A new book by designer Manuel Lima, however, shows that data viz’s roots go much deeper–some 900 years, at the very least. And calling them “roots” is very much appropriate.
The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge catalogs a stunning diversity of illustrations and graphics that rely on arboreal models for representing information. It’s a visual metaphor that’s found across cultures throughout history–a data viz tool that has outlived empires and endured huge upheavals in the arts and sciences.
5.0 out of 5 stars Simple Enough to Shake the Most Obtuse Leaders, February 10, 2012
First the disclosures. I asked for a copy of this book to review, David Weinberger being one of my heroes and I being unemployed at this time. They gave it to me and now that I have read it, I will be donating it to the Oakton, VA public library.
Second, the subtitle. The subtitle of the book captures the entire field perfectly, and richly merits emphasis: “Rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren't the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room.” This is the final nail in the coffin of secret intelligence communities and companies devoted to proprietary software. There is nothing intelligent — nor substantively valuable — about “closed” environments if ones purpose is to optimize both the allocation of resources and outcomes beneficial to the public.
Third, the historical context. Many people have been focused on the changing role of knowledge coming into the 21st century, and I list just five of the books below to make the point that in the context of all else, this book says it better, more easily graspable for the non-digital leaders struggling to decide where to go next –this book is highly relevant to the 1950's mind-set leaders of all eight tribes of intelligence: academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental / non-profit.
Summarizing the book concisely: everything we do now with hierarchical organization, hoarded information, restricted accesses, and isolation from the full range of external sources and methods, is wrong for the times.
Here are the five recommendations the author discusses in his last chapter, every single one of them poorly addressed by most organizations, and especially those that are highly bureaucraticized:
Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health (GQ)
Christopher Ketcham
Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the evidence is starting to pour in, and it's not pretty. So why isn't anyone in America doing anything about it?
Phi Beta Iota: This is “old” news that is still news because neither the government nor the public actually pay attention. We've known since the 1980's that Soviet emission controls were ten times tougher than ours, and now in Afghanistan as we find UAVs and all other devices conflicting with each other across old “dumb” (assigned) spectrum, we are learning, AGAIN, why spectrum consciousness matters. Open Spectrum and smart devices are the way to go, along with public truth-telling about electromagnetic emissions as part of the “true cost” of all devices.
By Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Chris Nuttall in San Diego
October 7 2009
The head of the US Federal Communications Commission warned on Wednesday that there is not enough room in the airwaves for the “explosion” in wireless data traffic, setting the stage for a big realignment of spectrum usage as the government tries to help mobile carriers keep up with consumer demand.
“The biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis,” said Julius Genachowski, the Obama administration appointee who took over as head of the five-member FCC in late June.
Phi Beta Iota: Top-down management of bottom-up needs and capabilities does not work. Open Spectrum is the only possible solution and has been proven in South Korea among other places. It's time to stop selling spectrum and start demanding smart devices and intelligent sharing of the commonwealth.
I totally disagree with the reviewers that pontificate against this book. It is not a techno-geek book, or a philosophy book, it is simply a common sense overview that I personally consider to be educated, helpful to the point of essential. At $16, with the Amazon discount, this book is a bargain.
I started with the index, and immediately discovered Meta-Data had 18 lines.
The book opens with examples from Staples (“hacking the physical”) to Apple iTunes (end of bundling) and I am immediately charmed by the combination of an end to fraudulent store organization (Giant supermarket moves everything from one week to the next to force searching which increases impulse buying) and an increase in focus on serving the individual rather than serving up a “one size fits all” solution. Separately I am looking at Chinese medicine for a health intelligence book, and this resonates.
Early on one sees the author agreeing with Jean Francois Noubel (the end of the pyramidal organization) and Jim Rough (rise of the circle of citizen wisdom)–I myself enraged the secret intelligence mandarins by announcing in the 1990's that “in the age of decentralized information central intelligence is an oxymoron.” The author is one of the gurus of what is becoming known as the axis of Cognitive Science and Collective Intelligence (the Art), and he and another 54 authors are brought together in the first collective work of its kind, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace which is also free online in full pdf or chapter docs. Disclosure: I published the book–I do not know the author personally, but Jock Gill, a gifted communicator, exposed me to the author's earlier work on Open Spectrum, something that inspired my own informal views on “Open Everything” and unlike most of the other contributors that were identified by Tom Atlee or Mark Tovey (the editor), I personally sought his contribution to the book because of my very high regard for his “take” on all this.
I bought the book as a fan already, but the content easily validates my appreciation The discussion of first order pigeon-holing (the Weberian concept of bureaucracy applies), second order cross referencing (naturally limited and often wrong in early generations–Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal System are toast), versus unlimited tagging, chunking, clustering, socially-informed selection, and other aspects of the power of the collective, are all illuminated by this book.
I am further impressed early on with his stellar discussion of Mortimer Adler and the limitations of alphabetization. I was a penniless graduate student when I discovered the Great Books, and as a young officer, spent my first $700 acquiring a set. The Syntopicon that the author mentions in the book is better understood by the image I introduce above, something I created in 1979, my second of four analytic models (the first was on predicting revolution across all domains).
I have two notes at this point:
1) Truth or what can be known constantly changing, a fixed or slow to adapt “index” process cannot scale or survive.
2) 2008 election is already lost–neither candidate offers us what we deserve: listening instead of stump speeches; appointed cabinet and balanced budget now, as part of the campaign, instead of empty promises; and 24/7 interaction with all 65 political parties, instead of focusing on the one third that is their base and a slice of the middle third.
He emphasizes that knowledge is not top down, and with a tip of the hat to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and also facilitator for the nation-wide network of 27 separatist movements, I also post above an image of Epoch B “bottom up” leadership that none of our world leaders understand.
Page 80, discussion of Ranganathan (India) Colon Classification system impresses me. I think to myself, wow, needs to be integrated into Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language, or IEML.
The middle of the book discusses–engagingly, I feel–how the digital world enables infinite variations in relationships and labels that can in turn create infinite variations of just right, just in time, just enough visualizations.
Crowd tagging leads to sub-set clustering which leads to contextual sense-making.
He spend time on Wikipedia. I admire Jimbo Wales and try to attend the Wikimanias, but I have given up on Wikipedia because in the case of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) page, I had to give up–while the author would have me engage and patiently lead the recalcitrant along (I have 20 years experience with that in the real world) I have come to a different conclusion: I believe that anyone should be allowed to CREATE, but only master moderators should be allowed to destroy.
The summary of the book's message is offered by the author with four concepts:
1) Filter on the way OUT, not in (this is the difference between the read only publishing model, and the read-write Creative Commons model)
2) Put each leaf on as many branches as possible–unlike the physical world, each leaf can have infinite lives
3) Everything is meta data and everything can be a label (he provides a fine discussion of bar codes, RFIDs, and Thinglinks)
4) Give up control. He admires Wikipedia for doing precisely that. When I first started the modern OSINT movement in 1992, I coined the phrase, “Give up control to gain control” meaning that centralized intelligence had to give way to decentralized sharing and sense-making. The spies still don't get it, but public intelligence in the public interest is here to stay. A corollary here is that the best approach is to include all–optimize inclusiveness and diversity; and where there is conflict or disagreement, postpone exclusion or resolution, more data later will make it easier and easier to come back to…
The final section of the book deals with mapping the implicit, mining the clouds of tags, creating an infrastructure of meaning with infinite potential. I have a note: unites the eight tribes of intelligence (governmenbt, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions).
Other flyleaf notes:
+ Stupid works. Keep it simple and let it evolve on its own.
+ Bit by bit, not all at once. Provide for innovation at the intersections and on the margins
+ Kind of and sort of rule, not the black and white that did rule
+ I learn of Valdis Krebs and his concepts of social cartography
+ I am engaged with the discussion of information sprawl and natural typologies
+ The author concludes that the search for knowledge will constantly struggle between the simple and the complex (sources and methods).
+ Going meta is what is so cool about web ecology and evolution.
The author does NOT say this, but I mark his book down as being in favor of the human web of sense-making beating out the semantic web and machine learning schools.
Page 230, this is a quote that really grabs my attention: “It's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individual thinking out-loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.” The rest of this page is equally good.
I am surprised to learn that the author holds a PhD in philosophy, and that he advised Howard Dean. I am not surprised to learn that he has been twice renewed as a fellow at the Berkman Center.
There are many others, most obvious. Please do see the two images I post above–I firmly believe that the last eight years were a gift from heaven, a necessarily catastrophic gutting of our Nation so that we might properly conclude that both political parties stink with corruption, and it is time we put We the People back into the Republic, 24/7. This book is a solid brick in our foundation for understanding why this is both possible, and necessary.
David Weinberger (born 1950 in New York) is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (originally a website, and eventually a book, which has been described as “a primer on Internet marketing”). Weinberger's work focuses on how the Internet is changing human relationships, communication, and society. A philosopher by training, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and taught college from 1980-1986. He was a gag writer for the comic strip “Inside Woody Allen” from 1976-1983. He became a marketing consultant and executive at several high-tech companies, and currently serves as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where he co-teaches a class on “The Web Difference” with John Palfrey. He had the title Senior Internet Advisor to Howard Dean‘s 2004 presidential campaign, and provided technology policy advice to John Edwards‘ 2008 presidential campaign.
Jock Gill served President Bill Clinton as a communications specialist, and has gone on to reflect deeply on public communications as the inherent foundation of democracy. As part of that process he has recognized–and taught us and others–that open spectrum as championed by David Weinberger is an inherent “need” for full and open public communications.
Below are two documents, the first is his presentation notes from OSS '04, and the second is the first page linking to David Weingerger's seminal White Paper that was also published as a chapter in COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace. The Frog leads to the original online; the page on the right to the printable version of the chapter.
