Everything Is Miscellaneous

Weinberger

Everything is Miscellaneous

By David Weinberger

Book notes compiled by Jane L. Sigford

Prologue

Information in Space

In the past our world has been defined by use of physical space which has limitations:

In some physical space some things are nearer than others
Physical objects can be in only one spot at any one time
Physical space is shared, so there can be only one layout, even though we all have different needs.
Human physical abilities are limited
Organization of any store needs to be orderly and neat.

Let’s talk about an alternative world—the digital world:

Instead of atoms that take up room, it’s made of bits.
Instead of making us walk long aisles, in the digital world everything is only a few clicks away.
Instead of having to be the same way for all people, it can instantly rearrange itself for each person and each person’s current task.
Instead of items being placed in one area of a store, they can be classified in every different category in which users might conceivably expect to find them.

Physical space has guided and limited how we organize knowledge.

Suppose that now, for the first time in history, we can arrange things without the limitations of physical. Knowledge is freed from physical constraints; information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous. P, 7

Chapter 1

The New Order of Order

iTunes example of how we can take full advantage of organizing the world

Everything has its places

Because we are organized now by bits, not physical space, the solution to the overabundance of information is more information. P. 13
In digital world, restrictions of space don’t hold. Items can get assigned to multiple places simultaneously

Yours, Mine, and Ours

Every day, more books come into the library than the 6,487 volumes Thomas Jefferson donated in 1815 to kick-start the collection after the British burned the place down. At Library of Congress books can be assigned up to ten different subject headings because of limitations of the organizational system and physical space.
Library of Congress—deals with seven thousand new books a day. Yet seven million pages are added to the Web every day according to The Washington Post. –26times the number of books in the Library’s entire book collection
The Library of congress’s processes for ordering information simply won’t work in new world of digital information. There is too much information moving too rapidly and there are no centralized classification experts in charge of the new digital world we’re rapidly creating for ourselves, starting with World Wide Web but including every connected corporate library, data repository, and media player

Three Orders of Order

First Order of Things: we organize things themselves e.g. silverware goes into drawers, books go on shelves.
Second Order of Things:sorts by characteristics of things; defining by attributes what it is and what it is not e.g. using a card catalog to sort by category.
Sorts by metadata because it’s information about information.
Implicit authority about who deems the information worthy of being published on paper.

Issue with both first and second order sorting—they arrange atoms. There are laws about how atoms work. They take up room, can only be in one place at a time, for example.

3. Third order: Organized by bits.
a. changing way we organize information

b. taking away authority of who controls and weights the information

Chapter 2

Alphabetization and its discontents

Alphabetization—unnatural and arbitrary. The alphabet itself has been a source of controversy for centuries. Whose alphabet? Which letters to include, or not? Which language?

Natural Order

Mortimer Adler tried to alphabetize wholeheartedly and organize information by deciding what would go in to Encyclopedia Britannica

And what are the Great Books that all should study.

It is one man’s vision of knowledge.
The task and discipline are imposed by physical limitations of paper.
BUT in 3rd order of order, ideas come unglued. Scholars shelve books differently, not just according to Adler. And in digital order, shelvings are provisional. Alphabetical order is not enough.

Joints of nature

Some items have “joints” or natural separations such as the joints in a turkey are logical places to cut it apart.
We try to apply a “natural” order to things that are arbitrary and not natural, such as the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. If doctors treat, prescribe drugs, and insurance reimburses, there needs to be a classification in the DSM. However, to understand how arbitrary this is one can look at the historical classification of being homosexual. In 1952 it was a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Several iterations occurred until the latest edition when homosexuality is not mentioned at all.
Knowledge is what happens when the joints of our ideas are the same as the joints of nature.

Order of Heaven

We believe there is an order to nature—that there are no “missing links” in the evolution of species from God to angels to humans to mammals to birds to insects to clams to plants to minerals to pure nothingness. Everything has its place. P. 35.
Example: The definition of a planet has undergone discussions. By some definitions we would have 20 or more but someone said to “think of the children trying to memorize that.” So they changed the definition and took Pluto off in the meantime. Points out that trying to classify by attributes, such as size, circling the sun, etc. is up for discussion. The 2nd order of things is not the only way to classify.
Race is another topic. One can pick out a set of properties, such as skin color, but that really makes no more biological difference than eye color, hair color, or being right- and left-handed. P. 39
How we classify our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams. P. 40

Chemical Solitaire

Mendeleev, classified the elements of the world. The Periodic Table has an order which appears to be the opposite of alphabetization because it adds no information to the items it arranges.
This ordering has also gone through the discussion—do we classify by atomic weight or atomic number? Atomic number one.
Because of some 2nd order media, such as paper, we’ve had to pick some orderings over others, a limit the third order removes. Now we know that not everything has its place. Everything has its places—the joints at which we choose to bend nature. P. 45.

Geography of Knowledge

Dewey in creating his system of classifying books thought that the physical layout of libraries should reflect the basic structure of knowledge.
He developed 9 major divisions. Yet many librarians say how out of date and provincial the system is. E.g. Christianity has a lot more numbers than Islam. Buddhism is way down the hierarchy.

Dewey’s World

Dewey wanted to democratize libraries. He thought there should be a single, universal way of cataloging books that all libraries could use. P. 50
Developed numbering system instead of simply alphabetizing books and putting them on shelves by size.
He decided to arrange books by subject (2nd order thinking)
Then he’d put them in order based on the relationships among them.
He decided to use decimals to define the relationships. By using decimals he could stretch the subject area beyond limit.
Numbering systems imply a hierarchy. P. 54 There is inherent importance in being a top-level category and not to the right of the decimal point.
Problem with system: had to had 000 to encompass computer science because that was not an area of information when Dewey developed his system.
The Dewey decimal system remains weirdly out of date, “reflecting the small-town sensibility of a student at a tiny Christian college in the mid-1870s. p. 55
Yet librarians around the world work to reclassify in light of new awareness e.g. changing wording of “children born out of wedlock” to “children of unmarried parents.”
Dewey Decimal classification because knowledge is unfixed. Knowledge is diverse, changing, imbued with the cultural values of the moment. World is too diverse for any single classification system to work for everyone in every culture at every time. P. 57 [Underlining mine]

Carnival Amazon

Amazon.com doesn’t care about Dewey Decimal or the precision and orderliness of its system.
It uses “collaborative filtering”—by using filtering of what people buy and what other books people buy who buy a certain book . Therefore, they gather this metadata and recommend books to you.
Amazon likes “friendly disorder, stuffing its pages with alternative ways of browsing and offbeat offers peculiar to each person’s behavior. P. 61.
Amazon==3rd order improvement. Overturns all 3 of Dewey’s big ideas
There is no one single universal system to catalog books. Amazon has unique organization for each user.
Amazon doesn’t arrange solely by subject—for each visitor they may have unique interests and links,
Dewey wanted to map knowledge; Amazon wants to sell books. P. 62
Amazon able to treat its collection as a miscellaneous pile that can be sorted digitally to reflect individual interests of each visitor
In 2nd order, the bigger a miscellaneous pile grows, the harder it gets to use.
In 3rd order, piles offer exponentially more possibilities and more value the larger they get as long as you keep them well and truly miscellaneous.
Problem with Dewey—he assumed knowledge had geography, a top-down view, a shape.—This makes sense in 1st an 2nd order of orders
It unnecessarily inhibits the useful miscellaneousness of the 3rd. p. 63.

Chapter 4

Lumps and Splits

Secret Life of Lists

A list is most basic way to order ideas.
A list is a list of something.
Nesting is putting items under headings e.g. hardware has nails, screws, etc. underneath it.

Nests in Trees

Using nests uses the primitive form of lumping and splitting.
Putting things under general headings = lumping
Itemizing under general headings= splitting.
We develop “trees” of classifying by having a “lump” and then drawing subheadings and relationships of branches and leaves underneath = splitting.

Laundry and Linnaeus

Carolus Linnaeus—fascinated with botany. Developed “trees” of classification and named by looking at attributes and sorting what items had and didn’t have. A binomial system. Developed naming system using genus and species.
He too like Dewey wanted to democratize knowledge.
He used the criterion of complexity to organize, starting with simple and going to complex.
However, complexity itself is complex notion. Are cats more complex than worms, e.g.?
His system used atoms to think through the order of natural world.

Trees Without Paper

So what would a nested order look like without paper? P. 787
Orgs are now used faceted classificationsystem that constructs a dynamically browsable, branching tree that exactly meets your needs. NASA, IBM, Barnes and Noble are implementing such systems
Faceted classification combines user-friendliness of browsing a tree with the power of digital computing. It is unthinkable without computers.
No one facet has to be the “root”. One doesn’t have to decide the root ahead of time because the “tree” can be built as you go depending on the facet most relevant to current interest, and then limit it by using another facet etc.
Can be used on the fly or constructed a head of time which imitates the real world—Reality is multifaceted. How we choose to slice it up depends on why we’re slicing it up
We have to give up Aristotelian belief that there is only one right and true tree of knowledge.
Now that we have 3rd order (eliminating confines of paper) we can hang a “leaf” on many branches of a tree.
It’s not that our knowledge of the world is taking some shape other than a tree or becoming some impossible-to-e vision four-dimensional tree.
In the 3rd order of order, knowledge doesn’t have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world. P. 83

Chapter 5

The Laws of the Jungle

Big Can of Worms

Things being miscellaneous causes many problems for people? Why? Because at its heart, the miscellaneous is a set of things that have nothing in common. Of course, that “nothing” is relative.
Even Stephen Jay Gould pointed out a taxonomic system divides a domain into two major lumps that are wildly uneven, e.g. vertebrates v. invertebrates. P. 87
Lamarck even realized that life cannot be order into a single line, from least complex to most as Linnaeus had done.
Order often hides more than it reveal.
Physical limitations on how we have organized information have not only limited our vision, they have also given people who control the org. of info more power than those who create the info.
Editors are more powerful than reporters, and communication syndicates are more powerful than editors because they get to decide what to bring to the surface and what to ignore. [Education is really powerful because they decide what is “standard” and what students have to know. Such decisions are class and race-biased. Schools are truly 1st and 2nd order. What would happen if education truly became 3rd order? NOTE MINE]
At least in the first and second orders of ord. In the 3rd order, bits rule. And so does the miscellaneous. P. 89

Tagging Leaves

The “leaves” on trees of information are ways to sort but when we draw a map of knowledge, it is all too easy to assume that knowledge is a territory that can be subjugated by applying a rigorous and relentless methodology. P. 91
Classification is a power struggle—it is political—because the first two orders of order require that there be a winner. P. 91
The 3rd order takes the territory subjugated by classification and liberates it. Instead of forcing it into categories, it tags it. Tagging lets a user of online resources add a word or two to them so she can find them later.
Delicious.com a way to cluster and tag areas and get back to them.
Tagging grew out of personal need and is way to organize. P. 93
On Delicious the lists also can be public so information can create tag streams—areas of interest common to people. One can also create a tag feed so a daily list of new pages is automatically sent to your email in-box or software—called an “aggregator.” P. 95
In 3rd order of order the messiness of miscellaneous information doesn’t reduce its utility.
Tagging is one way of the miscellaneous coming into its own. Another way is the way that online music sites aggregate the world’s music and let us access it in any order we want. P. 95

Miscellaneous from A to Z

Because we are no longer tied to physical paper, we can organize information any way we want.

New Properties, New strategies, new Knowledge

Miscellaneous doesn’t much resemble our traditional view of knowledge which we believe has 4 characteristics:

There is only one reality, one knowledge same for all.
We’ve assumed reality is not ambiguous, neither is knowledge
Knowledge is as big as reality and therefore no one person can comprehend it. Experts can only be expert in one field and they act as filters, using their education, experience, and expertise to keep bad information away from us.
Experts achieve their position by working their way up through social institutions. However which groups get funded can determine what a society believes and the funding is often granted by people who know less than the experts [NCLB e.g. NOTE MINE]

The way we have organized knowledge has been largely determined by these 4 properties of knowledge

However, 3rd order miscellany is digital, not physical, and we no longer have to agree on a single framework. Things have their places, not a single place. [Huge ramifications here for education when we continue to use a 1st order structure, and 2nd order idea of curriculum. NOTE MINE]
4 new strategic principles are emerging:
Filter on the way out, not on the way in—filtering on way in decreases value of abundance by ruling out items that may be of value to a few people. Filtering on way out—increases value of abundance by locating what is important to a given group at a given time. P. 103
Put each leaf on as many branches as possible: Real advantage in 3rd order of miscellany.
Everything is metadata and everything can be a label. In 1st 2 orders we had to think carefully about which metadata we made available. In 3rder every word in a book can count as metadata so can any of the sources that link to the book—Vastly increases leverage of knowledge.
Give up control—So powerful to let users mix it up for themselves. Users are now in charge of the org of the info they browse. [HUGE ramifications for schools. What if we let students determine their path of learning? What if they were so engaged that they built their own framework? NOTE MINE]
Control has changed hands. New rules of the information jungle are in effect, transforming the landscape in which we work, buy, learn, vote, and play. [Yet we still try to control content and system in schools. NOTE MINE]

Chapter 6