Nov 17

Written by: Matthew Hile
11/17/2006 6:50 AM

Clay Shirky's talk, Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories (Audio/Discussion), is a part of the fascinating Seminars About Long-Term Thinking (SALT) hosted by Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation whose fame began in the 60s with the creation of the Whole Earth Catalog which Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer, called the conceptual forerunner of the web search engine.

Shirky talked about the difficulty of preserving our information over the long term. Much of his focus was on how one could find information that had been stored. He described the difficulties of structured catalogs. Comparing them to lost languages for which we have no Rosetta stone. As a solution he suggested "degeneracy" that is classifitory redundancy so that the same thing is said in many different ways. Degeneracy is embodied in the "new" social tagging systems such as flicker, and del.icio.us. "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody" and by enabling this sort of categorization we have an ever emergent understanding of how people think about these items and can therefore find they. Perhaps more importantly, these systems also alow us to understand how our understanding changes over time.

The notions of tagging have long been used to help locate information. In searching the scientific literature these are called "key terms" which are associated, by the author or others, with a particular article. When searching for some information I would rarely choose to start with such classifications as the Dewey Decimal system. Rather I enter some key terms that would seem to me to fit the concept I want to understand and use what I find there to expand my search to gather in the web of knowledge that surrounds it. What tags adds to this information is that other readers add sharable terms which will expand and enrich that web of understanding making our information links more fruitful.

Shirky's talk is a great listen and a good jumping off point to expand your own thinking about how to find what you want and how to understand the meaning of what you find.

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