Thomas Jefferson built a formidable library. Back when having 200 books was a big deal, he eventually had over 6,700, which he donated to the Library of Congress after the Canadians (those belligerent bastards!) burned it down.

Sometime before 1783, Jefferson started creating a catalog of his library, dividing books into three major categories that accorded with Sir Francis Bacon’s divisions of the faculties of the mind: Memory (history), reason (philosophy) and imagination (fine arts). Before then, however, he had made numerous reading lists. According to Douglas Wilson, in the excellent monograph Jefferson’s Books:

In some of the numerous lists he compiled for law students, which were usually not confined to works on the law, he arranged the recommended categories of books by the time of the day at which they should be read…” (p. 34)

Before 8am, you should read “Physical Studies, Ethics, Religion, Natural Law” and save “Belles-Letres, Criticism, Rhetoric and Oratory” for after dark.

Jefferson, by the way, did not think that the organization of knowledge — or, at least of books — had to reflect a single, GodNature-given order. In 1815, he wrote to the Librarian of Congress that a “physician or theologist” would arrange the books differently. Organization should reflect utility, he believed. In fact, one of this slaves reported that Jefferson would routinely have twenty books open at a time, spread out on the floor, not to mention the five he could have open simultaneously in the spinning book holder he apparently invented.

One person’s mess is another person’s desk. In the age of the miscellaneous, we can accommodate every type of mess and order simultaneously.

According to the monograph, Jefferson’s personal favorites were Greek and Latin authors, in the original languages. We know that Locke was a big influence on the founding fathers, including Jefferson, but somewhere someone has written about the influence of the Greek playwrights and Roman poets on Jefferson’s political thinking. Any leads? I’m just curious… [Tags: taxonomy jefferson libraries everything_is_miscellaneous]

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I talked with Laurie Allen yesterday during the lunch break at the Annenberg conference on hyperlinks. She works on U of Pennsylvania’s PennTags project that allows readers to tag catalogued books. Some people use tags for personal bookmarking. Others tag more socially. It’s a great way to track resources for a research project and simultaneously make the results of your forays available to future researchers. In fact, it seems just plain selfish not to do so!

By integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy), you instantaneously get the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.

I didn’t talk with Laurie about this, but my guess is that the folksonomy that emerges will not change the existing taxonomy because in a miscellaneous world you don’t have to change something in order to change it. The existing taxonomy could stay exactly as it is, but the folksonomy could supplement it by providing synonyms for existing categories (e.g., a search for “recipes” could take you to the “cuisine” category of the existing taxonomy) and leaping-off-points from it into the user-created clusters of meaning (e.g., here’s the tag cloud for the node you’re browsing). Rather than disrupting, transforming or replacing the existing taxonomy, the folksonomy may just affectionately tousle its hair.

Anyway, PennTags looks like a great project.

(U of Penn’s Library Staff Blog is here. And here is the newtech category of that blog. On a quick browse, this looks like a terrific resource if you’re interested in libraries, taxonomies, folksonomies, the death of the Internet due to the venal stupidity of Congress, etc.) [Tags: penntags laurie_allen taxonomy libraries folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous tagging ]

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Clay responds to Jaron Lanier‘s debunking piece, Digital Maoism. I haven’t read Clay’s response yet (I’m at a conference) but I’m eager too… [Tags: clay_shirky jaron_lanier]

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Brian Oberkirch has posted a podcast interview he did with me last week at Syndicate. We talked mainly about the way in which many things are miscellaneous, I believe. [Tags: brian_oberkirch everything_is_miscellaneous podcast syndicate]

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Sean Coon muses about how Silly String completes trees. Well, actually, he muses about the shape of language, wrapped in an homage to his felicitously-named mentor, Bill Readings.

I like a lot what Sean says and the people he quotes from. And it makes clear just how un-tree-like is the structure of language. Ferdinad de Saussure, whom Sean quotes, talks about words not as leaves on forking conceptual branches — a picture Aristotle might have liked and that WordNet assumes — but words as standing in distinction from other words. Saussure’s view does not resolve into anything like a tree. At least as far as I remember. Likewise, when the British philosopher John Austin says that the word “real” usually doesn’t signify some positive quality but merely flags a distinction in mode — we only talk about a real gun if we need to distinguish it from a toy gun, a fake gun carved from soap, or a pretend gun made by pointing a finger — the meaning of “real” does not consist of its position in a tree.

Language, it seems to me, generally lacks the basic properties that make a tree a tree, with the one important exception that sometimes concepts contain other concepts. But there’s lots more to trees than that. E.g., a tree structure has a top and bottom. The elements are discrete. Each element hangs from one branch. All the branches signify the same basic relationship. The branches inherit essential characteristics from the branches they’re attached to. Branches have essential characteristics. Meanings can be traced and paths can be followed. The organization is neat, not messy. And even the basic notion of containment is a metaphor and way too general: Does “color” contain “red” the way “nation” contains “city” and the way “actor” contains “David Caruso” ? And, by the way, “yard” does not contain “dog” even if your dog is in your yard and “stomach” does not contain “peanut” even if you’ve just eaten one.

Sean’s post doesn’t get stuck in the tree metaphor. On the contrary. He uses Silly String to remind us that the tree of language has messy connections among its leaves. He points out that language isn’t a single tree, the same for all. He refers usefully to Saussure and Barthes.

So why stick with the tree metaphor at all? It’s gotten in the way of understanding for about 2,000 years now. (Porphyry is usually credited with being the first to draw categories in the shape of a tree.) Except in the limited domains where we carefully structure language into a tree, I think we ought to drop it.

I tried to get at this, or at least hint at it, in my reply to Julian Bond’s comment on a post of mine a few days ago. Or, as a certain book puts it, everything is miscellaneous…although that phrase by itself is misleading unless we immediately ask: Then why didn’t it stay that way?

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EirePreneur has a fascinating post on research by the Weizmann Institute of Science that a “tree-like hierarchy…may be a basic underpinning of language.”

There’s no question in my mind that arranging concepts so that A includes B which includes C is fundamental to how we think. But I’d only call that a tree if C can only hang from one branch. If it can hang from lots of branches simultaneously, we have something way messier and more complex.

From the article about the article:

Mathematically, these concept vectors can go in many directions, and reading the text can be thought of as a tour along paths in the resulting network. The multidimensional concept vectors seem to span a “web of ideas.” The scientists’ work suggests this network is based on a tree-like hierarchy that may be a basic underpinning of language. The reader or listener can reconstruct the hierarchical structure of a text, and thus the multidimensional space of ideas, in his or her mind to grasp “the author’s meaning.”

Hard to to tell from this exactly what the research showed. I haven’t yet found the original… (Thanks to Lisa Williams for the link.) [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous eirepreneur]

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Yesterday’s post about what tags should link to has spurred some really interesting discussion. As a result, I’ve mocked up a page that has some of the features and properties I’d like. It’s where you’d be taken if you clicked on a tag at the bottom of one of my posts. (I use “taxonomy” as my example.) It aggregates all of my posts tagged “taxonomy” and includes pointers to the Wikipedia “taxonomy” article, Flickr photos tagged “taxonomy”, and Technorati’s aggregation of everyone’s posts tagged “taxonomy.” One of the advantages of this approach: The page is mine and is (in theory) dynamic, so if Technorati (say) goes out of business, I can change the template and thus not have every page contain a broken link.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to code create such pages automatically. [Tags: tagging tags]

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Some people, including me, feel awkward about using Technorati as the namespace for our tags. (The namespace is the place that your tags link to.) I use Technorati not because — disclosure — I am on their board of advisors but because I mistakenly thought I had to if I wanted my tags indexed by Technorati. Nope. Even if you link to some other site, Technorati will index your tags.

So, what other namespaces are there? I asked Dave Sifry and he suggested Wikipedia as an obvious choice. That would mean that the tags at the end of your article would link to the Wikipedia article by that name. I’ve done that with the tags for this post, so if you click on the tag “tagging,” it takes you to the Wikipedia entry on tagging. Normally, my tags take you to the Technorati page that aggregates other pages tagged with that tag.

E.g., Instead of <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/tagging” rel=”tag”> tagging</a> I’m using, <a href=”http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/tagging” rel=”tag”> tagging</a>

Of course, where there is no Wikipedia entry, e.g., “everything is miscellaneous,” you get a broken link.

So, shouldn’t there be a non-vendor, open site that can serve as a namespace? But what would that site do with the tags it’s aggregating? And what would it take for it to aggregate those tags? Wouldn’t it have to have Technorati’s infrastructure? In other words, wouldn’t you have to rebuild Technorati?

I happen to be a fan of Technorati (and not because of my relationship to the company). I know and trust Dave Sifry. But there’s always a risk to counting on a particular company to be a continuing part of your own infrastructure. If Technorati goes under, or gets bought and becomes evil, I have several years of posts pointing at it. Plus, I actually like the tag services Technorati provides. So, I’m not sure what to do… [Tags: tags technorati taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Abby at LibraryThing has a great post about the strengths and weaknesses of tags and professionally-devised subject headings, and why it’s helpful to have both, as LibraryThing now does.

As she says, one of the advantages of a taxonomy is that it can capture the difference between Philosophy > History and History > Philosophy, whereas simply having those two tags on an object doesn’t tell you enough. Of course, with enough tags and fiercely clever algorithms, it’s possible a computer could automagically tell the difference, but the human taxonomizer is likelier to get it right. And, as she says, tagging opens up the possibility of a book being “sort of” a (say) dystopia or “78%” a dystopia (to take Joshua Schachter’s example).

We need both. We have both. Let the intertwingling continue! [Tags: taxonomy librarything everything_is_miscellaneous tags ]

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Does anyone have any examples of a metapedia, i.e., an aggregation of entries from Wikipedia around a particular topic, possibly with additional original or linked content? (The sites that merely republish Wikipedia content in its entirety don’t count.) Thanks.

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