Alex Wright

Investigador de productos del New York Times y autor de "Glut: Mastering Information Trough the Ages"

Alex Wright
Inglés
Futurismo y Nuevas Tecnologías · Innovación y Cambio

Alex Wright es director de “Experiencias del Usuario”, investigador de productos en “The New York Times” y autor del libro “Glut: Mastering Information Trough the Ages ”calificado por Los Angeles Times como “una exhaustiva y muy entretenida meditación sobre nuestra era de la información y sus raíces históricas”.

Con una dilatada carrera profesional, a lo largo de su trayectoria, Alex Wright ha dirigido multitud de proyectos de investigación y de diseño para grandes multinacionales como IBM, Microsoft, The Long Now Foundation, Harvard University, the Internet Archive, y Yahoo!, entre otros,  y su trabajo ha sido reconocido y galardonado por la industria en multitud de ocasiones, incluyendo: Webby, Cool Site of the Year, PRSA Silver Anvil y un Premio de la Sociedad Americana de Diseño.

Además, Wright escribe para algunas de las publicaciones más reconocidas a nivel mundial y muchos de sus artículos han aparecido en periódicos tan importantes como “The New York Times”, “The Christian Science Monitor”, “The Believer”, “Harvard Magazine”, “Yankee”, “Think”, “Interactions”, “Boxes and Arrows”, “New Architect”, “WebTechniques”, “Boston Business”, “Design Times” y “Library Journal”, entre otros.

Demandado conferenciante y excelente orador, en sus charlas, Alex Wright profundiza en el tema de la era de la información, ofreciendo a la audiencia una perspectiva global del estado actual de Internet, desde un punto de vista social y tecnológico.

Asimismo, ha impartido conferencias para algunas de las empresas y organizaciones más reconcidas del mundo entre las que destacan: The Long Now Foundation, Gartner Group, UC-Berkeley, el Institute of Design-Chicago, Seybold, ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit, CMP Web, Association of Internet Professionals, Creating for the Web o IBM.

 

Conferences

Lo que no era la Web: los antepasados olvidados de Internet

Catalogando el mundo

La Red Platónica

Glut: el dominio de la información a través de las distintas épocas

Investigación de productos y experiencias de usuarios

Books

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius.

In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Paul Otlet, a librarian by training, worked at expanding the potential of the catalog card, the world's first information chip. From there followed universal libraries and museums, connecting his native Belgium to the world by means of a vast intellectual enterprise that attempted to organize and code everything ever published. Forty years before the first personal computer and fifty years before the first browser, Otlet envisioned a network of "electric telescopes" that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed, in 1934, a réseau mondial--essentially, a worldwide web.

Otlet's life achievement was the construction of the Mundaneum--a mechanical collective brain that would house and disseminate everything ever committed to paper. Filled with analog machines such as telegraphs and sorters, the Mundaneum--what some have called a "Steampunk version of hypertext"--was the embodiment of Otlet's ambitions. It was also short-lived. By the time the Nazis, who were pilfering libraries across Europe to collect information they thought useful, carted away Otlet's collection in 1940, the dream had ended. Broken, Otlet died in 1944.

Wright's engaging intellectual history gives Otlet his due, restoring him to his proper place in the long continuum of visionaries and pioneers who have struggled to classify knowledge, from H.G. Wells and Melvil Dewey to Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steve Jobs. Wright shows that in the years since Otlet's death the world has witnessed the emergence of a global network that has proved him right about the possibilities--and the perils--of networked information, and his legacy persists in our digital world today, captured for all time.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

GLUT: MASTERING INFORMATION THROUGH THE AGES

What do primordial bacteria, medieval alchemists, and the World Wide Web have to do with each other? This fascinating exploration of how information systems emerge takes readers on a provocative journey through the history of the information age.

Today's "information explosion" may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation—nor even the first species—to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Dark Age monasteries.

Today, we stand at a precipice, as our old systems struggle to cope with what designer Richard Saul Wurman called a "tsunami of data." With some historical perspective, however, we can begin to understand our predicament not just as the result of technological change, but as the latest chapter in an ancient story that we are only beginning to understand.

Spanning disciplines from evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology to the history of books, libraries, and computer science, writer and information architect Alex Wright weaves an intriguing narrative that connects such seemingly far-flung topics as insect colonies, Stone Age jewelry, medieval monasteries, Renaissance encyclopedias, early computer networks, and the World Wide Web. Finally, he pulls these threads together to reach a surprising conclusion, suggesting that the future of the information age may lie deep in our cultural past.

GLUT: MASTERING INFORMATION THROUGH THE AGES

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