1948–2020
Scholar of perspective, visual knowledge and cultural history
Professor Kim H. Veltman was a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar whose work connected perspective, art history, science, technology, Leonardo da Vinci studies, media theory, cultural memory and the organisation of knowledge.
He treated perspective not simply as an artistic technique, but as part of the wider history of how human beings see, measure, represent and understand the world. This broad conception helped establish perspective as a subject extending across art, optics, instruments, science, communication, education and visual culture.
Veltman’s doctoral research at the University of London was supervised by the eminent art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich. He later worked within the intellectual environment shaped by Professor Marshall McLuhan, becoming Scientific Director of The Perspective Unit in the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.
His Life’s Work — In His Own Words
Veltman himself summed up the extraordinary breadth of his research through three deceptively simple subjects: “I work on 1 man (Leonardo da Vinci), one word (perspective) and 1 object (the proportional compass/sector).” Leonardo linked the three: Veltman observed that he used perspective and developed a version of the proportional compass, adding, “The individual facts were significant, but it was the connections between them that interested me most.” Looking back on more than fifteen years of post-doctoral research, he explained where those connections led him: “This work on one word, one man and one object brought me to the limits of knowledge in these fields and provoked to think about new methods of knowledge organization.”
Kim at Work — Thought for the Day
For a number of years Veltman circulated short Thought for the Day papers among colleagues — informal intellectual dispatches in which a practical question could rapidly expand into an exploration of knowledge, culture, technology and the future. They provide an unusually direct glimpse of the man at work: wide-ranging, connective, questioning and continually searching for new relationships between ideas. One was tellingly titled Thought for the Day and for a Lifetime’s Work.
“not a quest to find the most popular à la Google, but a commitment to exploring the most true in a cumulative sense.”
A substantial selection of these working papers survives in the Kim Veltman Archive.
Read Thought for the Day — Lots of Thoughts! (PDF) →
Goals, Passions and Intellectual Journey
Three surviving autobiographical documents offer an unusually direct view of Veltman’s intellectual ambitions, personal values and development as a scholar. Together they show not only what he studied, but why he studied it: his commitment to learning, connections between fields, the pursuit of truth, the organisation of knowledge and the sharing of ideas.
Brief Description of Interests and Goals
A concise intellectual manifesto in which Veltman explains how his work on perspective, Leonardo da Vinci and universal measuring instruments led him towards knowledge organisation, SUMS and a wider vision for new kinds of digital libraries.
Read the full document →Life Goals
A deeply personal reflection on the passions that shaped his life: learning, compassion and love. Veltman writes about curiosity, sharing, connections, truth, wonder and gratitude, offering a rare portrait of the person behind the scholarship.
Read the full document →Domains of Study
An extended autobiographical account tracing the development of his scholarship from his student years through Gombrich and Sabra, perspective and Leonardo, the bibliography, SUMS, the universal-library vision, Maastricht and his later return to perspective studies.
Read the full document →Kim H. Veltman — In His Own Words (2019)
Filmed at his home in 2019, shortly before his death, Kim H. Veltman introduces his work on the history and development of the alphabet. This brief interview offers a rare first-hand impression of Veltman himself — his intellectual rigour, breadth of enquiry and characteristic approach to scholarship.
Kim H. Veltman — Lecture
Watch Kim H. Veltman speaking in his own words, offering a direct introduction to his ideas and intellectual approach.
Canadian Television Interview — The Perspective Unit, University of Toronto (1994)
A 1994 Canadian television interview with Kim H. Veltman discussing the work of The Perspective Unit at the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, including its research into perspective, visual knowledge, new media and emerging digital methods.
Open the 1994 television interview →
Kim Veltman and the McLuhan Circle
A short interview with Marshall McLuhan’s wife recalling Kim Veltman and his connection with the McLuhan intellectual circle.
Open the McLuhan interview clip →
Alphabets of Life Lectures
A series of 28 recorded lectures by Kim H. Veltman exploring themes developed in Alphabets of Life, including alphabets, writing systems, language, culture and the transmission and organisation of knowledge.
German Radio Interview — New Technologies
A substantial two-part English-language radio interview in which Kim H. Veltman discusses new technologies, new media, knowledge organisation and their implications for culture and scholarship.
Part 1 — approximately 1 hr 14 min
Part 2 — approximately 1 hr 1 min
Career and Institutions
Veltman served as Scientific Director of The Perspective Unit within the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Program. He later became Scientific Director of the Maastricht McLuhan Institute and the Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute.
Through these institutions, he developed extensive research programmes and digital resources concerned with perspective, visual systems, Leonardo da Vinci, media, cultural heritage and the organisation of knowledge.
Veltman was also an early thinker on the future of digital knowledge. His System for Universal Media Searching (SUMS) explored how books, electronic resources, databases, museums and cultural collections could be connected in a common knowledge environment. His wider work addressed conceptual navigation, semantic knowledge, electronic libraries, cultural computing and the implications of new media for scholarship and society.
Kim Veltman’s Digital Knowledge Systems
Veltman did not simply write about the future organisation of knowledge: he built experimental systems to explore it. These surviving interfaces provide a visual record of that work, from the early System for Universal Media Searching (SUMS) to the later Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute.
System for Universal Media Searching (SUMS) — 1998
An early interface for Veltman’s proposed system of interconnected media, concepts and knowledge resources.
Open the SUMS 1998 PDF →
Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute — 2019
The later VMMI environment, bringing together SUMS, perspective, Leonardo studies, new media and topic-map approaches to knowledge.
Open the VMMI PDF →Scholarship and Contribution
Veltman’s work demonstrated that perspective belongs not only to the history of art, but also to the histories of science, optics, instruments, media, education and visual communication.
His major projects included the Bibliography of Perspective, containing approximately 15,000 titles, and the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Perspective. His interdisciplinary approach remains an important part of the intellectual foundation of the Perspective Research Centre.
The scale and breadth of Kim H. Veltman’s scholarship were exceptional. Across his career he wrote at least 24 major books or book-length works, with each multi-volume work counted only once. His major works included three volumes on Leonardo da Vinci and perspective totalling approximately 1,400 pages; the eight-volume, approximately three-million-word Encyclopedia of Perspective; a 600-page work on new media; and the approximately 2,250-page, multi-volume Alphabets of Life, developed from many years of research into alphabets, writing systems and the transmission of knowledge.
Kim Veltman’s Personal Library
A brief glimpse of part of Kim Veltman’s personal research library at his home. The collection comprised approximately 12,000 volumes, reflecting the extraordinary breadth of his interests across perspective, art, science, technology, cultural history and the organisation of knowledge.
Open the personal library video →
Major Publications and Book-Length Works
Veltman produced at least two dozen major books and book-length works, alongside hundreds of papers, chapters, lectures, reviews and other scholarly texts. His major writings ranged from Leonardo da Vinci, perspective and optics to knowledge organisation, new media, cultural history, alphabets and writing systems.
Perspective, Leonardo da Vinci and visual knowledge
| Year | Work | Pages | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1975/77 | Renaissance Optics and Perspective | 471 (full thesis scan) | Not extractable from scan |
| 1984 | Continuity and Discovery in Optics and Astronomy, Parts I–II | c. 1,200 (2 vols.) | 273,735 |
| 1986 | Studies in Leonardo da Vinci 1: Linear Perspective and the Visual Dimensions of Science and Art | 309 | Not extractable from scan |
| 1990 | Geometric Games: A Brief History of the Not So Regular Solids | 94 | 32,918 |
| 2004 | Leonardo’s Method | 103 | 43,379 |
| Various | Encyclopedia of Perspective | 8 vols. · 3,016 | c. 3,000,000 |
| Subtotal | c. 5,193 pages | more than 3.35 million words | |
The Encyclopedia of Perspective represents the culmination of decades of research and brings together earlier bodies of work including Literature on Perspective, Sources of Perspective and the Bibliography of Perspective. These earlier components are therefore not counted separately here as additional major works.
Knowledge organisation, media and digital culture
| Year | Work | Pages | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | SUMMA: System for Universal Multi-Media Access | 246 | 77,932 |
| 2004 | Frontiers in Conceptual Navigation for Cultural Heritage | 267 | 94,342 |
| 2008 | Understanding New Media | 690 | 282,813 |
| Subtotal | 1,203 pages | 455,087 words | |
Culture, writing and wider scholarship
| Year | Work | Pages | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1981 | Mediterranean Journey | 203 | Not extractable from scan |
| 2005 | Stories of the Sky | 145 | 57,531 |
| 2006 | American Visions of Convergence | 255 | 104,218 |
| 2015 | 9 and 11 | 118 | 45,451 |
| 2017 | Autobiography | 508 | 199,022 |
| 2019 | Alphabets of Life, Scholars Edition, vols. 1–2 | 2,250 | 513,811 |
| 2020 | Wowology and Wonderology | 95 | 14,213 |
| Subtotal | 3,574 pages | at least 934,246 words | |
The selected major works in these three tables alone amount to approximately 9,970 pages. The individual word counts and table subtotals give a further indication of their scale, but they should not be treated as a complete total of Veltman’s lifetime written output: some scans contain no extractable text, and substantial additional material lies outside this selected list.
This is a selected list of major works rather than a complete bibliography. The Kim Veltman Archive also contains a very large body of published papers, book chapters, conference contributions, lectures and reviews, together with private, unpublished, draft and project material.
Word counts are measured from extractable PDF text except where a fuller established work total is stated. Where a scan contains no machine-readable text, no word count is stated; table subtotals are therefore conservative.
The Kim Veltman Archive
The Perspective Research Centre maintains the official archive of Professor Kim H. Veltman’s work. The scale of Veltman’s surviving work is exceptional. The currently indexed UKS collection alone contains 424 archive records, comprising 19,461 pages, 7,069,290 searchable words and approximately 1.77 GB of digital material.
This indexed UKS collection represents only part of the wider Kim Veltman Archive. The archive contains well over 1,000 documents in all, including published books, book chapters, refereed papers, articles, reviews and vision statements, together with extensive private, unpublished, draft, prototype, project and presentation material that has not yet been fully indexed. The figure of 424 therefore refers to currently indexed archive records and should not be read as a count of Kim Veltman’s complete surviving output or as 424 formally published works.
The PRC preserves this body of work while continuing research into perspective, visual knowledge, classification, archives and the long history of attempts to represent spatial reality.
Explore the Kim Veltman Archive →
View the Publications Catalogue → (part of the Library of Perspective)
Memories and Tributes
Anna Maria Dell’Agata — Memories of Kim Veltman: The Spiritual Adventure of Research
A personal remembrance of Kim as scholar, friend and intellectual companion, tracing their friendship, travels and shared encounters with art, science and culture.
M. P. Satija — Kim H. Veltman (1948–2020): In Memoriam
A scholarly obituary surveying Kim’s life, career, research, publications and contributions to perspective, Leonardo da Vinci studies, new media and knowledge organisation.
Read the full obituary (PDF) →
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