Category Archives: KO

Digital Humanities 2009 – call for papers

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Digital Humanities 2009 » Call for Papers. Digital Humanities 2009–the annual joint meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs–will be hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland in College Park, USA.

Suitable subjects for proposals include, for example,

* text analysis, corpora, corpus linguistics, language processing, language learning
* libraries, archives and the creation, delivery, management and preservation of humanities digital resources
* computer-based research and computing applications in all areas of literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical studies, including electronic literature and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship
* use of computation in such areas as the arts, architecture, music, film, theatre, new media, and other areas reflecting our cultural heritage
* research issues such as: information design and modelling; the cultural impact of the new media; software studies; Human-Computer interaction
* the role of digital humanities in academic curricula
* digital humanities and diversity

KO

Reductiones ad absurdum

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

In Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy Elaine Petersen argues that as folksonomy is underpinned by relativism, it will always be flawed as an information retrieval method. So, folksonomy will collapse because everything ends up tagged with every conceivable tag so they all cancel each other out and you might as well have not bothered tagging anything.

On the other hand, David Weinberger in Why tagging matters? claims that taxonomy will fail because taxonomists want to invent one single taxonomy to classify everything in the entire world and in a totalitarian style insist that the one true taxonomy is the only way to organise knowledge.

I have no idea who these mysterious megalomaniac taxonomists are. Most of the taxonomists I am aware of only advocate using one single taxonomy for fairly well defined and limited situations (e.g. a single company, or perhaps a department in a big corporation) and are quite happy with the notion that you need lots of different taxonomies suited to context, which makes them much more like Petersen’s relativists.

Conversely, I am fairly sure you can’t actually create an infinite folksonomy with infinite tags for all possible viewpoints of all possible documents (let alone smaller knowledge units). When your taggers are a specific community with a shared purpose, they probably will hit upon a shared vocabulary that is “universal” within the boundaries of that community and so the folksonomy will be meaningful.

I think that these reductio ad absurdum arguments are interesting because they highlight how both folksonomies and taxonomies are inherently flexible and even somewhat unstable, especially when they become large and very widely used. Intervention and management of both will help improve and maintain their usefulness. No matter whether you choose one or the other or a combination of the two, you still need knowledge workers to keep them in good working order!

Is knowledge stuff or love?

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

Stuff or love? How metaphors direct our efforts to manage knowledge in organisations by Daniel G. Andriessen, in the Journal of Knowledge Management Research & Practice, is a charming paper proposing that the metaphors we use to describe knowledge affect the way that it is managed. Managers often talk about knowledge as a commodity or resource to be exploited – it has a finite value, can be traded, conserved, wasted, and presumably can run out. Having discussed various metaphors of knowledge as a resource, Andriessen asked people to talk about knowledge thinking of it as love. He says: “The topic of conversations changed completely. Suddenly their conversations were about relationships within the organisation, trust, passion in work, the gap between their tasks and their personal aspirations, etc.”

He points out the “knowledge as a resource” is a very Western viewpoint, whereas knowledge as love is more akin to Eastern philosophies. Knowledge as love can be shared without it running out, but it is much harder to direct or control it. It is not difficult to guess which metaphor managers tend to prefer!

Andriessen points out that the metaphors we use tend to remain hidden and unquestioned in our subconscious. He urges us to think about the metaphors underlying our discussions and research on knowledge management and ask “What would have been the outcome of the research if we see knowledge not at stuff but as love?”

Social Media vs. Knowledge Management

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

I was drawn to Venkat’s post on the Enterprise 2.0 blog via What Ralph Knows. Venkat suggests that Knowledge Management and Social Media are in conflict, with younger people preferring an anarchic, organic approach to building knowledge repositories, while older people prefer highly planned structures, and Generation X (of which I am one) remain neutral. I’m always a bit suspicious of generational divisions, as there are plenty of older innovators and young reactionaries, but I must admit I take a “best of both worlds” approach – so I conform to my generational stereotype!

I think the “battle” mirrors the taxonomy/folksonomy debate and experts I’ve asked about this suggest that the best way is to find a synergy. It all depends on the context, what is being organised, and what is needed. So social media are obviously great for certain things, but I’d hate to trust the company’s financial records to a bunch of accountants who said – “oh we don’t bother sorting and storing our files – if we need to prove your tax payments we’ll just stick a post on a forum and see if anyone still has the figures….”

KO

Meta Knowledge Mash-up 2.0 (2008)

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Estimated reading time 6–10 minutes

This joint ISKO UK/KIDMM (Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management) workshop, hosted by the British Computer Society on October 9th, boasted an impressive menu of speakers and delegates.

Alan Pollard (BCS president-elect) welcomed us and Conrad Taylor (KIDMM co-ordinator and organiser of the event) provided a very handy literature review and reading list and summarised concepts of knowledge and its management. He encouraged us to “turn data dumps into real knowledge stores”, referring to Etienne Wenger’s work on Communities of Practice and Karl Popper’s notions of “three worlds” (physical, internal/mental, and socio-cultural). The reification of knowledge was another theme and I was struck by the proposal that language is a reification of knowledge that enables participation.

As the spirit of the day was collaboration, we were seated “cabaret style” in small groups and encouraged to talk to each other and share ideas and formulate questions at the end of each presentation. This was a great way of meeting other delegates and giving the day an informal conversational feel.

Marilyn Leask (Brunel University) described her experiences building large-scale and international knowledge-sharing communities in education (TeacherNet, European SchoolNet, and I&DeA). She warned that projects that begin as community-based knowledge-sharing initiatives can be co-opted by the authorities and become accountability measurement instruments or mechanisms for disseminating information, rather than as spaces for true collaboration. It is therefore important to know what you are trying to achieve with your community and who will ultimately be responsible. It may not be appropriate to have community areas on a site that is ultimately a government tool – there are no wikis on TeacherNet – as private professional discussions cannot take place freely when there is government awareness, if not systematic monitoring, of what is being said.

Where funding is required, patience is necessary as projects can take many years to get going. Often it helps to “seed” an idea, leave it to germinate, and wait until enough people start asking why the idea has not already been acted on before funding can be obtained. It takes a critical mass of people accepting the idea to give it momentum.

Another good tip is to find “champions” of the idea and allow them to provide proof of concept. There will always be “late adopters” who are unwilling to participate and there is no point in trying to convince them in the early stages. It also helps to have knowledge-sharing and participation in community sites built into people’s job descriptions and time allowed for them to learn and join in within their normal working day, so that participation does not become yet another additional burden.

It is possible to provide return on investment (ROI) and value for money figures – for example by using costs of purchasing documents from the British Library (about £30 each) or costs of re-writing existing policy documents unnecessarily (often in the region of £5,000-£10,000).

Lindsay Rees-Jones and Ed Mitchell from CILIP talked about the discussion forums and blog spaces they had created for CILIP members. They pointed out that members of the community are contributing a valuable resource – their time – and so need to feel they receive some benefits in return. It is important to ensure social as well as technical cross-sections to make communities work and establishing behaviours, protocols, and processes is more important for administrators than proposing topics for discussion.

The two presenters agreed that participation needs to be part of job roles, not a voluntary extra, and that buy-in will start slowly, with just a few early adopters, but that others will follow. They also felt that quality of content is more important than the number of contributors.

They found it useful to have some “walled gardens” that were kept completely private and some public and semi-public areas for different groups and different purposes. They also pointed out a difference between networks and communities – networks radiate out from a person, whereas communities occur collectively and separately from any individual.

Jan Wyllie (Open Intelligence Ltd) talked about a knowledge community formed in the mid-1990s to produce the “Tomorrow’s Company Inquiry” report for the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Content was gathered through paper-based questionnaires and letters (mainly sent by fax). Content analysis was used along with a pre-existing taxonomy to identify shared meanings and structure the content. However, a purpose-built taxonomy might have been preferable. Classification is a powerful tool in knowledge discovery, as well as organisation, allowing key questions to be brought to the surface of complex and large collections of information.

Using social networks to organise knowledge is a powerful way of rating discussion – by monitoring who is discussing a subject as well as what is being discussed, a far more detailed picture of trends in thinking and emergent topics can be produced.

Christopher Dean (Airbus SAS) described building knowledge-sharing communities within industry. He classified communities into three types – organic, declared, and manufactured. Organic communities typically grow in a stepped manner – a “punctuated equilibrium” – with bursts of growth followed by plateaus. For communities to succeed, membership needs to be an attractive proposition, with perceived benefits (such as socialising, co-learning, co-production); affordable (in terms of costs and risks – which may be in time as well as money); and voluntary (easy to join and leave). Communities are more successful when they have a clear purpose and attract “birds of a feather” rather than arise out of a process of “herding cats”. Empires fall when their citizens stop believing in them and communities tend to wither when they cease to have a clear purpose.

Communities can be disappointed when an imbalance arises between the state of knowledge within the community and within the wider organisation, as specialist communities often find that things they take for granted are not understood by outsiders.

Dialogic design is a hot new topic concerned with teaching people to participate effectively.

Sabine McNeill (3D Metrics) talked about creating communities to raise political issues and lobby governments. Focusing on a proposal for “Green Credit for Green Growth” and the “Forum for Stable Currencies she described the process of moving from data through knowledge to wisdom. She described online communities as being forums for “software-aided thinking”. She also talked about the community-building value in schemes like LETS that sidestep the problems associated with the wider economic system and environmental destruction.

In our groups we then took part in an entertaining card-sorting exercise to identify key features and requirements for a new knowledge-sharing software tool and website to be built for KIDMM by Susan Payne (De Montfort University). I thoroughly enjoyed this, although unsurprisingly – given that I was amongst expert taxonomists – we tended to focus on classification issues! Susan presented her plans for the Know*Ware software and called for participation and collaboration in its creation.

To round off, there was a panel session which focused on how the Know*Ware tool would be built and what its aims should be.

NKOS slides

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Many thanks to Traugott Koch for these links:

NKOS Workshop at ECDL in Aarhus.

NKOS Special Session at DC 2008 in Berlin, all in one single pdf file.

The Joint NKOS/CENDI Workshop “New Dimensions in Knowledge Organization
Systems”, in Washington, DC, USA on September 11, 2008. “Thanks to the contributors, programme committees, chairs and the large and very active audiences. We invite your active participation 2009 as well. Watch the website. ”

KO

The Popularity Contest: Taxonomy Development in the Petabyte Era

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The Popularity Contest: Taxonomy Development in the Petabyte Era « Not Otherwise Categorized…. I really enjoyed this excellent analysis of a familiar argument (let’s just Google for information), especially the emphasis on the difficulty of answering the question “why?”. When and where are quite easy ones, but why is really tricky! I also liked the straightforward assertion that bias is not just inevitable in taxonomy, it is what makes a good taxonomy.

KO

Folksonomy articles

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Here are some articles on folksonomy that I found in a reading list on the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science website.

Peterson, E. (2006). Beneath the metadata: some philosophical problems with folksonomy. D-Lib Magazine, 12(11).

Vander Wal, T. (2007). Folksonomy coinage and definition.

Quintarelli, E. (2005). Folksonomies: power to the people

Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies: cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata.

Golder, S. A. & Huberman, B. A. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science, 32(2). 198-208.

KO

New method for building multilingual ontologies

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New method for building multilingual ontologies appeared on AlphaGalileo.Org – the Internet-based news centre for European science, engineering and technology. Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing (FIUPM) claim to have created a language-independent ontology-building tool. I think it will work very well for consistent well-structured information – for example in catalogues and directories – but it seems to me that it is essentially being an “auto-indexer” that only really works if you control linguistic forms, and perhaps even vocabulary, very tightly. That’s great – and means plenty of work for editors making sure everything is neat, tidy, and consistent to suit the system – but isn’t it going to be an awful lot of work? Or am I massively missing the point?