p. 83-84: Descartes made one of the first attempts to explain the concept of the affections in his last book, The Passions of the Soul of 1649 …. Descarte’s book was followed a year later by the Musurgia universalis of the “last Renaissance man,,” Athanasius Kircher …. Kircher was very much a believer in music not only as a mirror but as a fundamental element of Creation itself …; music was not so much a reflection or approximation of God’s perfect design, but an emanation of the divine Itself. Kircher’s motto was: “Music is nothing other than the knowledge or the order of all things.”

James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

 

About ten days ago there was a breathless story on the evening news about how “more information” appearing on New York City fast food menus was not being used by consumers. Told that sandwich A had 150 calories and sandwich B had 850 they were all buying sandwich B. How could this be?, wondered the newscaster, that people overlooked “information.” All of the talking heads interviewed were chefs, consumer advocates, and dietitians.

Not one knowledge organization specialist. Not one commentary on “concepts” of food, or the problems of homonymy and synonymy and meronymy, not one comment on cognition or cognitive overload or navigating networks pathways. A missed opportunity I think; we should’ve been right there, commenting.

In last week’s Economist is a story about “Ad scientists” with a headline image that looks an awful lot like some of my WordStat™ visualizations–lots of little boxes with network lines connecting them in pretty colors; all of it cast as terminological catch in a fishnet. The story begins with the example of what happens when someone searches “tennis balls” using three different search engines. Some of the results are said to be “organic” and others are paid links.

Now, why are no knowledge organization scientists cited in this paper?

How could it be that searchers are thrown off by overload, in which case they turn to the first available organic link (Patrick Wilson’s “relevance as means-to-an-end”; cognitive overload, etc. etc.)

Sigh ….

Family life being what it can be, I just spent two weeks sitting in a hospital, managing the care of my significant other (who now has recovered, btw). At the peak of the crisis he was in intensive care, where the large critical care team made me a part of their deliberations. It was curious in a number of interesting ways. But, this is my KO blog. On the morning of ASIST SIG/CR Classification Workshop, which I had to miss, I emailed my colleague and former doctoral student Chris Marchese about our co-authored presentation. I sent her this little story:

“Last night I had an experience. Dr. A and B were telling me he has condition X and Y. I said, that’s nothing new, I asked you to talk to his own doctor. They said “We have our own specialists” and I said, his doctor is a world-reknowned specialist and has two decades of data on his health and chronic conditions. I’m an information scientist, we encourage teams to talk to each other across their self-imposed boundaries.” They gave me a  kind of stunned look, but the next morning as I arrived they told me they had the file and had summoned his w-r-s doctor. But, it kept occurring to me that this is what our work is about, finding out how team A talks to its members, so we can learn how they are describing the same thing as Group 11, even though they seem to be working in different worlds. This is the importance of what we’ve done with CWA.”

There was a fascinating paper about boundary objects at Mysore this summer by Michael Shepherd and Tara Sampalli “Ontology as Boundary Object” (see the Mysore proceedings p. 131). Directly relevant, it showed how terms in clinical notes sometimes were misfires with terms in medical records, but the misfire was what made them boundary objects. I think there was to have been a paper about boundary objects at SIG/CR as well.

It behooves us to look more closely at this manner of creating interontological discourse.