Uncategorized

You in the Dewey Decimal System

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

Spacefem.com: Dewey Decimal System Meme. Some seasonal silliness!

via Impressions Scholarcast.

Here’s mine:

Fran’s Dewey Decimal Section:
002 The book

Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works

Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.

What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You’re working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

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information management

Knowledge angels

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< 1 minute

Knowledge angels are not Christmas decorations 2.0 but are “those people in information industries who are the most expert, understand innovations in their sector and add the most value to a company” according to an article on Alphagalileo. The phrase is based on “business angels” and one of the researchers who coined it stated: “Other possible names, such as, for instance, ‘consulting wizards’, ‘services magicians’, ‘knowledge-intensive demons’ or any further hybrid creatures resulting from the crossing of a management handbook and a magic trading cards, would sound less attractive.”

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the phrase to start appearing on CVs!

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search | semantic web

National Centre for Text Mining

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< 1 minute

The National Centre for Text Mining is “the first publicly-funded text mining centre in the world”. It is an initiative of Manchester and Liverpool universities, working with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Tokyo. They appear to be working mainly on biology texts at the moment, but I enjoyed the explanations of their techniques and processes, despite the technicality. There are links to events and seminars that are aimed at the scientific community but some would probably be of interest to more general semantic web enthusiasts.

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culture | KO

The Social Life of Information

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Estimated reading time 3–5 minutes

The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid is an info classic. It’s one of those delightful books that manages to be very erudite, cover a huge range of theory, but reads effortlessly and even had me laughing out loud from time to time. (My favourite anecdote was that BT’s answer to homeworkers’ sense of isolation was to pipe a soundtrack of canned background noise and chatter into their offices!)

Essentially, the book argues that information and information technology cannot be separated from its social context and ignoring the human factors in technology adoption and use leads to fundamental misunderstandings of what it can and does do. This may mean overestimating the potential of information technology to change pre-existing institutions and practices, on both a personal and collective scale, and underestimating the ability of people to adapt technology to suit their ends rather than those envisaged by the technologists.

The authors argue that many “infoenthusiasts” miss subtleties of communication, such as the implicit social negotiations that take place in face-to-face conversations or the social meanings conveyed by a document printed on high quality paper or a book with expensive leather binding. Such nuances are easily lost when the words from such communications are removed from their original context and placed in a new environment – such as an electronic database.

Similarly, although personalisation is often touted as a great advance – you can have your own uniquley customised version of a website or a newspaper – such personalisation diminishes the power of the information source to act as a binding-point for a community. If we all have different versions of the newspaper, then we can’t assume we share common knowledge of the same stories. We then have to put additional work into reconnecting and recreating our knowledge communities, so the benefits of personalisation do not come without costs.

The importance of negotiation, collaboration, and improvisation is argued to be highly significant but extremely hard to build into automated systems. The social nature of language and the complexities of learning how to be a member of a community of practice, including knowing when to break or bend rules, are also essential to how human beings operate but extremely difficult to replicate in technological systems.

The theme of balance runs throughout the book – for example between the need to control processes while allowing freedom for innovation in companies or between the need for communication amongst companies and the need to protect intellectual property (knowledge in companies was often either seen as too “sticky” – hard to transfer and use – or too “leaky” – flowing too easily to competitors). At an institutional level, balance is needed between the importance of stability for building trust and openness to evolution (the perception of the value of a degree is bound up with the established reputation of an educational institution).

I found this very interesting, as my brother has been trying to persuade me that Daoism with its emphasis on things moving gradually from one state to another is a more productive way at looking at complex systems than the Aristotelian view that something can be in one category, or its opposite, but never both at once. (Here is a sisterly plug for an article he has written on the application of Daoist ideas to environmentalism). It also fits in with the idea of balancing the stability of an ordered taxonomy with the fast-flowing nature of folksonomies and of finding a way of using social media to support rather than compete with more formalised knowledge management practice. Brown and Duguid say: “For all the advantages of fluidity, we should not forget that fixity still has its charms. Most of us prefer the checks we receive and the contracts we write to remain stable”, which seems particularly apt given the global credit crisis!

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KO

The Fractal Nature of Knowledge « Not Otherwise Categorized…

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

The Fractal Nature of Knowledge « Not Otherwise Categorized… is Seth Earley’s response to a question about whether we “need more categories” as knowledge becomes more specialised. He points out that “categories are only meaningful given a specific scale” and that the level of abstraction you need depends on the context.

The metaphor of the fractal nature of knowledge strikes me as quite a good one in this respect – a knowledge organisation system should allow you to pan out or zoom in to get different views, but obviously there are practical limits (Borges’s map of the empire that is the same size as the empire itself) so you have to make a selection – in both breadth and depth. Seth Earley notes that “Communities of Practice can coalesce around extremely arcane branches of knowledge” and they could well need a very “fine grain” that no-one else in their organisation would ever use.

He adds that “there is no ‘standard’ way of organizing knowledge even for a specific process in a specific industry” and describes the way different organisations (businesses, libraries, universities) have different “knowledge consumers” and therefore different classification needs. He also argues that for businesses to gain maiximum value from their knowledge, they should find the “sweet spot” between chaos and control – allowing people to “self-organise” while contributing to the overall goals of the business.

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information architecture | information management | search

Online Information 2008 (London online)

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Estimated reading time 4–7 minutes

I went on Tuesday to Online 2008 at Olympia. It seemed quieter than last year, so I took advantage of some of the free presentations. I listened to Laurent Le Meur talking about Agence France-Presse (AFP)’s efforts to create a multimedia news database – (Imageforum), Graham Beastall of Soutron Ltd on Taxonomy Development using Sharepoint, Scott Gavin on Knowledge Plaza, and Judith Lewis of i-level on the Dark Side of Social Media.

Le Meur described the need to create a common metadata language to bring together journalists and photographers, who tended to think about subjects very differently. AFP use autocategorisation software (supplied by Temis) but have invested heavily in training it to work well, in other words lots of human input. They imported a number of existing vocabularies from such sources as GeoNames, EuroVoc, and the IPTC‘s taxonomy of news categories as a base, selecting 300 of the IPTC’s 1,300 categories to improve software performance. They currently extract and autocategorise people, organisations, locations, points of interest, products, and brands. They would realy like to be able to pick out news events, but language usage is too broad and diffuse for them to have managed this with any success.

Their documentalists and indexers were initially reluctant to work with the new system as it meant a dramatic reduction in the complexity of their indexing work. Previously they could use some 3,000 terms but this was reduced in order to be compatible with the entity extraction software.

For images, they found the key facets were expressions (e.g. smiling), action, aspect (e.g. profile, close-up) and style (e.g. backlit). They are happy with the Antidot faceted navigation system that allows them to choose index fields, but have not been able to incorporate image rights, as they are too complex and vary according to things like location of the user.

Beastall said that users of Sharepoint are not fully exploiting it, with only 4% using it as a tool for search, while 43% use it for collaborative working. He warned that you need to impose discipline in categorisation right from the start of an implementation as once information has “grown wild” it is far harder to retrospectively tidy it up. He also pointed out that people tend to think they know where to find things, but then someone else has a site reorganisation, so if key information wasn’t well indexed, it can be lost.

There is also value in segmenting your information so that you have public areas separate from the main enterprise content management system. Such public areas can then be treated differently in terms of things like security and social working. An interesting take on the taxo/folkso synergy is to let people build their own sites, but to have a central team looking out for good candidates for inclusion in centralised systems, and to bring personal sites in when they are useful, amalgamating to remove duplicates, etc. He encouraged the use of folksonomies as a “fast track” to sit beside the core vocabularies and feed into them, as folksonomies are particularly useful for new and fast-moving areas, but not so good for long term management and control. He cited the websites contentandcode.com – a Microsoft solutions provider, The Information Architecture Institute, a useful article on taxonomies, thesauruses, etc., by metamodel, and the Sharepoint blog vitalskill.com.

Knowledge Plaza is a CMS [Scott Gavin has pointed out that it is actually more a Knowledge Management/Enterprise Search tool – see his comment] that allows a dual taxo/folkso approach, with options for a totally open folkso system, a managed folkso system, where users can use any tag they like, but an administrator effectively builds a thesuarus in the background to link synonyms and prompt future users with preferred terms, and a totally controlled vocabulary.

Social search seemed to be a buzzword this year, and Gavin talked about a function that allowed you to “use people as search engines” but as far as I could tell, this actually meant the system simply recorded everybody’s search results, websites visited, etc., and then allowed other people to run a search on specific people’s collections of information. [Actually, the system runs live Google searches on the websites particular people have looked at, as well as emails, documents, etc associated with them or that are tagged a particular way – see Scott’s comment for more details].

Lewis’s talk wasn’t a cultural critique of the effect of social media on humanity, but a useful practical guide to how to avoid breaking the law and causing damage to brand reputation by using social media badly. Essentially – don’t pose as a genuine customer when you are working for a company and don’t disguise advertisements by making them indistinguishable from articles (which can be a bit of a grey area). She also suggested that it was better to have one company blog and get lots of people to contribute to it to keep it moving, than have lots of company blogs that are hardly ever updated.

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culture

Obama and Facebook, Surowiecki and crowds, social media and the Panopticon

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Estimated reading time 2–3 minutes

Following on from my post the other day, it occurred to me that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is a bit like social media. We enforce a social norm not through pressure but through constant mutual observation.

This post on the election of Obama and the Facebook effect seems to be a different slant on the same idea: Unit Structures – Regarding the Facebook Effect. Fred Stutzman claims “Social Networks like Facebook reveal our lives to one another in novel and interesting ways. I’m able to friend you and watch your life pass by in a News Feed. Because of the pragmatics of daily life I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with that information otherwise. A side effect of this is that I’m also influenced by you – your decisions about the information you share or the identity you create…Obama was not elected because of a “Facebook Effect.” No, what happened is that the internet helped us pull the veil back on one another.”

Stutzman sees this as a positive “moderating” effect, but it seems rather like the “dark side” of social media discussed by James Surowiecki in The turning point for social media | Video on TED.com. Surowiecki argues that the “wisdom of crowds” only works when the members of the crowd think as independently as possible, but that when you join a network or group, you begin to lose some of that independence. The network influences what seems to be important (“groupthink”) and independent thought can actually suffer as a result. He uses the analogy of ants who get trapped in a “circular mill” where they just follow each other round and round in a circle until they die. This is the “dark side” of social media, which contrasts with the positive power of distributed intelligence.

So, although it is good to share, if we watch each other too assiduously, we risk losing the individuality and independence that made us intelligent in the first place. We may be social creatures, but it does us good to be a little bit anti-social too!

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information architecture | Uncategorized

Puzzled by The Future of Information Architecture

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

I read a copy of The Future of Information Architecture: Conceiving a Better Way to Understand Taxonomy, Network and Intelligence because I couldn’t resist the title, but was left utterly baffled by the book. The author appears to have taught at some US universities, but no biography was provided and the preface declared that due to the “political incorrectness” of his ideas, no institution or establishment had supported him in writing and publishing the book. Nevertheless, he seems to have produced quite a few books over the last few years. The publisher, Chandos Press, apparently printed the book directly from camera ready copy supplied by the author.

He writes in an extremely dense and academic style using phrases like “existential dialectics” and “post-human post-civilization”. I usually pride myself on being able to “translate” philosophy into “normal” English, but could not work out what was going on. The gist seemed to be a description of taxonomies and networks in terms of six “principles” (opposites such as simplicity/complexity, order/chaos) and I had expected some kind of conclusion to draw these principles into a proposition. Instead, he suggested that there were many more principles that could be used.

From the title I had hoped for some predictions about how IA might develop under the influence of social media or cloud computing etc., but there was nothing like that in the book. Instead, there were some statements about post-human evolution and the impossibility of predicting what IA will be like when we cease to be humans and become “free floating consciousnesses”.

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culture

Privacy is Dead. Long Live Privacy?

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Estimated reading time 3–4 minutes

Battle of Ideas: Privacy is Dead. Long Live Privacy? is a long video but well worth watching (it is divided into sections so doesn’t have to be seen in one go). The description says: “For many of us, divulging intimate details of our private lives via social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook has become the norm. But information and communication technologies have also facilitated surveillance and data gathering by government and big businesses. While in some contexts we seem so ready to give up our privacy, in others we seem increasingly anxious to protect it.”

The debate was hosted by the Institute of Ideas and features six excellent speakers who talk about designing technology so that it doesn’t violate privacy, the social and political debates – or lack thereof – around notions of what is public and what is private, and the effects of social media and new technology.

I found this very interesting as bridging a couple of themes that have been on my mind after hearing a talk by Matthew of 6consulting – a social media monitoring and engagement company. Firstly, the blurring of the lines between private and public in online spaces, which was also raised in relation to the national web archiving initiatives by the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF -which I wrote about in October) and secondly the idea that social media are taking over from traditional knowledge management. It has all left me wondering if social media will eat itself. It makes me think of science fiction stories about telepathy driving everyone crazy because actually knowing what people are thinking about you all the time is a nightmare!

I am a frequent user of social and real world networks and am also happy to have an online presence that is a public “performed” persona. However, I also like to have spaces where I can try out new and possibly crazy ideas in the company of friends without worrying that every off the wall idea is going to be preserved for ever more. I don’t want the world to see me “in rehearsal”, so does that mean I shouldn’t use social media spaces to experiment with ideas? If so, I can only try out ideas with the people I am geographically close to, which again seems to undermine part of the wonderful global connectivity of the online space. Closed, private networks, where we invite only people we can trust, get round this, but then you lose the power and appeal of the mass open networks.

So, how does this relate to taxonomies? Jeffrey Rosen talks about surveillance cameras being used as a tool for “classification and exclusion” of people – e.g. you are categorised as a shoplifter, so you are banned from the city centre, which links to Bowker and Star’s work on the politics of catgorisation of people in Sorting Things Out. I think that as knowledge workers, we are perhaps more aware than others of the potential uses and abuses of personal data and so we should be contributing to the debate on what information should be collected, classified, archived, and destroyed.

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information management

Amplification around a tag

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< 1 minute

Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog: Amplification around a tag offers an interesting perspective on vocabulary control. Dempsey’s well-referenced article highlights the power of designating a tag for an event so that blogs, tweets, etc. are consistently labelled – pulling them all together and amplifying their impact. He says: “in a sense, the tag becomes the virtual venue for the event’s digital legacy”.

This “gathering around a flag” in the infosphere strikes me as an interesting example of an intersection between branding, marketing, and knowledge management.

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