Ontology is Overrated

Prof. AlvaradoMDST 3703

16 October 2012

Business

Midterms next Thursday … Assignment: – See Assignments > Final Projects—Homework 1

Review

Manovich’s thesis: the database is a symbolic form– Produces a figure/ground reversal between

paradigmatic resources and syntagmatic products– Between process of production and finished product

How is this reversal represented in Vertov’s film?– How does Vertov “solve” the problem of relating

paradigm to syntagm?

Overview

Today we look at the development of the database as symbolic form on the web– Symbolic forms shape cognition

In particular, we look at changes in new media associated with Web 2.0– Web 2.0 is, roughly, the web after Google

In many ways, the Web 2.0 revolution is the result of the “databasing of the web”

Each of these are made possible by the application of database logic

Clay Shirky is one of the most important theorists of the post-Google web

American media theorist. Studied fine arts at Yale. Teacher, writer, consultant. Books include Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus.

What are some differences between Shirky’s view of ontology and others we have read?

All of the theorists interested in models have assumed that there is a model in the

text that can be retrieved by scholars (experts)

Shirky embraces the network effects of Web 2.0, in which user participation

outstrips the capacity for experts to control content

The text emerges as a site of competing interpretations

David Weinberger

This is the biggest rationalization effect so far:

That our view of knowledge itself is an effect of how we organize the

documents that store it

As Wesch says, we will have to rethink some of our deepest notions

The tree of nature and logic From Ramon Lull Ars Magna (Great Art), 1305

For example …

What is the advantage of this kind of structure?

Trees can be easily navigated by people

What is the advantage of this kind of structure?

Content can be classified in as many ways as there are perspectives

But this kind of organization follows from information stored in databases

URL 1 TAG 1

URL 1 TAG 2

URL 1 TAG 3

URL 2 TAG 2

URL 2 tAG 3

URL 3 TAG 1

URL 4 TAG 5

The Method: Tags and URLs

Links have addresses– <a href=“http://somewhere.net”>Click me</a>– Addresses are URLs

Tags can be used to classify these addresses– Delicious– Diigo

Anything can have an address and be tagged– Images in Flickr– Things in the world

Examples

Delicious (web pages and tags) Flickr (images and tags) Twitter (tweets and hashtags, retweets)

Effects

Cool visualizations Sometimes useful mashups The web itself becomes a large, socially

constructed database

A visualization of messages referencing the #Aristotle hashtag on Twitter, created by Social Collider. The red lines in the center are the #Aristotle references.

http://complexrhetoric.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-aristotle-on-twitter-panel-wrap-up.html

“we could mine the tweets surrounding an archived hashtag in order to generate a topic based context that would persist after the event had been long gone”

http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/09/09/additional-thoughts-on-tag-powered-context/

-- Scrape tweeting links using the hashtag from the twapperkeeper archive and feed them to a facet of the search engine

-- Look to other services, such as delicious, to see who has been bookmarking URLs with the particular tag-- Look to delicious to see who bookmarked the ALTC2010 homepage

SEE http://ohttp://ouseful.open.ac.uk/jit/examples/hypertree-demo2.php?mode=tag&url=http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2010/useful.open.ac.uk/jit/examples/hypertree-demo2.php?mode=tag

Tag Powered Context

35,000,000 Flickr Photos, MappedWhat happens when images are tagged by location

With Web 2.0 and social media, the web itself becomes a big database

When ontology doesn’t work

Domain – Large corpus – No formal categories – Unstable entities – Unrestricted entities – No clear edges

Participants – Uncoordinated users – Amateur users– Naive catalogers – No Authority

Does this match the

situation in scholarship?

Question

Are Unsworth’s and Shirky’s positions compatible?– What are their major differences?– Both approaches want to generate data and

produce visualizations …– Both approaches expose classifications that are

surprising and interesting

Michael Wesch is a UVA-trained cultural anthropologist at Kansas State. The video you saw propelled him into superstar status . . .

Wesch

Why is it important to separate form and content?

How do XML and RSS relate to Shirky’s and Unsworth’s positions?

How is Wesch’s argument similar to Shirky’s? Unsworths?

How is it different from both Unsworth and Shirky?

Brad Pasanek is a Stanford trained UVA professor of English who has used a simple database approach to study metaphor.