Connotea is kind of a del.icio.us for scientists. I’m not one, but I crashed its gates and instantly found a link to Clay Shirky, who argues that “Ontology is Overrated”. Here he speaks not so much of philosophy–though that, too, falls within his purview–but of artificial intelligence and knowledge management, which also deal with entities and their relations. He captures the theoretical wonder behind services like del.icio.us, which allow users to collect bookmarks, label them with tags they find relevant, and share them with others.
In a piece based on two of his talks at recent conferences, Shirky tells us why the periodic table may be the best categorization scheme ever and why the Dewey Decimal System won’t tell us much about religion. He then breaks down the essential problems inherent in any attempt to classify things.
A library catalog…assumes that for any new book, its logical place already exists within the system, even before the book was published.
(People do the same thing with babies.)
That strategy of designing categories to cover possible cases in advance is what I’m primarily concerned with, because it is both widely used and badly overrated in terms of its value in the digital world.
The Enlightenment isn’t finished with us, it seems. The message is unmistakable, even if some may not be prepared to accept it: In a world teeming with information, meaning will not, indeed cannot, be simply handed to us by experts from above. We are challenged now to pull together our own threads of meaning, and to share them in ways that build individual and collective understanding. Bookmark this one for sure.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which gives us doomsday in handy clock form, is holding a contest to design displays for its virtual museum. Winning entries will depict the eighteen settings of the clock’s hands, which have tracked worldwide nuclear anxieties since 1947.