MIT 1700 Lecture Week 8 March 1, 2011
Week 8: Information and the New Library
- Key Points
- Birth of the Personal Computer
- Search and find Utopia
- Amazon, POD, rejection of Dewey
- Meta-tagging, filtering, hand-clustering results
- Google Books and Digitization: A Faustian pact with libraries
- UPC, RFID, ISBN
- Information Management
- drastic changed in how we access info came in 1960’s/70’s
Allan Kay
- Personal computers should be at a price point for average consumers
- Computer as a ‘meta-medium’
- Democratizing the technology
- Standardize production like Henry Ford to make computers accessible
- Ford wanted to do this for the money, Kay had the peoples’ interests at heart.
- Make computers the medium of information exchange
- ARPA has been receiving funding from the US Government. Congress put law in place that
said that funding would only be given to things for National Defense.
- They didn’t realize that computing in general can help defense.
- Kay said that corporate and state interference shouldn’t happen here. He saw computers as a
kind of Public Sphere.
- Bring computing to the people.
- How we organize information is important. We need to find efficient ways of organizing to
make it useful though.
- The more information we have, the harder it is to find.
Search Woes
- Implicit vs. Explicit Information Result
- Junk Sites
- Profit Motives may be the hierarchical model
- Contempt for the expert - Google M.D
- Will crowdsource tagging help?
- We use referential language when we write/speak.
- Our search engines have no way of turning up referential terms though, unless
someone tags it. So there is a lot of information out there that we won’t be able to find.
- How can we find stuff that isn’t explicitly referenced?
- We are no longer passive, we are producers and consumers of the Internet.
- We can tag and produce content with meta-data descriptors. We do this in personal life
with facebook tagging and commenting.
- Crowdsourcing: NASA has millions of pictures that need to be sifted through
and tagged, so that have the public help them. You become the average
astronomer.
- Another form: online editing, revising, Wikipedia. But a Wiki article can have
misinformation/disinformation, and can never be fully complete and can be
changed by anyone. MIT 1700 Lecture Week 8 March 1, 2011
- How can we discern what is relevant and true?
- Mills’ Marketplace of Ideas - we reject the bad so we can embrace the true.
- Polarizing around opinions so we may disregard the grey area of a subject and only focus on
the black and white.
- The quantity of information put out by global warming deniers may persuade you just
based on quantity, not quality.
Contempt For Expert
- We seek out information that supports our views like Google M.D. which creates the issue of
self diagnosis
- We make Google tell us what we want to hear.
Too Many Books (Library of Congress)
- Has 150 million items, 50 million books
- 7000 new books each day, sent to 400 cataloguers
- 300 000 subject headings, 8 000 new ones created every year.
- Problem:
- first order organizati
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