Alex Wright | Britannica

Alex Wright

Contributor

BIOGRAPHY

Alex Wright is the Director of User Experience and Product Research at The New York Times. Alex has also led research and design projects for IBM, Microsoft, The Long Now Foundation, Harvard University, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo!, among others. He is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts MFA program in Interaction Design.

Primary Contributions (1)

Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet was a Belgian bibliographer and entrepreneur whose ambitious Mundaneum project attempted to create a universal repository of all the world’s recorded knowledge. His related writings on information science anticipated the advent of the World Wide Web. Born to a prosperous Brussels family,…

Publications (2)

Cataloging the World Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (2014)

By Alex Wright

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...

Glut Mastering Information Through the Ages (2008)

By Alex Wright

"Alex Wright delivers a fascinating tour of the many ways that humans have collected, organized, and shared information to show how the information age started long before microchips or movable type."--Publishers Weekly

"This stimulating book offers much opportunity to reflect on the nature and long history of information management as a damper to the panic or the elation we may variously feel as we face ever greater scales of information overload."--Nature

"Glut is a penetrating...