Classification, on the other hand, “involves the orderly and systematic assignment of each entity to one and only one class within a system of mutually exclusive and non-overlapping classes; it mandates consistent application of these principles within the framework of a prescribed ordering of reality” [Jacob 2004]

Other authors argue that tagging enables users to order and share data more efficiently than using classification schemes; the free-association process involved in tagging is cognitively much more simple than are decisions about finding and matching existing categories
[Butterfield 2004].

Again, by stable we do not mean that users stop tagging the resource, but instead that users collectively settle on a group of tags that describe the resource well and new users mostly reinforce already-present tags with the same frequency as they are represented in the existing distribution.

Mika [2005] addresses the problem of extracting taxonomic information from tagging systems in the form of Semantic Web ontologies. The article extends the traditional model of taxonomies by incorporating a social dimension, thus establishing an essential connection between tagging and the techniques developed in the SemanticWeb arena.

Huberman [2006], which also make use of del.icio.us data. They show the majority of sites reach their peak popularity, the highest frequency of tagging in a given time period, within ten days of being saved on del.icio.us (67% in their dataset), though some sites are “rediscovered” by users (about 17% in their dataset), suggesting stability in most sites but some degree of “burstiness” in the dynamics that could lead to cyclical patterns of stability characteristic of chaotic systems.

Therefore, while tags assigned to resources are accurate, their distributions may not be suitable to make a significant impact on search performance. This is somewhat in line with our findings: while tags converge relatively fast to stable power law distributions (cf. Section 2), the top of these distributions may contain common (or obvious) tags. Asolution to this problem (also suggested in Heymann et al. [2008]) may be a better mechanism for recommending tags.

Success in a project is very rarely a matter of ‘willpower’. It’s usually a matter of having set up a good structure to support the carrying out of the project. Your project need the mental and physical equivalents of government’s controlling structures.
...
What one is always aiming for is to make it easier to do the right thing than the wrong one.

The shared tag vocabularies (cf. Section 5 of this article) are not fully-fledged formal Semantic Web ontologies, but they can also be useful structures for many information retrieval applications, even without additional formalization.

When a search is complete and a resource of interest is found, collaborative tagging often requires the user to tag the resource in order to store the result in his or her personal collection. This causes a feedback cycle. These characteristics motivate many systems like del.icio.us and it is well-known that feedback cycles are one ingredient of complex systems [Bar-Yam 2003], giving further indication that a power law in the tagging distribution might emerge.

Information is the juxtaposition of data to create meaning.

This pattern where the top tags are considerably more popular than the rest of the tags indicates a fundamental effect of the way tags are distributed in individual websites which is independent of the content of individual websites.

Quotation with no tags

Quotation with no tags

Bloom postulates that the phenomenon of collective intelligence emerges from the interplay of five essential forces: conformity enforcers, diversity generators, inner judges, resource shifters, and intergroup tournaments.

The way you describe reality — the memes you have that label things — makes a big difference in life.

The way you describe reality — the memes you have that label things — makes a big difference in life.

The way you describe reality — the memes you have that label things — makes a big difference in life.

The digital world thereby allows us to transcend the most fundamental rule of ordering the real world: Instead of everything having its place, it’s better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously.

The aim of vision is to bring clarity and focus. If it doesn’t do that, then it is worse than useless.
…
In the same way when you decide on a course of action you should not only be choosing it but also rejecting all the alternative courses of action.

However for virtually all of the sites in the data set considered, the proportion of times a tag from the top 25 positions is used relative to the total number of times that a resource is tagged did stabilize
over time. So, while the total number of tags per resource grows continuously, the relative frequency of the tags in the top of the tag distribution compared to the those in the long tail does stabilize to a constant ratio.

Van Schaik hypothesizes that “populations in which individuals had more chances to observe others in action would show a greater diversity of learned skills than would populations offering fewer learning opportunities. And indeed, we were able to confirm that sites in which individuals spend more time with others have greater repertoires of learned innovations.”
...
Social concentration, it seems, is the engine of innovation.

Some nodes are much larger than others which again shows that taggers prefer to use to general, heavily used tags (e.g., the tag “art” was used 25 times more than “chaos”).

“Culture is created by the communal mind,” he [Wilson] writes, “and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain. Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked.”

Secondary epigenetic rules operate at a higher level of abstraction, affecting the way we integrate our sense perceptions, such as the tendency for all human beings to classify objects into opposing pairs like black and white, life and death, heaven and earth—notions that have no physical component in the human brain, yet seem to recure across human cultures.

We acknowledge that this is a restricted definition: in some applications, especially Semantic Web approaches, we would also like to know precisely how these terms are related. This type of structural information is difficult to extract only from tags, given the simple structure of folksonomies. Nevertheless, our approach could still prove useful in such applications: for example, one could
construct the set of related terms as a first rough step and then a human expert (or, perhaps, another [semi]-automated method) could be used to add more more detail to the extracted vocabulary set.

Another potential application is in selecting terms for sponsored search auctions. Some keywords
(tags) bring a high value to advertisers, and knowing all the related keywords in a category that people can potentially use in search for can be very useful information for an advertiser.

All strategy-memes are approximations, based on the idea that if you behave in a certain way, you’ll have a certain effect on the world.

All strategy-memes are approximations, based on the idea that if you behave in a certain way, you’ll have a certain effect on the world.

All strategy-memes are approximations, based on the idea that if you behave in a certain way, you’ll have a certain effect on the world.

Наиболее типичными примерами синтагматических цепочек служат буквы, образующие написанное слово; слова, образующие предложение; последовательность музыкальных нот, записанных в партитуре, чтобы зафиксировать «мелодию».
…
Связь между написанной партитурой, движениями пальцев и звуковыми волнами является парадигматической.

Символ / Знак = Метафора / Метонимия = Парадигматическая связь / Синтагматическая цепочка [Levi-Strauss] = Гармония / Мелодия

Из нашего общего опыта следует, что все виды человеческой деятельности (а не только речь) служат для передачи информации. Такие способы коммуникации включают: письменность, исполнение музыки, танец, живопись, пение, строительство, актерскую игру, лечение, отправление религиозного культа ит.д. Вся аргументация данного эссе основана на предположении, что на каком-то уровне «механизм» этих разнообразных форм коммуникации должен быть одним и тем же и что каждая форма является «трансформацией» остальных — совершенно так же, как написанный текст является трансформацией устной речи.

Advertisers want you to salivate, or the sexual equivalent, when you see their product.

Advertisers want you to salivate, or the sexual equivalent, when you see their product.

“Our predisposition to classify at all is an ancient trait,” writes Berlin, “and crearly has an adaptive advantage.”

As any copyright lawyer can tell you, people don’t own ideas. You can copyright the expression of an idea, artistic or otherwise: you can own the rights to a painting, novel, poem, or symphony based on whatever ideas you want; but you can’t own an idea. In fact, the reverse is often true: ideas sometimes own people.

As any copyright lawyer can tell you, people don’t own ideas. You can copyright the expression of an idea, artistic or otherwise: you can own the rights to a painting, novel, poem, or symphony based on whatever ideas you want; but you can’t own an idea. In fact, the reverse is often true: ideas sometimes own people.

Our capacity for classification seems to spring from two basic cognitive capabilities: binary discrimination (the ability to tell one thing from another) and lateralization of the human brain (the ability to string thought together).

Тот факт, что названия, придаваемые вещам и явлениям внешнего мира, произвольны и условны, подразумевает двойную природу как сенсорных образов и понятий, вызванных к жизни феноменом этих вещей, так и тех типов предметов, которые служат для нас воплощением метафизических идей.

Связь между X («понятием в сознании») и Y («сенсорным образом») — сущностная: они — две стороны одной медали; зато связь между Y («сенсорным образом») и Z («объектом во внешнем мире») всегда произвольна, по крайней мере до определенного предела.
…
Любая произвольная ассоциация, которую используют много раз, в конце концов начинает казаться сущностной.

Связь между X («понятием в сознании») и Y («сенсорным образом») — сущностная: они — две стороны одной медали; зато связь между Y («сенсорным образом») и Z («объектом во внешнем мире») всегда произвольна, по крайней мере до определенного предела.
…
Любая произвольная ассоциация, которую используют много раз, в конце концов начинает казаться сущностной.

Очевидно, что слова dog и chien суть разные образы одного и того же создания, но действительно ли мое зрительное восприятие «вещи-собаки», мой цельный сенсорный образ этого существа не может оказаться точно так же и культурно обусловленным? Вы в самом деле так уверены?

People can’t take in any more than a small fraction of all the information that hits their sensory organs every second. What information do we take in, and what do we filter out? Our unconcious minds decide for us, based on the distinction-memes we are programmed with.

People can’t take in any more than a small fraction of all the information that hits their sensory organs every second. What information do we take in, and what do we filter out? Our unconcious minds decide for us, based on the distinction-memes we are programmed with.

If taxonomy is rooted in our evolution as a species, the structure of these systems should also have a corresponding cognitive basis in the human mind. And indeed, the human mind appears to be particulary well suited to think in terms of hierarchical categories.
…
Her [Eleanor Rosch] theory suggests that people form categories based on “prototypes”, or best examples of a particular kind of thing.

Но художественное изображение одних и тех же объектов в разных культурах подчиняется весьма разным условностям, и это представляется значимым. Вполне возможно, что каждый индивид воспринимает свой мир таким, каким ему (или ей?) рисует этот мир его (ее) культура. Сегодня в большей части мира господствуют «реалистические» обобразы, обеспеченные нашим использованием съемочной аппаратуры. Но если вы воображаете — как оно, возможно, и есть на самом деле, — что ваш глаз «естественно» воспринимает мир таким, каким он бывает на фотоснимке, то это самообман.

This capacity for gradation — that is, the ability to recognize that things may be both different and similar at the same time — holds the key to our capacity for hierarchical categorization.
…
In other words the categories themselves are transmitted through culture, but the human brain is born ready to receive the transmission.

We see the emergence of stable power law distributions as an aspect of what may be seen as collective consensus around the categorization of information driven by tagging behaviors.

Finally, we show that vocabularies extracted from collaborative tagging data can be significantly richer, at least for some domains, than the ones that can be extracted from general search engine query logs.

Bad news for puritans who linger among us: the orgiast rats generally end up in better physical and mental shape than do their pleasure-deprived littermates. They are alert. Their coats are glossy. Their eyes shine.

Bad news for puritans who linger among us: the orgiast rats generally end up in better physical and mental shape than do their pleasure-deprived littermates. They are alert. Their coats are glossy. Their eyes shine.

Bad news for puritans who linger among us: the orgiast rats generally end up in better physical and mental shape than do their pleasure-deprived littermates. They are alert. Their coats are glossy. Their eyes shine.

Bad news for puritans who linger among us: the orgiast rats generally end up in better physical and mental shape than do their pleasure-deprived littermates. They are alert. Their coats are glossy. Their eyes shine.

Bad news for puritans who linger among us: the orgiast rats generally end up in better physical and mental shape than do their pleasure-deprived littermates. They are alert. Their coats are glossy. Their eyes shine.

Bad news for puritans who linger among us: the orgiast rats generally end up in better physical and mental shape than do their pleasure-deprived littermates. They are alert. Their coats are glossy. Their eyes shine.

As a result we are all born with a deep-seated need to understand the world in terms of categories and to share that understanding with each other.

Another important direction of work would be examining the effects of using specialized sub-communities of users in the study of convergence of tag distributions and resulting information structures, rather than the entire user population as in this article. As shown by Heymann et al. [2008], del.icio.us is not dominated by a small number of core users, but other tagging sites may be. We know relatively little about how user concentration might influence the types of information structures that can be derived from tags. Furthermore, the shared vocabulary used by a specialized subcommunity of users may differ considerably to that of a larger user base.

“Question Authority” is probably the best bumper-sticker advice ever given, so long as you don’t read it to mean “Contradict Authority”: mind viruses have just as big a field day with automatic rebels as with automatic yes-men.

The only way we learn and grow is by changing our beliefs systems — changing our memetic programming. Yet, paradoxically, we tend to hang on to that programming as if would kill us to be wrong about any of our memes.

“Question Authority” is probably the best bumper-sticker advice ever given, so long as you don’t read it to mean “Contradict Authority”: mind viruses have just as big a field day with automatic rebels as with automatic yes-men.

The only way we learn and grow is by changing our beliefs systems — changing our memetic programming. Yet, paradoxically, we tend to hang on to that programming as if would kill us to be wrong about any of our memes.

In our sense organs — eyes, ears and so on — we possess the most beatifully controlled, delicate and effective access to the brain. If we want to change a brain, we can best do it through our natural senses.

Moving people from one kind of housing to another and giving them more money is not giving them the kind of environment that will educate, that is, change them.

The truly creative person is not an outlaw but a lawmaker.

As radicals move into the conflict that is often required to produce social change they tend to rigidify as individuals and to form themselves into highly dogmatic organizations, intolerant of diversity within their own ranks.

… people who break the iron frame of custom are necessarily people of ardor and aggressiveness. They are capable of pursuing their objectives with fervor and singleness of purpose. If they were not, they would not succeed. And it is sad but true that in shaping themselves into bludgeons with which to assault the social structure they often develop a diamond-hard rigidity of their own. Thus arises the familiar problem of what to do with the revolutionaries when the revolution is over.

Social relationships grew more complex, demanding new forms of mediation. And somwhere along the way, people started making symbols.

Effective symbols trigger deep-seated emotional responses.

Решающим моментом здесь является то, что наше внутреннее восприятие окружающего мира в значительной мере обусловлено вербальными категориями, которые мы используем для его описания.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that strategic planning works.Except that when Starbuck reviewed them, he found the studies typically involved interviewing senior managers to ascertain how useful they thought their strategic planning was. And what do you know? Strategic planners tended to to find their strategic planning very useful. For a more objective assessment, Starbuck reviewed data on how a coloration’s profits fared as compared to the amount of strategic planning the company had engaged in. The results: companies that did a lot of strategic planning performed, on average, no better that companies that did less strategic planning.

Когда мы используем символы (вербальные или невербальные), чтобы отделить один класс предметов или действий от другого, мы создаем искусственные границы на том пространстве, которое в своем «естественном» виде является неразрывным.

“Art is cultural equivalent of mutation,” says New York University archeologists Randall White.
…
Art corresponds to periods of stress much more than it corresponds to periods of well-being and leisure.

“Each society creates culture and is created by it”

A mature society must make a particular effort to reward its innovators, because its very maturity discourages innovation.

Во-вторых, я бы особо подчеркнул, что весь этот процесс дробления внешнего мира на категории, имеющие названия, а также последующее упорядочение этих категорий в соответствии с нашей социальной потребностью основывается на том, что — несмотря на весьма ограниченную способность изменять окружающий мир — мы обладаем фактически неограниченной способностью манипулировать с его моделью, которую мы носим в голове.

Youth is characteristically impatient of carefully weighted procedures. The young organization (or individual) want to “get to the point.” The important thing is to get the job done and not to worry about how it is done. The emphasis is on serving the stark need as directly as possible with no frills.

But goals are achieved by some means, and sooner or later even the most impulsive man of action will discover that some ways of achieving the goal are more effective than others. A concern for how to do it is the root impulse in all craftsmanship, and accounts for all the style in human performance. Without it we would never know the peaks of human achievement.

Yet ironically, this concern for “how it is done” is also one of the deceases of which societies die. Little by little, preoccupation with method, technique and procedures gains a subtle dominance over the whole process of goal seeking. How it is done becomes more important than whether it is done. Means triumph over ends. Form triumphs over spirit. Method is enthroned. Men become prisoners of their procedures, and organisations that were designed to achieve some goal become obstacles in the path to that goal.

A concern for “how to do it” is healthy and necessary. The fact that is often leads to an empty worship of method is just one of the dangers with which we have to live. Every human activity, no matter how ennobling or constructive or healthy, involves hazards. The flower of competence carries the seeds of rigidity just as the flower of virtue carries the seeds of complacency. “There is a road to hell,” said John Bunyan, “even from the gates of heaven."

Переводя идеи, т.е. продукты разума, «ментифакты», в материальные объекты «вне нас», мы придаем им относительное постоянство, и в этой постоянной материальной форме можем подвергнуть их техническим операциям, которые недоступны разуму, если он действует сам по себе. Есть разница между проведением математических подсчетов «в уме» и выполнением их с карандашом и бумагой или с помощью калькулятора.

Evolution is a scientific model of how things become more complex; entropy describes how things become simpler. They are the creative and the destructive forces of the universe.

Evolution is a scientific model of how things become more complex; entropy describes how things become simpler. They are the creative and the destructive forces of the universe.

A common stratagem of those who wish to escape the swirling currents of change is to stand on high moral ground. They assert that the old is intimately bond up in moral and spiritual considerations that will be threatened by any change. When Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had to face the superior technological development of Western Europe, Slavophiles were impelled to speak of the Russian soul, much as some writers in India today assert that the superiority of Western technology is more than balanced by India’s spiritual depth. The new thing will usually look barbarous compared to the old. The era that is being born will often look less spiritual and less laden with the deeper values than the era that is dying. A society that has mastered the art of continuous renewal will not let such impressions distort its judgements. It will reject the notion that nothing is morally worthy unless it has been around for a long time.

Whether in art, in manners or in social structure, the trend to intricate elaboration often falls of its own weight, and people again seek a simple relationship to life and to one another.

The accumulations that weigh one down may even be of the nonmaterial sort, for example, reputation oк status. An organisation may avoid experimental ventures because it fears to damage its reputation for soundness. Many a gifted scholar has allowed his creative talent to be smothered by a growing commitment to his own previously stated doctrines. Many an established specialist fears the loss of his reputation if he ventures beyond the territory where he has proved his mastery. Indeed this fear is the greatest obstacle to intellectual breadth in the scholarly world.

We live in a world where things that make noises are constantly near us, where in a sense even the space around us has a faint murmur to it. This noise feels right to us; at an unconscious level, it is reassuring. The technical term for this type of background noise, in fact, is comfort noise — engineers like Bourget call it CN — and trying to talk to someone in the absence of it is a bit disorienting and even a little creepy. Our brains rebel at the unnatural neatness.

Dewey acknowledged a debt to Sir Francis Bacon, who in 1623 had divided knowledge into three parts — history, poesy and philosophy — which, according to Bacon, reflected the three capabilities of the mind: memory, imagination, and reason.

That there is a heavy and somewhat blind bias toward neatness and organisation is a little strange, considering all the negative associations so many of us have with highly ordered systems. Order reached a zenith of sorts, at least in Western civilisation, with Nazi Germany. (What, in contrast, could be messier than the Garden of Eden?) Obsessive-compulsive disorder and some forms of autism are to an extent diseases of overorganization. The question, then, isn’t whether or not too much neatness and organisation can be a problem. We all know it can. The question, rather, is where to draw the line. But oddly enough, it’s a question that hardly anyone asks. Most people simply assume they’re on the overly messy and disorganised side of the line and believe they would de well to drag themselves in the direction of neatness and order.

Some situations leave little room for mess; for example, nobody would want to go to a messy eye surgeon. Rather, we argue that there is an optimal level of mess for every aspect of every system. That is, in any situation there is a type and level of mess at which effectiveness is maximised, and our assertion is that people and organisations frequently err on the side of overorganization. In many cases they can improve by increasing mess, if it’s done in the right way. At minimum, recognising the benefits of mess can be a major stress-reducer — many of us are already operating at a more-or-less appropriate level of mess but labor under the mistaken belief that we’re failing in some way because of it.

Но сейчас я хочу подчеркнуть еще одну сложность, заключающуюся в том, что, хотя получатель ритуального послания обретает информацию одновременно посредством нескольких разных сенсорных каналов, все эти разные ощущения соединяются только в одно «послание».

As Dewey wrote at this time “My heart is open to anything that’s either decimal or about libraries.”
…
He wrote a school essay on the metric system when he was sixteen. When he was twenty-five he founded the American Metric Bureau to lobby for the adoption of the metric system within the United States. He even arranged his travel so that he would arrive on the tenth, twentieth, or thirtieth day of the month… rationalism crossing over into superstition.

If the properties of the environment were different, if gravity, light, inertia, air, sound and the like were not as they are, then learning would be different and the resulting organism, though clothed in a human body, would be different indeed.

The Dewey Decimal Classification system can’t be fixed because knowledge itself is unfixed. Knowledge is diverse, changing, imbued with the cultural values of the moment. The world is too diverse for any single classification system to work for everyone in every culture at every time.

From ancient Sumers to India to China to the Aztec kingdom, the same pattern manifested again and again: first came literacy, then the nation state, the empire, and ultimately the intellectual apotheosis of the empire, the library. When empires fall, they usually take their libraries with them.

Modern technology need not destroy aesthetic, spiritual and social values, but it will most certainly do so unless the individuals who manage our technology are firmly committed to the preservation of such values.

Во-первых, любую мышцу, которую можно напрячь, можно также и расслабить; все движения потенциально бинарны; если я шагаю вперед, то могу сделать и шаг назад.
…
Индексы в невербальных коммуникативных системах, подобно звуковым элементам в устной речи, имеют значение не тогда, когда выступают изолированно, а только когда они — члены одного ряда. Знак или символ только тогда приобретает значение, когда его отделили от какого-то другого, противоположного знака или символа.

Все это — сложный процесс, а если учесть, что отдельные знаки не организованы в линейную последовательность, наподобие отдельных букв в типографском оттиске, который вы сейчас читаете, или наподобие нот в музыкальной партитуре, то может показаться довольно удивительным, что мы вообще способны прочитывать карту. Тем не менее составление карты и прочитывание ее в двух измерениях почти универсально для человечества, тогда как чтение и написание линейных текстов — это специфическое достижение, ассоциируемое с высокой социальной и технической изощренностью.

Эта разница между человеческой Культурой и Природой очень заметна. Видимая нами дикая Природа представляет собой беспорчдочное пересечение хаотичных кривых; в ней нет прямых линий и мало каких бы то ни было правильных геометрических форм. А рукотворный, созданный человеком мир Культуры полон прямых линий, прямоугольников, треугольников, кругов и т.д.

The king [Thamus, Egyptian] goes on to decry the art of writing as “an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence,”...

We imagine that freedom, like sunshine or fresh air, is always there to be had if someone isn’t forcibly preventing us from enjoying it. But freedom as we now now it has been exceedingly rare in the history of mankind. It is a highly perishable product of civilisation, wholly dependent on certain habits of mind widely shared, on certain institutional arrangements widely agreed upon.

Aristotle’s interest in organizing books grew out of his passion for mapping the structure of human thought. He devoted enormous energy to questions surrounding the organization of knowledge, postulating theories of logic and taxonomic models that would reverberate for millennia.
…
He [Aristotle] also introduced the convention of binominal naming: that is, describing a species by its genus (e.g. “felis”) and species (“catus”).

[…] все человеческие существа имеют глубокую психологическую потребность в чувстве защищенности, а это чувство приходит, когда знаешь, где ты находишься. Между тем, «знание того, где ты находишься» есть вопрос осознание своего социального, равно как и территориального положения.
Поэтому «карты социального пространства» мы создаем, используя в качестве модели пространство территориальное. Если это происходит, то чем однообразнее контекст реального территориального пространства, тем более жесткой и искусственной оказывается модель.

Worker output improved no more under a Taylor-style regimen than it did under clearly meaningless changes, such as lowering the lights or turning them up, so long as management was standing there to record the results.

Aristotle did not invent the concept of genera and species; he simply adapted and codified the ancient oral traditions of folk taxonomies. His great contribution was to make the old implicit structures explicit, and therefore available for inspection and improvement.

Real work is what advances your business or your job. It should use your skills and knowledge to the full and will frequently take you out of your comfort zone. Since it is by nature quite challenging, it is likely to meet some resistance within your mind.
Busy work, on the other hand, is what you do in order to avoid doing the real work!

Unlike the royal libraries that preceded it, the Alexandria library was open to the public.
The structure of the library followed Aristotle’s division of knowledge into observational and deductive sciences.

The tree of knowledge, the tree of species, the breakdown of the human body into major biological subsystems, the division of the earth into continents and countries — all are ways of understanding, not ways of looking up information.

All along, though, our knowledge of the world has assumed the shape of a tree because that knowledge has been shackled to the physical. Now that the digitizing of information is allowing us to go beyond the physical in ways Aristotle could not have dreamed, the shape of knowledge is changing.

Over the past decade, the respect accorder randomness by scientists has climbed to an entirely new level, thanks to a once-obscure phenomenon known as stochastic resonance. In a nutshell, stochastic resonance applies to a paradoxical-sounding situation in which adding some sort of randomness to a system makes it more effective — as if the more static you picked up on a radio station, the more clearly you heard the music.

To Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, intellectual freedom was a paramount civic value (they would surely have bristled at the scholarly territorialism and narrowcast specialization of the modern academy), and the architecture of the library reflected that point of view.

If our minds didn’t have the ability to copy ideas from each other, all of us would be limited to the knowledge we could gather for ourselves in a single lifetime.

If our minds didn’t have the ability to copy ideas from each other, all of us would be limited to the knowledge we could gather for ourselves in a single lifetime.

Most messes encountered in daily life are failed orders — someone had an organizing scheme in mind, but for one reason or another it didn’t work.

The poet and librarian Callimachus was the first to undertake the job of creating a separate catalog of collection, a comprehensive bibliography known as the Pinakes, or “Tables of Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning Together with a List of Their Writings.”

The way to make money in business is usually to keep your focus as narrow as possible. Your aim should be to do a few thing really well. I you find you don’t have time to do them all really well, then narrow your focus so that you are doing even fewer things.

But here's another point to consider about an ordered deck of cards: What’s it good for? Of all the things in all the world that are done with deck of cards, few require an ordered deck of cards. The first thing you do with an ordered deck of cards is shuffle them.

«Грязь — это вещество не на своем месте»

Земля в кухне — это грязь; это — вещество не на своем месте. Чем определеннее мы обозначаем наши границы, тем ощутимее для нас грязь, каким-то образом попавшая не на ту сторону границы. Границы становятся грязными по определению, и мы тратим немалые усилия на то, чтобы содержать их в чистоте, именно для того, чтобы иметь возможность утверждаться в собственной категориальной системе.

What may be most in need of innovation is the corporation itself. Perhaps what every corporation (and every other organization) needs is a Department of Continious Renewal that would view the whole organization as a system in need of continuing innovation.

He (S.R. Ranganathan) proposed five basic areas of categorization, or facets: personality, matter, energy, space and time.
...
Intuition introduces vagueness into his system; according to his son, “Even Ranganathan was apparently not very clear about what the ‘Personality’ facet really stood for.”

Faceted classification can be used either way because it captures something important about the organization of the real world that organizational trees do not: Reality is multifaceted. There are lots of ways to slice it. How we choose to slice it up depends on why we’re slicing it up.

When you publish knowledge in books, you put those ideas into a treelike structure of volumes, books, chapters, sections, paragraphs, and sentences. Imlicitly, paper shapes knowledge into trees.

Lumping and splitting physical objects requires us to make binary decisions about where things go. Ideas, information, and knowledge shouldn’t have to suffer from that limitation.

In the third order of order, knowledge doesn’t have a shape. There are just too many usefull, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of the world.

Тем не менее на практике принципы формальной логики применяются нами только в относительно редких случаях, когда мы стремимся передать точную информацию на расстояние, используя единственный канал коммуникации, например при написании письма либо книги или в разговоре с кем-либо по телефону. Когда же двоим людям реально приходится близко общаться и они могут при этом пользоваться одновременно несколькими каналами передачи сенсорной информации — через прикосновения, взгляды, восприятие на слух и т.д, логическая упорядоченность индивидуальных посланий гораздо менее очевидна.

Anyone who has ever sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper and tried to force creativity knows that inspiration doesn’t usually happen that way. Rather it tends to to spring unexpected from novel connections, and novel connections, in turn, often go hand-in-hand with mess.

When we create a buffer we are switching our brain over from reactive to rational thinking.
One of the best ways of achieving this is to write down what we intend to do. Being a higher-level activity, writing switches us into a more rational mode.
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You need to make a rule for yourself here: whenever you think something comes up that you think needs a quick response, write it down.
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Making a habit of this is crucial because when you are designing your day you cannot plan for same-day actions.

Classifications make strange bedfellows.

… I am proposing in this book that there should be only two days on which your works gets actioned — today or tomorrow. The strong preference is for tomorrow.

Over the course of the millennia, we’ve developed sophisticated methods and processes for developing, communicating, and preserving knowledge. We have major institutions — serious contributors to our culture and our economy — devoted to those tasks. We’re good at it. Now we have to invent new ways appropriate to the new shape of knowledge. We are doing so at a pace unparalleled in our history.

Hanging a leaf on multiple branches makes it more findable by customers. Unlike in the second order, this doesn’t make your e-store disorganized or messy. It makes it more usable… and more profitable.

In the miscellaneous order, the only distinction between metadata and data is that metadata is what you already know and data is what you’re trying to find out.

The power of the miscellaneous comes directly from the fact that in the third order, everything is connected and therefore everything is metadata.

The society capable of continuous renewal not only feels at home with the future, it accepts, even welcomes, the idea that the future may bring change.

In the second order, the bar code gets stamped well after the manufacturer has decided what constitutes a product and how it’ll be packaged. In the third order, stamping an ID on a leaf often is what turns it into a leaf in the first place.

Sensible people will understand that there will never be a time when we are not in immanent danger. Cruelty, violence and brutality will be held in leash only by unresting effort — if held in leash at all. Sloth, indulgence, smugness, torpor begotten of ease and flabbiness begotten of security will always lurk in wait.

It is not that the “product” of our education system is not “capable.” He comes out with “skills.” He may be a usable component in the social machine. But he is just about finished as a learner.

A mood of wise and weary disenchantment may seem wonderfully mature, but it does not account for much of the growth and movement and vital action in the world.

Our lives today are about jobs, societies, and ideas — not lions, tigers, and bears. But people treat cultural failure as if it were as harmful as physical failure — being eaten!

Our lives today are about jobs, societies, and ideas — not lions, tigers, and bears. But people treat cultural failure as if it were as harmful as physical failure — being eaten!

The results were surprising: over the course of as little as a few weeks, managers who threw monkey wrenches into their routines in this way found that they were also able to change the wat they treated subordinates. The reason, says Fletcher, is that people tend to get trapped in what he calls “habit webs”. When they try to effect an important, useful change, they find they’re stuck tight. But if they snip away at individual, thin, supporting strands of the web, the web can eventually be loosened enough to permit more important change. “New behaviours lead to new experiences, and eventually that helps people change the way they think,” he says.

[Leonard] Shlain argues that the introduction of printed books seems to have triggered a kind of mass social pathology that may have stemmed from the jarring introduction of a linear, left-brained communications mode of thought into what had previously been a predominantly oral and visual right-brained culture.
...
The sudden shift from oral, vusually symbolic culture to an increasingly left-brained world of linear written texts may have triggered a deep shift in the European psyche that led, for a time, to a kind of mass psychosis.

The technique traced its roots to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, who in the fifth century BC described a method for improving one’s memory by visualizing a series of loci (places) in a particular order, then associating a meaningful image with each place, as an aid to reminiscence.

Whenever you send an e-mail, leave a message or ask someone to do something, make sure that you put a note in your task diary to follow up after a couple of days. Do the same if someone promises to do something for you. Follow-up is essential because you will never get anyone to attach a higher priority to your work than they perceive that you are giving it yourself.

[Thomas] Aquinas described the art as relying on two essential facilities: association (the ability to relate one concept to another) and order (the ability to arrange spatial memories into nested categories) \u2014 in other words, networks and hierarchies.

Instead of giving young people the impression that their task is to stand a dreary watch over the ancient values, we should be telling them the grim but bracing truth that it is their task to re-create those values continuously in their own behaviour, facing the dilemmas and catastrophes of their own time.

The moral order is not something static, it is not something enshrined in historic documents, or stowed away like the family silver, or lodged in the minds of pious and somewhat elderly moralists. It is an attribute of a functioning social system. As such it is a living, changing thing, liable to decay and disintegration as well as to revitalizing and reinforcement, and never any better than the generation that holds it in trust.

The writer Caitlin Flangan has posited that people who are tempted to turn to professional organisers often feel that something is out of kilter in their lives, and they mistakenly attribute the problem to a lack of neatness and order in their homes. She goes on to quote Cheryl Mendelson’s book, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, which notes this of home-order enthusiasts:

"They arrange their shoes along the colour spectrum in a straight line and suffer anxiety if the towels on the shelf do all face the same way. The expend enormous effort on what they think of a housekeeping, but their homes often are not welcoming. Who can feel at home in a place where the demand for order is so exaggerated? In house-keeping, more is not always better. Order and cleanliness should not cost more than the value they bring in health, efficiency, and convenience".

Bacon’s pursuit of an empirical method would eventually lead him to formulate a new philosophical framework for classifying all of human knowledge. He postulated that all human intellectual pursuits revolve around three essential facilities: memory, reason and imagination (or, in more familiar terms: history, philisophy, and poetry).

“An article is neutral when people have stopped changing it.” This is a brilliant operational definition of neutrality, one that makes it a function of social interaction, not a quality of writing to be judged from on high.

If you are considering spending hours meticulously ordering a CD collection, you may want to think about the fact that after Apple brought out the iPod, the ideal device for neatly categorising thousands of songs, it discovered to virtually everyone’s surprise that the most popular feature was the “shuffle” capability, which plays tunes in random order.

The product sold most frequently throughout history has always been yourself.

The product sold most frequently throughout history has always been yourself.

It would seem that Wikipedia does everything in it’s power to avoid being an authority, yet that seems only to increase its authority — a paradox that indicates an important change in the nature of authority itself.

You can have the world’s greatest idea, but unless you shout about it, crusade—evangelize—it has no impact.

You can have the world’s greatest idea, but unless you shout about it, crusade—evangelize—it has no impact.

Now we can see for ourselves that knowledge isn’t in our heads: It is between us.

Complicated things arise naturally out of the forces of evolution. No consiousnness intention is necessary.

Complicated things arise naturally out of the forces of evolution. No consiousnness intention is necessary.

In his [George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s] view the world existed more as a continuum of life forms; fixed categories were simply the insecure projections of feeble human minds. Buffon had little use for Linnaeu’s detailed classification system. He dismissed the work as an uninspired collection of tables.

In long technical papers, Kirsh and his students employ some of the anthropologists and computer scientists — Scruffy is a term from computer science, believe it or not — to analyse office “activity landscapes.” One of the key concepts in Kirsh’s research is that of the work entry point. What is it in your office environment that helps you figure out how to pick up where you left off or to begin a new task, where you’re interrupted, leave the office, switch tasks, or finish a task? “Neats,” he's found, depend on a small number of “explicit coordinating structures” such as lists, day planners, and in-boxes to quickly and surely determine what to do next. Scruffies, on the other hand, are “data driven” — that is, they don’t explicitly plan out and specify what they do but instead rely on the office environment to give them clues and prompts, in the form of documents lying on the desk, files piles up on top of the filing cabinet, comments scribbled on envelopes, Post-it notes (which, surprisingly, many Neats disdain) stuck here and there, books left open on the floor, and so forth.

“People shape their environments over time until it conforms to the way they’re comfortable working, even if it seems out of control to someone else,” he (David Kirsh) says. “As soon as you start to telling people how to do things, you’re customising their environment for them and that causes problems.” Not only will pushing Scruffies to get organised probably impair their productivity, he adds, but Scruffies will inevitably end up disorganised again anyway. “They’re recidivists,” he says.

You don’t automatically pay attention to everything you see and hear. You automatically filter out things that don’t coincide with your worldview, and that includes conspiracies, unless of course you’re a conspiracy buff, in which you see them everywhere.

You don’t automatically pay attention to everything you see and hear. You automatically filter out things that don’t coincide with your worldview, and that includes conspiracies, unless of course you’re a conspiracy buff, in which you see them everywhere.

Our instinctive reaction when we when we decide to take a break is to work to the natural finishing point — the end of the next chapter or section or whatever — and then take a break. This seems a very natural thing to do, but the problem it is that the mind chalks up a completion: ‘We’ve finished!’ The mind likes completion, so so getting it to start again on the next section can be an effort.

... library organizations are notoriously top-down, hierarchical, and process-oriented operations. And like stell mills, factories, secondary schools, and other institutional offspring of the nineteenth century, libraries are struggling to reinvent themselves in a postindustrial age.

It's a different way of thinking about a company — not as a seamless whole, but as a fractures conglomeration of transitory, semi-independent units, some leaping into being and growing quickly, others withering away, with employees and funding flowing freely and fast between them. University of Milan researcher Mario Benassi refers to spin-up-friendly companies as “modular” companies, and espouses three basic principles for them: growing in pieces instead of holistically; being as quick to shrink or get rid of logy pieces of the company as to invest in the promising ones; and being prepared to reorient its efforts around any of the pieces. “Modular companies are more focused, and faster,” he says. “They can quickly get rid of activities they’re not interested in anymore.” Traditional companies, by contrast, tend to be so fixated on preserving the same core business that potentially hot new markets are poorly served — if they are served at all.

In hopes of recruiting more pilant librarians willing to follow directions and conform to his desire for implementing a centralized scheme, Dewey actively encouraged the recruitment of women into the profession. He believed that women were more likely to acquiesce to implementing his system rather than devising their own.

Orderliness is the way things are supposed to be. It is the Eleventh Commandment, the one that caused the other ten to arrange themselves in neat lines on two symmetric halves of the tablet.

Using Ranganathan’s system, any item can be described in a highly specific way yet without imposing a deterministic subject hierarchy. It is a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down ontology.

If human beings are individual and unique, then any system of fixed scheduling and mass instruction must be insanely inefficient. It may seem tidy and convenient, but that is an illusion maintained only by pretending that individual differences are not significant and that the human potential is incredibly low — only by giving up on education and concentrating on control.

In 1883 Cutter wrote a futuristic essay entitled “The Buffallo Public Library in 1983.” Imagining what a library might look like in 100 years, he envisioned readers sitting at desks equipped with “a little keyboard” through which they could connect with a central electronic catalog, ordering books from the stacks by punching in a call number. He even forsaw networks of libraries connected by a “fonographic foil” that would enable them to communicate telegraphically, accessing each other’s collections so readily that “all the libraries in the country… are practically one library.” He missed the mark by less than a decade.

Both the way we endow our own utterance with meaning and our attribution of meaning to the utterance of others are acts of tacit knowing.

The expert recognition of specimens, the use of probes and tools, the major skills of our body and mind are all based on a meaningful integration of our body and the sensations felt by our body.

A word focally observed — that is as a sequence of sounds or of marks on paper — appears to us as a meaningless external object; while its assimilation, which makes it a subsidiary thing, deprives it of the opaque externality of an object. The meaningful use of a word, which causes it to loose its bodily character, makes us look through the word at its meaning.

Rosch realized that concepts can be clear without having clear definitions if they’re organized around undisputed examples, or prototypes, as she calls them. That’s as radical a thought within cognitive psychology as Wittgenstein’s family-resemblance theory within philosophy.

In 1934 the notion of networked documents was still so novel that no one had a word to describe such relationships until Otlet invented one: “links.” He envisioned the whole endevour as a great “reseau”: a web.

Rosch hypothesized that since “the task of the categorization systems is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort,” basic-level objects (chair, car) should have “as many properties as possible predictable from knowing any one property.”

He [Otlet] wanted to penetrate the boundaries of the books themselves, to unearth the “substance, sources and conclusions” inside. Taking Dewey’s system as his starting point, Otlet began developing what came to be known as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), now widely recognized as the first — and one of the only — full implementations of a faceted classification system. While Ranganathan deserves credit as the philosophical forbearer of the facets, Otlet was the first to put them to practical use.

The fact that we can possess knowledge that is unspoken is of course a commonplace and so is the fact that we must know something yet unspoken before we can express it in words. It has been taken for granted in the philosophical analysis of language in earlier centuries, but modern positivism has tried to ignore it, on the grounds that tacit knowledge was not accessible to objective observation. The present theory of meaning assigns a firm place to the inarticulate meaning of experience and shows that it is the foundation of all explicit meaning. [...] We see here how heavily the course of scientific inquiry may rest on deciding whether certain should be taken to be significant or be set aside as accidental.

Show us a clear-cut example — a prototype — of a cup or a bowl and we feel no ambiguity at all. Likewise, in our culture we agree that robin is a good example of a bird, but an ostrich, flamingo or penguin is not. A kitchen chair is a good example of a chair, but a beanbag is a terrible example of one. A car or a truck is a good example of a vehicle, but a skateboard is not, and skates aren’t vehicles at all, although it’s hard to explain why not. The prototypes — the good examples — do the job of organizing our world that Aristotle thought required essences and definitions.

Test on four hundred students in introductory psychology classes proved Rosch’s point. She found that the students were able to list more features for basic-level words than for superordinates; knowing that something is a bicycle brings more associated knowkedge with it than knowing that something is a vehicle.

The definitional view draws sharp lines. The prototype view works because things can be sort of, kind of in a category, the way a skateboard is sort of vehicle. Prototype theory relies on our implicit understanding and does not assume that we can even make that understanding explicit.

This means that a business that forces its products — or its employees — into a predefined set of categories is performing an unnatural act.

An unintelligible text referring to an unintelligible matter presents us with a dual problem. Both halves of such a problem jointly guide our minds towards solving them and will in fact be solved jointly by the understanding of the words referred to and the words referring to it. The meaning of the thing and the terms designating them is discovered at the same time.

With the faceted philosophy of the UDC as backdrop, the Traité [de documentation] posited a universal “law of organization” declaring that no document could ever be fully understood by itself, but that its meaning becomes clarified through mining its relationship with other documents.
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... he simply believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional things, with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, as well as other readers, writers, and topics. Otlet believed in the possibility of empirical truth, or what he called “facticity” — a property that emerged over time, and through the ongoing collaboration between readers and writers.
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Otlet’s vision suggests an intellectual cosmos illuminated by both objective classification and the direct influence of readers and writers: a system simultaneously ordered and self-organizing and endlessly reconfigurable by the individual reader.

I have describe the tacit process of understanding experience and that of understanding a report on an experience as two acts of sense-reading. In the process by which a writer picks words for describing his experience, we meet an act of sense-giving.

Our conception of a tree, for example, is formed in a similar way. It arises by the tacit integration of countless experienced of trees and pictures and reports of still others: deciduous and evergreen, straight and crooked, bare and leafy. All these encounters included it forming the conception of a tree; they are all used subsidiary with a bearing on conception of a tree, which is what we mean by the word ’tree’.

In Otlet’s last book, Monde, he articulates a final vision of the great reseau that might serve as his last word: “Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation, as a whole or in certain of its parts.”

Our capacity to endow language with meaning must be recognised as a particular instance of our sense-giving powers.

All knowledge falls into one of these two classes: it is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge.

The ideal of a strictly explicit knowledge is indeed self-contadictory; deprived of their tacit coefficients, all spoken words, all formulae, all maps and graphs, are strictly meaningless.

“There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” [Bush — As We May Think]

Otlet had called it a “link”. Bush called it an “associative trail.”
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Using associative trails, the user could forge a personal trail through any number of documents, creating an exteriorized representation of an internal thought process that other users could later see.
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“…Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.” Like ants leaving pheromone signals for their peers, the scholar could thus create a pathway for others to follow. The associative trail, then, represented a new kind of stigmergy.

To the question how a child can learn to perform a vast set of complex rules, intelligible only by a handful of experts, we can reply that the striving imagination has the power to implement its aim by the subsidiary practice of ingenious rules of which the subject remains focally ignorant. This king of rule can be acquired tacitly and only tacitly, and it can also be practiced only tactility.

Discovery takes place in two more to less separate stages, an arduous straining of the imagination is followed by a virtually spontaneous appearance of the solution. In his classic study of heuristics, Poincare´ has described cases in which these two phases were sharply separated: the effort of the imagination had ceased for several hours, when the bright idea turned up. Poincare thinks that first a strenuous search loosens possible bits of a solution and that discovery is then achieved by an effortless integration of these bits. He call this integration an illumination; I shall name it intuition.

Both a problem and a suggested solution are in the nature of surmises, but they differ by their degree of explicitness. A suggested solution can usually be clearly communicated and its convincing power be transmitted to others, for its grounds are largely tangible. By a contrast, a problem or any kind of surmise arising in the course of an inquiry — is difficult to explain to others, let alone make convincing to others, for its grounds are mainly unspecifiable.

In a society that insists on both group consensus and deep respect for the opinions of superiors, how can group decisions be reached at meetings without either excluding the boss or failing to defer his opinion? Easy: the boss kicks off the meeting, falls asleep, and wakes up when consensus has been reached.

Our worst error would lie in dreaming too small.

We inevitably make sense of what we experience. But the shape of sense is changing.

... a new kind of human being — one who is not driven by narrow competition, eager acquisition and aggression, but who spends his life in the joyful pursuit of learning. Such a human being, I feel, will result not so much through changed ideologies or economic systems as through changes in the process I have called “education.”
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It is hard to imagine a more revolutionary statement for us than “The natural condition of the human organism is joy.” For, if this is true, we are being daily cheated, and perhaps the social system that so ruthlessly steals our birthright should be overthrown.

A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.

The formula for experimenting with mess is simple enough and works in personal, institutional, and technical contexts: Try being a little messier in some way, and see if there’s an improvement. If there is, try a little more. Keep going until you get the sense that somewhere along the way things for worse, at which point you might want to try being a little neater. You get the idea.

Those who would reduce, control, quell must lose in the end. The ecstatic forces of life, growth and change are too numerous, too various, too tumultuous.

The notion that terrible things can befall utterly innocent people, which of course happens all the time, is one of that forces us to confront the messiness and randomness of life, and we manufacture excuses to deny it.

“Gamblers are very reliable when it comes to reporting how many days they gambled, which days they gambled, what games they played, and almost everything else about their gambling,” he (Wehelan) says. “The one thing they seem to have a really hard time remembering accurately is how much they won or lost. The vast majority reports results that are highly biased toward winning.”

"I wouldn’t trade my ADD for anything,” said (Edward) Hallowell. “As far as I’m concerned , you all have attention surplus disorder.” He went on to describe the ADHD mind as “a Ferrari with Chevrolet brakes,” by which he meant that people with ADHD often seem to think more intensely and about more things than the rest of us, but with less control. “it shouldn’t be called a ‘deficit’ of attention,” he said. “It’s a wandering of attention."

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