[I'm still in the middle of writing this one ... but feel free to read the draft below. A final revised version will find its way into my ICHIM 2007 conference paper.]

There’s been some lively discussion in the steve.museum mailing list over the past week on the subject of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ tagging of (museum) artefacts. It began with the following posting from Belinda Chu:

Hi,
We are looking into a scoping exercise with regard to implementing social tagging on our online collections and Picture Library. The issue of users incorrectly tagging an object was brought up by our Collections Information Manager (eg: tagging an item as a landscape when in fact it isn’t). I would be interested in hearing from any institutions out there that are currently utilising social tagging that may have come across this issue and how it was addressed. For instance do you moderate the tags before they go live on your site.
Also, is anyone out there currently allowing user generated tagging to be applied in a bilingual environment on indigenous artefacts (For example in our case we have Maori and Pacific Island artefacts in which members of those various communities may want to tag in their own languages…?)
I look forward to hearing back from you.

Rob Stein from the Indianapolis Museum of Art responded that “The approach we’re taking with the steve project is one where we are building tools that will allow individual institutions to ‘review’ terms submitted by users against their contributed works of art”, which elicited from Chad Petrovay the response: “Isn’t the purpose of the entire steve project to democratize object tagging? If institutions start to make decisions about what is ‘correct’ vs ‘incorrect’ doesn’t that negate the entire purpose?”

Catherine Styles, of the National Archives of Australia, followed up with a link to a ‘useful rave’ by David Weinberger about the relationship between tax- and folks-onomies, ‘Can tags be wrong?‘ His article is thought-provoking enough for it to be worth looking at in some detail; and, although I shall quibble with some of his points along the way, I shall find myself–with some reservations–more or less in agreement with his conclusions. Weinberger writes:

Personal tags are not about truth. If I tag a photo of the Bay Bridge in SF as “golden gate” because I think that’s what it is, I’m wrong. But, when I go to look for that photo, my tag is still useful to me so long as I’m still wrong about which bridge is which. Of course, I might have tagged it “golden gate” because I’m doing a report on bridges near the Golden Gate Bridge, in which case my tag was true, even though a stranger who is not privy to my mental innards would assume I’m mistaken. But many personal tags aren’t primarily about truth at all: If I tag the photo “homesick”, “examine closely later” or “write poem about”, the value of the tag isn’t in its representation of something true about the object.

He’s stating, of course, what we all intuitively know and what we all so take for granted that we don’t much reflect on it: personal tags, like the piles of papers on our desks or perhaps the organisaton of our bookmarks in Firefox, are about making things easy to find, not about what they ‘mean‘. The matter of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (or ‘accurate’ and ‘inaccurate’) tagging only really become an issue when we move from the personal to the public and social:

Now we’re in the realm of folksonomies, i.e., the topology of tags generated by lots of strangers. At its simplest, a folksonomy reports on which tags are most popular for particular objects … Folksonomies get their value by reflecting the viewpoint of the plurality, not what an authority thinks is or ought to be the viewpoint.

So again it’s not about meanings but about ‘viewpoint’: where it’s located in those great big majority-rule public piles of papers, as it were; a folk classification, it is consequently different in kind—rather than simply an alternative way of organising a domain—from formal (scientific) classification. Arguably, it’s still, as with the personal tag, less a statement about what kind of thing an entity is than about where the majority of taggers think it is, what metaphoric ‘pile’ it may be found in and retrieved from, functional rather than semantic. When in a visit, a while back, to the online Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example, I tagged Paul Cézanne’s untagged The Large Bathers as ‘Impressionist’, I did so not because it was part of the meaning of the painting but because I just happened to know that this was at least one of the ‘piles’ in which it belonged and that my tagging it as such would help others find it.

Yet this is where I suspect we’re stepping into what is still uncharted theoretical territory. For the personal tagger, is the choice of tag routinely determined, after all, by (in the broadest sense) semantic knowledge? ¹ I was possibly thinking taxonomically as much as folksonomically when adding the ‘Impressionist’ tag to Cézanne; and yet, although I don’t believe that either one excludes the other, my concern had been simply to put the painting where I believed it should be located for purposes of access rather than what kind of painting it is. The functional folksonomic tagging nonetheless was undoubtedly determined by taxonomic thinking against a background of what I’d assume to be common knowledge. And then going beyond personal tagging, is there some point at which the “viewpoint of the plurality” crosses over from the functional to the semantic? I don’t know; but I’d in any case want to say that in the former case, in which the tag is used effectively as just a mnemonic, it makes less sense to ask whether it is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ than whether it is ‘useful’. I want to return to this issue later; but to, in the meantime, bear it in mind when reflecting on Weinberger’s question, “Can a folksonomy be flat-out factually wrong?”, for which we therefore have to assume a semantic interpretation. He continues:

Suppose the main tag for “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an anti-Jew forgery, was “history”? While we cannot know what’s going on in the heads of all the people who tagged it that way, it seems as straightforward a misclassification as tagging bats as “bird.”

This is the point at which I feel bound to ask what may at first glance seem a misguided, if not uncomfortably odd, question: if the tagging represents the “viewpoint of the plurality”—presumably something like Schutz’s notion of “what everybody knows”—then isn’t it as arrogant as it is wrong to call it a “misclassification”? If pretty much everybody tags bats as ‘birds’, then they’re birds; it merely turns out to be the case that what popular consensus deems in this instance to be the meaning of ‘bird’ is probably somewhat different from what the word means for a zoologist.

But this is me now wearing my anthropologist’s hat. If, for the Karam of New Guinea, a bat is a yakt (‘bird’) and a cassowary is a kobtiy (roughly, ‘flightless biped’), I will not say that the Karam are guilty of ‘misclassification’. Rather, it happens to be the case that they classify things somewhat differently from the way that we do. And this, it seems to me, is both an interesting and an important point, particularly in light of Belinda Chu’s original posting: “we have Maori and Pacific Island artefacts in which members of those various communities may want to tag in their own languages”. It occurs to me that tagging in one’s own (non-European) language may inevitably and ineluctably entail tagging that also captures the indigenous classification systems for which that language is a vehicle. Were the museum devoted to the Karam rather than to the Maori and Pacific Islanders, for example, I would expect a bat to be tagged yakt and not kobtiy, a cassowary to be tagged kobtiy and not yakt. (They might also be tagged in other ways by non-Karam speakers; but that’s an issue I’ll come back to.) And I would also hope that the tagging might reflect the Karam taxonomy:²

The very act of tagging then becomes an integral early step in the process of discovering and organising the knowledge systems that in an important way constitute (in the words of ICOM’s statutes) “the tangible and intangible evidence of people and their environment”.

But for Weinberger it’s not simply a matter of “misclassification” alone. He goes on to write that:

If we took a poll about either the “Protocols” or bats and the results showed that the majority of those polled believed “Protocols” is true and bats are birds, we wouldn’t say the poll was wrong. We’d say the people were wrong. Likewise, the folksonomy would be a true reflection of the popularity of false beliefs.

I’ll come back to thorny issue of The Protocols of Zion later. I want first to provocatively think a little more about the claim that “the folksonomy would be a true reflection of the popularity of false beliefs” (my emphases). Folksonomies, he goes on to add, “reinforce belief systems, since we believe (rightly) that what most people believe is a (generally) reliable guide to truth. Folksonomies make visible, and thus magnify, the effect of belief systems.”

I want at this point to return to the questions I raised earlier: is folksonomic tagging, no matter how innocently functional it may be in the mind of the tagger, guided by taxonomic or, more broadly and generally, semantic thinking? is there some point at which the “viewpoint of the plurality” crosses over from the functional to the semantic? can coherent classification schemes emerge from undirected personal tagging by individuals? Weinberger apparently assumes so; yet I suggest we need to look at the issue in a little more detail. My starting point will be another question: is the “viewpoint of the plurality”, as represented by the highest ranking tags, best understood to be [a] the collective and consensual viewpoint of the majority of taggers? or [b] simply the sum total of all personal tags? Or, asking the question in a slightly different way, how reasonable is it to argue the bona fide existence of a consensual ‘viewpoint’ in sense [a] as (presumably) an emergent property of [b]?

There can be no straightforward answer, of course. There will always be likely to come a point at which the functional tagging of active taggers becomes semantic labelling for others, a point at which concurrently the functional for some is a keyword index to a belief system for others. It is nevertheless an important question when considering Weinberger’s claims with regard to ‘correctness’ of tags in general, to the ‘truth’ of tags, and in particular to possibly ‘false beliefs’.

One of the key features of a shared ‘belief system’ is that it is more than simply the cumulative and quantitative sum of the personal beliefs of individuals. A belief system is ’shared’ not because every member of an epistemic community contingently believes the same things but because each member believes that every other member holds (or, at least should hold) the same core set of beliefs. We might think of belief systems as ‘dynamic conversations’ in which, in the words of Berger and Luckmann (1967, p.173), “all who speak this same language are reality-maintaining others”. Does it, in that light, make sense to think of tags as, so to speak, ‘asynchronous conversations’ between taggers? Probably not: tagging remains a personal rather than a collective, collaborative, and negotiated activity—we typically do not consult with others or solicit the opinions of others before tagging an item.

Let’s go back to Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, now tagged “20th century, cezanne, french, impressionist, large bathers, oil on canvas, water” [blah blah ...]

if we allow multiple folksonomies (along with traditional taxonomies), the folksonomy becomes not a statement of how the world is ordered but a reflection of the different ways a crowd orders material—some ways wrong, some right, and some just useful.

[I've tagged this posting "folksonomies, knowledge-interface, museums-and-heritage, tagging, web-2.0"]

For interest, a video interview with David Weinberger:

References

Bulmer, R. (1967). ‘Why the Cassowary is not a Bird’, in M. Douglas (ed.) (1973), Rules and Meanings. Harmondsworth: Penguin. [Amazon]

Law, J. & Lodge, P. (1984). Science for Social Scientists. London: Macmillan Press. ISBN: 0333351010. [Amazon]

Schutz, A. & Luckmann, T. (1974). The Structures of the Life-World. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. ISBN: 0810106221 [Amazon]

Weinberger, D. (2007). ‘Can Tags be Wrong?’, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization. 4th May 2007. Accessed 19th June 2007 at:
http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-may04-07.html#wrong

Convert this post to PDF

1. I wonder whether this may, in principle at least, be an empirical question: if you want to know why a person tagged with the word s/he did, ask him/her. But I’m not yet ready to think this through.[back]
2. From the summary in Law & Lodge, 1984, p,69[back]

I missed this on my birthday, 28th May, but the coincidence of date demands that I say a few words about it now. I’ve been reading the occasional news item over the past year or so regarding creationist Ken Ham’s $27 million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which finally opened its doors to the public on my 55th birthday. Filling in for Bill O’Reilly on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor on that day, television host and former US Republican Representative John Kasich marked the occasion with a debate between Ken Ham and Lawrence Krauss, professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University.

I want to pick up on just two things from this brief (4:40 minute) debate: John Kasich’s prefatory statement, and Ham’s response to Kasich’s first question. I’m relying on the transcript provided by Jason Rosenhouse at EvolutionBlog; yet Rosenhouse’s transcript, starting only at the beginning of the debate itself, omits John Kasich’s opening words: “A museum all about creation opens today. But some people don’t like it: they say it’s junk science’. We’re going to hear both sides …”.

What’s interesting about Kasich’s introductory statement? I’d probably not have noticed the first point of interest had I not attended a talk by Robert Fisk a few weeks back, in which he pointed out that a golden rule of American journalism is (in principle though rarely in practice)¹ to give equal voice and equal weight to spokespersons on both sides of a story. Thus Kasich’s “We’re going to hear both sides”, irrespective of which speaker might have the heftier share of reason and evidence on his side. Within that ‘fair and balanced’ framework, consider the fact that Kasich announces this to be “a museum all about creation” rather than, say, “a creationist museum”, or (as he subsequently clarifies) a “museum … designed to convince visitors that the Biblical story of life on Earth is scientifically verifiable”. How should one understand this statement? (since ‘about’ is always about something, some existent.) It in part boils down to how one understands the word ‘creation’ to be used in this context: is it [a] as naming a Bible-based theory? or [b] as intending to identify an actual event or process? My son generously suggests the former to be a plausible interpretation, and hence the statement unexceptionable. I’m not sure … and I’m also wondering what the “all about” really means. Is it “exclusively about” (as in “That’s what the museum’s all about”) or is it “all there is to know about”? On the former reading, the statement is merely saying that the subject matter of the museum is ‘creation’ and nothing else; on the latter reading, on the other hand, the statement perhaps contentiously suggests that there is nothing more (or, at least, nothing other) to be said about the subject matter than is presented in the museum. Consider your own responses to the following:

1. A museum all about ice-cream opens today
2. A museum about ice-cream opens today
3. A museum all about Ronald Regan opens today
4. A museum about Ronald Regan opens today
5. A museum all about levitation opens today

What makes this especially interesting for me, then, is the issue that you’ll find raised in many places on this site: that museums offer representations rather than actuality, that a museum is a ‘knowledge interface’ mediating between the museum visitor and the world being represented, and that our primary interest must therefore be in determining principled mappings from representations into worlds. (Elsewhere I argue that the key components of a good theory of language–that it should be compositional, truth conditional, and model theoretic–may generically apply to the ‘language’ of museum representations.)

The final point of interest in Kasich’s opening words about the museum is that “some people don’t like it”. The “some” would appear to put the objectors in a minority; that they merely “don’t like it” weakens the grounds of their objections.

But watch the video now, and then we’ll talk about it some more.

I was interested in particular by Ham’s first response:

What we’re trying to accomplish is this: you know, through this nation whole generations of young people are being taught in the public schools there’s no God, life evolved by natural processes, they’re really just animals in the fight for survival, and that very much determines their morality, how they view themselves, their purpose and meaning in life, and so on. And what we wanted to do, was to give them information that’s been censored from the culture, [...] to show them that we can use the science of genetics, biology, geology, astronomy, anthropology, to confirm the Bible’s history. And if the . If there’s a God who owns you, then he sets the rules we have a basis for good for bad for right for wrong.

Seemingly conflated into a single issue, Ham is in fact making a small number of arguably unrelated claims:

1. that young people are being taught there’s no God (this seems unlikely; at least, I can’t imagine where across the broad school curriculum this might relevantly be taught. But let us for the sake of argument, and probably counter-factually, assume this to be the case)
2. that young people are being taught that life evolved by natural processes (I’d frankly have thought that the weight and sheer bulk of empirical scientific evidence would seem to be more on the side of 150 years of Darwinist evolutionary science than on the side of the first page or so of the Book of Genesis. Note that the teaching of evolution remains per se neutral with regard to the question of whethere there is or is not a God.)
3. that being taught [1] and [2] “very much determines their morality” (this also seems implausible: evolutionary biology remains silent on issues of morality; and while a belief in the existence of a god may carry with it a commitment to the moral code associated with whichever happens to be the god in question, one’s moral sense, believer or not, is fashioned by a great number of other societal factors)
4. that being taught [1] and [2] determines how young people view themselves, their purpose and meaning in life, and so on (this is probably true to some degree; however, I can see no basis in [1] or [2] for the making of value judgments concerning one’s self-image, sense of purpose, and whatever understandings one may have with respect to the meaning of life.)

So where, for Ham, is all this leading? If the biological and physical sciences can confirm the ‘). Let’s say that a moral code—generically, a corpus of beliefs that enables a person to “define and distinguish among right and wrong intentions, motivations or actions“—consists of a set of precepts A, B, C, D, …, Z; the same set of moral precepts A, B, C, D, …, Z could, of course, arise historically out of a quite different conceptualisation of the origins of the universe and of life within the universe. Consequently there may be a many-to-one, rather than a one-to-one, relationship between theories of origins and a moral code such that it is impossible to reason back from precepts to just one theory of origins uniquely associated with those precepts.

Given the choice between the creationist’s Ham and the evolutionists’ Egg, I’ll go with the Egg.

References and readings

Jason Rosenhouse, ‘The Kasich/Ham/Krauss Instatranscript’, EvolutionBlog.
Accessed 12 June 2007 at:
» http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2007/05/the_kasichhamkrauss_instatrans.php

Convert this post to PDF

1. I don’t recall journalists ever earnestly soliciting the considered views of Saddam or bin Laden, for example; though, of course, innumerable instances of, for example, Israeli military commanders being invited to offer their version of events on an occasion of their shelling of Palestinian civilians. [back]

In today’s The Independent, under the headline ‘Wear a veil or we will behead you,’ radicals tell TV women, I read:

All 15 women presenters reported for work at the official Palestine Television station in Gaza yesterday, in defiance of death threats by a radical Islamic group that is believed to have links with al-Qa’ida. The Righteous Swords of Islam warned that it would strike the women with “an iron fist and swords” for refusing to wear a veil on camera.

“It is disgraceful that the women working for the official Palestinian media are competing with each other to display their charms,” it said in a leaflet distributed in Gaza at the weekend. “We will destroy their homes. We will blow up their work places. We have a lot of information about their addresses and we are following their movements.”

The fringe group threatened to “slaughter” the women for corrupting Palestinian morals. “The management and workers at Palestine TV should know,” it warned, “that we are much closer to them than they think. If necessary, we will behead and slaughter to preserve the spirit and morals of our people.”

Whao! hold it there a second … let’s see if I’ve got this straight. To be unveiled on camera is immoral; to stalk with malicious intent, destroy homes, blow up work places, behead and slaughter, on the other hand, serves to “preserve the … morals of our people”. Uhm … I’m having some difficulties thinking that one through at the moment.

This is, of course, an absolutely fascinating illustration of alternative ‘knowledge systems’ and their relation to rationality. I shall be writing more on this … once I have time in what is, this week, a hectically busy schedule. In the meantime, a couple of brief but interesting observations:

• how tempting, and hence how easy, it is to extrapolate from the particular (the Righteous Swords of Islam group) to the general (all Muslims share such beliefs; or, such beliefs are endemic to Islam). I bet you did, didn’t you? Yet when Christian “pro-lifers”, for example, bomb abortion clinics, causing loss of life, we are likely to view such acts as at the wacko margins of our moral spectrum rather than as evidence of something rotten at the core of Christianity. We possibly do not (yet should) reflect on the irony of the murder of medical staff as ‘pro-life’.
• how tempting, and hence how easy, it is to “other” the Other; to assume that we are rational, they are irrational; that our moral codes, albeit with perhaps some flaky edges, are overall pretty moral, theirs pretty wacky, alien, off-the-wall. But then this is because we can see (though we’re probably unconscious of our seeing) our own moral judgments within a context, a framework wrought incrementally out of a lifetime of often casual experiences, dictums, credo, conversations, that make some kind of sense of them. Our wackos are not quite as “other” as theirs.

Interesting then, that ProLifeBlogs.com (and I pulled out this one pretty much at random from a Google search) should be horrified by a “new group of insane death-cult practitioners” who “issued a death threat over the weekend against women working for the official Palestinian Authority television station” while resolutely refusing to condemn those who issue death threats against women attending, or working within, abortion clinics.

Convert this post to PDF

For want of any other page in Attica’s Computing the Other (yes, my book-in-progress now has a confirmed title) in which to write about it at this time, I must make a note here of my interest in getting my hands on what has proven to be an elusive book by an equally elusive author:

Schoenhoff, D.M. (1993). The Barefoot Expert: Interface of Computerized Knowledge Systems and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Oxford: Greenwood Press. ISBN: 0313288216. [Preface by Walter J. Ong.]

On its Amazon page I read that there are “7 used & new available from £83.34″, a shade more than I’d be willing to pay for a slender tome of a mere 200 pages about which I know little beyond the synopsis / publisher’s description which reads:

It may seem a strange match—AI and crop irrigation or AI and the Serengeti lions but researchers in Artifical Intelligence envision expert systems as a new technology for capturing the knowledge and reasoning process of experts in agriculture, wildlife management, and many other fields. These computer programs have a relevance for developing nations that desire to close the gap between themselves and the richer nations of the world. Despite the value and appeal of expert systems for economic and technological development, Schoenhoff discloses how this technology reflects the Western preoccupation with literacy and rationality. When expert systems are introduced into developing nations, they must interact with persons who reason and articulate their knowledge in ways unfamiliar to high-tech cultures. Knowledge, particularly in poor and and traditional communities, may be expressed in proverbs rather than propositions or in folklore rather than formulas. Drawing upon diverse disicplines, the author explores whether such indigenous knowledge can be incorporated into the formal language and artificial rationality of the computer—and the imperative for working toward this incorporation.

The title, together with the final sentence of the synopsis, suggests that this may be useful background reading to my thinking and writing about the ‘knowledge interface’ in the context of development and ICT4D. A search on both author name and title yields numerous documents in which the book is listed in the bibliography; yet only one—Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst—in which there is in-text reference to the book. Schoenhoff points out, he notes, that

expertise—the kind we export to other nations—is always “embedded in a community and can never be totally extracted from or become a replacement for that community”. When we attempt the abstraction and apply the result across cultural boundaries, the logic and assumptions of our technology can prove bitterly corrosive. Worse, the kind of community from which Western technical systems commonly arise is, for the most part, noncommunity—typified by the purely technical, one-dimensional, commercially motivated, and wholly rationalized environments of corporate research and development organizations.
Stephen L. Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, Chapter 9 [Web].

OK, so it’s pretty clear now why I’d rather like to get my hands on it. There’s been a lot published in the area of cross-cultural communication—Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension, Silent Language, Understanding Cultural Differences, Beyond Culture), inter alia—but this is the first I know of in the use of knowledge-based systems for bridging the cultural interface.

And Doris M. Schoenhoff? she seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet.  No further publications, no current university affiliation, … nothing.

Convert this post to PDF