The Researcher's Workstation and the History of Hypertexts

The researcher's workstation focused on more and more handy machines, with laptop computers as well as devices that facilitated mobile data capture. Machinery, as Paul Otlet called it, became the solution for ensuring optimized workstation. The importance of Otlet in the history of digital humanities is in his desire to process information, documents and data using new processes, and the introduction of techniques. The techniques were both intellectual, and also “machine‐based”, like devices that made it possible to increase the ability of individuals and groups to process information. The rationale of a workstation was thus directly linked to the concept of hypertexts, to the idea of being able to handle as many documents as ideas. When conceptual stability and a technical wish came together, hypertextual systems were integrated into software environments, right up to the Web – making hypertexts its basis.