October 22, 2003
Signal = Message + Noise
Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics brings engineering paradigms to the field of information processing through the equation of signal = message + noise. To bring Weiner's equation into our own constellation of web services for academic libraries, it is necessary to ask area specific questions here: what is the larger online Signal', what is 'the message' that we wish to retrieve and what is the 'noise' that we wish to get rid of in a large academic library online information system? In an academic library setting many different user communities come to the academic research library with different information seeking needs. To be obvious, students are using webservices to find books and articles to fulfill their assignments, get good grades etc. On the high end, research academics are using the libraries resources to make connections, find new patterns and produce new knowledge.
The noise of web and online library activity is the surfing that goes on and the searches through databases and the catalog that do not produce valid or even possible further 'research leads'.
Academic Libraries with regards to knowledge production operate through the 'circulation' of documents'. Familiar to library and information scientists are the variable factors of 'precision' and 'recall' and the inverse relationship engendered between them. This becomes obvious in something such as a search engine - as recall increases (long scrolling hit result list) the precision of the information obtained decreases.
Returning to Weiner's equation, what is needed in our own cross-disciplinary databases and catalogues are tools to increase both precision and recall so that the documents found produce new connections and patterns to produce new knowledge for our academics - value as a research university increases. Can this be done through a better or at least differently operating or configured catalog? Can more innovative web services applications, information visualizations be developed to amplify 'message' and filter out 'noise'?
Perhaps, Weiner's equation could also be thought of productively by making use of its inverse. Eugene's Garfield Citational Analysis created an entirely new field (bibliometrics) from the conventionally thought of detritus of academic papers (the citation list and footnotes). Is there a way to do the same thing with 'webometrics' and use the conventional 'detritus of webpages or webpage hits or other data able to be collected (is this the metadata or keytags or something else, graphics, flash elements) and use this towards a new type of knowledge production?
October 20, 2003
Compartmentalization, Interdisciplinarity, Information
The logician Kurt Godel was once asked how he had reached such revolutionary insights. He answered "by raising the questions that children are told not to ask". This entry historicizes the trend towards interdisciplinarity. One of the reasons for the current rage with regards to interdisciplinarity is the extent to which nineteenth and twentieth century scientific disciplines became compartmentalized or siloed, speaking their own separate languages. Discoveries in one area failed to make an impact on another or became another areas 'unknowns'. With regards to information seeking, this can be examined in terms of 'databases of knowledge' where one database has no 'relationship' to another and there is little interconnectivity.
With regards to current computer and information science, this 'siloing' of data is being solved on the one hand by looking towards 'common standards' or common languages (i.e. EAD, Encoded Archival Description, Metadata descriptions - XML etc) so there is an interpenetration or relationships created between information sources - new connections arise. Similarly, new 'data warehouses' have the ability to 'amalgamate' disparate databases of knowledge through 'common keys' - hidden relationships and patterns can be made apparent - knowledge can be created through the new and perhaps unexpected relationships found.
To step back historically and dialectically, compartmentalization or 'separation' of disciplines was not always seen as a bad thing for knowledge creation. Disciplines were not always compartmentalized. At a certain point in history the undifferentiated spectrum between disciplines was thought of as a liability.
Writing about the eighteenth century mathematician, Carl Freidrich Gauss, E.T. Bell notes
The great mathematicians of the time were those who, like Laplace and Gauss, toiled to complete the Newtonian edifice of celestial mechanics. Mathematics was still confused with mathematical physics - such as it was then - and mathematical astronomy. The vision of mathematics as an autonomous science which Archimedes saw in the third century before Christ had been lost sight of in the blaze of Newton's splendor, and it was not until the youthful Gauss again caught the vision that mathematics was acknowledged as a science whose first duty is to itself. But that insignificant clod of dirt, the minor planet Ceres, seduced Gauss's unaparalleled intellect when he was twenty four years of age, just as he was getting well into his stride in those untravelled wildernesses which were to become the empire of modern mathematics
(Men of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 240).
The questions of interdisciplinarity or compartmentalization becomes one of knowledge production. When are differentiation, discrimination and 'silos' useful? When are they retrograde with regards to creating information systems or institutional information repositories? What is our role as an academic library or 'data warehouse' with regards to how this impacts knowledge production?
October 13, 2003
Descartes, Boole, Poincare, Online Information Systems
Rene Descartes' innovation in the seventeenth century (November 10, 1619) is to combine algebra with Greek Euclidean geometry to obtain analytic geometry. This inaugurates a new mathematics and much of physics through the possibities opened by the Cartesian coordinate system (x, y axis). Similarly, George Boole's innovation (the Boolean search, Boolean logic), is to combine Greek postulate logic with mathematical algebra. This give us "Boolean logical operators" prefiguring much of our databases search methodologies, computer science and library information systems.
The common trick in creating housings for new 'information infrastructures' seems to be in marrying disparate systems and from this produce new areas for epistemelogical paradigms. Mathematics as a discipline progresses by building on Descartes central innovation. Classical mathematical physics is actually founded on this foundational innovation. Similarly, while not really recognizedin its time, much of computer science and 'web logic' comes out of George Boole's application of algebraic logic to 'word' operators (ie. 'and', 'not', 'or' etc).
With regards to our own information systems, we currently work with long scrolling lists of databases. These are searched through boolean logic. Our library and web information systems are largely navigated through un-visual but screen-like devices. We use our eyes to search or visually scan visual screen spaces through a coordinate system. Is it possible to combine "Boolean logic" and the visual paradigm of online screen space through a (x,y) coordinate methodology? What new opportunities would this produce? Similarly, is there an algebraic application that can be mapped to our own information systems to make them more searchable and open up new areas.
(Descartes, Meditations)
The French Mathematician, Poincare, sometimes called the last universalist, had this to say about mathematical creativity. Poincare felt that 'new information system' creation "does not consist merely in making new combinations of things already known:
'anyone could do that, but the combinations thus made would be infinite in number and most of them entirely devoid of interest. To create consists precisely in avoiding useless combination and in making those which are useful and which constitute only a small minority. Invention is discernment, selection'
(Henri Poincare, as quoted in E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster: New York, 1937, p. 548).
Synthesis + Discernment = Innovation