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Digital Document Quarterly Perspectives on Trustworthy Information |
Volume
6, Number 3, 3Q2007 |
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HMG Consulting |
© 2007, H.M. Gladney ISSN:
1547-8610 |
A 2005 cartoon by Pat Oliphant depicts God
working at a drawing board, with a bearded angel looking over His shoulder, and
ascribes to God the words,[1]
“I’ve been trying to perfect some kind of intelligent design, but all I keep coming up with is a bunch of simple-minded, right-wing, fundamentalist, religious fanatics. I think I’ll just let the whole thing evolve.”
Digital Preservation
Science fiction fans will welcome the digitization of the late Robert Heinlein’s works. The UC Santa Cruz Library is making available a collection of 106,000 pages, consisting of Heinlein's complete manuscripts—including all his published works, notes, research, and early draft manuscripts.
NDIIPP Funding Withdrawn
According to the Washington Post on May 17, “in February, Congress passed and the president signed legislation rescinding $47 million of the program's approved funding.[2] This jeopardizes an additional $37 million in matching, non-federal funds that partners would contribute as in-kind donations.” The effects start in fiscal 2008.
On August 3, the Library of
Congress announced eight grants in a new initiative, Awards to Preserve American Creative Works.
The latest NDIIPP achievements report is part of the LoC Strategic Initiatives Annual Review for fiscal 2005.
Another Task Force, and Also New NSF Funding
“Though significant progress has been made to overcome the technical challenges of achieving persistent access to digital resources, the economic challenges remain daunting.” With this motivating assertion, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Mellon Foundation have announced yet another digital preservation study. Since the topic has been studied by several committees in the last decade, I cannot help but wonder what new ground this task force hopes to expose.[3]
The announcement calls for “economic sustainability of digital information for the science and engineering, cultural heritage, academic, public, and private sectors.” As I understand it, the economic problem for preservation of scholarly digital content is that research collections live by governmental and charitable funding and want to extend their reach to digital content without diverting funds from paper collections.
The U.S. Government has funded a substantial digital effort at NARA, but there are next to no similar efforts for state or local government holdings.
The private sector has expressed little interest in digital preservation.[4] Its priorities seem to be elsewhere, such as in satisfying Sarbanes-Oxley imperatives and continuing to make its digital infrastructure safe and effective.
My puzzlement is increased by an almost simultaneous NSF call for proposals for Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet). This seeks development of new types of organizations that "integrate library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise," and offers projected funding of $200,000,000 over ten years. In keeping with the NSF mission, this seems to be directed at mostly academic digital content.
While digital preservation for the
Little attention is paid records essential for utilities,
transportation, and social services, such as records needed to care for the 40%
of
What might be done to achieve the long-standing medical dream called
“the longitudinal patient record”?[5]
Presuming that citizens become interested in lifetime records,[6] what preservation tools might ensure these
records’ utility decades after they are created?
All this background suggests that the yet-to-be-identified task force members will have to ask themselves, “Precisely who are we trying to influence? What persuasion can we invent beyond what has been said before?”
Vintage Gadgets at the Computer History Museum
For an account of a different kind of digital preservation, see a San Jose Mercury News video. Behind the scenes at the Computer History Museum includes forgotten tales from the frenetic history of the electronics industry.
Epistemology
Notes on Natural Language
What does an American call the drink that is
made with milk and ice cream: a milkshake, frappé,
cabinet, or thick shake? His answer
helps suggest the
The more epistemology I read, the more sensitive I become to how difficult it can be to communicate precisely. For instance, I am immediately alert when I hear the word “just” used as a synonym for “only,” because it is likely to signal an excuse for unacceptable behavior, as in, “I just hit my little sister twice!”
Consider the phrase, “now let’s be sensible”. All too often, what the speaker means is, “What you have proposed is nonsense. What I’m about to propose is most prudent and likely to be effective!”
Within
a debate, it can help to remember that the universal quantifier, “all”, is
likely to introduce an assertion that can be refuted with a single
counter-example. Perhaps such
difficulties influenced the conversation of
Heavily used words are likely to be overloaded,[7] or to have meanings that depend on when they were uttered, or by whom. Some words that are key for careful thinking are burdened in such ways. A reader needs to be sensitive to the possibilities inherent in words such as “value”, “logic”, and “scientific” or “science”.
Value: among these examples, “value” is relatively straightforward. It can denote an abstraction (in contrast to an object, as in “mathematical values”) or a philosophical attitude (an ethical judgment). It can also be used as an economics attribute, as in “today’s value of gold is $602 per oz.” Often the usage context provides clear evidence which of these, or of several variants, is intended.
Logic: the issue is not so clear for “logic”. One needs to remember history. Whenever Kant used “logic”, he must have intended Aristotelian syllogisms,[8] because until the 1847 work of George Boole,[9] “logic” meant what we today call “syllogistic logic.” In modern professional usage, whenever ambiguity might lead to misunderstanding, a modifier is included to clarify, as in “first order logic” and in “modal logic”. However, in everyday conversation “logical” is usually a synonym for “reasonable”, in the sense of “carefully thoughtful.”
Science: “scientific” is more troublesome. In much of its modern usage, it is intended to claim academic prestige for some topic. In reaction, a student enrolled in university science courses—chemistry, zoology, psychology, …—is likely to snort derisively if the term is used outside this scope. The same student is unlikely to know that the word “science” originated with the Latin “scio,” and thus arguably would be correct for any form of knowledge, but not for religious beliefs, myths, aesthetic judgments, or ethical precepts.
Isaac Newton did not call what he did “scientific research,” but instead “Natural Philosophy,” a term which his contemporaries thought appropriate. When Immanuel Kant used (the German equivalent of) “science” in his Critique of Pure Reason, this was explicit allusion to Newtonian methodology. Kant’s immense influence led to “scientific” being used by philosophers to mean a combination of logical reasoning with empirical observation.
Nevertheless, the first reaction of a physics student to the title of Ernst Cassirer’s The Logic of the Cultural Sciences[10] is likely to be puzzlement about both “Logic” and also ”Cultural Sciences.” The title is eminently descriptive of the book’s theme: an exploration of the applicability of physics and mathematics methodology to topics that today we usually call “the Humanities.” Of course, Cassirer did intend to draw attention by usage that was unusual in 1942, so his choice was very successful.
A hallway joke, popular among 1960’s undergraduates, asserted: “If it has ‘Science’ in its name, it ain’t a science.” For instance, I think of Computer Science more as an engineering discipline (devising how to accomplish practical objectives) than as a science (studying the constituents of the world and their interactions.)
Knowledge and Information
The current DDQ number begins a DDQ discussion of the nature and prospects of Information Science. Some authors have promoted their information management projects as “knowledge management,” perhaps because the broader term helps them obtain enterprise support and funding, for instance in a suggestion that university Information Science Departments should be renamed “Knowledge Science Departments.”[11] To make what follows as clear as possible, it might help to say what DDQ means by ‘knowledge’ and by ‘information’.
What is the distinction between knowledge
and information? What is the distinction
between “knowledge” as an objective topic and “knowing” as a psychological
topic?
Authors usually seem to
take for granted that their readers understand what they mean by ‘knowledge’. The books in which one might hope to find a
definition provide none, perhaps because the concept is too primitive to be
defined in simpler terms.[12]
Instead, one finds ‘knowledge’ as a modifier, as in “knowledge
acquisition,” “knowledge base,” “knowledge engineering,” “knowledge level,” and
“knowledge source,” and also many scenarios describing how knowledge figures in
human and animal behavior.[13] There seems to be agreement that knowledge
has to do with whatever it is that we mean by “the mind.”
Consider Knowledge Management (KM)[14] as exemplary
use of ‘knowledge’ as a modifier. Under
various names, it has been considered by the artificial intelligence community
for about thirty years and by archivists grappling with records and information
discovery for about ten years. Perhaps
this is why The Semantic Web is
prominent in recent Information Science literature.[15]
Should KM be construed to include job-related training of the kind that IBM has for decades provided its employees? Should we think of schools and colleges as Knowledge Management institutions? When a father teaches a child how to ride a bicycle, is this elementary knowledge management? Apparently not, because KM literature