Okay, let's see. We're back to Weinberger, and this week's reading focuses mostly on how important tagging is. I found it amusing when he was going on about the Getty Thesaurus, because I love tagging so much I can't help but think how neat it would be if you could use the designators created by the system to tag each aspect of a work of art - using the leaf metaphor, I was picturing someone gluing leaves, painted with numbers, to a canvas as some sort of collage item ... which I think is something that was only funny in my head. However! I suspect that this is the wave of the future of institutionalized categorization systems like the thesaurus - instead of putting each item somewhere on a branch, we define a set of tags, and categorize the tags, and then allow any given item to have as many tags as appropriate. I realize that the power of public tagging is that we can put as many words as we want on something, but as Weinberger pointed out, 'SF' and 'San Francisco' may not always result in the same searches. So while I want to continue to tag my del.icio.us bookmarks as I see fit, I don't hate the idea of libraries putting secondary Dewey Decimal numbers on books to aid in searching, even if the primary number still determines where the item will be placed on the shelves.
I particularly liked his point about how metadata is really just 'the data you remember' these days. Case in point is my last entry - I could not remember where that Google article was. I thought I might have gotten it from Digg, but I can't say for certain, because I couldn't find it when I searched Digg for 'Google'. What I wound up doing was searching for was '"i feel lucky" people like google', which turns up that article as the second item. (I think it might have been the first item when I searched last week, but that's not really the point.) So I find it very convenient that any given part of an item is now part of its metadata.
It seems like the moral of the sixth chapter is that we need to come up with some better ways to categorize things like books, and we're going to need to do that soon. I know there's always someone trying to rant about how change is both imminent and inevitable, but we're doing things we never used to do, even with something like books. Consider Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you aren't familiar, someone has taken Jane Austen's novel, which is public domain due to its age, and inserted some nice gory zombie moments. (Yes, really. And yes, there's already a movie in the works.) How would you categorize that? I mean, sure, fiction, that's easy, but beyond that, how do you talk about it? It doesn't belong on any given shelf. If you put it in horror, Jane Austen fans might never find it. If you put it with the Jane Austen, horror fans might never know about it. In both cases lovers of satire might remain ignorant - but if you try to shelve it next to Dave Barry, you miss out on the first two audiences. This is the kind of thing that can only be properly categorized in multiple places, and I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the coming years.
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Aha. You tied the chapter together nicely for me. I never really understood what Weinberger was blathering on about (mostly because after a while, I just started skimming through what I assumed were more metaphors about categorizing things), and now, with your analogy about Jane Austen book, I can sort of see where he's coming from.
ReplyDeleteIf that is indeed the moral of chapter six, then I agree wholeheartedly and take back some of the things I said about Weinberger under my breath.
I like the Jane Austen example because it points out there is only one physical book and therefore only one place to put it. What makes a digital search great is that in the digital world, it can be all three places (Horror, Jane Austen, Satire) and then you can keep the Dewey System (or any other outdated system) around to take care of the physical part. So what I'm saying horrifies me because it suggests we need to keep the old linear/Dewey system around to save physical space in the world. So two systems work together instead of one replacing the other. What do you think? In the IT world they always want to upgrade and make the older system obsolete and not refer back to it. When the physical world is involved however, it seems like we have to keep the old sytem around.
ReplyDeleteI actually don't care to tag things. I tag Facebook pictures, and I tag people in notes, but besides that, I don't care to tag keywords in a blog post or a picture I post online. It's convenient when I'm looking for things with a shared keyword or subject, but I personally don't care to take the time to tag everything that is relevant to searchers. I think that is at least partly because I post things for myself and a small audience of friends. I don't post things to entertain the whole internet audience, so I don't care to tag my posts for the world to find. It's like with the internet, you get this worldwide stage, which works for some personalities.
ReplyDeleteGreat example with the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - where do you find this stuff? haha
ReplyDeleteTo comment back to Celena's comment - I can see how the merging of the tagging system with the Dewey Decimal would work, and can't really see it working any other way. I think it is an interesting point that you bring up - how with the IT world we always want to upgrade and forget about the old system, but in the physical world it seems that is impossible.
Celena said: "When the physical world is involved however, it seems like we have to keep the old sytem around."
ReplyDeleteWeinberger imagined thousands of librarians inhaling toxic white dust, changing the labels on the spines of books--oh so physical.
Melissa said: "I think that is at least partly because I post things for myself and a small audience of friends. I don't post things to entertain the whole internet audience, so I don't care to tag my posts for the world to find."
This is the kind of private/public tension I was trying to get at in the course description--thanks Melissa!