14-17 May 2008
Ghent University, International Conference ANALOGOUS SPACES 
  
The International Conference on Analogous Spaces interrogates the analogy between spaces in which knowledge is preserved, organized, transferred or activated. Although these spaces may differ in material, virtual, or operational ways, there are resemblances if one examines their 'structure,' 'form' and 'architecture'. How do these spaces co-exist and interrelate?
   
  
The conference will present papers on the following types of spaces:

• architecture and elements of the built environment
  (museums, libraries and archives, warehouses, ministries, administrative towns, world capitals, physical infrastructure, functionalist urbanism, etc.)
   
• information storage and data processing
  (databases, information retrieval, data mining, conceptual maps, scholarly communication, search engines, etc.)
     
• the architecture of "the book"
  (contents and layout of atlases, scientific and scholarly treatises, encyclopedias, guides, manuals, children's books etc.) 
   
• organizational schemes and diagrams
  (organigrams, functional diagrams, visual language, interfaces, artificial intelligence, taxonomies, classification systems, itineraries, etc.).
  Conference papers will examine analogical relationships between these types of spaces by investigating how they produce, accumulate, order, conserve, distribute, classify, and use knowledge.