lumps and splits

Dave Weinberger's Sunday session at FOO Camp was an introduction to his book in progress with a working title of Lumps and Splits (working subtitle is Messiness as a Virtue). It was an example of what I consider to be the most prevalent track at this conference: categorization/tags/pivot points/ontologies. Here's my notes from the session:

- Lumps and Splits [Messiness as a Virtue], Dave Weinberger
  - [way cool email address deleted]
  - How we draw lines defines culture (romans didnt have dff word for baby/adolescent)
  - book is about changes in how we classify
  - typical
    step 1 arrange items (books)
    step 2 make index (card catalog)
  - new
    step 3 - the owners of the info no longer control the organization of the info
      - no penalty for having multiple tags
      - job of librarian changes from coming up with useful taxonomy to building as much meta
        data as possible into object so users can catalog as has meaning to them
  - chapters
    - lumps and splits, why isn't everything miscellaneous?
    - dewey decimal system, why is it so racist? (less digits for christianity than "other")
      - Classifications are tools, not mirrors of reality
      - Steven Pinker (is 64 more even than 4? people say yes)
      - worst classification system: the colon system (facted classification)
    - better to have a wrong system than waste time fixing it
    - bar codes and rfids as transitional elements between real world and digital
      - value of implicit meta data
      - history of spaces between worlds and history of capitalization
    - trees (branching trees)
      (google kicked yahoo's ass but there are places for trees 
      - (game of 20 questions, 20 hops gets you anywhere))
    - farce of knowledge, attempts to make universal taxonomies
      - Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge
      - perhaps history of SGML will go here
      - how do you knit disparate ontologies together
      - del.icio.us tag choice as popularity contest
  - historical controversy of the introduction of alphabetization as an affront to God's Plan
  - object model of OWL as differnt sort of obj model than that of a programming language
  - people cluster around prototypes (name a bird, unlikely to name an ostrich)
    - dow jones had a boolean search engine which failed because it was too exact, what worked
      better was a fuzzier search that lets the human skim more results
  - scientific name for blue whale means "winged little mouse" ...all that matters is it has a name

Comments

[Anne]

Hi Dav,
Just wanted to say thanks for posting your notes. As a librarian I find this stuff fascinating - thanks for putting me on to this guy's work!