An "Arcipilago" as an Intellectual Ecosystem: In Search of Jean Piaget's Library Through a Visual History.

Abstract

Divided into three parts, this article highlights the spatial and temporal boundaries of Jean Piaget's library through a visual history of his office based on photographs taken since the late 1960s. First, we showed how Piaget's library, as part of an intellectual ecosystem, sedimented along a spatial boundary into a horizontalized space, the "archipilago," consisting of an archipelago of book stacks and files, and a vertical space, the wall-mounted bookcases. This division of space corresponded to two donations of works to the Piaget Archives made at different times. It also highlights the fact that Piaget's writing space became mobile at a certain point in time, which has yet to be determined. Second, we scrutinized Piaget's intellectual ecosystem, asking how his disorder was structured and what its temporal boundaries were. To answer this question, we developed a model that distinguished between two types of behavior specific to an intellectual ecosystem: research behavior and archival behavior, the former managing the potentiality of the elements it processed (open segments), while the latter closed many of these segments. Applying this model, it becomes clear that certain areas of the office were closed at a certain point in time, especially the library, which was thus partially inaccessible. The third part focused on the heuristic perimeter of this intellectual ecosystem, using statistical analyses of the library to complement its visual history. These analyses allowed us to better understand Piaget's relationship with certain issues, such as the time it took him to build up his library, the types of reading he did, the evolution of his relationship with interdisciplinarity and the interdisciplinary perception of him by the scientific community, and the geographical distribution of the works dedicated to him at different times. The article concludes by showing how the analysis of the library allowed us to date the period when the writing space became mobile, Piaget responding to changes in his intellectual environment by modifying the shape of his ecosystem.