Here are a few of your notes from the group discussions of the readings from class this week:
Maxwell, Yohsuke, Alysha, and Nick said:
Taxonomy- A hierarchical classification system that is top-down.
Anything that organizes things into specific categories
Tagging- The process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to share content
Problems
-Tagging
-The ambiguity of tagging systems- tagging gives you such wide variety of information that it tends be just as negative as it is positive.
-One word can mean many, “A window may refer to a hole in a wall, or the pane within it.”
-Plurals and parts of speech are a factor in a tagging system “Cats is different than cat”
-Taxonomy
-Every time you order something in one way you are losing it in another-”the classification system of animals-aspects are lost when classifying specifically.”
-The Authoritative closes doors
-Different people categorize things in different ways. “different views of a moshpit-fun, concert, excitement or violence.
-Tagging is an individual/personal process.
-Social Proof- Popularity- Tags are imitated- it can be helpful if you don’t know how to tag a url. So many people are doing it this way so it must be right. Imitation does not explain everything.
Blake, John, and Kyle said:
Four Characteristics of Knowledge
1. Just as there is one reality, there is one knowledge, as same for all
2. We’ve assumed that just as reality is not ambiguous neither is knowledge
3. Because knowledge is as big as reality no one person can comprehend it
4. Experts achieve their position by working their way up through social institutions.
The new order of information is challenging the older orders by giving power to people- not the experts experts, giving us the power to have all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, letting everyone have an equal opportunity to learn and become knowledgeable and give people a better comprehension of what knowledge is.
We use what we know to find out what we don’t know. Everything becomes both knowledge and what we want to know. It interconnects and blends together until it becomes organized and able to be digested. Tags become necessary so we can find what we need and the Dewey Decimal system becomes obsolete. “Everything can be a label”
Because there are no claims on information- it’s slippery and leaky and thus no one can hold on to it. IF they give up control everyone can own it and refine it and organize it. “Put simply, the owners of information no longer own the organization of that information.”
Organization has become so important- especially by hierarchy. Even on “myspace” people organize their friends in order of importance to them. This effects how we act because people compete against each other and starts arguments between friends. Another example is how we have an upper class, idle class and lower class. This system causes people to segregate each other, and look down on each other. We tend to label and organize everything we see, weather it’s the way someone looks, or the way we perceive them to look, we will put them into a label and judge the way they act. Stereotypes get reinforced.
Lauren, Mack, Ryan, Alex
Ontology: the study of entities and their relations…the nature of being
–> Less concerned with what is than what is to come
–> Asks what things exist/can exist, and what kind of relationships they can have
In short, ontology is overrated because everyone’s associations, their individual views of the relationships of things, are different. There is no one way to structure everything so it perfectly suits everyone, and there doesn’t need to be; see tagging.
Online, there are no shelves that we have to fit things onto. Things can be in more than one place at once because there are no physical constraints. Everything is related; everything is metadata.
We want to organize immaterial data like we do physical objects like books because it’s what we’re used to; this is unnecessary online.
Tagging allows a system of organization to form organically, evolve out of chaos. It allows people to use their personal associations, share the associations, and thus find them more quickly — it’s faster to use than organization based on physical restraints.
Tagging is not better or worse than other forms of organization, but it is much better in the digital realm, just as card catalogs are better for material libraries.
Is a hybrid possible for libraries?
Top-down information filtering: These people decide what the masses hear.
News media, governments, medical institutions, colleges or any school, the church, etcetera.