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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Granular Social Network
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.
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Proposal Defense
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.
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Al Gore’s TED Talk
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
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Autism and Understanding Others
Re-blogged from Autism and Understanding Others « Neuroanthropology
Amanda Baggs presents her own life and thoughts in her YouTube video, In My Language, her translation of how she is in a constant conversation with the world around her. She is autistic and does not speak. But she can type, and after three minutes showing her interacting with her environment, she uses computer technology to explain herself to us.
This is interesting to me because it provides a high contrast example of the difficulty of communication between cultures. It is difficult for many people, even academics, to grasp the idea that culture has a significant impact on what we perceive as real and existential. People from different cultures don’t see the same things, even when looking at the same entity. When walking through the Australian Outback, I come across a rock formation and I see it as a rock formation. When one of the indigenous persons of the area come across that same rock formation, they see it as Krantjirinja, their Kangaroo Ancestor. It’s not a “different interpretation” or differing “social constructions” that apply different words to the same entity. They are not the same entities.
Such is the case with Amanda Baggs. She perceives a completely different world, understands and communicates with and within it in completely different ways than non-autistic persons. Not understanding what she experiences during the first three minutes of the video–having no reference system with which to understand it–makes it frustrating for those of us who are used to a particular form of cultural interaction. If we give in to our frustration, we dismiss Amanda and pass up an opportunity to expand our cognitive horizons and understanding of the world (and the autistic persons in it). Amanda’s video is an extreme example, but we often don’t invest enough time to understand before dismissing people from other cultures or simply assuming that they see what we see.
The problem is the same for computational systems, especially across domains. Creating a “specification of a conceptualization” will never be able to address the issue of seeing completely different things, even if it is machine-readable. It’s difficult enough to construct an ontology for a single domain, but trying to do it across domains requires a completely different approach. Machine-readable specifications just wont’ cut it. It’s like trying to give a dictionary or a glossary to someone and telling them to learn to speak another language.
This is why I advocate for the introduction of culture into the study of ontologies in computational systems. Ontology is, after all, a philosophia prima that examines the notion of Being, explores the nature of existence and tries to describe what exists. But there are many ways to understand the nature of existence, and culture is the primary force in shaping our understanding of it. So if we are to be successful in developing ontologies for our information systems, we will have to incorporate an understanding of the culture that uses the technology and the information within the system. Only then will we be able to see what members of other cultures see and be able to translate information meaningfully.
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Heh…I got quoted
The IST Graduate Symposium was held on January 31 and February 1, 2008. I had the privilege of chairing the symposium last year, but this year the event became much bigger, with big names in industry and academia giving keynotes and talks. The symposium gained a lot of support from the administration in this third year.
Annemijn and I proposed a panel about IST research in the developing world, and with some cajoling were able to get six panelists including myself. My advisor, Fred Fonseca, agreed to moderate the panel. There was some good discussion and a diversity of research and opinions that illustrated the complexity and scope of potential IST research in developing countries. There were some good questions from the audience. I thought it went pretty well.
The panel seems to have made enough of an impression that it was the only one quoted in the news blurb put out by the university. And they quoted me(!), much to my surprise:
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How Can Information Science Contribute to a Solution to the Climate Crisis?
I can’t answer that question definitively, but I have a few ideas. Not only will it be important to gather data and information from a variety of sources using a variety of systems, platforms and protocols, but it will be important that we address the communication of knowledge between the many cultures that exist on the planet. Developing information systems that allow us to translate cognitive and cultural schemas that are embedded in the information and knowledge of different cultures is one essential step. Enabling streams of continuous flow of information related to climate, geography, culture, humanitarian relief, food sourcing and distribution, infrastructure support, population displacement and relocation, epidemiological surveillance, and conflict emergence is another essential step. Creating a visualization mechanism that allows for understanding the continuous information flow by the collective bodies of decision makers responsible for managing the impacts of climate change is an essential third step. These steps are a bare outline of the boundaries of a potential solution. Any solution will be vastly more complicated and involve a great many information scientists and knowledge workers.
If you haven’t watched An Inconvenient Truth (and you should as it will shake you to your core), you may want to watch Al Gore’s acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize given in Oslo, Norway just a couple days ago:
The full text of the speech can be read at Al Gore’s site.
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Myths about the developing world
Information Science in action:
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