Avatars of Capital

What was Steve Job’s great­est con­tri­bu­tion to indus­try? Accord­ing to Isaac­son, he either trans­formed or invented six indus­tries: per­sonal com­put­ing, desk­top pub­lish­ing, ani­mated film, music, tele­phony, and tablet com­put­ing. Isaac­son also notes that Jobs suc­cess­fully reimag­ined the retail store in an era when bricks and mor­tar were being replaced by vir­tual store­fronts like Ama­zon. Fair enough. But what is miss­ing in this account is some­thing much more pro­found. Jobs rein­vented cap­i­tal­ism. Or at least he advanced its rein­ven­tion far beyond the move­ments ini­ti­ated by the vir­tual eco­nom­ics of Ama­zon, EBay, and Pay­Pal. Look­ing back at the iPod, the water­shed prod­uct event in Job’s return to Apple, most attribute its sin­gu­lar suc­cess to the design and aes­thet­ics of the object itself — it’s char­ac­ter­is­tic Zen-like sim­plic­ity, its almost sex­ual good looks, its leg­endary usabil­ity. But to do so is to engage in a fetishism of both the polit­i­cal eco­nomic and sex­ual kinds. For one aspect of the iPod’s usabil­ity that tends to be over­looked is the way it man­aged the rela­tion­ship between the user to the music, the con­sumer to the prod­uct. As Jobs famously noted, although you can use an MP3 player with pirated music, you end up work­ing for less than min­i­mum wage in the time you spend find­ing, down­load­ing, copy­ing, and cat­a­loging files. Much bet­ter to have a ser­vice like iTunes do that for you. But iTunes is of course much more than a music and media orga­nizer. It is an actual store — and entire inven­tory wait­ing to be pur­chased — sit­ting on your com­puter, or, even­tu­ally with the iPhone, in your pocket. What the iPod did was to extend the busi­ness model of Ama­zon into the very fab­ric of per­sonal space, pro­vid­ing a mate­r­ial con­duit between con­sumer and pro­ducer, between labor and cap­i­tal. The iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are there­fore avatars of cap­i­tal, mate­r­ial embod­i­ments of a rela­tion­ship between peo­ple and the vir­tual real­ity known as cap­i­tal, which, by virtue of their beauty and ease of use, become both con­duits to and dis­trac­tions against that real­ity. As smart phones and other devices, from cars to wash­ing machines, become  “smarter” and con­nected to var­i­ous ser­vice providers, this kind of cloud cap­i­tal­ism will become more dom­i­nant. The Kin­dle Fire, which marks Amazon’s appro­pri­a­tion of Job’s dis­cov­ery, is just the start.

Posted in Political Economy | No Comments »

If You See Steve Jobs in the Road, Kill Him

Now that Steve Jobs has passed away and Wal­ter Isaacson’s fair but inevitably approv­ing biog­ra­phy has been read by large num­bers of the self-identified lead­er­ship class, we can expect a period in which many will imi­tate the lead­er­ship style of the deceased as a means to suc­cess. Let us hope it is short lived. For the con­clu­sion I sus­pect that many will draw is that it is OK, even nec­es­sary, to be an ass­hole so long as one imag­ines one­self to be cre­at­ing beauty and sav­ing the world along the way. Although Jobs fits the MO of so many suc­cess­ful cre­atives in his­tory (I think of Ezra Pound), each of whose genius seems to be not only closely bound up with but intrin­si­cally related to their lack of social grace, few, very few peo­ple actu­ally pos­sess the cre­ative where­withal to jus­tify the social cost of said genius. This is because genius is not merely a mat­ter of genes. Read­ing Isaacson’s biog­ra­phy I am struck by the degree to which Jobs was a prod­uct of a series of con­ver­gent trends in the par­tic­u­lar time and place of Sil­i­con Val­ley in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a place where even work­ing class neigh­bor­hoods were inhab­ited by engi­neers involved with cut­ting edge tech­nolo­gies. Jobs could not have hap­pened with­out his par­tic­i­pa­tion in a com­mu­nity invested in elec­tronic cul­ture and his wit­ness­ing and join­ing in the bad man­ners and counter-cultural ethos of the time. The simul­ta­ne­ous pres­ence of a new cul­tural assem­blage — the elec­tronic gone main­stream — and a rejec­tion of all author­ity and received wis­dom, save that of dis­tant and dis­torted Asia, allowed him to invent an aes­thet­ics of the elec­tronic that would be dis­tinc­tive of the Apple brand. (As for Job’s aes­thetic itself, it seems to owe largely to his father’s influ­ence and, through him, the aes­thet­ics of high car cul­ture in the 1950s and 60s. Job’s com­put­ers in ret­ro­spect appear to be most like cars — inte­grated beau­ti­ful things that even an idiot can use.) The kind of suc­cess that Jobs achieved is not some­thing that oth­ers, even pos­sess­ing the same cog­ni­tive endow­ments, are likely to achieve sim­ply by adopt­ing what would become his noto­ri­ously unfeel­ing yet pas­sion­ate lead­er­ship style. The cul­tural cross-currents and social com­po­si­tions con­ducive to both Job’s char­ac­ter and his luck are just not avail­able to every­one. So if you find your­self secretly con­sid­er­ing this style or, worse, work­ing for some­one who has adopted it, remind your­self or that per­son of this — that it only works if you really can cre­ate some­thing great, and that to cre­ate some­thing great you have to be part of some­thing great, a great world, such as was Sil­i­con Val­ley in the 1960s.  Bet­ter to work for cre­at­ing that world than to assume it exists.

Posted in Management | 1 Comment »

The Digital Humanities Situation

Let’s be honest—there is no def­i­n­i­tion of dig­i­tal human­i­ties, if by def­i­n­i­tion we mean a con­sis­tent set of the­o­ret­i­cal con­cerns and research meth­ods that might be aligned with a given dis­ci­pline, whether one of the estab­lished fields or an emerg­ing, trans­dis­ci­pli­nary one. The cat­e­gory denotes no set of widely shared com­pu­ta­tional meth­ods that con­tribute to the work of inter­pre­ta­tion, no agreed upon norms or received gen­res for dig­i­tal pub­li­ca­tion, no broad con­sen­sus on whether dig­i­tal work, how­ever defined, counts as gen­uine aca­d­e­mic work. Instead of a def­i­n­i­tion, we have a geneal­ogy, a net­work of fam­ily resem­blances among pro­vi­sional schools of thought, method­olog­i­cal inter­ests, and pre­ferred tools, a his­tory of peo­ple who have cho­sen to call them­selves dig­i­tal human­ists and who in the process of try­ing to define the term are cre­at­ing that def­i­n­i­tion. How else to char­ac­ter­ize the mean­ing of an expres­sion that has nearly as many def­i­n­i­tions as affil­i­ates? It is a social cat­e­gory, not an onto­log­i­cal one.

As a social cat­e­gory, the term has a more or less clear set of orga­ni­za­tional ref­er­ents. Recently Matt Kirschen­baum reminded us that there is a peer-reviewed jour­nal, a fed­eral office, an annual con­fer­ence, and an inter­na­tional net­work of aca­d­e­mic cen­ters asso­ci­ated with the term, not to men­tion an Oxford Com­pan­ion. How­ever the gap between the social and the onto­log­i­cal can­not avoid appear­ing as a kind of scan­dal. This is evi­dent from the num­ber of essays and blog posts that have emerged seek­ing to define the cat­e­gory, as well as from the play­fully com­bat­ive and defen­sive tone some remarks have taken. This anx­i­ety of self-definition seems to indi­cate a new phase in the his­tory of the field, one that may indi­cate the emer­gence of a ter­ri­to­r­ial instinct in an envi­ron­ment of scare resources–even as the lan­guage of the “big tent” emerges. After all, the shift from Human­i­ties Com­put­ing to the Dig­i­tal Humar­ni­ties indexes a growth in the size and pop­u­lar­ity of the com­mu­nity. With growth comes grow­ing pains.

To many, the dig­i­tal human­i­ties feels like a small town that has recently been rated as a great place to raise a fam­ily. It is now inun­dated by devel­op­ers who want to build con­dos for new­com­ers who are com­pet­ing for resources and who may not under­stand local cus­toms. Iden­tity crises emerge when tacit, unspo­ken under­stand­ings and modes of inter­ac­tion are dis­rupted by exter­nal con­tact and demo­graphic shifts. In the quest to defend old ways and invent new ones, in-groups are defined, prophets emerge, witch­craft accu­sa­tions are made, and peo­ple gen­er­ally lose what com­mu­nal sol­i­dar­ity they once had. The dig­i­tal human­i­ties com­mu­nity has not gone this far, but one can­not help but notice the dis­par­ity between the Wood­stock feel­ing of THAT­Camp events and what appears to be the Alta­mont of DH 2011.

To be sure, all dig­i­tal human­ists share a com­mon bond as human­ists, schol­ars devoted to the inter­pre­ta­tion of what Panof­sky called “the records left my man [sic]”—works of lit­er­a­ture, art, archi­tec­ture, and other prod­ucts and traces of human intel­lec­tual labor. More specif­i­cally, the sorts of human­ists who have been drawn into the fold of dig­i­tal human­i­ties have had a dis­tinct pref­er­ence toward tex­tual remains, even if we enter­tain pleas to con­sider non-verbal chan­nels as well (usu­ally orig­i­nat­ing from non-traditional fields, such as media stud­ies). It remains an implicit (if dis­com­fit­ing) assump­tion among dig­i­tal human­ists that, as Tim Bray put it, “knowl­edge is a text based appli­ca­tion.” Con­sis­tent with this view, the typ­i­cal dig­i­tal human­ist is a lit­er­ary scholar, an his­to­rian, or a librarian—all tra­di­tional fields con­cerned with the man­age­ment and inter­pre­ta­tion of writ­ten doc­u­ments. Oth­ers, such as myself, come from other back­grounds; but I believe it is no acci­dent that the most recent buzz about the dis­ci­pline was spawned by talks given at the MLA.

There are also many schools of thought under the sign who do share, within them­selves, a more or less coher­ent set of meth­ods and con­cerns. There is, of course, the old guard of human­i­ties com­put­ing, trained in the dig­i­ti­za­tion of tex­tual sources using TEI and versed in the the­o­ret­i­cal impli­ca­tions of this mode of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. There is a newer com­mu­nity who embrace the “spa­tial human­i­ties” through the use of map­ping soft­ware in rela­tion to tex­tual (and other) sources, and who have shifted our atten­tion toward visu­al­iza­tion and human geography—an over­looked field that should rightly have its day. Along­side these there is a long run­ning group of sta­tis­ti­cal crit­ics, extend­ing from Father Busa and IBM to Franco Moretti and Google, as well as other com­pu­ta­tional human­ists who have been at it since the 1960s and who believe that count­ing words, apply­ing the meth­ods of com­pu­ta­tional lin­guis­tics, and observ­ing pat­terns in large cor­pora will pro­duce insights unreach­able by mere read­ing. One could also point to the Crit­i­cal Code Stud­ies group and other schools of thought that have emerged in the space.

Taken as a whole, how­ever, there is lit­tle con­nec­tion among these groups beyond a shared inter­est in texts and the use of com­pu­ta­tional tech­nolo­gies to explore and under­stand them (as opposed to merely cre­at­ing or dis­trib­ut­ing them). But more impor­tant, none of these groups, either in iso­la­tion or as a whole, has suc­cess­fully demon­strated to the wider com­mu­nity of human­ists that there are essen­tial and irre­place­able gains to be had by the appli­ca­tion of dig­i­tal tools to the project of inter­pret­ing (and rein­ter­pret­ing) the human record for the edi­fi­ca­tion of soci­ety. To a dis­con­cert­ingly large num­ber of out­siders, the dig­i­tal human­i­ties qua human­i­ties remains inter­est­ing but irrel­e­vant. Anthony Grafton speaks for the major­ity when, in a recent New York Times piece, he repeats the plat­i­tude that the dig­i­tal human­i­ties is a means and not an end. (Given his stature in the field, his recent Road to Dam­as­cus expe­ri­ence at the AHA may indi­cate a turn­ing of the tide—but the con­ver­sion of other promi­nent schol­ars has not pro­duced such shifts in the past.)

Now, if we use the term dig­i­tal human­i­ties and can­not define it, maybe we are think­ing of such def­i­n­i­tions in the wrong way. Maybe the tra­di­tional way of defin­ing dis­ci­plines in the acad­emy is all wrong. Instead of say­ing that physics is the study of mat­ter and energy, or his­tory the study of what peo­ple have done in the past, maybe we should say that physics is the work of those who read New­ton and Ein­stein, who use var­i­ous branches of math­e­mat­ics, and who know how to con­struct exper­i­ments in a cer­tain way. Or his­tory is the work of peo­ple who know how to nav­i­gate archives and read old tax records and diaries and other tex­tual remains, whereas archae­ol­o­gists are those who know how to man­age digs and how to retrieve, clas­sify and inter­pret shards and bones.

This may sound forced for the hard sci­ences, but it is emi­nently rea­son­able for the human­i­ties and social sci­ences. For what are the real dif­fer­ences between his­tory, soci­ol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, anthro­pol­ogy, and archae­ol­ogy? Each claims to address the struc­ture and func­tion of soci­ety. The answer is that each has mas­tered a par­tic­u­lar domain of data—its acqui­si­tion, orga­ni­za­tion, analy­sis, and inter­pre­ta­tion. Soci­ol­o­gists do sur­veys and sta­tis­tics, inter­views and con­tent analy­sis. Cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gists do field­work and thick descrip­tion. Econ­o­mists count indi­ca­tors and develop equa­tions to relate them. His­to­ri­ans are very good at con­vert­ing old doc­u­ments and archives into sto­ries. When an archae­ol­o­gist starts to read such doc­u­ments, we say she is doing “his­tor­i­cal archae­ol­ogy.” Document-reading anthro­pol­o­gists become eth­no­his­to­ri­ans. And so forth.

Such a def­i­n­i­tion (which philoso­phers will rec­og­nize as a species of prag­ma­tism) allows us to turn our atten­tion to the prac­ti­cal and sit­u­ated basis of the dig­i­tal human­i­ties. In this view, dig­i­tal human­ists are sim­ply human­ists (or inter­pre­tive social sci­en­tists) by train­ing who have embraced dig­i­tal media and who have a more or less deep con­vic­tion that dig­i­tal media can play a cru­cial, indeed trans­for­ma­tive, role in the work of inter­pre­ta­tion, broadly con­ceived. Beyond this all bets are off. Because the cat­e­gory of dig­i­tal media includes essen­tially every­thing afforded to the human­ist by the pres­ence of avail­able computing—everything from crowd-sourcing and social media to nat­ural lan­guage pro­cess­ing and latent seman­tic index­ing to gam­ing and hap­tic immersion—the dig­i­tal human­i­ties is in prin­ci­ple asso­ci­ated with as many meth­ods and tools as there are inter­sec­tions between texts and technologies.

The com­plex­ity of the field is also mul­ti­plied by the modes of rela­tion­ship that may char­ac­ter­ize the inter­sec­tion between com­pu­ta­tion and tex­tu­al­ity in each case. Con­sider the dif­fer­ence between the prac­tices of tex­tual markup and the work asso­ci­ated with Crit­i­cal Code Stud­ies. The for­mer sub­jects pri­mary source texts to dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion by means of code—XML, XSLT, etc.—whereas the lat­ter treats code itself as text, seek­ing to apply prin­ci­ples of inter­pre­ta­tion theory—hermeneutics, struc­tural­ism, etc.—to pro­gram­ming lan­guages and, one hopes, markup lan­guages as well. (One might include here Kirschenbaum’s Mech­a­nisms, which treats hard­ware itself as text.) As Stephen Ram­sey points out some­where, prac­ti­tion­ers of the for­mer approach can be curi­ously uncrit­i­cal of their tools and meth­ods, check­ing their post­mod­ernist per­spec­tives at the door of the lab.

Con­sider also the case of data­bases. On the one hand, many schol­ars sup­ple­ment their research by using data man­age­ment tools to orga­nize notes and ref­er­ences. On the other hand, there is an emerg­ing school of thought, ini­ti­ated by Lev Manovich, which regards the data­base itself as an object of crit­i­cism in its own right. The dif­fer­ence between the two approaches is like night and day, although one can imag­ine how one may profit from the other. Still a third mode of inter­sec­tion is to regard tech­nol­ogy as an alle­gory of tex­tu­al­ity. For exam­ple, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has employed the image of the fiber optic net­work as a frame for the inter­pre­ta­tion of dig­i­tally medi­ated social inter­ac­tion and text. So not only are there as many kinds of dig­i­tal human­i­ties as there are inter­sec­tions between human­i­ties and com­pu­ta­tion tech­nol­ogy, that num­ber is at least tripled by the kind of rela­tion­ship that inheres in that inter­sec­tion. To a human­ist, com­pu­ta­tional tech­nol­ogy is poten­tially tool, text, and metaphor.

Given this sur­plus of exten­sional mean­ings, there is sim­ply no way to describe the dig­i­tal human­i­ties as any­thing like a dis­ci­pline. Just think of the cur­ric­u­lar require­ments of such a field! Not only would the field require its mem­bers to develop the deep domain knowl­edge of the tra­di­tional humanist—distant read­ing notwithstanding—it would also demand that they learn a wide range of diver­gent tech­nolo­gies (includ­ing pro­gram­ming lan­guages) as well as the crit­i­cal dis­courses to sit­u­ate these tech­nolo­gies as texts, cul­tural arti­facts par­tic­i­pat­ing in the repro­duc­tion of social and cog­ni­tive struc­tures. Granted the occa­sional poly­math who may mas­ter all three, the scope of such a pro­gram is sim­ply too vast and var­ie­gated. And in fact there has been no con­sen­sus among dig­i­tal human­ists about the basic ele­ments of a cur­ricu­lum, a prob­lem we share with advo­cates of media flu­ency to define a cur­ricu­lum for fac­ulty development.

So, if the dig­i­tal human­i­ties is, nei­ther in fact nor in prin­ci­ple, a dis­ci­pline, then what is it? Surely, with its grow­ing army of fol­low­ers and plethora of con­crete insti­tu­tional man­i­fes­ta­tions, it must have some basis in a real­ity other than its own exis­tence. In fact it does. The dig­i­tal human­i­ties, as both a broad col­lec­tion of prac­tices and an intense, on-going inter­pre­tive praxis gen­er­a­tive of such prac­tices, is best thought of as hav­ing two very con­crete but equally elu­sive dimen­sions. One the one had, the dig­i­tal human­i­ties (con­ceived of in the plural) com­prises some­thing very much like a cur­ricu­lum, an inter-related col­lec­tion of sub­ject domains and resources that, as a whole, con­tributes to both the con­struc­tion of knowl­edge and the edu­ca­tion of peo­ple. Although no one indi­vid­ual can mas­ter an entire cur­ricu­lum, a cur­ricu­lum nev­er­the­less has a logic, a coher­ence, and even a cen­ter of gravity.

This leads to the sec­ond and more impor­tant dimen­sion: that cen­ter of grav­ity is not a par­tic­u­lar assem­blage of tech­nolo­gies or meth­ods but the on-going, play­ful encounter with dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion itself. It is the encounter that the dig­i­tal human­ist dis­cov­ers and finds at once reveal­ing, sat­is­fy­ing, and an inef­fa­ble source of fel­low feel­ing with his col­leagues. This encounter is not regarded as merely a means to an end, but as an end in itself, in so much as the process of inter­pre­ta­tion is often as reward­ing as its prod­ucts. I call this encounter the sit­u­a­tion of dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion, a sta­ble but always-in-flux event space that is but a spe­cial case of the work, or praxis, of rep­re­sen­ta­tion in gen­eral. Adult mem­bers of lit­er­ate cul­tures for the most part have sub­li­mated and for­got­ten this praxis, but it remains present to the minds chil­dren and poets, who are always learn­ing how to read and write.

This, I believe, is what Stephen Ram­sey means by “build­ing.” Or at least it is a char­i­ta­ble mis­read­ing that retrieves the argu­ment he makes when he sug­gests, essen­tially, that real dig­i­tal human­ists write code. In my rephras­ing, real dig­i­tal human­ists are engaged in the play of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, which pro­foundly involves putting things together, whether the vehi­cle of assem­bly be Lisp or Zotero. That marks a wide spectrum—but there is a com­mon ele­ment of play, of pro­duc­tively map­ping and remap­ping the objects and cat­e­gories of schol­ar­ship in the rapidly chang­ing, intrin­si­cally plas­tic but struc­turally con­strain­ing media of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. With­out this play—to the extent that the scholar has a stand-off, do-this-for-me atti­tude toward the medium—then, no, she is not a dig­i­tal humanist.

Dig­i­tal human­ists are aware that in the cur­rent his­tor­i­cal moment, as the older men­tal­ites of print lit­er­acy con­tinue to be dis­placed and reworked, the human­ist has the oppor­tu­nity to immerse her­self in the trans­duc­tive plasma of inter­pre­ta­tion where ideas and their expres­sive vehi­cles can be mapped and remapped in a vari­ety of forms and frame­works, a giddy play of praxis that not all gen­er­a­tions have the good for­tune of wit­ness­ing. This expe­ri­ence cross-cuts all of the var­i­ous dis­ci­pline– and technology-specific instances of dig­i­tal human­i­ties work. To the extent that a com­mon dis­course is emerg­ing to reflect on this expe­ri­ence across the dis­ci­plines, then the dig­i­tal human­i­ties is a real enough.

Posted in Digital Humanities | 10 Comments »

Research Assisant Professor in Digital Humanities at South Carolina

My friend and col­league, David Miller (Eng­lish, South Car­olina), sends this along:

The Uni­ver­sity of South Car­olina is seek­ing to appoint a Research Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor in Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties.  Here is the text of the job advertisement:

Research Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor, Dig­i­tal Humanities

The Uni­ver­sity of South Car­olina Col­lege of Arts & Sci­ences seeks to appoint a spe­cial­ist in Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties to sup­port col­lab­o­ra­tive research and develop infra­struc­ture for a pro­posed Cen­ter for Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties at South Car­olina.  Can­di­dates should have a PhD in a human­i­ties dis­ci­pline, along with a strong back­ground in com­pu­ta­tional research method­olo­gies.  Impor­tant skills for the posi­tion include an imag­i­na­tive approach to col­lab­o­ra­tive research, effi­cient project man­age­ment, strong grant-writing abil­i­ties, the abil­ity to build coali­tions and work coop­er­a­tively with a vari­ety of part­ners, and the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate effec­tively with spe­cial­ists in a vari­ety of dis­ci­plines includ­ing Com­puter Science.

Nine-month salary $50,000 with ben­e­fits; sum­mer salary to be sup­ported by funded projects.  Based on per­for­mance the posi­tion is annu­ally renew­able.  Send let­ter and resume by Feb­ru­ary 15, 2010 to David Lee Miller, Direc­tor, Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties Ini­tia­tive, Depart­ment of Eng­lish, Uni­ver­sity of South Car­olina, Colum­bia SC 29208.

The Uni­ver­sity of South Car­olina is an affir­ma­tive action/equal oppor­tu­nity employer.  Minori­ties and women are espe­cially encour­aged to apply.  The Uni­ver­sity of South Car­olina does not dis­crim­i­nate in edu­ca­tional or employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties or deci­sions for qual­i­fied per­sons on the basis of race, color, reli­gion, sex, national ori­gin, age, dis­abil­ity, sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion or vet­eran status.

Posted in Digital Humanities | No Comments »

Getting Off the Bus

“We must jump off Lévi-Strauss’s bus one stop before he does.“
Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spi­der, p. 149.

It is hard to over­es­ti­mate the infli­uence of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French philoso­pher turned anthro­pol­o­gist who liked to be known as a crafts­man, on the dis­course of the human­i­ties and social sci­ences in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Oper­at­ing among a sur­plus of great thinkers (espe­cially in France) dur­ing a period of the deval­u­a­tion of the role of intel­lec­tual, his name nev­er­the­less stands out not sim­ply for hav­ing founded one of the most impor­tant intel­lec­tual move­ments of the cen­tury — struc­tural­ism — but for hav­ing defined the agenda, along with Wittgen­stein, for a host of major thinkers up to the present time.  With­out Levi-Strauss, there is no Fou­cault, no Der­rida, no Bour­dieu, no Lyotard to both absorb and react to the idea of struc­ture and the great anthro­po­log­i­cal tra­di­tion which served to flesh out the idea.  For with­out Levi-Strauss, the vast store­house of descrip­tive ethnog­ra­phy that he dis­cov­ered and fully absorbed in Amer­ica, in the New York Pub­lic Library, while in exile dur­ing the war, would never have reached Paris.  The sig­nif­i­cance of these mate­ri­als — many of them dry cat­a­logs of cul­tural traits inter­spersed with ten­ta­tive obser­va­tions about the nature of cul­ture — would never have caught the atten­tion of the Euro­pean eye.  And with­out his role as cul­tural vec­tor between Amer­i­can empir­i­cal ethnog­ra­phy and French philo­soph­i­cal anthro­pol­ogy, the deep well of ethnog­ra­phy in gen­eral might never have informed the imag­i­na­tion of decon­struc­tion, post­struc­tural­ism, and post­mod­ernism.  Evi­dence for the influ­ence of this source can be found every­where, both implic­itly, as in Foucault’s appro­pri­a­tion of the idea of mana to the­o­rize power, and explic­itly, as in Lyotard’s strong ref­er­ence to Lévi-Strauss and the ethno­graphic exam­ple of the Cashinahua in the Post­mod­ern Con­di­tion.  Sur­prised by his fame and noto­ri­ously absent from the activism of the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss was the unmoved mover for an entire sys­tem of thinkers whose lights shone the brighter for their prox­im­ity to him.

Today the bus has stopped.  For those of us who have fol­lowed Doniger’s advice — and you have to — per­haps now we may con­sider get­ting back on for a few more stops.

Posted in Anthropology | No Comments »

Brain Behavior and Behaving like Brains

Mus­ings on Zacks, the Hip­pocam­pus, and Kafka

NOTE: This arti­cle has been mod­i­fied slightly since I orig­i­nally posted it.  The sec­tion on the hip­pocam­pus has been sub­or­di­nated to an inline note.  It is inter­est­ing (at least I think so) but not part of the main argu­ment I’m try­ing to make here.

A few weeks ago I had the good for­tune of see­ing Jeff Zacks give a talk enti­tled “Film, Nar­ra­tion, and Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science” at the Curry School of Edu­ca­tion at U.Va.  He was invited to speak by my col­league Glen Bull as part of the school’s Tea & Tech­nol­ogy series (every Thurs­day at noon in Ruffner Library if you’re around).  It was an excel­lent talk not only for its con­tent, but for Zacks’ gift of clar­ity.   At no point did the sci­ence over­whelm, and the talk had the use­ful effect of rais­ing lots of inter­est­ing ques­tions in
my mind and in the minds of others.

Zacks’ the­sis is rel­a­tively straight­for­ward: human beings have the capac­ity to per­ceive events as a series of dis­crete seg­ments, and this capac­ity to seg­ment events is cor­re­lated with the long-term mem­ory of those events, as well as the abil­ity to focus on and form con­cepts about the goings on in an event.  There are big cog­ni­tive pay-offs to per­form­ing this work of seg­men­ta­tion, pay-offs which  (pre­dictably) are thought to cor­re­late to evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tage.   Inter­est­ingly, the bound­aries that peo­ple spon­ta­neously define for events — such as a sequence in a French film or a film of a man wash­ing dishes (two exam­ples used in Zacks’ exper­i­ments) — are widely shared.  Where there is vari­ance, sub­jects are either older or suf­fer­ing from demen­tia (which gives me a really good feel­ing about the aging process).  The mech­a­nism for seg­ment­ing thus appears to be hard-coded and deeply rooted, prob­a­bly in the hip­pocam­pus.

One of the most inter­est­ing parts of Zacks’ the­sis is the process by which event bound­aries are per­ceived, or rather, defined by the brain.  Appar­ently, bound­aries are inserted where the brain expe­ri­ences what Zacks calls “pre­dic­tion error” — when things break a pat­tern of rep­e­ti­tion and thus sig­nal to the brain a bound­ary that is used to con­struct the tem­po­ral model for the event — its typ­i­cal sequence.   Zacks did not men­tion this, but I would be sur­prised if this capac­ity were not in some way con­nected with the capac­ity of the brain to per­ceive infor­ma­tion in Shannons’s sense.  For pre­dic­tion error is an excel­lent name for the new­ness that his neg­a­tive entropy equa­tion defines.  My ten­ta­tive hypoth­e­sis is that we must be wired to both per­ceive infor­ma­tion in this sense, and to make use of it in the for­ma­tion of per­cep­tual struc­tures which, in turn, become the mate­ri­als from which cog­ni­tive struc­tures are built.

Now I men­tion this because the response of the audi­ence — com­prised mainly of edu­ca­tional experts — and of Zacks him­self is that one prac­ti­cal les­son from his research is that cre­ators of nar­ra­tive con­tent, such as film, should make an effort to pro­vide more obvi­ous seg­men­ta­tion in their prod­ucts.  Clearly, if this is how the brain works, we should work this way too.

I think this is a major fal­lacy that per­vades the recep­tion of brain sci­ence research.  Peo­ple tend to assume that if the brain works a cer­tain way, then so should we. I call it the fal­lacy of brain-behavior mir­ror­ing (at least until I come up with a bet­ter name), a more recent vari­ant of the mir­ror of nature fal­lacy described by Rorty.  For exam­ple, since we know (since Kant and then Gestalt psy­chol­ogy) that the brain actively con­structs objects from expe­ri­ence, then, the argu­ment goes, we should have stu­dents actively con­struct things too.    But clearly, if the brain already works a cer­tain way, then it works that way — in spite of, or per­haps because of, how we behave, obliv­i­ous to a detailed descrip­tion of its work­ings.  In the case of event seg­men­ta­tion, it seems clear to me that Zacks’ research sug­gests an oppo­site les­son — it says that peo­ple who can per­ceive pre­dic­tion fail­ures can also seg­ment expe­ri­ences, and thereby gain cog­ni­tively.   If so, then the les­son is to get good at per­ceiv­ing and cre­at­ing event bound­aries, which requires not pre-segmented media, but the oppo­site — hard to grasp art, stuff that vio­lates expec­ta­tions and rewards the per­ciever with a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive.   In fact, giv­ing stu­dents media with well defined bound­aries may cause their capac­ity to con­struct bound­aries to atro­phy, much as caf­feine causes our adrenal glands to shrink. (I know, it’s a good rea­son to stop drink­ing coffee.)

Now it turns out that some research form the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at Santa  Bar­bara cor­rob­o­rates this view.  Accord­ing to the head­line of the New York Times,’ piece in this work, non­sense — such as the absur­dist work of Kafka — sharp­ens the intel­lect.   (Another sum­mary of this research is enti­tled This is Your Brain on Kafka.)    Essen­tially, your brain has to work hard to make sense of things, which it is evolved to do, and this has the side effect of mak­ing you smarter, or at least sharper in the period fol­low­ing the effort to make sense where there is none.  And what is non­sense but pre­dic­tion fail­ure on a large scale?

So, what is the ped­a­gog­i­cal and media design les­son here?  Learn­ing Teach­ing is not about mak­ing con­tent easy to ingest, it’s about cre­at­ing envi­ron­ments where stu­dents can play this game of mean­ing for­ma­tion, which isn’t always stress-free.  Mar­keters may dis­agree, but they are in the busi­ness of indoc­tri­na­tion, not teaching.

Posted in Neuroscience | 1 Comment »

RDF Schema Definition Language">Toward a Structuralist RDF Schema Definition Language

When I get the time, I’m going to write a vocab­u­lary cre­ation lan­guage to sup­port struc­tural­ist text inter­pre­ta­tion.  It will con­sist of two specs: one to han­dle the mark­ing up the sur­face fea­tures of text, such as rhetor­i­cal fig­ures and tropes.  This will be based on my work with the Prince­ton Char­rette Project and it will likely incor­po­rate some ideas from Steven Bird’s work on anno­ta­tion graphs.  The sec­ond will be either an exten­sion of or a vari­ant of SKOS and|or OWL designed to rep­re­sent extracted sym­bolic struc­tures.  It will incor­po­rate pred­i­cates to han­dle rela­tions of sig­ni­fi­ca­tion, such as has_part, has_analogy, and has_metonym, between the ele­ments rep­re­sented in the first lan­guage.   At a larger level, I want to rep­re­sent holis­tic dimen­sions such as con­text and level, as well as nar­ra­to­log­i­cal things like encom­pass­ment, trans­for­ma­tion, inver­sion, and liminality.

One of the big prob­lems I see in this project is an appar­ent lim­i­ta­tion in RDF to sup­port triples about triples.  For exam­ple, an anal­ogy is a rela­tion between struc­tures, not terms.  The asser­tion A : B :: C : D is, at minu­mum, an asser­ta­tion about the rela­tion­ship between two asser­ta­tions, A : B and C : D.  (The pred­i­cate of the asser­tions them­selves is usu­ally X has_part Y.)  An anol­ogy looks some­thing like this then:

[A has_part B] just_as [C has_part D]

The eas­i­est way to accom­plish this task would be to pro­vide URIs for each RDF triple.  I haven’t seen a gen­eral solu­tion to this prob­lem.  I know I can cre­ate local URIs within a spe­cific triple store, and use these in triples.  But I need to define an RDF triple as a datatype first.  And I antic­i­pate prob­lems fur­ther down­stream; I won­der if the cur­rent RDF toolset is designed to han­dle index­ing and infer­enc­ing of these kinds of triples.

If any­one has sug­ges­tions about how to han­dle this issue, I’d be glad to hear them.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

After writ­ing this, it strikes me that to say that two triples are anal­o­gous is just to say that they share a predicate–so long as that pred­i­cate is suf­fi­ciently spec­i­fied.  To assert an anal­ogy, then, is to assert that such an iden­tity is impor­tant or rel­e­vant in a cer­tain context.

Posted in Comparative Ontology | 7 Comments »

Rituals, Texts and Databases

Com­par­a­tive ontol­ogy asserts that humans already have ontolo­gies, and that machine ontolo­gies are both pro­jec­tions of human ontolo­gies (those of the numerati) and mate­r­ial agents that inter­vene in the ongo­ing repro­duc­tion of ontolo­gies (every­one else’s).  Devel­op­ers of ontolo­gies for the web of linked data would do well to under­stand the nature of human ontolo­gies, as well as they way machine ontolo­gies inter­vene in the ongo­ing con­struc­tion of social life.

Human ontolo­gies are not like ROM pro­grams, hard-wired into our brains and exe­cuted with­out mod­i­fi­ca­tion; they are designed to be repro­grammed through engage­ment with the world. They are one of our most effec­tive adap­tive traits.

Ontolo­gies are adaptive

Anthro­pol­o­gists have stud­ied ontolo­gies in the wild for a long time, under the var­i­ous cat­e­gories of “struc­ture,” “sym­bol­ism,” “cul­ture” and “col­lec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tions.”  One of the most impor­tant con­trib­u­tors to the study of ontol­ogy is the Amer­i­can cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gist Mar­shall Sahlins.

Sahlins’ prin­ci­pal the­o­ret­i­cal con­ti­bu­tion to cul­tural anthro­pol­ogy has been to retrieve the con­cept of cul­tural struc­ture from the ahis­tor­i­cal, for­mal­ist, and mech­a­nis­tic con­cep­tion devel­oped by Lévi-Strauss, whose own work on mythol­ogy belies his more the­o­ret­i­cal pro­nounce­ments.  Rather than sep­a­rat­ing struc­ture from event (and his­tory), and locat­ing the for­mer deeply within a uni­ver­sal mind–like a camshaft respon­si­ble for the jig­saw puz­zle of culture–Sahlins focuses on what he calls the “struc­ture of the con­junc­ture” of struc­ture and event.  His­tory emerges as a cul­tur­ally dis­tinc­tive second-order struc­ture that results from the ongo­ing work of cat­e­gories in praxis. So cat­e­gories have a struc­ture, but that struc­ture under­goes reeval­u­a­tion and change as it is applied to the world.

In Islands of His­tory Sahlins describes the process of cul­tural (onto­log­i­cal) change in terms of the “risk of ref­er­ence”: as cul­tures clas­sify things in the world–as they deploy ontologies–they also put these ontolo­gies at risk.  For things in the world do not always behave as clas­si­fied, or planned.  Even the sun  has an occa­sional eclipse.  Although the keep­ers of culture–from priests to grandmothers–try to enforce adher­ence to the cat­e­gories, the behav­ior of things will inevitably con­tra­dict the cat­e­gories and call for their revi­sion.  Sahlins reads the Hawai’ian’s clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Cap­tain Cook as Lono as just such a world chang­ing event.

Rit­ual is one mech­a­nism humans use to syn­chro­nize the world with world view.  As peo­ple grow, for exam­ple, and change sta­tuses, rites of pas­sage are used to medi­ate this “con­tra­dic­tion” and reclas­sify peo­ple so that they can fit into the sys­tem.  Another mech­a­nism is prophecy, where  the reverse is true–world views are aligned with a world that has changed.  Mil­lenar­ian move­ments are the clas­sic exam­ple of this: a prophet emerges who can make sense of the new in terms of the old, but changes the old in the process.

Rit­u­als and prophetic move­ments are the orig­i­nal forms of change management.

This is the ongo­ing work of cul­ture.  Cul­tural repro­duc­tion is never mechan­i­cal.  That is one rea­son we humans have his­tory.  There is always a dis­pro­por­tion between words and things, plans and situations.

Data­bases (and the point of this post)

Now, a data model, such as a set of tables and fields in a rela­tional data­base, an XML schema of ele­ments and attrib­utes, or an RDF vocab­u­lary of classes and prop­er­ties, is a plan, a schema of clas­si­fi­ca­tion.   And data­base appli­ca­tions, like rit­u­als and texts, have their own forms of ref­er­en­tial risk to con­tend with. They clas­sify the world and, in the process, both effect the world they clas­sify and open them­selves up for revi­sion by that world as it changes.

For exam­ple, the cat­e­gories pro­duced by a require­ments elic­i­ta­tion process for an appli­ca­tion designed to improve some work­flow, and encoded in a data­base that sits at the bot­tom of an appli­ca­tion stack, may not accu­rately rep­re­sent the work­flow as it is actu­ally prac­ticed, and as it will inevitably change as new devel­op­ments take place–changing per­son­nel, clients, strate­gic plans, etc. The data­base, then, is put into a situation–the sit­u­a­tion of the conjuncture–into which its cat­e­gories are at risk.

In this sit­u­a­tion, data­bases are like texts–they are built on the arma­ture of a hard-coded ontol­ogy, and they can move beyond their orig­i­nal domain of applicatibility.

But unlike most texts, and very much like sacred texts, data­base appli­ca­tions (and their admin­is­tra­tors) are usu­ally given a cen­tral posi­tion within an orga­ni­za­tion.  They are often deployed as key ele­ments of an enter­prise archi­tec­ture that calls the insti­tu­tional shots.  Thus they can insu­late them­selves from ref­er­en­tial risk.  They can force con­for­mity to their logic–as Michael Wesch’s New Guinea vil­lagers redesigned their set­tle­ment pat­tern to con­form to the gov­ern­ment census–or they can pro­duce a black mar­ket of behav­iors in an orga­ni­za­tion that bypasses the data­base gov­erned work­flow.  This is what fac­ulty do who are forced to use an LMS but would rather use Google Docs.

Com­par­a­tive ontol­ogy can help here.  If we view ontolo­gies as always sit­u­ated, then we should (1) design sys­tems for max­i­mum flex­i­bil­ity and adapt­abilty, and (2) learn a les­son from the rit­ual life of peo­ples around the world and through­out his­tory: engage our ontolo­gies in con­stant reeval­u­a­tion and mod­i­fi­ca­tion, mak­ing the world (of our orga­ni­za­tions) fit where appro­pri­ate, and also refin­ing the cat­e­gories to fit the world.

To meet the first chal­lenge, we shouldn’t cre­ate over­wrought ontolo­gies, but rather focus on just enough clas­si­fi­ca­tion to achieve the effects we need. Usu­ally, the effects we are most con­cerned with are con­nect­ing peo­ple to peo­ple, peo­ple to infor­ma­tion, and infor­ma­tion to infor­ma­tion, in as few links as possible.

To meet the sec­ond chal­lenge, we may want to refine what we mean by “social oper­at­ing system”–for that is pre­cisely what a rit­ual sys­tem is.  Maybe it’s time to fol­low McLuhan’s advice and exploit the rit­ual effects of the elec­tric, in order to mit­i­gate and shape the more dan­ger­ous effects of the elec­tronic.   When we build ontolo­gies, maybe we should also be think­ing of the phys­i­cal and vir­tual spaces in which they will be deployed, and the mate­r­ial and dig­i­tal arti­facts that will be their vehi­cles of expression.

Posted in Anthropology, Comparative Ontology, Media Theory | No Comments »

Theory Driven Design

I am all for user-driven design method­olo­gies. My instinct is to dis­trust the Cen­tral IT ethos of “we know bet­ter” because “we think more ratio­nally about things” and all that.  That per­spec­tive is based on a simul­ta­ne­ous over-valuing of a lin­ear, ratio­nal notion of process (“plan­ning”) and a grudg­ing accep­tance of user behav­ior as “cul­tural” and there­fore out­side the scope a require­ments gath­er­ing process.

The term “non-functional require­ments” speaks vol­umes and cap­tures the Cen­tral IT atti­tude very well.  Under that cat­e­gory, the whole point of effec­tive soft­ware design is swept under the rug.  We know that soft­ware will be most effec­tive when it adapts to user behav­ior and vice versa, but we often side­step that issue, hop­ing for incre­men­tal, evo­lu­tion­ary changes to pro­duce the desired effects over the long run.  We miss the oppor­tu­nity to inno­vate, leav­ing that to the less timid.

But I also find that user-centric method­olo­gies are based on naive assump­tions about what users want, or who The User is, or what the point of the user research is in the first place.  Unless you have a very restricted audi­ence for your software–and admit­tedly one often does–it is very dif­fi­cult to trans­late the views of a few peo­ple, whether cap­tured by focus group, sur­vey, or even participant-observation, into gen­er­al­ized prin­ci­ples for an appli­ca­tion.  Ulti­mately, good design is what works, and we ret­ro­spec­tively attribute suc­cess to our process.  But we really have no clue.

What is it that one is cap­tur­ing by user-centric research, any­way?  The atti­tudes and dis­po­si­tions within a class of indi­vid­u­als?  This can’t be it.  User atti­tudes and men­tal mod­els are highly vari­able, and they are muta­ble because humans are adap­tive, more than we think.  If you build soft­ware based on some sta­tic notion of what users want, what they say they want, you will miss the effect soft­ware has on redefin­ing what they really want.  This is because users inhabit cul­tural envi­ron­ments, and soft­ware inevitably has effects on those envi­ron­ments.  If you focus too much on the abstract user–what’s “in” the user–you will often have the feel­ing of the goal posts mov­ing.  Or you may end up dis­miss­ing the user alto­gether as fickle and irre­spon­si­ble, and go on with your own design ideas.   If you design soft­ware for a liv­ing, I am sure you know what I am talk­ing about.

I think the proper focus of user-centric soft­ware design has to be the user-in-context.  That is, not the user but the Sit­u­a­tion.  But sutu­a­tion defined in a spe­cific, rig­or­ous way.  Sit­u­a­tion as the objec­tive, insti­tu­tional frame­work of power and infra­struc­ture in which peo­ple work.  This is dif­fi­cult ter­rain to study, hedged in as it is by all sort of taboos and mis­recog­ni­tions that keep the social gears mov­ing.  Let me give you an example.

One of the areas where the Cen­tral IT soft­ware design ethos dom­i­nates is in the area of doc­u­ment man­age­ment.  Two fac­tors drive the design of solu­tions: (1) devel­op­ers assume (know) that paper­less­ness is a Good Thing, and (2) the paper-based work­flows that users are enmeshed in are so crufty, com­plex, and idio­syn­cratic that it is impos­si­ble for users to describe them in enough detail to re-engineer them.  The result is that the dig­i­tal doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tion will almost always build around people’s behav­ior, or else it will break work­flows where it has to.  So, instead of step­ping back and rethink­ing what the data flows entailed by a paper form entail, or tak­ing advan­tage of the metaso­cial moment and ask­ing Why are We Doing This in the First Place, document-logic is repro­duced in the soft­ware.  The eff­fect is not to repro­duce the old way, and make it more effi­cient.  It is some­thing unpre­dictable and bound to have hid­den con­se­quences, not all of which can be good.  Most likely, we’ve pre­served the noto­ri­ous stu­pid­ity of bureau­cra­cies and have ensured its con­tin­ued sur­vival in a mutant  and more pow­er­ful form.  Because once cat­e­gories get encoded in insti­tu­tional data­bases, the tail wags the dog.  Think health insurance.

So, what to do?  I sug­gest that we pur­sue theory-driven design.  We actu­ally try to make sense of the soci­ol­ogy and anthro­pol­ogy of bureau­cra­cies and oper­a­tional­ize the best ideas in these dis­courses as design prin­ci­ples.  We think of how soft­ware behaves as an assem­blage of arti­facts in a liv­ing cul­tural envi­ron­ment.  This is not social engi­neer­ing, nor is it to tread the tired path of “orga­ni­za­tional behav­ior,” a field that is too closely tied to the exec­u­tive per­spec­tive.  It is to pur­sue a rich, empir­i­cal under­stand­ing of soft­ware in the wild, or at least, the office.

Theory-driven design is not anti-empirical.  It is the oppo­site: for a good the­ory gen­er­ates testable hypothe­ses.  It gives a frame­work to user-centric research beyond the unan­swer­able quest for what users really want.  As they say, there is noth­ing so prac­ti­cal as a good theory.

A good start­ing point might be to take Ted Nelson’s ideas about doc­u­ments and hyper­text and com­bine them with, say, David Graeber’s crit­i­cal anthro­pol­ogy of bureau­cracy.    Not to con­done the anar­chism of Grae­ber, but to lever the authen­tic­ity of per­spec­tive he brings to a dis­cus­sion about the role of doc­u­ments in the orga­ni­za­tion.  Read­ing his essay, “Beyond Power/Knowledge an explo­ration of the rela­tion of power, igno­rance and stu­pid­ity,” it is hard not to believe that a rad­i­cal rethink­ing of the doc­u­ment, and document-logic, would not ben­e­fit from his perspective.

Posted in Software Design | No Comments »

Words and (Social) Things

I sup­pose it is the pre­rog­a­tive of dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions to simul­ta­ne­ously dis­miss and retrieve old ideas by intro­duc­ing new words for them. I have in mind words like “metacog­ni­tion” and “knowl­edge man­age­ment.” In both cases there is an exist­ing word that more or less describes the ref­er­ent of the new(ish) word: epis­te­mol­ogy and edu­ca­tion respec­tively. Both metacog­ni­tion and epis­te­mol­ogy refer to, roughly, the activ­ity of “think­ing about think­ing,” and the core mis­sion of edu­ca­tion is the man­age­ment of knowl­edge — pro­duc­ing it, stor­ing it, repro­duc­ing it, etc.  How­ever, in each case, the intent of the new word is clearly dif­fer­ent from the older one, and this dif­fer­ence can be attrib­uted to a dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tional con­text: knowl­edge man­age­ment is about edu­ca­tion and research in cor­po­rate set­tings (now defined as “knowl­edge pro­duc­ers”), as opposed to soci­ety or the world at large, while metacog­ni­tion has flour­ished within the rel­a­tively nar­row con­text of aca­d­e­mic depart­ments of education.

But why the com­plete absence of the old words in the new dis­courses? Why not call metacog­ni­tion some­thing like “applied epis­te­mol­ogy”? Or knowl­edge man­age­ment “cor­po­rate edu­ca­tion” or “cor­po­rate teach­ing and learn­ing”?   It can’t be for lack of famil­iar­ity with the older words.   Nor can we assume that the newer words are more “sticky” and eas­ier to use; that just begs the ques­tion.  I think it’s clear that the prob­lem with these con­struc­tions is their con­no­ta­tions: they carry too much seman­tic baggage.

But now here’s the thing: the new words do not sim­ply stand along­side the old ones, they actu­ally seem to take their places.   The new words take the place of the old words at an abstract level–but then replace the implicit social mean­ings in the process.  The effect is to implic­itly usher in newer or dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions in the space reserved for the old. So know­eldge man­age­ment is about edu­ca­tion, yes, but edu­ca­tion in a busi­ness set­ting where knowl­edge is viewed as a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, not a gen­eral good for the bet­ter­ent of humankind.  And, even­tu­ally, this will have impli­ca­tions for edu­ca­tion itself, as essays like “Apply­ing Cor­po­rate Knowl­edge Man­age­ment Prac­tices in Higher Edu­ca­tion” become more common.

Sim­i­larly, metacog­ni­tion is about epis­te­mol­ogy, but not as an abstract philo­soph­i­cal con­cern, nor one tied to the remote activ­ity of a purely sci­en­tific enter­prise as it once was; it is epis­te­mol­ogy in the ser­vice of class­room teach­ing and learn­ing, where the users of the word no doubt think it belongs. So the effect of the word “metacog­ni­tion” is to usher out the ivory tower and to replace it with the more pop­ulist insti­tu­tion of the class­room. And this mean­ing is con­sis­tent with the cur­rent ethos of edu­ca­tional pop­ulism, as expressed in wider ideas like connectivism.

So lan­guage really does embody the social:  these words are actu­ally the encod­ings and ampli­fiers of social changes hap­pen­ing right now.  Per­haps those of us famil­iar with the older names of things would do well to note these shifts and pay atten­tion to their insti­tu­tional commitments.

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