpreted (i.e., treated as a sign) or both, and very little of it escapes some degree of interpretation. An account of the process of Interpretation is thus the key to the understanding of the Sign-situation, and therefore the beginning of the wisdom. It is astonishing that although the need for such an account has long been a commonplace in psychology, those concerned with the criticism and organization of our knowledge have with few exceptions entirely ignored the consequences of its neglect. (pp. 50-51)
 * See also: The Meaning of Meaning

1930

 * Wikipedia
 * The concept gained its greatest publicity just after the World War II as a tool for world peace. Although it was not built into a program, similar simplifications were devised for various international uses. I. A. Richards was a forceful advocate of the use of Basic English, and lobbied the government of China to teach it in schools there. More recently, it has influenced the creation of Simplified English, a standardized version of English intended for the writing of technical manuals.
 * In the future history book The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, H. G. Wells depicted Basic English as the lingua franca of a new elite which after a prolonged struggle succeeds in uniting the world and establishing a world government. In the future world of Wells' vision, virtually all members of humanity know this language.
 * From 1942 until 1944 George Orwell was a proponent of Basic English, but in 1945 he became critical of universal language. The language later inspired his use of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Noted science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein used a form of Basic English in his story "Gulf" as a language appropriate for a race of genius supermen.
 * See also: Special English, Globish, International English, European English

1933

 * See also
 * General semantics
 * The map is not the territory.
 * S. I. Hayakawa (1949) Language in Thought and Action

 * Wikipedia
 * [Wells] depicted Basic English as the lingua franca of a new elite which after a prolonged struggle succeeds in uniting the world and establishing a world government. In the future world of Wells' vision, virtually all members of humanity know this language. [See C. K. Ogden (1930).]

1936

 * A seminal work on "metaphors we live by" (Lakoff et al. (1980) ) in creative, intellectual as well as everyday life.

 * Lecture delivered at the Royal Institute of Great Britain, November 20th, 1936. Reprinted in: H. G. Wells, World Brain, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran & Co. Inc., 1938, pp. 3-35.

 * Excerpts
 * My particular line of country has always been generalization of synthesis. I dislike isolated events and disconnected details. I really hate statements, views, prejudices and beliefs that jump at you suddenly out of mid-air. I like my world as coherent and consistent as possible. So far at any rate my temperament is that of a scientific man. And that is why I have spent a few score thousand hours of my particular allotment of vitality in making outlines of history, short histories of the world, general accounts of the science of life, attempts to bring economic, financial and social life into one conspectus and even, still more desperate, struggles to estimate the possible consequences of this or that set of operating causes upon the future of mankind. All these attempts had profound and conspicuous faults and weaknesses; even my friends are apt to mention them with an apologetic smile; presumptuous and preposterous they were, I admit, but I look back upon them, completely unabashed. Somebody had to break the ice. Somebody had to try out such summaries on the general mind. My reply to the superior critic has always been -- forgive me -- "Damn you, do it better." (Wells 1938, pp. 3-4)

1938

 * La formation de l'esprit scientifique (orignal in French)

 * Excerpts
 * And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed.
 * See also
 * Constructivist epistemology

 * Doubleday, Doran & Co. Inc., Garden City, New York, 1938.

 * Excerpts
 * The human individual is born now to live in a society for which his fundamental instincts are altogether inadequate. He has to be educated systematically for his social rôle. The social man is a manufactured product of which the natural man is the raw nucleus. (p. vii)

1939

 * Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.; The M.I.T. Press, 1967 (paperback)

 * See also
 * Roy Johnston (2001) Century of Endeavour: JD Bernal and the 'Science and Society' Theme

 * This was unpublished, and later reworked and expanded as his celebrated As We May Think (1945).

 * Excerpts
 * Dr Obispo places great faith in science and medicine as a saviour of humankind. He sees everyone as a stepping stone to science, the greater good, and thus only derives happiness at others' expense. According to Propter's philosophy, he is trapped in ego-based "human" behaviour that prevents him from reaching enlightenment.

 * Faber and Faber, London

 * Wikipedia
 * H.G. Wells, in a personal letter to Joyce, argued that "you have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence [...] I ask: who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?"

1945

 * The Atlantic Monthly (July) pp. 101-108. (Mirror site)

 * Excerpts
 * Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.... The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. Cf. H. G. Wells (1938) World Brain "... our contemporary encyclopedias are still in the coach-and-horse phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane. These observers realize that the modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct and accessible assembly of facts and ideas than was ever possible before."
 * Wikipedia
 * The article was a reworked and expanded version of his 1939 Mechanization and the Record.

 * Cf. J. D. Bernal (1939) The Social Function of Science

1946

 * Astounding Science Fiction, March 1946.

 * This is a science fiction short story, often associated with the idea of World Wide Web.

1950

 * A serious obstruction to the scientific process and progress for the world population is to be relieved, if not removed.
 * Wikipedia
 * August 12 – In his encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII declares evolution to be a serious hypothesis that did not contradict essential Catholic teachings.

 * Mind, Vol. 59, No. 235, pp. 320-344.
 * Reprint: http://books.google.com/books?id=o1jGSavwQZIC
 * Comment: http://books.google.com/books?id=NRDl50cFWmYC

 * Excerpts
 * It is obvious that anyone who uttered the sentence, "The whale is a mammal", would be using the expression "the whale" in a way quite different from the way it would be used by anyone who had occasion seriously to utter the sentence, "The whale struck the ship". In the first sentence one is obviously not mentioning, and in the second sentence one obviously is mentioning, a particular whale. Again if I said, "Napoleon was the greatest French soldier", I should be using the word "Napoleon" to mention a certain individual, but I should not be using the phrase, "the greatest French soldier", to mention an individual, but to say something about an individual I had already mentioned. It would be natural to say that in using this sentence I was talking about Napoleon and that what I was saying about him was that he was the greatest French soldier. But of course I could use the expression, "the greatest French soldier", to mention an individual; for example by saying: "The greatest French solider died in exile". (p. 320)
 * In response to Bertrand Russell (1905) "On Denoting".
 * See next Ernest Gellner (1959) Words and Things.
 * See also
 * Descriptivist theory of names
 * Theory of descriptions
 * Theory of reference
 * Causal theory of reference
 * "Contextual theory of reference" (Ogden & Richards (1923))
 * Reader-response criticism, Close reading
 * Seven types of ambiguity
 * Metaphor, Implicature, Indexical
 * Legal realism, Legal interpretivism
 * Contextualism, Behaviorism, etc.
 * Ordinary language philosophy

1955

 * Le Phénomène Humain (in French)

 * Wikipedia
 * The [book] contains many insights that have proven prescient with the development of a complex Internet-based global society.
 * Borrowing Julian Huxley's expression, Teilhard describes humankind as evolution becoming conscious of itself.
 * See also
 * Omega Point
 * Long review by Sir Peter Medawar
 * Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg (1995). "A Globe, Clothing Itself With a Brain". Wired, June 1995.

 * Wikipedia
 * The $64,000 Question is an American game show broadcast from 1955 to 1958, which became embroiled in the scandals involving TV quiz shows of the day. The $64,000 Challenge (1956–58) was its popular spin-off show.
 * Three years after it exploded into a nation's consciousness, The $64,000 Question and its progeny were dead. Having faded in popularity as it was, in the wake of the hugely popular Twenty-One championship of Charles Van Doren, The $64,000 Question and The $64,000 Challenge were yanked off the air within three months of the quiz show scandal's eruption. Challenge went first, in September 1958, with The $64,000 Question -- once the emperor of Tuesday night television -- taking its Sunday night time slot, until it was killed in November, 1958.

 * American Documentation 6: 1-18.

1960

 * Senate Document No. 113, 86th Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on Government Operations, 1960.

 * Excerpts
 * The wide dissemination of scientific and technical information is the cornerstone of scientific progress. (p. 2)
 * All agencies generally agreed that there was an urgent need for the development of improved systems of engineering and for the installation of mechanical, electronic retrieval equipment adaptable to specific programs in order to make certain than all available scientific information would be readily accessible to government agencies and to members of the scientific community. (p. 7)

 * IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1 (Mar. 1960), 4-11.

 * Excerpts
 * Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

 * American Documentation, 11(4): 288–295.

1964

 * Grove Press, New York, 1964; MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1964; Johnson Reprint Corp., New York, 1972.

 * See also
 * Derek J. de Solla Price (1964). "A Great Encyclopedia Doesn't Have To Be Good?" Science, 144(3619): 665-666. (Review of Einbinder (1964) The Myth of the Britannica)
 * Harvey Einbinder (1975). "Politics and the new Britannica." The Nation 220(11): 342-4. (Review of the Britannica 3)

 * Science 144 (May 8, 1964) pp. 649-654. Reprinted in Essays of an Information Scientist by Eugene Garfield, vol 7 (1984), ISI Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1985, pp. 525-535.

 * Excerpts
 * Over a quarter of a century ago H. G. Wells made a magnificent, if premature, plea for the establishment of a world information center, "the World Brain" (1). To Wells, the World Brain became the symbol of international intellectual cooperation in a world at peace. The realization, within our lifetime, of the physical and intellectual achievement envisioned in World Brain no longer lies in the realm of science fiction. The ultimate specification for a World Brain must await more fundamental studies and understanding of information science. However, the increasing convergence of such previously unrelated fields as genetics, linguistics, psychology, and chemistry foretells exciting realignments in classical conceptions of the "information" problem. Unquestionably there are many different forms and arrangements which a World Brain could assume. Vannevar Bush's "Memex" was a microfilm version of the universal fingertip library (2); Memex stimulated considerable speculation but also produced some realistic work (3). Tukey's "Information Ledger" is a recent specification of the desiderata for a universal information system (4). More recently, Senders has given an approximate quantitative measure of the information content of the world's libraries (5). Surely the increasing awareness of the science-information problem on the part of both the legislative (6) and executive (7) branches of government will add momentum to the inevitable trend toward establishment of a world information center.

 * The main purpose of this article is to provide some perspective on the science-information, or science-"indexing," problem: to review briefly the developments in citation indexing that have occurred over the past 10 years; and to indicate why the recently published Science Citation Index (8) is a harbinger of things to come -- a forerunner of the World Brain.
 * References and Notes (partial)

 * 1) H. G. Wells, World Brain (Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, N.Y., 1938).
 * 2) V. Bush, "As we may think," Atlantic Monthly 176, 101 (July, 1945).
 * 3) E. A. Avakian and E. Garfield, "AMFIS -- the Automatic Microfilm Information System," Spec. Libaries 43, 145, (1956).
 * 4) J. W. Tukey, "Keeping research in contact with the literature: Citation Indices and beyond," J. Chem. Doc. 2, 34 (1962).
 * 5) J. W. Senders, "Information storage requirements for the contents of the world's libraries," Science 141, 1087 (1963).
 * 6) (omitted)
 * 7) A. M. Weinberg et al., "President's Science Advisory Committee," in Science, Government, and Information (Responsibilities of the Technical Community in the Transfer of Information) (Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1963).
 * 8) E. Garfield and I. H. Sher, Science Citation Index (institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, 1963).

 * Testimony before a Subcommittee on a National Research Data Processing and Information Center of the Committee on Education and Labor, 1964. Reprinted in: Essays of an Information Scientist by Eugene Garfield, vol. 1 (1962-1973), ISI Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1977, pp. 8-9.

1965

 * Science Progres 53(211): 455-9.

 * Appended to "J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Cambridge" by Eugene Garfield (pdf)

 * Science, 149 (3683): 510-515.

 * Wiley, New York, 1965.

 * Contents
 * Watson Davis (1965) "The Universal Brain: Is Centralized Storage and Retrieval of all Knowledge Possible, Feasible, or Desirable?" ibid, pp. 60-65.
 * See also
 * Watson Davis (1937). Davis letter to Wells March 15, 1937. File, "Davis, Watson," Wells Papers, Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
 * Watson Davis (1933). "Project for Scientific Publication and Bibliography" (Scientific Information Institute). Reprinted in: J. D. Bernal (1939). The Social Function of Science, Appendix viii, pp. 449-457, including the quotations, taken from Microfilms Make Information Accessible, American Documentation Institute, Washington, DC.

 * MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

 * See also
 * J. C. R. Licklider (1965). "Man-Computer Partnership," in: International Science and Technology, May 1965.
 * J. C. R. Licklider (1960). "Man-Computer Symbiosis," in: Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, pages 4–11, March 1960.
 * J. C. R. Licklider And The Universal Network at Living Internet

1970

 * Original Portuguese ed. 1968

1975

 * New York: Academic Press.

 * Contents
 * Karl W. Deutsch, "On the Learning Capacity of Large Political Systems." pp. 61-83.
 * Eugene Garfield, "The World Brain as seen by an Information Entrepreneur," pp. 155-160.
 * Harold D. Lasswell, "Constraints on the Use of Knowledge in Decision Making," pp. 161-169.
 * Derek J. de Solla Price, "Some Aspects of 'World Brain' Notions." pp. 177-203.
 * See also
 * Manfred Kochen (1972) "WISE: a World Information Synthesis and Encyclopaedia," Journal of Documentation 28: 322-341.

 * Columbia University Press, New York.

 * Reviews
 * As a student of MIS in the 1980s, certain research efforts impressed upon me the importance of focusing on the role of people in systems. Henry Lucas’ study of why information systems fail (Lucas, 1975) is a case in point. In particular, his finding that human behavior is at least as important as technical excellence to the success of an information system left a lasting impression on me. It is easy to be dazzled by the stream of technological innovations in hardware and software. However systems are built for people. It is how people react to technology that is of fundamental importance to systems' success. Today the concept of the "operational feasibility" of a systems idea is included in all textbooks on systems analysis and design. To be assured that a systems idea has a fighting chance of succeeding, the people for whom the system is being developed must ultimately accept the system and use it in the manner it was developed to be used. -- Edward J. Szewczak (Canisius College), Selected Readings on the Human Side of Information Technology

 * Wikipedia
 * "The Message in the Bottle"

 * A group of scientists lives on the island, and they separate these messages into two categories: empirical facts and analytic facts. The castaway is disturbed by this classification, however, because it does not take into account the messages' effect on the reader. Thus, he comes up with the categories of knowledge and news. Knowledge belongs to science, to psychology and to the arts; simply put, it is that "which can be arrived at anywhere by anyone and at any time" (125). News, on the other hand, bears directly and immediately on his life. The scientists, because of their commitment to objectivity above all else, cannot recognize the difference between these two categories.

 * A piece of news is not verified the way a piece of knowledge is—whereas knowledge can be verified empirically, news can be verified empirically only after the hearer has already heeded its call. The castaway must first, however, decide when to heed the call of a piece of news and when to ignore it. Percy sets forth three criteria for the acceptance of a piece of news: (a) its relevance to the hearer's predicament; (b) the trustworthiness of the newsbearer; and (c) its likelihood or possibility. As news depends so heavily on its bearer, the messages in bottles that the castaway finds cannot be sufficient credential in and of themselves. The castaway must know something about the person who wrote them.

 * J. G. A. Pocock#The 'Cambridge School'
 * Pocock is celebrated not merely as an historian, but as a pioneer of a new type of historical methodology: contextualism, i.e., the study of 'texts in context.' In the 1960s and early '70s, he, (introducing languages of political thought) along with Quentin Skinner (focusing on authorial intention), and John Dunn (stressing biography), united informally to undertake this approach as, the 'Cambridge School' of the history of political thought.[11] Hereafter for the Cambridge School and its adherents, the then-reigning method of textual study, that of engaging a vaunted 'canon' of previously pronounced "major" political works in a typically anachronistic and disjointed fashion, simply would not do.

 * University of Chicago Press. (Google books)

 * Excerpts
 * From Perception to Metaphor

 * Perhaps I. A. Richards has made as great an effort to explain the power of metaphors as anyone so far. It is both the likeness and the unlikeness of the two parts of a metaphor, the tenor and the vehicle, that somehow account, he thinks, for the way it works. There is, he says, a "peculiar modification of the tenor which the vehicle brings about," and this is "even more the work of their unlikenesses than of their likenesses."5 But Richards does not explain to us how this peculiar interaction of likeness and unlikeness can have such a powerful effect upon us.

 * Except for very simple metaphors, which Max Black thinks can be viewed as substitutions or comparisons, an "interaction" view, such as he thinks I. A. Richards' view is, seems to Black to be the best. Yet there are many complications in this view. In the end Black seems to think that "the secret and mystery of metaphor" reside in the connection that the reader is forced to make between the two ideas in a metaphor, but how this works remains unexplained. In spite of the fact that he can and does use metaphors in his efforts to account for the "secret" of the metaphor (i.e., he has a tacit understanding of "metaphor"), Black fails to unravel this secret explicitly. In fact, he seems to think that, even if we could state a number of relevant relations between the tenor and the vehicle, "the set of literal statements so obtained will not have the same power to inform and enlighten as the original." Although he admits that an attempt to explicate the "grounds" of a metaphor can be valuable, he holds that we must not regard this "as an adequate cognitive substitute for the original." Thus, although Max Black seems to regard metaphors as communicating cognitive content, they seem to defy all his efforts to state just what this cognitive content is. A "suitable reader," he says, must "educe for himself, with a nice feeling for their relative priorities and degrees of importance," the various relations in the metaphor which, when we try to express them explicitly, we can only present wrongly as having equal weight.6

 * What is altogether missing in this honest admission by Black of his theory's limited ability to unpack metaphors is any sort of explanation of why or how a metaphor can move us so greatly -- can carry us away. At best he shows only that we learn something cognitively from a metaphor that we did not know before and that this has something to do with a "suitable" reader's capacity to make a connection between "the two ideas" in a metaphor.

 * Back cover

 * Published very shortly before his death in February 1976, Meaning is the culmination of Michael Polanyi's philosophic endeavors. With the assistance of Harry Prosch, Polanyi goes beyond his earlier critique of scientific "objectivity" to investigate meaning as founded upon the imaginative and creative faculties.

 * Establishing that science is an inherently normative form of knowledge and that society gives meaning to science instead of being given the "truth" by science, Polanyi contends here that the foundation of meaning is the creative imagination. Largely through metaphorical expression in poetry, art, myth, and religion, the imagination is used to synthesize the otherwise chaotic and disparate elements of life. To Polanyi these integrations stand with those of science as equally valid modes of knowledge. He hopes this view of the foundation of meaning will restore validity to the traditional ideals that were undercut by modern science. Polanyi also outlines the general conditions of a free society that encourage varied approaches to truth, and includes an illuminating discussion of how to restore, to modern minds, the possibility for the acceptance of religion.

 * FID520, VINITI, Moscow.

 * Excerpts
 * In 1937 the Institute for Intellectual Co-operation organised a World Congress for Universal Documentation in Paris. This was an enormous congress attended by representatives of governments as well as by those interested in documentation in a more private capacity. It was, in fact, the first time that such a large, influential congress had been held in the field since the IIB conferences of 1908 and 1910 and those of the UIA in 1910 and 1913. Here Otlet and La Fontaine came into much respectful praise. Their positions as grand old men of European documentation were clearly acknowledged. The idea of a Universal Network or System for Documentation was taken up and the IID once more changed its name and statutes to become the International Federation for Documentation, in order better to promote this. Here there was much talk of H. G. Wells' idea of a World Brain, a new form of the encyclopedia, an idea which, in a different form, Otlet had been writing about for decades. Here Otlet met Wells and made "magnificent improvisations". (p. 356)
 * It is indeed paradoxical that libraries and archival repositories preserve large masses of documents without having the resources to catalog, analyse and circulate them [...]. The Universal Network of Documentation is called on to organise the liason of these reservoirs and repertories, of producers and users. The ultimate goal is to realise the World Encyclopedia according to the needs of the twentieth century. (p. 357)

 * Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin and S. J., John Costello (trans.), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

 * Ricoeur took I. A. Richards (1936) The Philosophy of Rhetoric as seriously as Michael Polanyi (1975).

 * See also
 * Cognitive map
 * Concept map
 * Conceptual metaphor
 * Entity-relationship model
 * Mental model
 * Semantic web
 * John Hoskyns#The Stepping Stones Report, 1977
 * When Margaret Thatcher, who read chemistry at Oxford, saw the diagram, she remarked it looked like a chemical plant.

 * In: D. G. Bobrow & A. N. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding, New York: Academic Press, 1977. pp. 237-272.

 * See also
 * Roger C. Schank & Robert P. Abelson (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures.

1980

 * Wikipedia
 * According to Berners-Lee, the name was inspired by a book entitled Enquire Within Upon Everything.
 * ENQUIRE had pages called cards and hyperlinks in the cards. The links had different meanings and about a dozen relationships which were displayed to the creator, things, documents and groups described by the card.
 * ENQUIRE was closer to a modern wiki than to a web site.

 * Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pp. 24–31. (ACM Portal)

 * Abstract
 * The very best document-formatting system is a good secretary. He can be given scrawled handwritten text in no particular format, and without further instruction produce a flawless finished document. Nevertheless, we believe that document formatting should be done by computers, because so much of it is the tedium that computers handle so well. Existing computer document formatting programs have met with some success; indeed, most computer systems offer some sort of text formatting capability. These programs are often difficult to use, and are almost invariably tied to a particular kind of printing device. The document-formatting language Scribe was designed to provide a simple, portable language in which document formatting could be specified; the Scribe compiler was written to process that language into finished documents. In following sections we describe the design goals, the implementation, and report on experience with the completed system.

 * References
 * 1) Gorlick, M.; Manis, V.; Rushworth, T.; van den Bosch, P. and Venema, T: Texture User's Manual. Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5, 1975.
 * 2) Evan L. Ivie, "The programmer's workbench -- A machine for software development," Communications of the ACM, v.20 n.10, p.746-753, Oct. 1977.
 * 3) Brian W. Kernighan, Lorinda L. Cherry, "A system for typesetting mathematics," Communications of the ACM, v.18 n.3, p.151-157, March 1975.
 * 4) Knuth, Donald E. TEX: A System for Technical Text. Tech. Rept. AIM-217, Stanford University, November, 1978.
 * 5) Lampson, Butler. Bravo Manual. Xerox Corporation, Palo Alto, CA, 1978.
 * 6) Burt M. Leavenoworth, Jean E. Sammet, "An overview of nonprocedural languages," Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Very high level languages, p.1-12, March 28-29, 1974, Santa Monica, California, United States.
 * 7) Ossanna, J. F. TROFF User's Manual, Tech. Rept. 54, Bell Laboratories, 1977.
 * 8) Reid, Brian K. Scribe Users' Manual. CMU Computer Science Department, 1978.
 * 9) Shortliffe, Edward Hance. Computer-Based Medical Consultations: MYCIN. American Elsevier, 1976.
 * 10) Sibbald, Kern E. DPS User's Guide. Tech. Rept. CN-16.0, University of Maryland, April, 1976.
 * 11) Tesler, Larry. PUB: The Document Compiler. Tech. Rept. ON-70, Stanford University Artifical Intelligence Project, September, 1972.
 * 12) Terry Winograd, "Beyond programming languages," Communications of the ACM, v.22 n.7, p.391-401, July 1979.
 * 13) William A. Wulf, Lawrence Flon, Mary Shaw, Paul Hilfinger, Fundamental Structures of Computer Science, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1981.

 * See also
 * Brian Keith Reid (1981) Scribe: A Document Specification Language and its Compiler
 * Brian Keith Reid & David Hanson (1981) "An annotated bibliography of background material on text manipulation"

 * Wikipedia
 * Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, over a decade before the World Wide Web was developed and the general public got access to the Internet. It was originally built on the "poor man's ARPANET," employing UUCP as its transport protocol to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through the newly developed news software such as A News. The name USENET emphasized its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation.
 * One notable difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another in so-called news feeds. Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server operated by their Internet service provider, university, or employer.

1981

 * Current Comments, No. 52 (1981), pp. 5-11. Reprinted in Essays of an Information Scientist, vol. 5 (1981-82), pp. 348-354.

 * Excerpts
 * I first mentioned the world brain in Current Contents® (CC®) in 1964, when this column was called The Informatorium.7 Wells argued for sweeping reforms in the process by which we bring our accumulated knowledge to bear on social, economic, and political affairs. He envisioned a "World Encyclopedia," in which multidisciplinary research information of a global nature would be gathered together and made available for the immediate use of anyone in the world.
 * 7. Garfield E. Towards the world brain. Current Contents (40): 3-4, 6 October 1964.

 * Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. (Doctoral dissertation, 173 pages)

 * Cited by 24
 * (ACM Portal)

 * Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symposium on Text Manipulation, Portland, Oregon, U.S., June 08-10, 1981. (ACM) pp. 157-160.

 * Abstract
 * This is the first ACM conference specifically devoted to text manipulation, but there have been good papers and books on the topic published in the past. To help define the state of the field as of the time of this first conference, we have assembled this small annotated bibliography listing classic or important past work on text manipulation, including material on text editing, document formatting, typography, graphic communication, writing style, string and pattern matching, and other problems of interest to researchers in this field. Ben Schneiderman of the University of Maryland and Chris Fraser of the University of Arizona have provided us with some of the annotations of papers on text editing. In a bibliography like this one it is impossible to include every relevant paper, or even every important paper. We in general have chosen to include those that have been influential, are widely available, and are also reasonably current. We have additionally included a number of papers and books that supply background knowledge about relevant applications areas that might not be widely known to computer scientists. (ACM)

1985

 * The Sixth International Research Forum in Information Science (IRFIS 6), Frascati, Italy, September 16-18, 1985. (Proceedings edited by B. C. Brookes and published by North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1986.)

 * Wikipedia
 * [This] is a work of "retrospective futurism" in which Smart Mobs author Howard Rheingold looked at the history of computing and then attempted to predict what the networked world might look like in the mid-1990s. The book covers the groundbreaking work of thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and J.C.R. Licklider, as well as Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, and Microsoft (when Microsoft was "aiming for the hundred-million-dollar category"). Rheingold wrote that the impetus behind Tools for Thought was to understand where "mind-amplifying technology" was going by understanding where it came from.

 * Wikipedia
 * [This] is a book by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. It examines the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over Boyle's air-pump experiments in the 1660s. On a more theoretical level, the book explores the deeper issue of acceptable methods of knowledge production. It also focuses on societal factors related to the different knowledge systems promoted by Boyle and Hobbes. The "Leviathan" in the title refers to Hobbes's book on the structure of society, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil and the "Air-Pump" refers Robert Boyle's invention which is the central topic of debate for the contemporaries under study.

1990

 * Wikipedia
 * A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages, which described the project itself.

1991

 * Excerpts
 * On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. The first server outside Europe was set up at SLAC to host the SPIRES database.

1995

 * Developed in 1994, and launched in 1995.
 * Excerpts
 * The software and website were developed in 1994 by Cunningham in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier. The concept was based on the ideas developed in HyperCard stacks that Cunningham built in the late 1980s. He installed the software on his company's (Cunningham & Cunningham) website, c2.com, on March 25, 1995.
 * A notable example of the WikiWikiWeb's legacy is Wikipedia. A WikiWikiWeb user, programmer Ben Kovitz of San Diego, California, introduced the WikiWikiWeb to Larry Sanger of Internet company Bomis on the evening of January 2, 2001. At the time, Bomis was working on the online encyclopedia Nupedia; but that project failed, so Sanger suggested running an open encyclopedia on UseModWiki, an indirect clone of WikiWikiWeb's engine. Sanger presented the idea to Jimmy Wales, then head of Bomis, and he agreed. The UseModWiki-based encyclopedia eventually came to be known as "Wikipedia."
 * See also
 * Bo Leuf & Ward Cunningham (2001) The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web.

 * Wired, June 1995.

 * Wikipedia
 * In the June 1995 issue of Wired, Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg said "Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived":
 * Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nerve-like constellation of wires.
 * See also
 * Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1955) The Phenomenon of Man.

1998

 * Bill Clinton (1998) : "An America where every child can stretch a hand across a keyboard and reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed."
 * Vannevar Bush (1945) : "If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van."
 * H. G. Wells (1938) : "It seems possible that in the near future, we shall have microscopic libraries of record, in which a photograph of every important book and document in the world will be stowed away and made easily available for the inspection of the student. [...] The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica." (pp. 76-77)

1999

 * Skeptical Inquirer (Jan-Feb, 1999)

 * Information Services & Use, 19 (1999): 99-105.

 * Computer (June 1999), 32(6), 67-71.

 * See also
 * CiteSeer

 * Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50 (May 15, 1999): 557-579. (copy)

 * Excerpts
 * World Brain or Global Brain proponents tend to extrapolate quite extravagantly the capabilities and implications of emerging technology. For Wells it was microfilm. Today it is the infinitely more sophisticated Internet and World Wide Web which have enmeshed our globe in a fantastically intricate and diffused communications infrastructure. By means of this technology as World or Global Brain proponents imagine it taking shape, the effective deployment of the entire universe of knowledge will become possible. But this begs unresolved questions about the relative value of the individual and the state, about the nature of individual and social benefits and how they are best to be allocated, about what constitutes freedom and how it might be appropriately constrained. It flies in the face of the intransigent reality that what constitutes the ever-expanding store of human knowledge is almost incalculably massive in scale, is largely viewpoint-dependent, is fragmented, complex, ceaselessly in dispute and always under revision. (from Conclusion)

 * Proposed in 1999; founded in 2001.
 * Excerpts
 * Immediately upon its creation, GNUPedia was confronted by confusion with the similar-sounding Nupedia project led by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and controversy over whether this constituted a fork of the efforts to produce a free encyclopedia. In addition, Wales already owned the gnupedia.org domain name.
 * The new Wikipedia project received an enthusiastic reaction from some GNUPedia participants, and Wikipedia eventually overtook both efforts. The GNUPedia project continued to exist, and addressed the naming controversy by changing its name to GNE (an abbreviation for "GNE is Not an Encyclopedia", a recursive acronym similar to that of the GNU project) and by redefining the project as a comprehensive "library of opinions" or "knowledge base".

2000

 * A seminar held in Dagstuhl, Germany, in March 2000. Proceedings edited by Dieter Fensel, James A. Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster, foreworded by Tim Berners-Lee, published by MIT Press, 2005. (Google Preview)

 * Description
 * As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to obtain information efficiently. Because most search engines read format languages such as HTML or SGML, search results reflect formatting tags more than actual page content, which is expressed in natural language. Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the current "web of links" with a "web of meaning." Using a flexible set of languages and tools, the Semantic Web will make all available information—display elements, metadata, services, images, and especially content—accessible. The result will be an immense repository of information accessible for a wide range of new applications.
 * This first handbook for the Semantic Web covers, among other topics, software agents that can negotiate and collect information, markup languages that can tag many more types of information in a document, and knowledge systems that enable machines to read Web pages and determine their reliability. The truly interdisciplinary Semantic Web combines aspects of artificial intelligence, markup languages, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, intelligent agents, and databases.

 * Oxford University Press, 2000.
 * Dedicated: To the Memory of Mike Sendall and Donald Davies.

 * Excerpts
 * The World Wide Web is like an encyclopaedia, a telephone directory, a record collection, a video shop, and Speakers' Corner all rolled into one and accessible through any computer. It has become so successful that to many it is synonymous with the Internet; but in reality the two are quite different. The Internet is like a network of electronic roads criss-crossing the planet -- the much-hyped information superhighway. The Web is just one of many services using that network, just as many different kinds of vehicle use the roads. On the Internet, the Web just happens to be by far the most popular. The arrival of the Web in 1990 was to the Internet like the arrival of the internal combustion engine to the country lane. Internet transport would never be the same again. (opening paragraph, p. 1)
 * See also
 * Tim Berners-Lee (1999) Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (with Mark Fischetti and Michael L. Dertouzos)

 * The title may remind you of J. D. Bernal (1939) The Social Function of Science.
 * Reviews
 * David McIntosh reviewed the book for the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation. The review ... concluded, "The Social Life of Information makes a real contribution to our collective knowledge. ... We believe that war is too important to be left to the generals. Similarly, this book suggests, the information revolution is too important to leave to the technologists. Communicating the content is easy, while understanding the context is harder. And there is a lot more social context out there than any of us had realized.
 * See more.

 * Excerpts
 * Nupedia lasted from March 2000 until September 2003, and is mostly known now as the predecessor of the free wiki encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
 * Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars to volunteer content for free.

2001

 * New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (Amazon)

 * Excerpts
 * [Opening quotation] THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing? DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

George Bernard Show
 * Prologue: Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain Since the infancy of the personal computer in 1983, authors and scientists have been churning out works on the subject of a coming global brain strung together by computer networking. Today the Internet, the World Wide Web, and its successors allow a neuroscientist in Strasbourg to swap ideas instantly with a philosopher of history in Siberia and an algorithm juggler in Silicon Valley. But according to the visionaries who predict a world-spanning intelligence, this is just the beginning. They tell us that a radical human transformation has begun,1 one that will hook "the billions of minds of humanity together into a single system . . . [like] Gaia growing herself a nervous system."2 We will soon come together, predict the techno-prophets, on a post-World Wide Web computer net that will learn our ways of thought and fetch us the knowledge we need before we know we want it, a web that will turn the human race into a single "spiritual super-being," a massive "collective conscious" that will even incorporate the brains of computer-equipped whales in distant seas.3 The result will be "one of the greatest leaps in the evolution of our species."4     My twenty years of interdisciplinary work indicate that beneath these visions lurks a strange surprise. Yes, the computerized linking of individual minds is likely to bring considerable change. But a worldwide neocortex -- complete with whales -- is not a gift of the silicon age. It is a phase in the ongoing evolution of a networked global brain which has existed for more than 3 billion years. This planetary mind is neither uniquely human nor a product of technology. Nor is it a result of reincarnation, or an outgrowth of telepathy. It is a product of evolution and biology. Nature has been far more clever at connectionism than have we. Her mechanisms for information swapping, date processing, and collective creation are more intricate and agile than anything the finest computer theoreticians have yet foreseen. (p. 1)
 * No index terms for H. G. Wells, World Brain and new encyclopaedism.

 * Orignially
 * Global Brain. Die Evolution Sozialer Intelligenz. (Hardcover, Feb. 1, 1999)

 * A free, egalitarian and utilitarian encyclopedia, based on the World Wide Web, evolved from the Nupedia founded in 2000, maybe affected by the idea of GNUPedia conceived in 1999. It has turned out to be the closest, dramatic embodiment of new encyclopaedism.

2004

 * Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2004 (Commentary)

 * Excerpts
 * The nub of the matter lies in the distinction between information (data, facts, images, quotes and brief texts that can be used out of context) and recorded knowledge (the cumulative exposition found in scholarly and literary texts and in popular nonfiction). When it comes to information, a snippet from Page 142 might be useful. When it comes to recorded knowledge, a snippet from Page 142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place.
 * See also
 * Michael Lesk (2005) Digital Searching to Digital Reading.

 * W. W. Norton.

 * See also
 * Sam Harris & Annaka Harris (2007) Project Reason.

2005

 * Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, CoLIS 2005, held in Glasgow, UK, June 2005. (Google Preview)

 * Contents
 * David Blair (2005) "Wittgenstein, Language and Information: 'Back to the Rough Ground!'" ibid pp. 1-4. This is the preview of David Blair (2006).

 * Presentation at LITA session at American Library Association conference, Chicago 2005.

 Everything Digital "every child can stretch a hand across a keyboard and reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed." -- Bill Clinton's State of the Union message, January 1998.

Similarly: H. G. Wells, World Brain, "There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind."

"If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van." -- Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think."

 Some think online reading is bad. COMMENTARY Google and God's Mind The problem is, information isn't knowledge.

(by Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association).

"The nub of the matter lies in the distinction between information (data, facts, images, quotes and brief texts that can be used out of context) and recorded knowledge (the cumulative exposition found in scholarly and literary texts and in popular nonfiction). When it comes to information, a snippet from Page 142 might be useful. When it comes to recorded knowledge, a snippet from Page 142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place."

From the Los Angeles Times.... (December 17, 2004)

 Shneiderman & Marchionini 1988

"Today's electronic retrieval systems . . . focus on coding, indexing, and cross-referencing (organization for retrieval) rather than on meaning, readability, and assimilation (organization for understanding)."

This was before the Web, but it was part of an argument for hypertext (specifically Hyperties).

Shneiderman has always argued for context, for systems that help people understand where they are in a task.

 Conclusion

Large collections are coming (whether they will help quality is doubtful, but they will contain a lot of new information).

We need an interface oriented towards large books. We still haven't explored the selection of materials in context. We also need ways of judging bias, genre,. ..

And mostly we need to measure utility.

 * http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/08/hg-wells-on-the-world-brain.html

 * Excerpts
 * Commenting on my Google Library vs. Publishers piece, George Dyson sent me this great piece from HG Wells. I already reposted it to the comments on that blog, but this is enough of a relevant historical artifact that it deserves its own top level posting. (As always, George does an amazing job of reminding us all of how many of the ideas we are wrestling with are not new, just because we finally have the technology to realize them.)

2006

 * Information Science and Knowledge Management Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ. (Google books)

 * Book reviews
 * This book is an extension of the discussions presented in Blair's 1990 book Language and Representation in Information Retrieval, which was selected as the "Best Information Science Book of the Year" by the American Society for Information Science (ASIS). That work stated that the Philosophy of Language had the best theory for understanding meaning in language, and within the Philosophy of Language, the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was found to be most perceptive. The success of that book provided an incentive to look more deeply into Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, and how it can help us to understand how to represent the intellectual content of information. This is what the current title does, and by using this theory it creates a firm foundation for future Information Retrieval research. The work consists of four related parts. Firstly, a brief overview of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and its relevance to information systems. Secondly, a detailed explanation of Wittgenstein's late philosophy of language and mind. Thirdly, an extended discussion of the relevance of his philosophy to understanding some of the problems inherent in information systems, especially those systems which rely on retrieval based on some representation of the intellectual content of that information. And, fourthly, a series of detailed footnotes which cite the sources of the numerous quotations and provide some discussion of the related issues that the text inspires.

 * International Journal of Epidemiology, 35: 1127-1128.

 * Excerpts
 * Reading the 1955 paper once again reminds me of the inspiration that the concept had from my early interest in encyclopaedism. In 1970, Manfred Kochen commented on its role in the worldwide encyclopaedic movement.13 Today the Internet has enabled the development of Wikipedia and other grand schemes that will make the H.G. Wells dream of a World Brain a reality.
 * 13 Kochen M. WISE -- world information synthesis and encyclopedia. J Document, 1972; 28: 322-343.

2007

 * Founded aiming for the promotion of scientific knowledge and secular values within society.
 * See also
 * Sam Harris (2004) The End of Faith.

 * Libraries Unlimited. (Google Preview)

 * Review
 * Knowledge management (KM) is frequently presented as a recent development born entirely of the business world. However, the intellectual origins of knowledge management are both deeper and broader than have been posited in the literature to date. Influences of philosophy, economics, education, psychology, information and communication theory, and library and information studies have been almost completely overlooked. This book links current and historical works to the development of knowledge management across domains and disciplines to give students and scholars a deeper appreciation of the origins of KM and a better understanding of its intellectual origins, its concepts, and principles. Through his thorough and critical examination of historical and more recent classic works, Wallace demystifies this important, emerging area of study.

 * Excerpts
 * World Brain = World Wide Web Like Otlet, Wells has assembled in his essays and addresses on the World encyclopaedia and the World Brain a preview of the World Wide Web: a colossal, globally accessible compendium of everything knowable. Although the World Wide Web clearly lacks the authority and editorial consistency both Otlet and Wells favor, the notion of a practicable universal source of information preceded the realities of the Internet and the World Wide Web by several decades. (pp. 151-152)

2008

 * In: W. Boyd Rayward (ed.) European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. (Google Preview)

2009

 * Journal of Information Science (April 2009) 35(2) 131-142. (ACM Portal)

 * Abstract
 * The paper evaluates the data - information - knowledge - wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy. This hierarchy, also known as the `knowledge hierarchy', is part of the canon of information science and management. Arguments are offered that the hierarchy is unsound and methodologically undesirable. The paper identifies a central logical error that DIKW makes. The paper also identifies the dated and unsatisfactory philosophical positions of operationalism and inductivism as the philosophical backdrop to the hierarchy. The paper concludes with a sketch of some positive theories, of value to information science, on the nature of the components of the hierarchy: that data is anything recordable in a semantically and pragmatically sound way, that information is what is known in other literature as `weak knowledge', that knowledge also is `weak knowledge' and that wisdom is the possession and use, if required, of wide practical knowledge, by an agent who appreciates the fallible nature of that knowledge.

 * Hyperion, March 17, 2009.

 * Wikipedia
 * Lih describes the importance of early influences on Wikipedia including Usenet, Hypercard, Slashdot and MeatballWiki.
 * Review
 * Jeffrey Barlow (2010). "The Wikipedia Revolution," The Journal of Education, Community and Values, vol. 10, iss. 4 (May 2010).
 * The impact of Wikipedia is closely related to the impact of the Internet itself. It is very much part of the Web 2.0 stage of the Internet.

title: User:KYPark/Encyclopaedism/Timeline


text:
Motivation and emotion/Book/2010/Self-sabotage motivation

Overview
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them." Eric Hoffer (1902-1983, American author, philosopherthu)

As a student, have you found yourself faced with the grim task of tackling an entire essay mere hours before the due date? Have you ever succumbed to the pressure from friends and gone out drinking the night before an important meeting at work? These are but two examples of a behavioural phenomenon called self sabotaging

This chapter will aim to explore the behavioural tendency that is known as self sabotaging or self handicapping. It will explore the nature of motivation, and attempt to explain why a person would intentionally create inhibitors to prevent the successful completion of a personal goal. Finally, it will analyse some tactics used to overcome self handicapping behaviour, and thus allow you to achieve your goals.

What is Self Sabotaging?
Self sabotage is a term used in behavioural psychology to give explanation to why some people fail to achieve goals in their lives. Self sabotage, or self-handicapping as it is otherwise known is closely related to other motivational inhibitors such as Procrastination and self-esteem.

Self sabotage can take on various forms, however most agree that it involves creating impediments which hinder the successful accomplishment of tasks which an individual considers important (Urdan, 2004). Simply put, a person is seen to be performing self sabotaging behaviour when they create incidents which may be perceived as excuses when the desired goal is not achieved. This thereby reduces the likelihood of successful goal achievement. Martin et al. (2003) argue that this is a strategic technique aimed at creating a legitimate causal excuse for failure, and thus deflecting the blame off the individual. For example, ‘I only failed that exam because I got so drunk last night!’

Theoretical Perspectives
It is important to analyse the construct of self sabotage within the broader motivation theoretical perspective. To understand why an individual will create impediments to inhibit successful achievement of a goal, we must understand what drives an individual’s motivation to set and achieve goals in the first place.

Achievement Goal Theory
Achievement Goal Theory is a widely regarded theory which suggests that individuals seek to achieve goals for a variety of different reasons, and as such these purposes translate to different outcomes (Urden, 2004). Much of the research relating to achievement goal theory has revolved around academia, and has sought to analyse the differences in motivation between students, as a mechanism to explain the broad variety of academic outcomes (Covington, 2000). Nilsen (2007) argues that the core of achievement goal theory allocates students into two main categories; performance goal achievement or mastery goal achievement.

Mastery Goals
Students who represent those categorised as mastery goal achievers commonly possess a desire to develop competence, improve skills, and understand concepts (Urden, 2004). These students are learning-oriented, and view assignments and tasks as challenges to be overcome (Nilsen, 2007). In simple terms, students who fit into the mastery goal category are driven and motivated by the desire to learn and master the content of the course. Urden highlights that much of the research on mastery goal theory has demonstrated that students who fit into this category demonstrate:
 * High levels of intrinsic motivation
 * Use of deep cognitive and self-regulatory strategies
 * Persistence in the face of failure
 * Positive feelings about school and school work
 * Self efficacy

The underlying premise with the master goal aspect of the achievement goal theory is that these students are motivated by learning. There is little desire to prove one’s knowledge to peers, rather the thrill of learning and succeeding is sufficient to motivate success.

Performance Goal
Performance goal students are more concerned with the recognition they receive for performing a task (Nilsen, 2007). Urden (2004) suggests that performance goal oriented students are concerned with demonstrating their competence by outperforming peers, and by gaining recognition from teachers. It is a social imperative for students who are motivated by performance goals to appear competent to their peers, and to do everything in their power to ensure that, at no stage, they appear incompetent. Wolters (2004) lists the motivational priority of students who possess a performance goal brand of achievement as:
 * Success translates into extrinsic rewards
 * Demonstrating high ability to peers and teachers
 * Doing better than others.

As performance goal achievement is based largely on social comparison, this highlights the first insight into the inherent premise of goal achievement theory – the overall achievement is a product of the type of motivation, and the differences between the two types of motivation create different paths to success.

Multiple Goal Theory
Harackiewicz et al. (2002) suggest that achievement goal theory is not merely a dichotomy and needs to be broken down further. These experts propose a model which incorporates performance and mastery goals, but each are split into approach and avoidance (see Figure 1).

Performance Approach
Performance approach orientation describes students who long for the opportunity to demonstrate their ability relative to others, and wish to prove their self worth in a public manner.

Mastery Approach
Students who fit this category possess high levels of intrinsic motivation, and are driven by the desire to learn as much as possible. Students within this category tend to be able to overcome adversity and challenges, and are constantly focused on increasing their level of competence.

Performance Avoidance
Performance avoidance is a construct whereby students are motivated by the fear of incompetence. They are motivated to learn and achieve so as to avoid appearing as though they lack ability and knowledge.

Mastery Avoidance
The mastery avoidance orientation describes students who are driven to learn in order to avoid a lack of mastery. Students in this orientation are worried they won’t be able to learn enough to master the topic, and this in turn motivates them to continue.

How is this relevant to Self Sabotage?
Understanding the motivational driving force behind an individual’s pursuit for success highlights the factors which may become detrimental to goal achievement. A great deal of research supports this statement (Martin et al., 2003), suggesting that goal orientation is a pivotal construct in identifying the manner in which students set about completing their studies. The dichotomous goal orientation theory consists of two different types of motivation; Task (Mastery) and Ego (Performance). Martin et al. (2003) argue that ego-oriented individuals are often very competitive, and derive their success based on comparison to others. Furthermore, these individuals tend to base their success upon outperforming others. Task-oriented individuals are more concerned with the task itself, and are less concerned with outperforming others. Success and failure for these individuals is primarily based on the effort they put in.

These two entirely different motivational forces create the opportunity for entirely different methods of failure. For the task-oriented individual, failure is generally seen as a sign of insufficient effort, and alterations can be made to amend the strategies before the eventual failure. However, ego-oriented individuals, who are constantly basing their own work on that of their peers, are particularly vulnerable in achievement scenarios (Martin et al., 2003). Urden (2004) argues that this vulnerability in ego-oriented individuals creates a situation where, faced with failure, that individual must salvage their own self-worth by creating excuses, often blamed on extrinsic factors such as insufficient time or unusually difficult assessment. This propensity for excuse-seeking can even extend to environmental attributes such as excessive socialising, or exhausting the time for preparation of an assignment on trivial, unrelated tasks (e.g. procrastination).

Students
The bulk of current research relating to self sabotage relates to students. There is a desire within psychology to discover the motivational variances between students, in an effort to explain the different study techniques, habits, and overall results amongst a group of individuals who seemingly receive the same resources to achieve their goal.

Self sabotage is common in students of all ages, ranging from the very young through to University students. There are various mechanisms of self sabotage that students commonly engage in, including:
 * Strategic reduction in effort
 * Procrastination
 * Ingestion of drugs or alcohol
 * Choosing performance debilitating circumstances

Urden (2004) argues that self sabotage in students may be a product of the sum of the environmental factors present in the classroom. For instance, teachers emphasise the differences between the work that students produce by showing superior work to the entire class, and sub-consciously displaying preferential treatment towards the high achievers. If we consider what this level of comparison must feel like for ego-driven achievers, we begin to see the potential for these students to create defensive strategies focused on protecting that student’s self worth.

'Remember!! For ego-driven achievers, comparison to other students is everything!!'

In younger ego-driven students, the common form of self sabotage may be to act recklessly in class, and no pay attention as achieving this superior level of work is perceived as impossible. While this student is acting recklessly, they miss out on further information necessary to produce good work, which in turn creates more reckless behaviour. This produces a perpetual cycle which is detrimental to the goal attainment of that student.

Self sabotage exists throughout the duration of many students' lives, extending right through university studies. It is common for students to leave assignments until the bare minimum amount of time exists in which to complete them. Students often go out drinking the night before an exam. These are all examples of self sabotage to the university student. Martin et al. (2003) suggest that self handicappers avoid a disconfirmation of a desired self-conception. In simple terms, if the student fails an exam due to lack of preparation, or excessive socialising the night before, they have a ready made excuse. This allows the individual to blame extrinsic factors, rather than a lack of ability.

Martin et al. (2003) argue that a student’s goal orientation is a predictor of self sabotaging behaviours. Ego driven students are driven by a competitive nature, and base their success on out performing others. However, if that student sees the potential for failure, they will tend to start searching for extrinsic excuses for their underachievement. Harackiewicz et al. (2002) further support this argument, suggesting that is it important to distinguish between students with approach goals and students with avoidance goals, in determining the likelihood of self sabotaging behaviours occurring. Students categorised into the mastery and performance approach goal groups test higher for intrinsic motivation (Urden, 2007) and are more likely to adjust their behaviour to accommodate the necessary levels of work. However, avoidance goal category students are likely to fear failure and comparison to others so much that they will either create an external excuse, or give up entirely. It is therefore vital to determine what motivates a student to study, to determine whether or not they are likely to engage in self sabotage behaviour. This variance in motivation also seeks to explain the disparity in results amongst students' achievements who seemingly receive the same resources.

Professionals
Self sabotage is an enduring phenomenon which can extend past an individual's study and manifest throughout their professional life. Benabour (2002) argues that self handicapping within the workplace is a deliberate or instinctive strategy aimed as the preservation of one’s self esteem. The behaviour manifests similar to that of a student. In the work place, and individual might:
 * Take mind altering substances before an important task
 * Neglect necessary sleep before work
 * Set overly ambitious tasks which almost assures failure

Newton et al. (2008) suggest that failure is an inevitable aspect of professional life, stating that as many as 50% of executives fail in their jobs. Failure in a task can be a harrowing experience, and crippling to an individual’s self esteem. For ego-driven individuals, the workplace presents another opportunity for comparison to others, and as such self sabotaging techniques may be either consciously or subconsciously employed to create an excuse for inevitable failure.

Interestingly, Newton et al. (2008) suggest that self handicapping in the workplace can also be used as a technique to heighten the thrill and reward of successful completion of a task. While most commonly used to create external attributes to blame for failure, ego-driven employees may set unusually high goals for themselves, and when they complete these goals successfully, they can enjoy greater personal attribution for their success.

Weight Loss
A common vehicle for self sabotage relates to obesity and weight loss. There is a common regard that obesity is detrimental to health, lifestyle and social fulfillment, however obesity rates continue to rise. A study by Straus (2000) found there to be a strong relationship between obesity and self esteem, even at a young age. While this may be common sense, if this statement is considered within the context of goal motivation, it becomes evident that self sabotage can become prevalent for ego-driven individuals who attempt to implement a weight loss plan.

Some common statements of self sabotage in weight loss:
 * I'm too stressed
 * I need energy
 * This won't work anyway, why even try?
 * I need to lose 10kgs in 5 weeks!
 * I'm too old
 * It's taking too long!
 * I'm too busy/ I don't have time
 * I haven't been well

As mentioned previously, a common form of self sabotage is setting unrealistic goals, so that there is a ready made excuse to pre-empt failure. Jardine (2010) highlight this by suggesting that a common reason for failure when dieting is the setting of unrealistic goals in terms of exercise regime, diet, and overall weight loss goals. As with students, when the individual fails to see instant rewards for their vigilance there is the propensity to attribute blame to external factors, rather than admit failure.

Case Study: Adam
Adam grew up in a household that celebrated food. His mother was always cooking, and meal times were a time to celebrate the company of his family. Throughout his childhood, Adam learned how to cook, and developed a real passion for it. He loved to cook, and loved the reception he received when he presented friends or family with a delicious meal.

Throughout his school days, Adam dreamed only of being a chef. He thought this to be his ideal job, and pursued it as such. Upon graduation from school, Adam applied for a job in a busy restaurant, and started immediately. Soon it became apparent that cooking for friends and family was not the same as cooking for 200 people every night. Adam quickly lost the passion for cooking, and no longer enjoyed cooking for friends and family on weekends. In fact, if it wasn't for the pay cheque, Adam would have no motivation to go to work. After a while, it was becoming difficult for Adam to get to work on time. Each time, something would come up; Returning a movie, a Doctor's appointment, heavy traffic.

''If Adam were to be fired for chronic lateness, would this be easier to reconcile, after spending his entire life wanting only to be a chef? Would it be less crippling on his ego to be fired for being late, rather than failing at the career he thought he was destined to love?''

Overcoming Self Sabotage
The following are techniques aimed at overcoming self sabotage:

This is paramount in eradicating self sabotage behaviours. With regards to students, it is important to identify the behaviours which are inhibiting the successful achievement of study goals.
 * Identify the problem behaviours
 * Are you taking too many classes?
 * Are you giving yourself sufficient time to complete tasks?
 * Are you resting suitably before exams and assignments?

This is also the fundamental solution to maintaining a healthy and exercise plan. A report by Kase (2005) suggests that around 30% of normal weight people under-report the amount of food they eat, and around 60% of obese people under-report the amount of food they consume. This highlights the fact that overweight people are often naïve to the problem behaviours. If they do not see what they are doing is a problem, there is no way to fix it.

Psychologists refer to this as ‘stimulus control’. This is particularly important for individuals who attempt to diet. It is important to ensure you have control over your environment, and this includes:
 * Regulate your environment
 * Eliminating junk food from your house,
 * Controlling portion sizes
 * Ensure there are healthy snacks on hand

Controlling these factors will reduce the opportunity to use the aforementioned excuses, and rescind into unhealthy habits. Similarly, removing distractions such as mobile phones and laptops from a place of study or work will reduce the likelihood that an individual will create an excuse to check their phone and organise a social activity which will detract from the goal achievement.

Achieving goals is an ongoing process. Often the problem that individuals who experience self sabotage face is the implementing of unrealistic goals. When these goals are in danger of being missed, there is a danger that the individual will see this as a sign of failure, and desist from trying to accomplish it. An easy way to avoid this is to set short term, realistic goals. For example, if a person wishes to find a new job, the first easily achievable step could be to update their resume.
 * Success breeds success

Summary
Self sabotage is a psychological restraint which appears more common than may be initially thought. Research based on students motivational influences shows considerable prevalence of self sabotaging behaviours. This may be explained by the role self-esteem plays in the lives on students, and the general population. It is clear that people place a priority on maintaining a feeling of self worth for themselves, and appearing in control to their peers. It is human nature to try to avoid failure, and the human brain can create techniques to minimise the emotional tole that comes with failure. Self sabotage is a prime example of this. It guards against failure by creating the opportunity to blame external factors for failure, and helps us reconcile failed ventures in our own mind. As was discussed with regards to workplace self sabotage, it also creates the opportunity for people who truly excel, to brag about triumph through adversity, further feeding the self esteem and ego. Self sabotage is a natural defense mechanism against the threat of failure, however it can in turn become a self-fulfilling prophecy when it hinders the achievement of goals. {{Hide in print|

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text: User:Robertgreer

title: User:Robertgreer


text: User talk:Robertgreer

title: User talk:Robertgreer


text:
User talk:S.emp

 Hello S.emp, and welcome to Wikiversity! If you need help, feel free to visit my talk page, or contact us and ask questions. After you leave a comment on a talk page, remember to sign and date; it helps everyone follow the threads of the discussion. The signature icon in the edit window makes it simple. To get started, you may

 * Take a guided tour and learn to edit.
 * Visit a (kind of) random project.
 * Browse Wikiversity, or visit a portal corresponding to your educational level: pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary, non-formal education.
 * Find out about research activities on Wikiversity.

 * Read an introduction for teachers and find out how to write an educational resource for Wikiversity.
 * Give feedback about your initial observations
 * Discuss Wikiversity issues or ask questions at the colloquium.
 * Chat with other Wikiversitans on #wikiversity-en.

And don't forget to explore Wikiversity with the links to your left. Be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage, and see you around Wikiversity! If you're a twitter user, please follow http://twitter.com/Wikiversity. Jtneill - Talk - c 21:40, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

 Hi! My name is WikiversityJack. I am a pumpkin and a Wikiversity mascot. My aunt told me that fun + learning = Wikiversity. Let me know if I can help you out.

Motivation and emotion
Hi. Welcome to the unit and to Wikiversity! I look forward to learning with you and I hope you find the topic and the unit rewarding. Please feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions or would like help at any point along the way. Sincerely, James Neill, -- Jtneill - Talk - c 21:40, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

-- Jtneill - Talk - c 14:12, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

title: User talk:S.emp


text:
User:S.emp

Hello Motivation and Emotion World

Hi everyone my name is Sheree and I am currently in the fourth year of study (and my last :) finally!). I am doing Psychology and Arts.

As we are all getting graded on our wonderful contributions please feel free to comment and I will check out your pages as well.

Lecture and Tutorial Thoughts

 * Lecture 1: Introduction
 * Lecture 2: Damn Wiki!
 * Lecture 3: Psysiological brains and needs
 * Tutorial 1
 * Lecture 4: Psychological and social needs
 * Lecture 5: I-E Motivation and goal setting
 * Tutoral 2
 * Lecture 6: Control beliefs and the self
 * Tutoral 3
 * Lecture 7: Nature of emotion
 * Lecture 8: Aspects of emotion
 * Tutoral 4
 * Lecture 9: Personality and emotion
 * Lecture 10: Unconscious motivation (Give me a HD James - This is your unconcious speaking)
 * Tutoral 5
 * Lecture 11: Growth and postive psychology
 * Tutoral 6
 * References

Textbook chapter
Please follow the following link to my text-book chapter on adultery and to the online motivation and emotion text-book.

Conclusion - Goodbye
I have found this class really interesting and insightful. Out of all the psychology classes, this is one of my favourites. I really enjoyed learning about what motivates a person to do certain things and the different emotions and reasons behind them. My favourate assessment piece would have to be the text-book chapter, I really enjoyed being able to pick my topic and that made me more interested in writing the textbook and I learnt a lot. I even enjoyed wiki, it was great to be able to read other people's thoughts. Thank you James and everyone for making this class enjoyable.

"“Sucess is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”- Winston Churchill"

"'The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.”- William James"

title: User:S.emp


text:
User talk:Visvesvaran

 Hello Visvesvaran, and welcome to Wikiversity! If you need help, feel free to visit my talk page, or contact us and ask questions. After you leave a comment on a talk page, remember to sign and date; it helps everyone follow the threads of the discussion. The signature icon in the edit window makes it simple. To get started, you may

 * Take a guided tour and learn to edit.
 * Visit a (kind of) random project.
 * Browse Wikiversity, or visit a portal corresponding to your educational level: pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary, non-formal education.
 * Find out about research activities on Wikiversity.

 * Read an introduction for teachers and find out how to write an educational resource for Wikiversity.
 * Give feedback about your initial observations
 * Discuss Wikiversity issues or ask questions at the colloquium.
 * Chat with other Wikiversitans on #wikiversity-en.

And don't forget to explore Wikiversity with the links to your left. Be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage, and see you around Wikiversity! If you're a twitter user, please follow http://twitter.com/Wikiversity. --Ottava Rima (talk) 14:07, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

title: User talk:Visvesvaran


text:
User talk:MussaHamad

 Hello MussaHamad, and welcome to Wikiversity! If you need help, feel free to visit my talk page, or contact us and ask questions. After you leave a comment on a talk page, remember to sign and date; it helps everyone follow the threads of the discussion. The signature icon in the edit window makes it simple. To get started, you may

 * Take a guided tour and learn to edit.
 * Visit a (kind of) random project.
 * Browse Wikiversity, or visit a portal corresponding to your educational level: pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary, non-formal education.
 * Find out about research activities on Wikiversity.

 * Read an introduction for teachers and find out how to write an educational resource for Wikiversity.
 * Give feedback about your initial observations
 * Discuss Wikiversity issues or ask questions at the colloquium.
 * Chat with other Wikiversitans on #wikiversity-en.

And don't forget to explore Wikiversity with the links to your left. Be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage, and see you around Wikiversity! If you're a twitter user, please follow http://twitter.com/Wikiversity. --Ottava Rima (talk) 14:07, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

title: User talk:MussaHamad


text:
User:Jmaustin/Books/Complete

A Compilation of Completed Challenges

 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Aquatic Entomology/Understanding Populations
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Applied Linear Algebra
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Biology/Parasite distribution
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/BIOL 1402/Surface Area to Volume Ratio
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Circuits II/Laplace Transform
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Computer Science/Operating Systems
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Computer Science/Repetition
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Computer Science/Selection
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Contemporary Math//The Mathematics of Apportionments
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Comparative Embroyology/Birth Defects and Their Causes
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Databases/Partitioning
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Engineering Economics/Using Methods of Project Assessment
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Intermediate Algebra/Right Triangle Problems
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Introduction to VLSI
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Measurements/Temperature Measurement
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Microbial Biotechnology /Immunology
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Microprocessor System Design/Microprocessor System Design
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Nutrition/Enzymes
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Organic Chemistry I/Chromatography
 * UTPA STEM/CBI Courses/Physical Chemistry/Magic Blue Bottle
 * Probability and Statistics I

title: User:Jmaustin/Books/Complete


text: File:2010 08 26 13 57 13.djvu

title: File:2010 08 26 13 57 13.djvu


text: File:2010 08 26 14 53 13.djvu

title: File:2010 08 26 14 53 13.djvu


text:
Meta-analysis/Interest group

Meta-analysis Special Interest Group

Centre for Applied Psychology, UC

Introduction

 * 1) What experience do you have with meta-analysis?
 * 2) What projects are people working on?
 * 3) What do you want to learn about meta-analysis?
 * 4) What would like to present/workshop and when? e.g.,
 * 5) Proposals
 * 6) In-progress studies
 * 7) Past studies
 * 8) Problems you'd like help with
 * 9) What meta-analysis resources can be suggested?

title: Meta-analysis/Interest group