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June 3, 2007

David Weinberger: Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger has written a book about metadata, called Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, and if you're thinking metadata's a dull subject, guess again. In fact, this is the most important book I've read in years, and one of the best at getting at what's really as we move online and digitize everything we know. David's written about the changing architecture of knowledge as a third order of organization emerges. The first order is physical (how you stack books on a shelf or arrange silverware in a drawer); the second is physical or analog metadata, like the cards in a card catalog or the entries in a ledger. The third order is electronic metadata, and what's significant about it is ... sufficiently complex that he's written a book about it. The third order is characterized by folksonomy or tagging, where you can create multiple categories for any one item, creating many classification schemes and many ways to order the same reality. From the book...

For example, the digital order ignores the paper order’s requirement that labels be smaller than the things they’re labeling. An online “catalog card” listing a book for sale can contain–or link to–as much information as the seller wants, including user ratings, the author’s biography, and the full text of reviews. You can even let users search for a book by typing in any phrase they remember from it–“What’s the title of that detective novel where someone was described as having a face like a fist?”–which is like using the entire contents of the book as a label. That makes no sense when all that information has to be stored as atoms in the physical world but perfect sense when it’s available as bits and bytes in the digital realm.

I'm leading a conversation with David at the Inkwell conference on the WELL, and we're about halfway through the two-week discussion. If you want to comment or ask a question but you're not a member of the WELL, you can email inkwell at well com and one of the forum hosts will post your words. Meanwhile I suggest that you buy the book if you're interested in the changing architecture of knowledge.

Metadata is, of course, information about information. Back in the day, it was easier to know which was the data and which was the meta. The book on the shelf was data (purists may disagree with me) and the catalog card was metadata. In fact, this corresponds to the first two "orders of order" my book postulates. In the first order, you organize the things themselves: The books on the shelves, the bolts in the bins, the cans in the larder. In the second order, you physically separate the metadata from the things, you generally reduce the metadata to what fits on a card or label, and you organize them: The library's card
catalog, the map of the items in the warehouse. In the second order, you frequently can manage multiple sorts (subject, author, title), whereas the first order requires you to put each thing in one and only one spot, because that's atoms are mean that way.

In the third order, the content and the metadata are all digital. We can now organize free of the constraints of the physical. The old principles of organization are ill-suited to this new environment, so we have to invent new ones...which is what my book is about.

Now, metadata gets mushy in the third order because when both the content of (say) a book is on line, we can use that content as
metadata. So, we can ask "What was that tragedy Shakespeare wrote in 1599?" using the author, genre and year as metadata, or we can ask, "When did Shakespeare write the play that has the line about someone having 'smote the sledded Polacks'?" The content becomes metadata. So the difference becomes operational: Metadata is what we know and data is what we're looking for.

This makes metadata squishier as a concept, but it makes our species smarter. Everything that is linked to anything else becomes a lever by which we can pry up new knowledge.

Photo by Jon L.

jon posted this at 11:50 AM
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