“To clarify, ADD data”*…
1939 World’s Fair– The World of Tomorrow– under construction, on the site of a former Queens (New York City) wetland
Who dreams of files? Well, I do, to be honest. And I imagine Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, and Le Corbusier did, too. It’s not only the files and cabinets themselves that enchant, but their epistemological and political promise; just think of what you can do with all that data! The dream has survived as a collective aspiration for well over a century — since we had standardized cards and papers to file, and cabinets to put them in — and is now expressed in fetishized data visualization and fantasies about “smart cities” and “urban science.” Record-keeping and filing were central to the World of Tomorrow and its urban imaginary, too…
Shannon Mattern on the way in which the 1939 World’s Fair anticipated our current obsession with urban data science and “smart” cities: “Indexing the World of Tomorrow.”
[TotH to Rebecca Onion]
* Edward Tufte
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As we dream of spires, we might spare a thought for Andreas Felix von Oefele; he died on this date in 1780. A historian and author (most notably of the 10 volume work Lebensgeschichten der gelehrtesten Männer Bayerns, “Life stories of the most learned men of Bavaria”), von Oefele was the first “Electoral Councillor, Bibliothecarius and Antiquarius”– the first head of the Bavarian Court and State Library and Secret Archives.
