Scott B. Weingart has posted a preprint [pdf] of “From Trees to Webs: Uprooting Knowledge through Visualization,” in which he discusses the shift from visualizing the classification of knowledge as hierarchical and linear (tree) to the modern conception of knowledge as rhizomatic and networked (web).
In the blog post announcing the work, which also contains several images that are not included in the preprint, Weingart explains:
It’s basically two stories: one of how we shifted from understanding the world hierarchically to understanding it as a flat web of interconnected parts, and the other of how the thing itself and knowledge of that thing became separated.
The article will be published as part of the proceedings of the Universal Decimal Classification Seminar at the Hague, taking place in October 2013.