Contents

• the importance of interpretation
• The Topography of Knowledge: mapping the real and the conceptual museum. Classification, indexing, and organisation of knowledge from Aristotle to the present (see the 'Timeline for Knowledge Organization' and 'Historiography of knowledge organization')
  
• Aristotle
• Raymond Llull
• Francis Bacon
• John Wilkins
  
• Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus)
  
• Henry Evelyn Bliss & John Dewey
• S. R. Ranganathan
• knowledge organisation and technology
• from incunabula to indices: the long birth of the printed book
• Paul Otlet
• Vannevar Bush
  
• early uses of computers for knowledge encoding and storage
• Ted Nelson
  
• information retrieval
• knowledge representation in artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences
  
• hypertext and historiography
  
• metadata
• tagging
• as mnemonic
• as label
• as identifier

Museums, knowledge, & learning

Museum, whose business (according to the ICOM Statutes) is to “acquire, conserve, research, communicate and exhibit, for purposes of study, education, enjoyment, the tangible and intangible evidence of people and their environment”, communicate a representation of, rather than the ‘raw’ (though that’s probably not the right word) actuality of, “people and their environment”. The physical topography (and constraints) of the exhibition space; the limited collection of artefacts to which the museum has access (and equally significantly the artefacts that are missing); the decontextualisation within museum space of artefacts from their originating historical, geographical, social, political, economic, industrial, possibly religious or ceremonial, and epistemic contexts of occurrence and use; the exhibition design and display decisions; as well as the explicit commentaries and explanations presented to the museum visitor interpose between the visitor and the ostensible subject, as much a veil as a window. Every representation is consequently to some degree a misrepresentation: museums transform culturally purposefully objects into objects of viewing, displays, new artefacts created by museological practices, creating new meanings, new interpretations. Finally, the act of viewing, in itself, entails interpretation within the context of, and with reference to, what the museum visitor already knows ... or mis-knows.

... the maker of the artefact. If one thinks of the maker's relation to his culture in terms of the customary distinction between the participant's understanding and an observer's understanding, the maker is the classic participant. He understands his culture more immediately and spontaneously than any outsider (exhibitor or viewer included) can. Much of his understanding of it takes place without rational self-consciousness; much of his knowledge of it is dispositional.Michael Baxandall, ''Exhibiting Intention:Some preconditions of the visual display of culturally purposeful objects', in I. Karp & S.D. Lavine (eds.) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1991. p.36

The Topography of Knowledge: mapping the real and the conceptual museum

[my reminder note to myself: text on the organisation of exhibits in real-world exhibitions; important because (i) the organisation of exhibits reveals a lot about underlying organisation of knowledge--e.g. MoL spiral; (ii) classification systems aid search]


Imagine, some 5,000 years hence, @@@ [mobile / coltan] [John Searle / institutional facts]

• Melvil Dewey--the Dewey Decimal System
• Paul Otlet and the Mundaneum
• Vannevar Bush and the Memex: 'associative' knowledge as model of mind; hypertextual representation; anticipates the Web and Wikipedia
  
• Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu

Museums, history, and hypermedia

[notes from here on ...]

Vannevar Bush and the Memex

Well, H.G. 'World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia'. First published in the Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937. Accessible online at:
» https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html

[more notes from here on ...]

Since the Web and other digital platforms afford non-linear, heterarchical, hypertextual organisations of knowledge that is not possible with paper-based or building-based representations, how might the Web-as-technology be used to persuade us to think about the nature of history?

• Spartacus: an early and powerful example of the non-linear representation of history
• Exploring 20th Century London, which allows site users to explore material either from a 'Timeline', or via 'Places', or alternatively through a number of 'Themes' (communities, leisure, transport, power and politics, work, youth culture and fashion, migration and citizenship, etc)
  
• the wiki: heterarchical, as an alternative to linear ('timeline'), topic-centric, and hierarchical representations of history. Participatory; but what risk is there of authorial and editorial democracy compromising the veracity of the document?
• restoring the n-dimensionality of the artefact

Information access and management

• metadata

• Open Archives Initiative
• the Open Archives Forum online tutorial
  

Building in commonsense knowledge
'Social tagging' on the web has in many ways been an exciting, liberating, democratizing innovation.

• tagging the artifact--the Philadelphia Museum of Art
  
• labeling images--why image search (on Google, for example) & simple tagging (in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example) doesn't work
• Luis von Ahn and the 'knowledge interface'. Von Ahn describes online programs that elicit keyword descriptions of images (which, of course, could and do include images of cultural artefacts) from ordinary web users. A brilliant example of knowledge generation from a 'virtual community'? How reliable are their descriptions? to what extent is there risk of culturally-determined perceptual bias?
  
• whose knowledge is it, anyway? shortcomings in von Ahn's model
• controversy at the Natural History Museum?
  

Readings and references

Bowker, G.C. & Star, S.L. (2000). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN: 0262522950. [Amazon]

Corfield, P.J. (2007). Time and the Shape of History. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN: 030011558X. [Amazon]

Hjørland, B (2006). Lifeboat for Knowledge Organization. Accessed 23 May 2008 at:
» http://www.dbstud.dk/k05pebr/knowledge/

Hjørland, B (2008). 'Knowledge organization systems', Lifeboat for Knowledge Organization. Accessed 23 May 2008 at:
» http://www.db.dk/bh/lifeboat_ko/concepts/knowledge_organization_systems.htm

Kottke, J. (n.d.) Review of Alex Wright's Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Accessed 23 May 2008 at:
» http://www.kottke.org/07/09/glut-mastering-information-through-the-ages

Kwasnick, B.H. (1999). 'The Role of Classification in Knowledge Representation and Discovery', Library Trends, Summer 1999
» http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_1_48/ai_57046525

Mink, L.O. (1978). 'Narrative form as a cognitive instrument', in Canary, R.H. & Kozicki, H. (eds.) The Writing of History: Literary form and historical understanding. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN: 0299075702. [Amazon]

Newall, P. (2005). 'Introducing Philosophy 18: Philosophy of History'. The Galilean Library. [You may also wish to browse the History & Historiography section]

Wells, H.G. (1938). World Brain. Methuen & Co. Limited.

White, H.V. (1987). Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: 0801829372. [Amazon]

Wright, A. (2007). Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. ISBN: 0309102383. [Amazon]