Elaine Peterson, associate professor at Montana State University, has an article in D-Lib
Magazine called “Beneath the Metadata: Some
Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy.” It’s good to see the issues taken
seriously, and many of her premises strike me as true. But, I disagree with her pragmatic
conclusion that “A traditional classification scheme will consistently provide better
results to information seekers.” And I think I disagree with her philosophical critique,
although I am not confident that I’m understanding it as she intends.
I read the article two different ways. At first I thought it was a critique of folksonomies on
the grounds that they contradict traditional philosophical premises. The next time I read it, I
thought it was simply pointing out the differences. Now I’m tending toward my first
reading, in part because her section on the traditional defends it against some objections while
about half of the section on folksonomies is critical of them.
Her philosophical criticism seems to be rooted in what she presents as the Aristotelian approach
to classification: Things are lumped with other things like them, and simultaneously
distinguished from them. Most important, she says, is the idea that “A is not B,”
which means that A cannot be truthfully classified also as a B. But what about digital items that
“can reside in more than one place”? That is “irrelevant,” she says,
“since one is talking about a classification scheme, not about the items themselves.”
I have to admit I don’t understand this. What is the philosophical basis for restricting
things to one category if not that that restriction reflects the metaphysical truth that A cannot
also be B? So, I think she’s saying we are to reject multiple classifications because such
classifications are untrue metaphysically.
This reading is supported by the section on folksonomy, where she identifies philosophical
relativism as “the underlying philosophy behind folksonomies,” and pretty clearly
intends this as a criticism. (I personally am no fan of philosophical relativism, although
there’s a longer story there.) The problem with relativism, she writes, is that it means
classification escapes from the demand that A be A and not be B. I take this as indicating that,
in her section on traditional classification, she is agreeing with the 1930 textbook she cites
that recommends that classifiers give “emphasis to what the author intended to
describe.” If you’re arguing that, on metaphysical grounds, things should only be
classified in a single category, I guess looking for the author’s intention gives you a way
forward…even though categorizing only by the author’s intent is to me like insisting
that readers only underline passages that the author considers significant.
And this highlights what I think is my root disagreement with Elaine’s piece (if I’m
understanding it correctly). It’s fine to raise pragmatic problems with folksonomies, as
she does. But Elaine is pointing at philosophical problems. And those problems require assuming
that folksonomists are trying to do what Aristotelian categorizers are trying to do. But
they’re not. Aristotelians (I’m using this sloppily as shorthand, so pardon my
“tagging”) are trying to find the one true and right category for each thing,
creating a well-ordered system free of contradictions. Folksonomies are trying to help us find
stuff.
Inconsistencies in tags actually make a folksonomy useful; a folksonomy that consists of 1,000
instances of a single tag isn’t worth the folksonomizing. But these inconsistencies are a
problem for Elaine because she is thinking of a folksonomic classification as a philosophical
statement rather than as a mere tool. She says that “perhaps … the strongest
criticism one could make of folksonomies” is that because tags can be true for one group
and false for another,
a folksonomy universe allows both true and false statements to coexist. Because tags are
relativized, personal, idiosyncratic views can coexist and thrive in the form of tags, in spite
of their inconsistencies. Readers of texts on the Internet become individual interpreters,
despite the document author’s intent.
To this many of us will say “Hallelujah!” because we disagree with Elaine’s
opening claim that all classification is about answering the philosophical question, “What
is it?” Indeed, she’s a hard-liner: An inconsistency to Elaine is any multiple
classification, not simply one that contradicts others. Classifying a dissertation about
“Moby-Dick” under “ecology” as well as under “novels: 19th
Century” would introduce an insupportable inconsistency (in Elaine’s terms). She
seems to assume that tags are Aristotelian judgments in which we say that A is a B. But, when I
tag a photo of my wife as “ann,” “birthday,” “2008,” and
“family events,” I am not saying the essence of Ann (or her photo) is any of
those things. Even if I believed in essentialism (I pretty much don’t), we could make use
of Aristotle’s idea of “accidental properties” (non-essential but true) to
explain what I’m doing. And if I tag Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” as
“Angelina Jolie” or “tripe” knowing full well that I am not staying true
to the author’s intent, well, tough on Oliver. Tags are not always truth claims, and a
folksonomy is not intended to mirror nature. Indeed, a folksonomy can reveal the most appalling
areas of ignorance and prejudice in a populace — and, pragmatically, we may well want to
address those popular errors, especially since a folksonomy can indeed reinforce them
But, Elaine is right to point to the philosophical implications of folksonomies. An individual
folksonomy may make no claim to providing the real truth about how the world is ordered, but the
use of folksonomies generally carries some philosophical implications. Elaine sees relativism
underneath them while I see a form of pragmatism. But folksonomies didn’t arise out of
philosophy. They are a “found” ordering: Hey, we have all these tags, so why
don’t we make use of them in a more systematic way? So, I think Elaine is mislocating the
philosophical moment in folksonomies. Philosophy isn’t underneath them or behind them.
It’s after them, in their effect. Folksonomies reinforce our move away from the
essentialist view that every thing has a single category that reflects its single and real
essence. We’ve been moving away from that view for a long time as a culture. The success of
folksonomies as a tool reveals that we accepted the traditional Aristotelian scheme in part
because it was useful. If its utility has been undercut, then we have to ask for the other
reasons we should believe in an Aristotelian metaphysics.
The ball is in Aristotle’s court.
* * *
Most of Elaine’s outright criticisms of folksonomies are actually practical, not
philosophic. She makes them without empirical evidence. She has not convinced me that she’s
right. For example, her final paragraph says:
A traditional classification scheme based on Aristotelian categories yields search results that
are more exact. Traditional cataloging can be more time consuming, and is by definition more
limiting, but it does result in consistency within its scheme. Folksonomy allows for disparate
opinions and the display of multicultural views; however, in the networked world of information
retrieval, a display of all views can also lead to a breakdown of the system… Most
information seekers want the most relevant hits when keying in a search query.
By “exact” she apparently means the results include fewer false results (where a
result is false if the search term doesn’t really apply to the result, as when you search
for “fish” and get back posts about dolphins). And that seems correct: A
professionally constructed index should have fewer of those sorts of mistakes. But the second
criterion in her concluding paragraph is relevancy, and there folksonomies well may beat a
professionally constructed index. Not only might a folksonomy retrieve results more relevant to
me personally or to my cultural sub-group, but it constructs a semantic system that can retrieve
results the narrow and carefully categorizing by experts might miss. So, I disagree with her last
sentence: “A traditional classification scheme will consistently provide better results to
information seekers.” Traditional classification is best for certain types of searches
— ones where you want precision over recall and relevancy, and especially where there is a
confined domain of contents that you have to be sure you’ve searched thoroughly — but
is not as good as a folksonomy for other types of searches.
In short, neither traditional nor folksonomic classifications are best. Each is best for
something.
[Tags: folksonomy taxonomy philosophy elaine_peterson ]
BRAINDANGEROUS
A historic Presidential election,
an economic crisis, and even Hannah Montana were unable to capture the #1 spot in Yahoo’s
yearly rankings of popular search terms. Instead, for the 7th time in 8 years, that title goes to
Britney Spears.
thegenie69
boske93370
Rap2K
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
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