Blog #2

Chapter 5: The Laws of the Jungle

Overview: Often times a miscellaneous category can be farther broken down into more specific categories, instead of lumping everything together, it is better to split it apart to find it in the future based on who is using the information. Organizational trees reduce what they are classifying down to how they relate to other branches of the tree. Tagging items is a newer way to cross-list things that belong to multiple categories that rely heavily on the user to create as many of their own terms to correctly define the object, but can introduce a form of ambiguity.

Quotes:

“We might say that the miscellaneous category should make us wary because it hides information waiting for a Lamarck to come along and split the lump in useful ways. Or we might say that Linnaeus was not miscellaneous enough… But every time you organize matters in one way, you are disordering them in others.” (Weinberger 88)

“But in the third order, the messiness of miscellaneous information doesn’t reduce its utility.” (Weinberger 94)

“In the miscellaneous order, the only distinction between metadata and data is that metadata is what you already know and data is what you’re trying to find out.” (Weinberger 104)

Relate it: This chapter dealt a lot with tags and metadata, and mentioned Flickr. In the past I have tried to find photos on the creative commons section of Flickr, but found that I was being too specific in my tags. I had to think more miscellaneously in order to find pictures that would work for my project. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a photo of a woman turned away from the camera on a dock, it was that there were not enough tags to clearly define the photo.

Chapter 6: Smart Leaves

Overview: From UPCs to RFIDs, metadata is standardizing the way the information is exchanged and tracked. Physical things, such as a species of fish or bird, can be classified either miscellaneously, taking all names of the species into consideration and lumping them together, or by being very meticulous in determining what qualifies as a different species. Smart leaves use any information as metadata, that when cross-referenced with the web gives the user all the related information they could ever want about their search query, all based on tags and links.

Quotes:

“Having lost essentialism, we don’t have a replacement that does as good a job at divvying up the things of the world. We don’t even have confidence that there is an inarguable way to divide the world into types of things. And that’s a problem, because as the world becomes more miscellaneous, if we can’t pin something down, we can’t coalesce information around it.” (Weinberger 117)

“As we mix computers and human intelligence to rake together all sorts of leaves about books and their relationships, those leaves will be associated in more and more ways, perpetually building our miscellaneous pile of leaves in fits and starts. It will be imperfect because there is no one ideal Hamlet we can blister-pack and bar-code once and for all, but that imperfection is also a source of richness.” (Weinberger 124)

“‘People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.’” (Ted Nelson on Weinberger 125)

Relate It: This chapter talks a lot about Hamlet and its many versions, and how each is labeled with a separate identifier. This made me think of searching on Amazon for textbooks before the Bookie so graciously added the ISBNs to their website. It is a nightmare trying to find a certain edition of a book, especially when the title is something general like “Art History.” Even though ISBNs are an imperfect system, they are significantly more reliable than a search based on keywords, even in the third order.