La connaissance est un réseau. Perspective sur l’organisation archivistique et encyclopédique

Abstract

Knowledge is a network. Network analysis is not revolutionizing our objects of study, it revolutionizes the perspective of the researcher on the latter. Organized as a network, information becomes relational. It makes potentially possible the creation of new information, as with an encyclopedia which links between records weave a web which can be analyzed in terms of structural characteristics or with an archive directory which sees its hierarchy fundamentally altered by an index recomposing the information exchange network within a group of people. On the basis of two examples of management, conservation and knowledge enhancement tools, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the archives of the Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, this paper discusses the relationship between the researcher and its object understood as a whole.