The Good Neighbour Explorer
Click and drag to spin the coloured wheel
Classification Table
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1st Floor Image |
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2nd Floor Word |
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3rd Floor Orientation |
A - Philosophy |
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4th Floor Action |
Classification Table
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1st Floor Image |
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2nd Floor Word |
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3rd Floor Orientation |
A - Philosophy |
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4th Floor Action |
Spin the wheel, and imagine another possible Warburg Institute. The Good Neighbor Explorer allows you to deform the Warburg Institute's Library Catalogue, but in a consistent way. The ten main categories of the Warburg Catalogue are in the blue table, together with the floor of the institute they are shelved under. As visitors to the institute will know, each floor corresponds to the progressive tetrad of Word, Image, Orientation and Action, but these are also the top-level categories of its library catalogue.
The unique principle of the Warburg Catalogue is the "Law of the Good Neighbor" which says that the book that one finds will be shelved next to the book one was looking for. The great secret of the Warburg's Catalogue from an information organization perspective is that this is done simply through the categories themselves, not through any properties or keywords attached to the categories. This goes back to the idiosyncratic nature of Warburg's original collection, but those who have followed in his footsteps certainly seem to have continued this logic of association. Books are shelved according to a kind of sympathy among their contents, rather than based on an arbitrary classification schema.
This little thinking machine allows you to create new Good Neighbors every time you imagine a new Warburg Library. What would the library look like if "A - Philosophy" was considered as associated with "Image" rather than "Word"? Spin the wheel and find out. Each time you spin the wheel, a new imaginary Catalogue is generated, and you receive four "Good Neighbors," one for Word, Image, Orientation and Action. Clicking through the links will reveal to you where they are actually shelved in the Warburg Institute. You can also use this machine to orient yourself. You can spin the wheel and receive four book recommendations, and then head out into the physical institute to see what other Good Neighbors the library has in store for you. Good luck.
Readers may also remember Borges' fable "The Library of Babel." which tells of an infinite library with infinite books. The Good Neighbor Explorer is a bit like that, except you can use it to generate an infinite number of Warburg Institutes from the original catalogue...
The astrological volvelle plays a modest yet significant part in the history of the book. Volvelles are analog computers which consist of circular paper dials, often used to represent the position of celestial bodies in the heavens. Ramon Llull uses them to represent logical reasoning in a diagrammatic way. Due to this, volvelles are also one of the antecedents to modern computation. When Leibniz discusses the enigmatic idea of 'situs' in his dissertation De Arte Combinatoria, if one takes its frontispiece into account, it seems likely that the position he had in mind was one measured in degrees or radians; in other words, his characteristica universalis was probably meant to be written on volvelles. Since the volvelle spans the history of astrology, computation, and the origins of modern science, it is a highly Warburgian topic. Indeed, some of the most popular books to come out of the institute, such as the works of Dame Frances Yates can be read (among other interpretations) as a history of volvelles.
The volvelle has been underexploited as a user interface design. Pie charts and sunburst diagrams abound in the field of information visualization. Few have taken the extra step to consider a pie chart as a coordinate system in and of itself. Fewer still have added the operation of spinning a wheel to transform how elements are positioned in that coordinate system. There is a simple reason for this: circles are divine objects, whose mysterious proportions inherently boggle the human mind. This is despite the fact that both modern physics and ancient intuitions tell us that their geometry is closer to the true nature of space and time. Rectilinear visualizations and cartesian coordinate systems are easier for our little Euclidian minds to grasp. The math problem of the quadrature of the circle will always remain popular because it offers us the impossible dream of taking the mysterious but true proportions of radial space and presenting them in sequential, cut and dry, cartesian order.
All of this is to say, circular visualizations are confusing. But they do offer users the ability to consider items in a holistic way. This is why pie charts are effective. For proportions one can quickly grasp holistic relations between different variables. For treemaps which represent hierarchical relationships this can be confusing. Circular visualizations offer users the chance to enter a meditative state and consider the whole, rather than the parts. They encourage an investigation of information which is meditative, relational, and non-sequential. In most circumstances, this is not an ideal visualization. For browsing the Warburg library catalogue this is perfect, because the radial visualization offers a new way to realize the Law of the Good Neighbor.
In order to transform the Warburg Catalogue into a volvelle the first step is to create an ontology. This is not the same as a philosophical ontology: this is an information ontology. An information ontology uses the tools of philosophical ontology to describe data in a given domain. In this case, the classmarks of the Warburg Catalogue were transformed into a simple hierarchy. This was done by hand. The ontology can be found here. Then, the ontology was used to reason over the complete Warburg catalogue as of early 2023. To keep modelling simple, each book was treated as an instance of a 3 letter code, and the following numbers, including cutter numbers, were ignored. This was due to the fact that modeling numbers would be confusing at later steps in the project, as the numbers would have be treated as words, which might confuse the machine. Following this the ontology reasoned over the 300,000 books in the Warburg library and determined that if a book was an instance of an alphanumeric whether it was shelved under Word, Image, Orientation or Action. This creates a representation of the Warburg Library which looks like a branching tree, where the books are the leaves, and the cataloguing system is the branches.
Next, a method called OWL2Vec* was used, which transformed this tree into a geometric representation of its structure. OWL2Vec does this by conducting random walks along the tree and assembling a document of "sentences." A typical sentence would be "BookA" is a "ClassB." After creating this document of "sentences" OWL2Vec uses Google's famous Word2Vec, which treats the entities in the classification system as words, to transform their positions into vectors.
Now the books existed as points within an abstract space of 100 dimensions. The dimensions of this space represent the context of how a word is used in a sentence, or in this case where a book appears in the catalogue. Unfortunately, visualizing 100 dimensions if often tricky, so in order to create this interface a method called principle component analysis was used to reduce those dimensions to two. Then these two dimensions were converted from cartesian to polar coordinates, giving the space the shape of a circle. This makes it simple to create a mapping from rotating the wheel to spinning through the space.
The space the books are mapped to is different from the arbitrary space of the circular volvelle interface. A simple equation to sum the semantic of positions of the categories and books and map it to the rotations of the interface was used. For each of the four positions represented on the cross (Word, Image, Orientation and Action), a different set of books are fetched based on the position of the dial from the original catalogue. Some degree of randomness emerges in this process.
Another consideration in the creation of the Good Neighbor Explorer was the design. The colours in the wheel are based on an old colour classification scheme for the Warburg Categories. This was taken from Anna Gialdini's paper "The Warburg Library Classification Scheme in its Context", a paper she wrote for a course in Library and Information Science at City, University of London (#CityLIS). The Warburg Library Emblem was chosen as an elegant way to link the interface to the structure and spirit of the institute itself, and also encapsulating the ahistorical nature of using a Llullian volvelle as a way of browsing a library catalogue.
In Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series, recently adapted for the screen by the BBC, the protagonist Lyra Belacqua manipulates her truth-reader (an "alethiometer") to perform a kind of divination very reminiscent of Renaissance emblems. Indeed, Pullman has been open about being inspired by Yates' work "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition". In order to read the alethiometer Lyra must enter a special kind of meditative state to interpret the emblems in the symbol reader. When we enter terms into Google today or, (God forbid) questions into ChatGPT, too often we are seeking instant information, which precludes the possibility of a contemplative space. The Good Neighbor Explorer invites us to think of browsing a library as an act of serendipity: to search for Good Neighbors with no objective in mind, and to enter a meditative state similar to Lyra's, allowing the magic of the alternative Warburg Libraries to naturally emerge.
In the future, the hope is that user interfaces like this one will allow us to engage with the information artificial intelligences create for us in a more humane (humanistic), contemplative, and structured way.
