Wordle: The Ontology of Tags
Below is a Wordle
of a paper that I’m presenting at the iConference in a few weeks:
The paper offers up an ontology of tags based in Heideggerian phenomenology and schema theory. It critiques the view that social bookmarking sites are a type of collaborative effort among users and illustrates that collective is often mistaken for collaborative. The latter implies an shared cultural understanding and the former results in the loss of minority culture semantics. The paper argues that the semiotic approach underlying the analysis of tags likewise mistakes the ontic for the ontological. Only an approach that is inclusive of the cultural identities of the taggers can succeed in discerning the emergent semantics of tag sets and reach the ontological conceptualizations that are integral to semantics of tags.
Update 2010.02.05: QuickTime .mov of the presentation.
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The Infiltration of Technology
From Heim, M. (1993) The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, New York: Oxford University Press:
Tags:culturalWhat Heidegger called ‘the essence of technology’ infiltrates human existence more intimately than anything humans could create. The danger of technology lies in the transformation of the human being, by which human actions and aspirations are fundamentally distorted. Not that machines can run amok, or even that we might misunderstand ourselves through a faulty comparison with machines. Instead, technology enters the inmost recesses of human existence, transforming the way we know and think and will. Technology is, in essence, a mode of human existence, and we could not appreciate its mental infiltrations until the computer became a major cultural phenomenon.
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Wordle of a Paper
Below is a Wordle of a paper that I’m presenting at NA-CAP@IU 2009 next month:
The paper talks about semantic network representations as emergent cultural entities that are ontologically connected to larger cultural landscapes. I explore semantic networks from a Heideggerian existentialist and phenomenological perspective. I invoke cultural schema theory to bridge the syntactic and lexical elements to the semantic and conceptual dimensions of semantic network graphs and offers reasons why the viability of such graphs as they are currently constructed are insufficient for creating semantic interoperability for our information technologies.
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Web of Belief and Ritual
Wade Davis makes the point: cultures are facets of the human experience. There is no pinnacle of culture, no culture that sits at the apex of a metaphorical pyramid. Each has something of value to share as part of the story of what it means to be human.
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Successful Proposal Defense
I successfully defended my dissertation research proposal yesterday. I was a bit nervous, as this is a pretty big milestone, but I’ve got a great committee backing me up. They asked a bunch of insightful questions and gave me some good advice on improving some things.
I’ll post a copy of my presentation here sometime soon. I just wanted to mark the milestone.
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TEDTalks Navigation Sphere
I found this navigation sphere via Information Aesthetics. I like the interface a lot, but it’s not without its difficulties. It portrays a series of images in the shape of a sphere that are connected to each other with lines. Both the images and lines are clickable. Click on an image and it will play that particular TEDTalk. Click on a line and it rotates the sphere to focus the connected image.
The images and lines themselves are a bit overwhelming. It is difficult for me to garner any useful information about the particular talk simply from the image. I might be intrigued by the look of a particular person or image enough to click on it, but I go into it blind, not knowing if the content is going to be of interest. However, the clickable images and lines are not the only components of the interface.
The more important and useful part of the interface is an overlaid translucent panel. At the bottom of the panel is a menu for visual, info, nav, about, and “X” (to close). Visual is the default. It allows you to manipulate the interface–the radius of the sphere, whether you’re looking at the sphere from a vantage point inside it or outside, making the connecting line visible or invisible, and allowing for fullscreen mode. The Info panel is what I need when navigating the sphere. It contains the information about the TEDTalk in focus–the title, a short description, tags, and the URL. The Nav panel is even more interesting in that is provides a tagcloud to allow for browsing the TEDTalks. Clicking on a tag produces a list below the tagcloud of all videos tagged with it. About is the obligatory information panel about the interface itself–who created it (Bestiario), that the videos come from TEDtalks, and a one-sentence description of what it is. The only complaint I have is that it doesn’t include the time of the video in either the panel or the spherical interface.
I think it’s an effective way of integrating text, tags and graphical navigation interface. I think it’s intriguing because I just started on a project today that has me exploring visualizations that would facilitate intercultural understanding. For example, in situations where there is a humanitarian disaster and the NGOs, the military support personnel, and the indigenous communities must work together to provide aid, relief and assistance. Each comes to the disaster context with different goals, different ideas about how things should work, different perspectives on the geography, and different ways of approaching phenomena. What becomes salient for these diverse cultural groups when they view the same phenomenon? It’s more than simply a visualization of a common operating picture (COP). Culturally different people will look at the same picture, object, or phenomenon and derive very different meanings from it. How do I capture what they see, what is salient for them? That legitimizes their perspective and worldview regardless of whether it conforms to the dominant objectivist perspective? Moreover, how do I create a visualization that will lead to a common operational understanding, a step beyond the COP? Is this the fundamental problem with COPs? I think it’s very likely.
It’s an interesting problem. I know that what they see is dependent upon their intrapersonal schemas–the patterns of cognitive elements that are evoked upon continually encountering the world–which shape what qualities and dimensions of an entity or phenomenon achieve salience. In Heidegger’s words, what is ready-to-hand becomes present-to-hand. But there’s a difficulty with trying to craft a representation for such schemas and display them with machines. It’s an ontology problem. With a three-dimensional visualization, you need to define the x, y, and z axes. But the experience is emergent and defies strict categorization. The only way to understand the experience is phenomenologically, but the only way to represent it is categorically. But reducing things to categories results in decontextualization and loss of semantic information. How can the semantics be retained in the visualization and representation process?
This is my conceptual problem to grapple with over the next few days. I have to have a direction to go in by Thursday morning. So, I think the best course is to delineate some boundaries and parameters of what is possible versus what is desirable, to craft some scenarios to help contextualize the visualization requirements, and explore how I might make permeable the potential categorical boundaries that I might be forced to employ.
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A Destining of Being
I’m continuing to work on my research proposal for my dissertation. Heidegger’s philosophical perspective is a significant part of my thesis, and I have been reading a lot of Heidegger lately. The following passage, from Lovitt’s introduction to The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, really spoke to me:
A destining of Being is never a blind fate that simply compels man from beyond himself. It is, rather, an opening way in which man is called upon to move to bring about that which is taking place. For man to know himself as the one so called upon is for him to be free. For Heidegger freedom is not a matter of man’s willing or not willing particular things. Freedom is man’s opening himself–his submitting himself in attentive awareness–to the summons addressed to him and to the way on which he is already being sent. It is to apprehend and accept the dominion of Being already holding sway, and so to be “taken into a freeing claim.”
…Man himself, through whom the ordering characteristic of Enframing takes place, may even be wholly sucked up into the standing-reserve and may come to exist not as the “openness-for-Being” (Da-sein), but as a merely self-conscious being knowing himself only as an instrument ready for use.
While I don’t have a solid grasp of what Heidegger refers to as Enframing, I understand the passages as speaking to the notion of emergence. In Heidegger’s ontology, the fundamental question he asks is: “What does it mean to be?” This is a fundamentally different question than the one Aristotle asks: “What is?” (in the sense of what “exists”). Our contemporary ontology tends to still work from an Aristotelian frame, where ontology becomes the theory and study of categorization, especially when it comes to computational ontology artifacts. Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis places Being within the realm of emergent phenomena, and Man’s being in particular as the ever-evolving state of emergent understanding.
Freedom, then, is the openning of being to that which is emergent and unfolding. It is not volition in the sense of exercising one’s will, for we are always immersed in an experiential world, and being thrown into the world as Dasein (man’s being), we are always emerging into(?) our being as part of the world, not separate from it. When we separate ourselves from the world–objectify it–we lose our being by transforming ourselves into nothing but commodities and tools that exist as objects within that world, albeit self-conscious ones.
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Fungus Among Us
Mycologist Paul Stamets studies the mycelium — and lists 6 ways that this astonishing fungus can help save the world. It’s an interesting presentation that offers some cool insights and innovative solutions to the climate and energy crises. There’s also some interesting ideas about how ecosystems, and life itself, are dependent upon mycellum. Worth a watch.
Tags:climate crisis
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