Notes from David Weinberger’s session titled “Miscellaneous Knowledge” (he retitled it “The Smell of Knowledge” – David is a pretty funny guy…)
We’re in an age of abundance – both good and bad stuff (ie., spam)
We’re used to our notion of “it’s hard to find good stuff” – not so hard anymore
We assume this – some knowledge is simple – it’s true for everyone – ex = some apples are red
Other assumptions:
- knowledge and truth is scarce (so institutions grow around this scarce knowledge)
- knowledge is orderly (everything fits neatly into categories, even one category)
This is not the case – ie., “is pluto a planet?” – it’s not orderly
we cluster things depending on what we’re doing at the moment – it’s not orderly – it’s personal and changing
Three orders:
first order – come up with a single way of ordering – stuff goes in a single place
second order – separate metadata from the thing – makes physical object easier to find
third order – content and metadata becomes digital – no need to put stuff in one place anymore
In the third order:
1. leaf on many branches – ie., a camera can go in multiple categories (computer equipment, photographic equipment, graduation gifts, etc)
2. messiness is a virtue – all this stuff can link to each other, you can link it in many different ways to add value to it
3. metadata and data are merging – ie., you can search subject heading for Moby Dick – you can also search for “call me ishmael” – brings back same thing. You just used data as metadata… “everything is a lever”
Content is connection – Books are built as dead-ends – it’s difficult to make connections from one book to another. Digitally, this gets much simpler through links
4. unowned order – or personally-owned order. I can arrange it however I personallywant to – I don’t have to depend on others anymore
Cataloging – worked great in print. On the web, it simply doesn’t scale
Example – LOC added 3000 photos to flickr with the metadata they had – they allowed users to add tags, and they did. SOme photos ran out of tags – flickr allows 75 tags. So people left their tags in the comments.
LOC doesn’t have the time, staff, or expertise to tag these 3000 photos the way they’re being tagged – they needed user-generated tags
Nice slide – David added Wikipedia’s “the neutrality of this article is disputed” phrase to a screenshot of the New York TImes… then asked – “why don’t we see this?”
A discussion list is smarter than an individual poster to the list. Knowledge exists through conversation, and is social.
Knowledge is becoming linked.
a blogger that links to other places tells people to “go away.” The hope is that readers will find that valuable enough to come back to you.
A newspaper is more narcissistic than a blogger – they point back to themselves most of the time – the rest are ads. Bloggers point away from themselves.
What happens to librarie? “I don’t know.”
“We all love books, but books really suck.”
- books aren’t convenient – you have to go get it, you can’t comment, you can’t share well.
- books have long-form arguments – it’s overrated. Hard to actually find books for that.
- books have content, but not links
- etc
What’s the “must” of libraries now? We can’t know this until we know what’s happening with knowledge – and we don’t know that yet.
Tagged as:
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miscellaneous,
threeorders
Remember my post about my day in the life a day or two ago? Guess what? Bobbi Newman, cool Digital Branch Manager at Chattahoochee Valley Libraries and blogger at Librarian by Day, just posted her Second Annual Library Day in the Life Project!
The idea being that you’re sharing an average day, so many of us don’t have an average day though so a lot of people did a week, me included.”
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