The digital context revolution

Dr. David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. His most recent research has been on the changing nature of how information is organized for search and retrieval. It's the field of taxonomy and classification indexing and information tagging, and it's undergoing nothing short of a revolution.

Bruce Taylor spoke with Dr. Weinberger about the social, historical, and intellectual impact of how digital content is tagged. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Bruce Taylor: Going back over your career over the last decade or so, you've had an enormous influence in the whole area of intelligent search and retrieval, indexing, taxonomies, tagging, meta tagging. It's a very, very arcane and incredibly important part of the world we're in today digitally. Where are you going with that now?

David Weinberger: For the past year I've been writing not a book, but a book proposal exactly on this topic. The book proposal is now 25,000 words long. So I may go straight from proposal to book. You never know. But the topic that really interests me these days is the way that we organize. We have well-developed ways of organizing and categorizing and thinking about stuff in the real world, very basic principles that have been with us for thousands of years. Now we have this digital way of organizing digital stuff, and the principles of organization are quite different.

They violate all sorts of the rules in the real world. In the real world you can only put a book on one spot on one shelf, whereas if you're doing this digitally, you'd put it into as many different categories as you could. That's a pretty basic rule that gets violated. And furthermore, the rules by which we organize, the principles by which we organize the real world and have done so for 2500 years are really basic and important. They determine things like what constitutes a discipline, what constitutes a topic; in some senses what constitutes meaning. And when you change that stuff digitally, it should have some effect. So that's what I've really been interested in.

In the past few months and with the pace picking up, there's been a huge amount of development in the realm of tagging online and digitally. The differences between the sort of real-world way of organizing stuff, which in its finest incarnation, you have somebody who builds a universal taxonomy, a set of classifications into which everything can fit, you know, like the Dewey Decimal System. Every book can find a place in this preset set of categories arranged into a hierarchical tree.

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