On Monday, I’m trying out a talk I’ll be giving at the U of North Carolina a few days later. The talk is called, for now, in a doomed attempt to be slightly light-hearted about it, “Being and Tags. Here are the five sections (not counting the zero-based prologue):

0. Three orders of order
1. Tiny tags
2. Are taxonomies real?
3. Can tags be wrong?
4. The miscellany beneath
5. Tagging meaning

The section that particularly worries me is #2—Perhaps you’ve heard that there is no one true taxonomy?— mainly because I think it argues against a position no one really holds. But I can’t tell any more.

I’m also worried about the presentation style. I’m trying to be more precise than usual, so I’ve written out a talk, tightly integrated with Powerpoint—yes, Powerpoint, dammit!—with tons of animations. While I carefully prepare presentations, I never read them from a script. Except for this one.

The whole thing is headed for disaster.

Although the Monday night talk started out as one in my Web of Ideas discussion series, it’s been assimilated into the Harvard-Yale Cyber Scholars series. So, at 6pm you can here Yale’s Shyam Balganesh talking about “Social Costs of Property Rights in Broadcast.” I’m on at 7pm. We’re serving Indian food. It’s open to everyone. [map] [Tags: tags taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous berkman philosophy aristotle]

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