Comments

Edward Vielmetti | May 3, 2007 7:47 AM

Thanks for the review Peter - I have a copy of the book for my train trip to Chicago, hope to have some notes up on it myself.

David Weinberger | May 3, 2007 2:29 PM

Peter, first, thanks for the incisive review. I always enjoy the clarity you bring to discussions.

I'm really sorry to agree with you, because that means I didn't make myself clear. Ack.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of digital ways of organizing digital information is exactly that we can have as many simultaneous ways of organizing as we want, including strictly hierarchical taxonomies, alphabetizations, and the world as it appears to Mortimer Adler.

Or am I misunderstanding the force of your criticism?

About the dedication: To the librarians for what you have done and what you will do. That's more or less what I had in mind.

Peter Morville | May 3, 2007 3:26 PM

David, thanks for responding so quickly during what must be a very busy, exciting time.

I do think we mostly agree, and I'm perhaps just splitting hairs when I should be lumping, but I'm not sure you acknowledge the degree to which most third order schemes are built on top of and dependent upon second order schemes.

Also, professional organizers are often responsible for designing the very systems that enable and leverage user participation.

But, I'm probably just being an overly sensitive and defensive professional organizer :-)

In any case, thanks for clarifying the dedication, with a colon, and a positive note about the past and future. Ranganathan would be pleased.

David Weinberger | May 4, 2007 10:49 AM

In terms of emphasis, I'm sure you're right. (I'm not sure I like your implied activity of "lumping hairs," though :)

I count myself as a support of hybrids and mixed modes. Whatever works. The more semantics the better...assuming we keep getting better at making sense of the abundance, with tools like the ones you describe in Ambient Findability.

Edward Vielmetti | May 8, 2007 11:07 AM

I wonder what the crossover between information architects and professional organizers (the sort of folks who work with you until you have a clean closet) is like.

Dan Ryan | March 14, 2008 1:17 PM

I think Peter was dead-on, though I accept David's suggestion that it's a matter of emphasis and he's writing a book to provoke consideration of a new point of view.

I'd push the "built on top of and dependent upon second order schemes" point a little harder even. I think a lot of our thinking about information omits the critical importance of social organization and history as (1) foundational, (2) the raw material for all the "re-ordering" (and for the ways of doing that re-ordering), (3) and as structuring the very cognitive communities that collectively make sense of stuff.

dlp | March 24, 2008 1:08 AM

"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - *our* thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our old-age distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) *et cetera*, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the start impossibility of thinking *that*.