MASSLIB08 Keynote Speaker David Weinberger Miscellaneous Knowledge or The Smell of Knowledge
David Weinberger, author of Everything is miscellaneous and member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society gave the Wednesday keynote talk called the Miscellaneous Knowledge, which he changed to The Smell of Knowledge at the 2008 Massachusetts Library Association conference in Falmouth, Mass.:
Bought up the fact that letters used to have the smell of vinegar on them during an outbreak of cholera
Talked about the New Yorker article called Digitization and its discontents
He said it’s going take a long time to do digitization
abundance–way too much stuff–spam, porn, filters–abundance of crap
Hard to find good stuff
There’s one knowledge according to the West
Ancient Greece–One knowledge–same for everybody
Simple–Philosophy–confusing and complex–changing all the time
There’s stuff to know
Doesn’t matter who says it, it’s true
Knowledge is scarce
Worth listening to
Lots of opinions–find the truth
Real set of categories–how they are populated
Real order of nature
Carving the joints Are bloggers journalists?
We cluster things Look at spices (Shows curry/other spice, then curry/cat)
Things alike share attributes, look alike, smells alike depends on our needs
Clean laundry–how to put away-decision process–how to put away–summer/winter–socks–can’t put in two piles
The real evil purpose is to keep things apart—show two cars together in same toll booth
Paper limited–editors determine what’s important–have negotiation power with author–There are physical limitation of newspapers
First order–archive–220 feet down in the ground single way of order
Second order–card catalog–separate the metadata from the card
Digitizing everything–Lots and lots of stuff will be digitized.
First resort
1. leaf on many branches–what category—Amazon–multiple categories–tags
2. Messiness as a virtue–online is success–explore the different links on a blog or website. You never see the messiness. Search gets richer and richer
Metadata
Herman melville Do Search: Call me Ishmael Shown everything about Melville and Ishmael Metadata and data–no difference
Metadata is a lever to find more stuff
Content is connection
Website you have control–reorganize the stuff on your website
Always reflects values
Online–layer over multiple categories
Too much information, too much to know
What the pieces are, how they fit together
Library of Congress catalogs 7,000 books a week
Better to include than delete
LC photos on Flickr metadata of photos 75 tags: Trash, French, etc. Why not? Some pretty interesting
Flickr annotated–Fake photo?–Insanely conversation–variety of comments–ran out of tags–limit of 75 tags
Wikipedia Someone can trash it. Has reliable info with some reservations
Discussion pages–sociological artifact
Pop up buttons–”This article appears to contradict another article” or “The neutrality of this article is in dispute”
Why don’t we see this on online newspaper articles Editors embarrassed about errors Can’t see the need for discussion about the article
Wikipedia not perfect, but on our side
Conversation makes us smarter
Sharing knowledge between us
Blogs Lots and lots of links Blog rolls on the right side First cause you to go away, but come back to check on other links
Links taken for granted Links sharing info for the world Links point back to you No links, no web Links are acts of generosity
Encyclopedia Britannica philosophy multiple volumes
Wikipedia Philosophy multiple links
Books suck–covenient for reading, not for commenting, sharing, accessing
Libraries–sense of knowledge Web no sense of knowledge
Books are not dead according to Newsweek
Digital library–will contain all metadata
We do not know about the new knowledge–it will take a generation to figure out
(Now I know what j goes through when attempting to post interesting stuff! Need more practice in taking notes at conferences. Also need tape talks. Getting too old(sigh)
Posted by Rich
