This is an interesting paper on the authority of online information sources by Peter Morville.
It contrasts the traditional view of authority of information (accurate, objective, current, from a source of authority in terms of its publisher and author), with an apporach built around social networking, collective intelligence and the folksonomy crowd.
Wikipedia is an example of what Morville is talking about. Its authority is derived from
"the information architecture, visual design, governance, and brand of the Wikipedia, and from widespread faith in intellectual honesty and the power of collective intelligence."
Morville describes Wikipedia, along with de.licio.us and Flickr, as successes in bottom-up publishing and collaborative categorization.
As a librarian and a product of an teacher-centred education system I find myslef struggling a little to join the collective. As my pal George Macgregor has pointed out there have been numerous high profile inaccuracies in, and abuses of, Wikipedia (for instance
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4520678.stm ). Are these new approaches scaleable? How scaleable is a folksonomy? Who gets ruled in and out of the collective tagging community? Perhaps I'm just struggling to keep up. I don't think it's any good fighting the trend, as Morville points out,
"we must also recognize the power that devolves to the individual in an open media landscape that enables us to select our sources and choose our news. In today's Google economy, we are increasingly becoming our own authority."
As a librarian, a researcher and a lecturer, I agree with his closing comments,
"The real upheaval lies just ahead, as a generation of school kids (and their teachers and librarians) struggle to reconcile traditional notions of education and objectivity and authority with the constructivist web of social facts and collective intelligence where folksonomies flourish and the truth is a virus of many colors."
For a projection of the future media landscape, visit the Museum of Media History in 2014. All sounds very plausible and not too far off....
2 comments:
I agree and disagree with bits of Peter’s exposition. However, in his discussion about folksonomies and tagging, I’m glad to see that Mr. Morville emphasises that “it's the Findability, Stupid!” that counts. All too often this is forgotten…
Services offering collaborative tagging provide rich interactive experiences that exemplify a sense of community among disparate user groups, yet their raison d'être remains similar to that of traditional retrieval systems based on controlled indexing languages or automatic indexing: to enhance information retrieval effectiveness (and therefore resource discovery) and to facilitate knowledge organisation. However, the long-term ability of collaborative tagging to fulfil the basic premise of an information retrieval system, to provide relevant results – and thereby enhance resource discovery - is quite limited. Leaving aside issues pertaining to the control of synonyms, homonyms/homographs, lexical anomalies and the lack of semantic structure, to make tagging systems usable they also have to be able to reconcile differences inherent in Personal Information Management (PIM) and Collaborative Information Management (CIM). The conflict between PIM and CIM currently compromises the effectiveness of tagging systems for resource discovery. Information use and seeking behaviour is, as research continues to demonstrate, quite different depending in which context the user is situated.
In addition – and related to PIM vs. CIM - the use of popularity as a tool within tagging systems does not ensure that documents are tagged as objectively as possible. By ‘objectively’ I mean based on observable characteristics and without bias. Tagging systems expose users to bias and convergent behavioural practices, meaning that the probability of documents being sufficiently tagged to expedite general resource discovery is limited. In this sense, popularity precedes relevance as tags may be assigned to resources irrespective of whether the user believes the tag to be a true representation of the resource in question or not. See: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/www2006.html
In my opinion – and to answer Jake’s question RE scaleability – I do not think tagging systems are currently in a position to be scaleable. Such systems can be useful, but the view that collaborative tagging is somehow going to provide high precision searching and facilitate semantic approaches to an ever expanding Web is fanciful. There are simply too many variables for system designers to reconcile: PIM vs. CIM problems, popularity over relevance, synonym problems, homonym/homograph issues, lexical anomalies and lack of semantic structure. Added to which, do system designers really think users have the inclination to tag the universe? Designers will doubtlessly address some of the above noted issues, but it is difficult to imagine wholly satisfactory solutions emerging in the near future.
Prof. Tom Wilson posted an interested email on the UK LIS-LINK list last week which truly encapsulates some of the absurdities inherent within the tagging hyperbole. Read at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0601&L=lis-link&T=0&F=&S=&P=3752
Thanks for your comments George, I look forward to seeing your conference paper! I think the issue of authority is crucial, although I get the feeling that this is where I might be fighting the trend. To my mind the authority of information is more important, in terms of addressing an information need, than its popularity. Popularity becoming a prime motivator for resource selection is a subversion of the traditional information retrieval paradigm. This isn't some sort of revolutionary shaking off of information oppression, its mob rule.
If users are guided to popular resources, rather than authoritative resources then their information need is satisfied because a resource has matched the information need of a number of other individuals, rather than their own. Can't we do better? Or don't we want to? The issue of sufficiency comes into the argument here. Perhaps, in a world in which we all have to make many decisions based upon information we seek the balance is altering - the more decisions we make, the quicker and more easily we want our information needs met? More stress, less time demands quicker pay off....
Perhaps we need to think in terms of consuming less information, rather than more. The whole world environment comes into play here, not just universities and libraries. There is a constant deluge of digital information available to swamp those who open themselves up to it - do we understand as much as we consume? This is where I need to read Postman - "Entertaining ourselves to death".
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