Mondothèque: A Radiated Book
2016
In 1919 the Mundaneum occupied half of the majestic Cinquantenaire building in Brussels. The ambitious project was imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine as a mix between documentation center, conference venue and educational display. “The Mundaneum is an Idea, an Institution, a Method, a Body of workmaterials and collections, a Building, a Network.” (Paul Otlet, Monde)
In 2013 a band of artists, archivists and activists set out to unravel the many implications of a statement that routinely compared the Mundaneum to “Google on paper”. Under the moniker Mondotheque they organised discussions, reflections and workshops in various locations. A Semantic MediaWiki functioned as a platform for writing, editing and bookdesign. The publication of Mondotheque::a radiating book creates a moment, an incision into this collaborative process. It is an invitation into the entanglements of knowledge infrastructures, geo-politics and local histories[1]
.
In 2016, well way into the Mondotheque project, Femke Snelting invited to join and help transclude the content, structures and interconnections of the articles written in the Mondothèque wik onto a paper publication. Far from being an individual effort, this process involved the whole editorial team, which besides myself and Femke included Sînziana Păltineanu, Dennis Pohl, Dick Reckard, Natacha Roussel, [https://monoskop.org/Alexia_de_Visscher Alexia de Visscher. We devised a wiki-to-PDF workflow, using primarily the Mediawiki API to select and download articles' wiki pages as HTML files, and [http://weasyprint.org/ Weasyprin with custom CSS stylesheets for print to convert the HTML files into a printable PDF, plus some custom scripts to manipulate the HTML content [2]. The resulting publication can be downloaded from http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/File:Book.pdf .
Links
- [http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Mondothèque project wik
- The Radiated Book (wiki) Table of Contents
- Radiated Book PDF
Tools
- [http://mediawiki.org/ Mediawik
- [https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki Semantic Mediawik
- Etherpad
- [http://weasyprint.org/ Weasyprin
- [https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ GNU Mak
- Python Libraries
References
- ↑ From A Radiated Booklaunch
- ↑ See: Radiated Book Code Repository https://gitlab.com/Mondotheque/RadiatedBook
Publishing Projects