miscellaneous

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: davidweinberger, metadata, miscellaneous, threeorders

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