[unrev-II] Akin to blog theory, and everything

From: Jack Park (jackpark@thinkalong.com)
Date: Thu May 17 2001 - 10:36:26 PDT

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    The following links with quotes were found whilst roaming about in
    blogspace. It may turn out that *visiblelanguage* is a great site to
    browse. The first paper reminds me of the notion of Relational Biology, a
    topic I mentioned here maybe a year ago. The thinking is that human
    behaviors, human knowledge, information flow, story telling, all of that
    and everything, are driven by complex systems, not complicated (simple)
    systems that are reducible to their constituent components.

    This leads me to wonder just what datamining is all about. Given that we
    can construct ontologies by any of a variety of ways of mining data that
    are both sensed (measured) and expressed (e.g. textual, multimedia), we
    have ways of sensemaking along with our daily activities. OHS is all about
    collective sensemaking. Can collective sensemaking work for every
    individual, given that every individual is, indeed, an instance of a
    complex system? I do not know that an answer to that question is known. I
    do suspect, however (intuitively speaking), that there is sufficient
    empirical evidence to support a claim that collective sensemaking works for
    a large enough body of individuals that the effort to promote tools like
    OHS is justified. To pursue the design of an OHS is, I think, to pursue
    the evolution of a complex system. But, complex behaviors evolve out of
    lots of simple behaviors (think: beehive, ant colony). Thus, I think that
    storytelling, what appears to be a simple behavior, is of great importance
    to an OHS-like system. But, storytelling, and storyunderstanding, only
    appear to be simple. Inside, they are complex.

    The links below only tickle the notions I express here. There's more. All
    of this, simply by entering blogspace.

    Cheers
    Jack

    http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage/Feature%20Articles/Frascara_CognitionE
    motion/

    "There is an Aristotelic tradition in cognitive psychology, information
    design and artificial intelligence, to understand human information
    processing as a mechanism, that is, as a complicated system, ultimately
    explainable on the basis of the understanding of every one of its multiple
    components and their interactions. Instead of looking at human information
    processing as a complicated system, I propose to look at it as a complex
    system, distinguishing for this paper the complicated from the complex; the
    first being composed by a high number of discrete parts with many
    interconnections: as in a computer circuit, the second being an integrated
    system where everything affects everything: as in the relation between two
    people."

    http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage/Feature%20Articles/ArtofMemory/ArtofMe
    mory.html

    "Intelligibility has emerged as a persistent difficulty in interactive
    multimedia and hypermedia. While much discussion has focused on screen
    design and readability, intelligibility is a deeper problem that the
    hypertext literature has disregarded. Before literacy was widespread, The
    Art of Memory was widely used as a method for retaining information. This
    mnemonic method, both visual and symbolic, was used to map new information
    onto familiar and symbolically significant structures which provided frames
    for the organization and interrelations within informational clusters.
    More than computer metaphor, The Art of Memory is presented to offer
    insight into intelligibility. It is offered as a model for the non-text
    based organization of multimedia presentation: one that can provide
    semantic contexts within which communications are intelligible"



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