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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.

Tags:culture, environment, ritual TEDTalks
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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.

Tags:dissertation proposal
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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.

Tags:category, conceptualization, cultural schemas, ontology, phenomenology, schemas, TEDTalks visualization
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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.

Tags:Being, emergence, Heidegger, openness technology
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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, energy, metaphor, mushrooms science
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I’m in the midst of writing and revising my thesis proposal. It deals with the ontology of tags–ontology in the sense of being and what is. While perusing the internet for information sources speaking to the notion of tags and folksonomies (collections of tags), I ran across something new in Thomas Vander Wal’s blog, Off the Top. It is a short video of the ideas embedded in the talks he’s been giving recently about social networks. In it he explores the granularity of social networks and the overlapping connections that comprise them.

Though the vid is short, I found it interesting because it speaks to my ideas and understanding of culture, which is a type of social network I suppose. I wanted to post it here and get back to a more thorough explanation of it in relation to culture.

Granular Social Network from Thomas Vander Wal on Vimeo.

Tags:cultural schemas, culture, granularity, sharing social network
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One of these days I’ll get to the IA Summit. There are some slides of presentations from this year’s summit available on Slideshare. This is one that I wish were available for download, but unfortunately is not. But, I can post it here to make it easy for myself to find, and I get to share it with those who might be interested. It’s definitely hard to read on this blog, so it’s worthwhile clicking on the Slideshare link and then viewing it in full screen mode.

I not only like the title of this presentation, Linkosophy, but it focuses on some of the fundamental issues of emergent networks and communities as well the issue of imposing structure. These are some of the issues that I am most interested in in terms of ontology, semantics, and tagging. This presentation discusses some of the tagging that has emerged and its relationship with structure.

Tags:community, ia summit, networks, structure tagging
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Well, I set a date for defense of my dissertation proposal. It’ll be on June 12, 2008 at 9:00AM. I’ve got a few more weeks to refine and finish up the proposal. I want to get it to my committee members about four weeks prior.

So what’s my dissertation going to be about? The tentative title is The Ontology of Tags. It’s basically an exploration of the use of tags as representations of cultural schemas, which are the flexible and adaptable cognitive structures that comprise the conceptualizations of an ontology. I adopt a Heideggerian existentialist perspective on ontology, which is phenomenological rather than categorical.

The formal ontologies constructed for information systems today are based on a classical notion of ontology that consists of complex taxonomies comprised of categories and relationships between them. However, formal ontologies are problematic in that they simultaneously crystallize and decontextualize information, which in order to be meaningful must be adaptive in context. In trying to construct a correct taxonomical system, formal ontologies are focused on syntactic precision rather than meaningful exchange of information. It is not fair to claim that syntax is irrelevant, but the meaning we make of information is dependent upon more than its syntactic structure. The semantic content of information is dependent upon the context in which it exists. For true semantic interoperability to occur among diverse information systems, within or across domains, information must be contextualized.

The way to introduce this contextualization is through the notion of culture. Culture is a phenomenon that emerges through the interplay of intrapersonal cognitive structures (i.e., schemas) and the extrapersonal structures of the world. Culture shapes the way we conceptualize the entities and phenomena of the world of our experience. What I describe as culture, Heidegger describes as background, in which we are continually immersed as Dasein. We are always being-in-the-world. Moreover, we are always being-in-becoming, emerging into the world as it were.

My thesis is that ontologies are more properly conceptualized as cultural schemas (i.e., shared cognitive schemas) rather than taxonomical structures. Situating them as cultural schemas means that they are inherently flexible and adaptable. I believe we can create schematic or phenomenological ontologies for information systems using sets of tags and folksonomies, which can complement and supplement the formal ontologies that are developed by ontology engineers and information scientists.

So, that’s my thesis and proposal in a nutshell. Although I try to explain it as simply as I can, most people still have trouble grasping it. I consider myself very lucky to have a committee that gets it. And each brings a particular expertise to the committee that touches on the major components of my justification and research project. I’m really excited and looking forward to June 12th.

Tags:cultural schemas, culture, folksonomies, Heidegger, ontologies, ontology, semantics tags
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Al Gore did another TED Talk last month. He has a new slide show where he talks about the democracy crisis as a parallel to the climate crisis. He tasks us with a generational imperative. I think it’s brilliant. And I only hope that my research can be part of the solution to both crises.

Tags:climate crisis, cultural schemas, culture, democracy generational
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