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"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 17 2001 - 10:54:20 PDT