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« Whither Information Architecture? || Back to Blog | My brother's honor, and takin' the midnight train » December 01, 2006
On Monday, I'm trying out a talk I'll be giving at the U of North Carolina a few days later. The talk is called, for now, in a doomed attempt to be slightly light-hearted about it, "Being and Tags. Here are the five sections (not counting the zero-based prologue): 0. Three orders of order The section that particularly worries me is #2—Perhaps you've heard that there is no one true taxonomy?— mainly because I think it argues against a position no one really holds. But I can't tell any more. I'm also worried about the presentation style. I'm trying to be more precise than usual, so I've written out a talk, tightly integrated with Powerpoint—yes, Powerpoint, dammit!—with tons of animations. While I carefully prepare presentations, I never read them from a script. Except for this one. The whole thing is headed for disaster. Although the Monday night talk started out as one in my Web of Ideas discussion series, it's been assimilated into the Harvard-Yale Cyber Scholars series. So, at 6pm you can here Yale's Shyam Balganesh talking about "Social Costs of Property Rights in Broadcast." I'm on at 7pm. We're serving Indian food. It's open to everyone. [map] [Tags: tags taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous berkman philosophy aristotle] Posted
by D. Weinberger at December 1, 2006 07:24 PM
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Comments
Regarding your #2.
I didn't really understand your problem with it.
The one thing I do understand from your words will look like a problem if you are trying to explain and show the lack of a global taxonomy in the sky. The one taxonomy that covers everything and all other taxonomies are actually a small part of it.
I guess you can always say that taxonomies are real in the sense that they are a certain view on the world that is mainly dictated by the taxonomy's creator (similar to a database view on physical tables in the database. But that's not a good example if the lecture is for non-technical people ;-) ).
Since they do phyiscally exists (why would you mention it if they were not :-) ) and try to categorise items (some physical, some not) it does exist.
Posted by: Eran Sandler | December 2, 2006 08:32 AM
Taxonomies are as real as maps, I guess.
Posted by: JJ | December 2, 2006 10:40 AM
Don't get stressed about the UNC talk; as long as you don't accidentally show up in a Duke sweatshirt, you'll do great.
Taxonomies can be very real; just look at the wonders of Phylogenetic systematics.
Anyone who denies the absolute reality of these structures is just as clado-masoschist.
Whilst it is clearly possible for tags to be wrong, this wrongness is best understood in a non-monotonic or a bayesian sense, rather in terms of a purely first order logic; if a tag lowers the probability of anyone corrently finding the tagged object, then it's hard to call it anything other than wrong.
We need both tagging and formal classification/categorisation working together if we're ever going to get a handle on the digital midden pile we're building.
שלום עכשיו
Posted by: Simon Spero | December 2, 2006 07:39 PM
It strikes me that trying to define The One True Taxonomy is akin to finding out what the private langage that is behind everything is. There is no such thing. My feeling on this is that Wittgenstein's concept of meaning as reflected in usage is a correct metaphor for taxonomies on the web. They provide a framework, or scafffolding within which we test the contect of the given objec under description. As you move from one taxonomy to anther the meaning can change, just as there are many meanings of one word, the concept is context dependent. This does not stop these taxonomies from being very very very accurate at providing descriptors, especially in more specific contexts. One can then rely on plasability to make inferences from the information at hand, I think.
Posted by: Ian Mulvany | December 4, 2006 12:54 PM