The New Is
Thanks to Collin Brooke for pointing to David Weinberger’s “The New Is,” which is a short piece on the value of social tagging. Collin summed up the piece by quoting Weinberger’s three guiding principles:
Links, not containers: A page is what it points to.
Multiple tags, not single meanings: A thing gains more meaning by having multiple local meanings.
Messiness, not clean order: The best definitions are ambiguous.
As Collin notes, Weinberger takes a historical approach to this topic, as can be seen from this passage:
From Aristotle’s way of thinking came a history of thought and politics that made certain assumptions: Because knowledge and being are fused, just as there is only one reality, there is only one structure of knowledge. The best people to put this structure together are experts. Because of the economics of parchment and paper, experts filter what we need to know. They become gatekeepers, priests of knowledge.
The digital age undoes all of these assumptions, changing the nature of knowledge and even of meaning itself. We are entering the age where to understand something is to see how it isn’t what it is.
Until now, the structure of knowledge has mirrored the way we’ve structured the physical world: We take a pile – think of your laundry – and split it into lumps, and then split those lumps into further lumps, until we have piles that are not worth splitting any more. So, we create a library classification system such as the Dewey Decimal System, or a Periodic Table of the Elements, a Tree of Life, or a business organizational chart. But when we’re dividing up our laundry, we have to put our socks into one pile or another, but not both (the Law of Identity). Why should the same restriction hold when we’re dealing with ideas? Why can’t ideas go in many piles? Why can’t a single intellectual leaf hang from many branches?
This is precisely what happens in the digital age. If you are trying to decide where to put a digital camera in your physical store, you’re going to have to pick one or two areas. If you’re listing it on your Web site, you’ll put it in as many categories as you can because you want people to be able to find it. Is the digital camera photography equipment, a vacation accessory, a sports item, a featured sale item? The answer is: Yes. And if you can think of other categories in which to list it, you have an economic motive to do so.
This makes a mess of your site’s organization. But that’s a good thing. In the digital age, messiness is not a sign of disorder. It is a sign of a successful order. Messiness is a virtue.
It’s clear, to me at least, that social tagging is a digital mnemonic practice. In a sense, it is the smart mobs version of personal mnemonic systems (both simple word associations and large scale place and image systems), which often work by idiosyncratic association. As Weinberger notes, individuals may tag idiosyncratically: A photo of London may never be tagged as “London” but instead may be tagged with “my vacation” or “Underground” or “Big Ben” or “winter in the park” or any combination of these, and more. For those searching for London, they won’t find this photo unless a second person adds to it the London tag. I don’t want to stretch this comparison too far, however. While idiosyncratic, personal mnemonic systems are essentially closed systems (or at least fall on the closed end of the scale), and while social tagging, as both a social and a digital practice, is an open system, I don’t think its all so clear cut that we can just assign closed an open labels to these practices and leave it at that.
Nevertheless, for pre-digital mnemonic technologies, the more associations/meanings you attach to a word or to an image, the less mnemonic function it has. Technologically, therefore, the system does favor closure rather than openness. And, on the other hand, because it’s as easy to add one tag to digital information as it is to add 100 tags, and because good search programs aren’t bothered by multiple associations, digital mnemonic technologies do favor openness, multiplicity, or what Weinberger calls “messiness” (more on messiness below). Along these lines, while comparing orality, textuality, and electracy, John Miles Foley labels these opened and closed practices as filing and tagging.
While I want to agree — do agree — with them, I’m struck by the slipperiness of it all. Take, for instance, the print index. An index is a closed system, but is it really an example of clear-cut filing? Is there no tagging going on? I’ve found that the most useful indexies have overlapping categories and make use of cross-referencing. While it does not have the openness of social tagging, it’s not the one-to-one classification system Aristotle posits in his Law of Identity. I’m also thinking here of Walter Ong’s index card files with all their cross referencing, what I’ve referred to as Ong’s index card database. Even while a printed index, an ordered index card file, or even the Library of Congress classification system are examples of filling, of discrete categorization, they can and do engage in and make use of tagging, of multiple and overlapping categorization. The externalization of writing — the ability to store, access, and share information outside of ourselves — helps mitigate the disorder that comes with multiple associations. While the logic of writing and print favors filing, discrete categorization, the practice of writing is more fluid, more open, than its logic would suggest.
A paradox? I don’t think so. Orality, as Ong has long argued and as Foley argues throughout his Oral Tradition and the Internet, is an open system. And yet, at the same time, orality’s openness is limited. While meaning and categorization are fluid in oral traditions, without recourse to external, more permanent, more fixed, storage, there is a real limit upon the number of associations one can work with. As I’ve already noted, whether one is working with a memory palace, a proverb, a story, or rhyming poem, each additional association attached to the mnemonic device dilutes its overall mnemonic power. To put it another way, while oral tradition is more closely connected to the human lifeworld, it’s not so good at keeping in mind multiple realities — the past is what is remembered and what is remembered tends to reflect what is.
Lessons from all this? Not sure, really, as this is really thoughts on the fly. But it seems clear, to me at least, that while contrasting writing with the oral and/or the digital, we need to make sure we’re not overly simplifying writing. We need to keep in mind the complex medium dynamics of writing while we’re figuring out the complex medium dynamics of oral tradition and of digital technologies, and I note this as much a remembrance for myself as a warning for anyone else.
Oh, as a side note, I like Weinberger claim that messiness is a virtue, not because I want to embrace messiness, but because, as I’ve explained earlier, in medieval memory theory it was not forgetting but information disorder that was considered a sin against the virtue of Prudence. As Weinberger points out, messiness (complexity) is not the same as disorder, and that too is worth bearing in mind.
art of memory | database | David Weinberger | digital culture | electracy | John Miles Foley | memory | metadata | oral culture | oral tradition | print culture | social networks | tagging | tags
A Response to “Is It Time to Shut Down Engineering Colleges?”
In an Inside Higher Ed article “Is It Time to Shut Down Engineering Colleges?,” Domenico Grasso, the dean of engineering and mathematical sciences at the University of Vermont, argues that if America is going to reclaim a leading role in engineering (in both producing those who entering engineering as well as educating them), we need to revise the engineering curriculum: in short, that they need fewer technical classes and more humanities courses:
Faced with the increasingly complex design challenges of the 21st century – an era where resources of every kind are reaching their limit, human populations are exploding, and global-warming related environmental catastrophe beckons – engineers need to grow beyond their traditional roles as problem-solvers to become problem-definers.To catalyze this shift, our engineering curriculum, now packed with technical courses, needs a fresh start. Today’s engineers must be educated to think broadly in fundamental and integrative ways about the basic tenets of engineering. If we define engineering as the application of math and science in service to humanity, these tenets must include study of the human condition, the human experience, the human record.
How do we make room in the crowded undergraduate engineering curriculum for students to explore disciplines outside math and science – literature and economics, history and music, philosophy and languages – that are vital if we are to create a competitive new generation of engineering leaders? By scaling back the number of increasingly narrow, and quickly outmoded technical courses students are now required to take – leaving only those that teach them to think like engineers and to gain knowledge to solve problems. Students need to have room to in their schedules for wide ranging elective study.
As an undergraduate, I was a humanities major surrounded by engineers. Literally. I spent all but one semester living in the dorms known as the Engineering Quad where one had to be an engineering or science major to get in (I began my college career as an English and biochemistry double major). A good number of my closest friends in college were engineers. Class rank was a real issue for these men and women, and as it turns out, a good number of my closest circle of friends were at the top of their classes. The best of them, the most successful of them, took more humanities and social science courses than required. One was torn between engineering and art. Another between engineering and music. A third between engineering and history and philosophy. Others weren’t torn but took as many humanities/social science courses as they could. Is there a correlation here? I don’t know. I could just be that they had the opportunity to take extra courses because they weren’t retaking Calculus III or Advanced Thermodynamics for a second or third time. What I do know, however, is that my friends at the top of their classes were called in by the Dean of the College of Engineering, who then strongly encouraged them to take a special two-term humanities for engineers honors course during their sophomore year.
I do believe, however, that undergraduate college education should be cross disciplinary. I believe that thinking critically means being able to see beyond a narrow perspective. I disagree with those academics who believe that academic specialization means adopting disciplinary blinders. So, in short, I agree with Grasso that our engineering education needs more humanities and social sciences to produce critical thinkers who can work not as problem-solvers but as problem-definers. I don’t agree, however, that we should shut down colleges of engineering.
But there’s a flip side to this, however. The amount of science and technology courses the average non-science and engineering major is required to take is pitiful. It’s no secret that the American public has little understanding of science and technology even while many of our most pressing and contested social and political issues are issues of science and technology. Ultimately, it won’t matter how well trained our scientists and engineers are if the American public, if the average voter and the typical policy maker, doesn’t have the basic knowledge necessary to grasp, let alone make informed decisions about, some of the most pressing and important issues facing us today.
While I have, at times, thought that we could do away with business degrees at the undergraduate level, I don’t think we should be closing our schools of engineering. I don’t think, however, that is what Grasso is really arguing for. Rather, he’s arguing for increased humanities and social science education as part of the engineering curriculum and I agree with that. And just as our engineers ought to be more knowledgeable of “the human condition, the human experience, the human record,” our non-scientists and non-engineers need to be more knowledgeable of science and technology.
We need to increase the amount of science and technology the average undergraduate takes. In addition to the fundamentals like Introduction to Chemistry or Introduction to Geology, humanities/social science majors should be taking a broad range of upper division classes geared for non-majors or that look at the intersection of science/technology and other disciplines. Two of my favorite courses, taken as electives after I’d stopped being a biochemistry major were “Life in the Universe” and “Evolution, Creationism, and the Origins of Life,” offered by the departments of Physics and Astrophysics and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology respectively. The former blended astrophysics, biology, philosophy, and religion, and the later blended biology, sociology, and religion. As a biology major, one of my wife’s favorite classes was “Plants and Human Affairs” which was a mix of biology, history, sociology, and economics. Her research paper, the paper I think she most enjoyed writing as an undergraduate, was on the Tulip-Bulb Craze of the 1630s. We need more classes like these and more students need to be taking them. The sad fact is that right now most science and engineering majors get a better education in the humanities and social sciences than most humanities and social science majors get in science and technology. This, too, needs to change.
curriculum reform | Domenico Grasso | engineering education | higher education | humanities education | science education
A Guide to Digitizing History
Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
This book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. It begins with an overview of the different genres of history websites, surveying a range of digital history work that has been created since the beginning of the web. The book then takes the reader step-by-step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy-to-use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and how to reach and respond to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age, and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance on insuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years.
Digital History, by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, is a “free online version” of a book published by U. of Penn Press. I don’t know how, or if, the online version and the print version differ.
via Archivalia
digital scholarship | digitization | history | humanities computing
Mac Resources
via digital b
Odysseus’ tomb found
According to a Sept. 27, 2005 article in the Madera Tribune, Odysseus’ tomb has been found.
POROS, Island of Kefalonia, Greece – The tomb of Odysseus has been found, and the location of his legendary capital city of Ithaca discovered here on this large island across a one-mile channel from the bone-dry islet that modern maps call Ithaca.
This could be the most important archeological discovery of the last 40 years, a find that may eventually equal the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann’s 19th Century dig at Troy. But the quirky people and politics involved in this achievement have delayed by several years the process of reporting the find to the world.
Yet visitors to Kefalonia, an octopus-shaped island off the west coast of Greece, can see the evidence for themselves at virtually no cost. Read whole story.
via Jerz’s Literacy Weblog
Cross-posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive
archeology | Homer | Iliad | Odysseus | Odyssey
Teaching Hogfather
Starting Tuesday, I’ll teach my first Pratchett novel — we’re reading Hogfather, and I wanted to give my class a brief introduction to both the Discworld and some of its controlling concepts. (For those of you not familiar with Pratchett’s Discworld, Wikipedia’s entries on “Discworld” and “Discworld (world)” are good introductions.
Since Hogfather is specifically about the power of belief, I focused on what The Discworld Companion calls the “physics” of Discworld: Life force, The Power of Metaphor and Belief, and Narrative Causality. (The Discworld exists on the edge of Reality where the real and the not real are in constant struggle, thereby allowing Discworld to exist.) In short, Life force means that since life has a tendency to exist, things that exist on the Discworld are alive (even things like thunderstorms and buildings, though most people don’t know how to communicate with buildings and few people want to get up close and personal with thunderstorms — well, that’s not true, a malevolent thunderstorm (and is there any other kind?) can be a nasty thing. Likewise, metaphors are often literalized as real things and belief is a source of power (witch magic, as opposed to wizard magic, is based on “headology,” the knowledge of how to use belief, both your own and others, to make things happen, and stories have power and can define what will happen (my favorite, if small, example is that a million-to-one chance tends to succeed because, narratively, million-to-one chances always work. And finally, narrative causality governs everything, but this doesn’t mean much for most people most of the time because it’s hard for those in a narrative to understand the larger narrative pattern, and because most people most of the time play narratively unimportant roles like the poor customer who unjustly suffers the wrath of the clerk because they happen to be the one in line behind a rude bastard).
While these laws govern all Discworld novels, Hogfather specifically plays with these ideas, and it’s with this novel that we’ll really start thinking about the social role of story telling and John Niles’ theory of Homo Narrans. (Back in early August, I mentioned Niles’ book and quoted from the beginning of Hogfather, which sets the stage for a story about the power of Story.)
Looking over the entry on Hogfather in Annotated Pratchett File v.9.0, I found a lovely quote from Pratchett. When he was working on the novel, someone asked him what the book was going to be about, and he replied:
“Let’s see, now…in Hogfather there are a number of stabbings, someone’s killed by a man made of knives, someone’s killed by the dark, and someone [sic] just been killed by a wardrobe.It’s a book about the magic of childhood. You can tell.”
Without given away any significant plot point or really giving any hint of what the novel is about, Pratchett summed up it up well: “It’s a book about the magic of childhood.” And it is, in part. The fact that Story, the traditional stories that shape and give meaning to our lives and connect us to our past and our serve as the medium for our cultural knowledge, is often considered the domain of children is both of great interest to me and something that greatly disturbs me. As Tolkien tried to remind us almost 70 years ago in “On Fairy Stories,” somewhere along the way we (adults in modern Western European nations) have forgotten the power and importance of Story. Niles’ book Homo Narrans is about the power of Story, about story-telling as the defining characteristic of what it means to be human. Kevin M. Bradt’s Story as a Way of Knowing is also another good take on the importance of Story (I write about it in the second half of an entry in a Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive)post. The recovery of Story and its related elements is also behind what Shippey calls “the Grimmian Revolution” (comparative philology and mythology which began with the Grimm brothers) and will be the focus of Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth, the Festschrift for Shippey I’m co-editing with Andrew Wawn and Graham Johnson — Story helped make the Western European nation states.
Story is so much more than the magic of childhood. And yet, even Pratchett who does know better, feels compelled to describe it as such. Well that’s not entirely fair as the novel is about belief (or lack thereof) in the Hogfather, Discworld’s version of Santa Claus. So, really, it is accurate to say that Hogfather is about the magic of childhood. But Pratchett’s point, as was Tolkien’s point, is that the magic of childhood is powerful, deep-down stuff. It’s the magic that keeps the world going even if we adults, both the adults of the Discworld and adults in our world, have forgotten to pay attention to it.
Hogfather | John Niles | Kevin Bradt | T.A. Shippey | Terry Pratchett | Tom Shippey | Story
Jack Foley on Walter J. Ong
9/26 Update: Talking with my boss today, I learned that Jack Foley had sent us this material back in August 2003. At that time my boss knew they’d be hiring someone to process the collection, so he put it aside and forgotten to pass it on when I was started the job almost a year later. When I posted this last week, I saw the August 28 date on the accompanying letter and didn’t pay attention to the year. The show was broadcast on March 10, 2004 and is available as both streaming audio or .mp3 download.
I learned today that Jack Foley will have a radio show tribute to Fr. Ong broadcast on November 5 at 3:30-4:00 p.m. PST on the Berkeley, CA station KPFA-FM as part of his weekly “Cover to Cover with Jack Foley” show. It may be broadcast via streaming audio at that time, and after the show it should be archived at http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?show=106.
Foley also recently published an article on Fr. Ong, “Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003): In Memoriam” in the online magazine Alsop Review.
Cross-posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive.
Jack Foley | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong
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“Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments“
Leaving a comment on someone’s weblog is like walking into their living room and joining in on a conversation. As in real life, online there are some people who are a pleasure to converse with, and some who are not.Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged. Build your own online social capital and become a great blog commenter by keeping these simple guidelines in mind before you post.
Via Clancy who posted this to TechRhet and to Gina who forwarded it to me since I’ve got TechRhet (and just about everything else) on nomail.
Yoko Kanno
I got the Cowboy Bebop CD-Box featuring Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts. Earlier this year, I’d already picked up the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Soundtrack. Yoko Kanno’s (and the Seatbelts) versitility and range is nothing short of amazing. My only wish for the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack is that there is non-live version of “The Real Folk Blues.” There is an alternative version titled “See You Space Cowboys Not Final Mix Mountain Root” but it’s all in Japanese. While it’s a great song in and of itself, for me, what makes “The Real Folk Blues” is that in the middle of this bluesy song with Japanese lyrics is the line “the real folk blues” sung in English.
Don’t just take my word for it, however. Here’s another rave review of Yoko Kanno’s work.
anime | Cowboy Bebop | Ghost in the Shell | The Seatbelts | Yoko Kanno
Call me bemused….
Last week, I suggested to the English Graduate Organization, that we put together a formal request asking our department to include more computer/digital technology in our program. I suggested this address four related issues:
- To request an increase in the use of computer technology and computer-assisted instruction in graduate courses so that we can experience these technologies from a student perspective (which I believe to be an important component of learning how to teach with computer technology).
- To request an increase in the level of training in computer-assisted pedagogy, both in terms of workshops and formal courses. This may include asking/suggesting that we seek to create a culture of knowledge within the department and that graduate students assigned to monitor our computer-assisted instruction classrooms have some knowledge computer-assisted pedagogy or be actively interested in developing such knowledge.
- To request that we be exposed to the theories, methods, and practices of humanities-based computing and digital technologies as it pertains to English Studies.
- To request a more formal certification in computer-assisted pedagogy along the lines of Purdue’s Instructor Goals for Integrating Technology, available as .pdf from
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/ICaP/instructor_resources/english106_resources/technology_resources.
I was thinking about this issue over the summer when someone on the Digital Medievalist listserv asked if Medieval Studies graduate programs should require a humanities computing course and what such a course should cover. The poster was leaning towards a course that was more conceptual than a course that focused on using specific software to do specific activities. Since this issue was on my mind, I responded:
As a graduate student who is both a medievalist and a technorhetorican (I’m even on the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication), I would say yes, all humanities graduate students need an introduction to humanities computing, and I’ve long been thinking that the conceptual approach you suggest is a good way to start.As we all know, digital tools are both changing the way we do work in the humanities and they are creating new methods, theories, practices, and opportunities. I’d argue, actually I have been increasingly arguing both locally and in other forums, that to ignore the issue of humanities computing and the increasing role of digital technologies and digital culture in graduate education is quickly shifting from being an issue of not being on the cutting edge to being an issue of negligence on the part of that program. In other words, it’s rapidly becoming not an issue of humanities computing on the one hand and the disciplinary subject on the other, but humanities computing becoming one of the various methods and practices of engaging the disciplinary subject.
But I’d go farther too (this is the technorhetorician and the Ongian in me). It shouldn’t just be about digitizing material, but also the production and consumption of native digital texts, and understanding of digital culture, digital noetics and practices, and the logic of new media. In other words, not just how to digitize primary sources, but how digital technologies is and can change the way we do scholarship and the way we interact with both knowledge and the world.
For instance, how can the logic of new media — the cut-up, the mix and remix, juxtaposition, association and linkage, to name a few — change the ways we can make arguments, explore our subjects, and share and preserve information? [Channeling a bit of Jeff Rice here.] In what ways might the mediated experience of a virtual recreation of an archeological dig change the way archeology is done (for one, would the added financial and physical constraints of creating a real-time virtual reality model of the dig outweigh or be outweighed by the possibility of future archeologists (or the original archeologists) reexploring a dig in much the same way architects create virtual reality models to “walk” through their designs? Or how does our understandings of digital culture help us rethink our understanding of past cultural processes as it has already done for orality and literacy studies and book history? Or, for that matter, how can our understanding of earlier cultural processes help us understand digital ones (see, for instance, John Miles Foley’s Pathways Project, or the work being done in textual and bibliographic studies).
We discussed the issue a bit (someone asked why this was needed because we did get some training in computer-assisted instruction), so I asked, to make my point, if anyone at the meeting could name specific ways in which computer/digital technologies were being applied to the study of their field or to literature in general. Those who were objecting could not, even though for a few of them their own dissertation directors are engaged in humanities based computing.
It was silly of me to think that by pointing out that a number of literature faculty in our department are engaging in digital scholarship and computer-assisted pedagogy in their undergraduate literature courses, a fact most graduate students in the department aren’t aware of, would be a pretty clear sign that the methods, theories, and practices of humanities based computing and digital English Studies aren’t making it into our graduate education.
I learned today that my proposal is actually part of a larger move to force a rhetoric and composition agenda upon the program. Call be bemused indeed. Call me bemused that I specifically discuss the Sidney Bibliography database and in-progress Walter J. Ong database and the electronic edition of Modern Chivalry as some of the digital projects/scholarship being undertaken by our literature faculty and some how this issue gets framed as a movement by the handful of rhet/comp graduate students trying to storm the ramparts (if you’re worried that we’re trying to take over, maybe you should stop voting us into 3/4 of the English Graduate Organization officer positions — you’ve been voting us into these positions for years).
Call me bemused that here at Saint Louis University in the department which Walter J. Ong called home, in the department where Fr. Ong studied under Marshall McLuhan, there is so little understanding and so little discussion of how digital technologies are shaping English Studies.
And call me bemused in that while a good number of rhet/comp people can’t get beyond seeing me as a Medievalist who dabbles in rhet/comp as a hobby, people in my own department can’t get beyond the fact I do rhet/comp and computers and writing no matter how much literary studies I do. When I die, if my obituary can read “He was a RhetoricianMedievalistCompositionist” and no one objects, if no one says “But…but…he wasn’t a rhetorician/compositionist” or “But…but…he wasn’t a real medievalist,” I can die in peace.
Digital Medievalist | English Studies | humanities computing | Jeff Rice
Twitter Feed- "Never try to out stubborn a cat." -- *The Notebooks of Lazarus Long*
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