1. Seminar 8
Shirky, Wesch and Web 2.0
Introduction to the Digital Liberal Arts
MDST 3703 / 7703
Fall 2010

2. Business
• Mid-terms next Thursday
• For those who missed Thursday—see Final
Projects

3. Review
• Digital scholarship as the work of representing
worlds
– Expressed by categories
– Encoding in symbols
– Cultured in communities
• Thematic research collections use various
devices to produce this representation
– Hypertext (intertextuality)
– Contextual mass

4. Overview
• The horse = the Library
– or the book or the shelf – any artifact of this
assemblage
• The faster horse = Yahoo, VOS, etc.
• Unsworth and Shirky represent two
approaches to building cars
– (old) Ontology vs. (new) Tagging
– Humanities Computing vs. New Media
• Can we combine Unsworth and Shirky?

5. The tree of nature and logic
From Ramon Lull Ars Magna (Great Art),
1305
* Trunk = Aristotle's categories
* 10 leaves on the right = questions
* 10 leaves on the left = keyed to a
system of rotating disks for generating
answers.
Inspired Leibniz, creator of
symbolic logic, and early
ancestor of the computer
Ontology is the
basis of computing

7. What does Unsworth mean by
“foolish consistency”?

9. Representing "Innocence"

11. The Rationalization Effect(s):
1. Uncovering tacit categories and
worlds
2. A new look at old data

12. “I found myself right back at questions
of interpretation and the articulation
of an unspoken lifeworld”
From Unsworth, 2001, Figure 2,
‘Debugging the Spec’

17. https://dev1.shanti.virginia.edu/fellows/baird/graphs/
https://dev1.shanti.virginia.edu/fellows/baird/

18. The process that one goes
through to develop, apply,
and compute knowledge
representations is unlike
anything that humanities
scholars have ever been
required to do
And it’s what we should be doing

19. Shirky’s thesis
The ways we're attempting to
apply categorization to the
electronic world are actually a
bad fit  Faster horses!

21. Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Ontology

22. If you've got enough links, you don't need the hierarchy anymore

23. The Method: Tags and URLs
• The targets of links have addresses
– <a href=“http://somewhere.net”>Click me</a>
– Addresses are URLs
• Tags can be used to classify these addresses
– Delicious
– Diigo
• Anything can have an address and be tagged
– Images in Flickr
– Things in the world

24. Examples
• Delicious (web pages and tags)
• Flickr (images and tags)
• Twitter (tweets and hashtags, retweets)

25. Effects
• Cool visualizations
• Sometimes useful mashups
• Scary but interesting Giant Global Graph

26. A visualization of messages referencing the #Aristotle hashtag on Twitter, created by Social
Collider. The red lines in the center are the #Aristotle references.
http://complexrhetoric.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-aristotle-on-twitter-panel-wrap-up.html

27. “we could mine the tweets surrounding an
archived hashtag in order to generate a topic based
context that would persist after the event had
been long gone”
http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/09/09/additional-thoughts-on-tag-powered-context/
-- Scrape tweeting links using the hashtag from the
twapperkeeper archive and feed them to a facet of the
search engine
-- Look to other services, such as delicious, to see who has been
bookmarking URLs with the particular tag
-- Look to delicious to see who bookmarked the ALTC2010
homepage
SEE http://ohttp://ouseful.open.ac.uk/jit/examples/hypertree-
demo2.php?mode=tag&url=http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2010/useful.open.
ac.uk/jit/examples/hypertree-demo2.php?mode=tag
Tag Powered Context

28. 35,000,000 Flickr Photos, Mapped
What happens when images are tagged by location

29. When ontology doesn’t work
• Domain
– Large corpus
– No formal categories
– Unstable entities
– Unrestricted entities
– No clear edges
• Participants
– Uncoordinated users
– Amateur users
– Naive catalogers
– No Authority

30. Question
• Are Unsworth’s and Shirky’s positions
compatible?
– What are their major differences?
– Both approaches want to generate data and
produce visualizations …
– Both approaches expose classifications that are
surprising and interesting

31. Wesch
• Why is it important to separate form and
content?
– Note that ontology is useful here (document
markup in RSS)

32. Wesch
• How do XML and RSS relate to Shirky’s and
Unsworth’s positions?
• How is Wesch’s argument similar to Shirky’s?
Unsworths?
• How is it different from both Unsworth and
Shirky?

33. Some concluding observations …
• Unsworth pays attention to the consequences
of limitations
• Shirky and Wesch are as much observers of
the Web as users
• Wesch exploits a different medium – video
• How shall we organize our own collections
and tags?