Towards the World Brain

From highlighting pens to faceted clipmarks …

By Jan Wyllie, Trend Monitor 2.0

 

I have been a dedicated highlighter and annotator of what I thought were key bits of text for nearly 40 years now. I learned its use from my father who was a prolific under-liner in pencil, before he became a highlighter himself when marker pens came in.

 

The art of highlighting is about communicating the meaning and significance of key content through time. It is also about expressing judgements and sharing insights. It can be biased – only highlighting text with which the highlighter agrees or disagrees – or it can be as disinterested as humanly possible used only to illustrate key points and quotes.

 

I quickly learned that from my enthusiasm that highlighted items from different books and documents needed juxtaposing, and that book and magazine covers are massive obstacles to research and intelligent reflection. That is why the cutting and clipping of texts (and pictures) was the next step in the paper-only knowledge management process.

 

This was as far as I got, as a university student and a journalist. It’s as far as most people get, and the result is that most of the lovingly highlighted material is lost in the massive log-pile of text, never to be seen again by myself or anyone else for that matter.

 

Luckily for me, may daily newspaper where I was working nights as a desk-editor was closed down, and I got a job as a content analyst from a protégée of John Naisbitt of Megatrends fame. I was taught the well-versed trade of qualitative content analysis – analysing information flows to extract intelligence (key information which would otherwise have been missed). It was then I learned the answer to information and highlighting overload was what was then called multivariate classification, which is now known as faceted classification.

 

I saw with my own eyes in 1982 that if you put high quality highlighting together with a reasonably good faceted classification schema well applied, the result can be a refined intelligence feed good enough for major corporations and government bodies to pay a lot of money read.

 

Then along came computers which many people hoped would make classification obsolete. Every word was indexed, so people could search for and retrieve anything they wanted, instantly and from anywhere. Heady stuff! People, who believed that classification is necessary intellectual tool, were considered either to be out-of-date, or slightly loony.

 

That was when I met Dr. Tony Kent who was one of the original software developers who brought us this near instantaneous free text retrieval capability when he wrote the software which put Chemical Abstracts online. (He also wrote <<STRIX>> in the 1980s which first brought full text database functionality to PCs, but that is another story.)

 

When I met him, Tony was beginning to smell a rat in the brand new world of total accessibility. At a slightly boozy lunch at an English cider bar in Pimlico, I persuaded him that I wasn’t “totally” mad in arguing that multivariate or faceted classification could add significant value to a collection of text documents. He had no difficulty in persuading me that <<STRIX>> was the ideal software for the job. So our 10-year long partnership began.

 

I must confess that despite our best efforts, Tony and I could not compete with the likes of Alta Vista and Google, and the latest <<STRIX>> source code is languishing on an unused, ancient Xenix box (although an Open Source Phoenix version is being contemplated).

 

One of the consequences of our failure to put <<STRIX>> — a fully-fielded, free- text database with Thesaurus – out onto the popular Internet (or even into Windows, it must be said) is that practical knowledge of faceted taxonomies is still restricted to an obscure but dedicated band of “information professionals”.

 

The rest of the world has been ‘googlised’ into thinking that document retrieval — using very basic search terms and tags without any understanding of Boolean logic (which can be taught in half an hour) or any of the grouping and intelligence generation benefits of a multifaceted classification system – is the state of the art.

 

The good news is that there is a lot of room for improvement as the vision of a really intelligent and useful knowledge web for both corporate and individual users is, once again, overwhelmed with the quantity of information retrieved. Users therefore obtain only a very superficial appreciation of questions which the knowledge base could answer based mainly by scanning over the top four of five “most relevant” documents returned by the search engine.

 

Until a couple of weeks ago, when I started using a piece of Web 2.0 software, called ClipMark (http://clipmarks.com/clipper/JICWyllie/ ), I was more or less resigned to the lamentable lack of knowledge organisation and refinement on the net … just another area where human groups could do a lot better, but have not succeeded.

 

After looking at clipmarks for a few minutes, here is part of what I wrote:

 

“Clipmarks is the first vital step towards the collaborative creation of a new level of metaknowledge enabling people to better understand the big picture. The next step is to use multifaceted taxonomies as the intellectual tools for collecting and organising the evidence on which metaknowledge is based.

 

“During the 1930s, H.G.Wells wrote a series of booklets advocating his vision of what he called the ‘World Brain’, by which he meant a common, systematic global organisation of the world’s knowledge. According to Wells, this world encyclopaedia would act as “a clearing house of misunderstandings” and as “a way for humanity to achieve a common perception of a common purpose”. Wells also predicted that intellectual workers would move from the assembly of knowledge to digestion of its meaning with the ultimate goal of achieving “wisdom”, which he defined as “having a sense of knowing what to do when handling complex problems that require understanding and effective decisions”.

 

I did not say that there is not a long way to go, and work to do. But I am serious about large numbers of people needing to learn to use faceted taxonomies combined with free text retrieval to add value to information, and help navigate all the text, sound and visual media. As I will argue in a forthcoming article, the tagging free-for-all which is the dominant information management strategy used for all the exciting new Web 2.0 applications is not good enough or fit for purpose.

 

Nevertheless, Clipmarks, even with its very basic information management capabilities, has given new meaning to my need to highlight the important bits of what I read. Not only do I get to keep and organise my clips with a link to the source, but other people can benefit from your highlights collection. Readers award POPS for Clips which they especially appreciate which is useful for looking for the best stuff, the Clips which have the most POPS. An appreciation measure, and links to the appreciators, also helps motivate Clippers to do a good job. Feedback and chats are invited on every clip. It is even possible to have groups of Followers who sign up to see what leading clippers are adding to their topics of interest.

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments begins with these words:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

With this kind of motivation, people can and have created great things from the Women’s Institutes to Wikipedia and the whole Open Source software movement.

The potential for team working and intense collaboration using classified online clipping services is as yet untried. If people learn how to use it intelligently, this kind of software service (including faceted taxonomy) could lead to a new level of collaborative meta-intelligence that H. G. Wells envisaged – a way of combining the work of many different human intelligences using the purpose built common knowledge frameworks enabled by multi-faceted classification systems.

Writing in the late 1930s, H G Wells believed that what he called a World Mind would be necessary for the survival of our civilisation. If anything, civilisation, and the natural world which supports it, is much closer to its demise now, than it was then. So the need for better intelligence is more pressing than ever.

The great thing is that all the necessary technology already exists. Indeed it has existed for years. There is no need to wait for the imponderables of Artificial Intelligence discoveries or semantic Web algorithms comprehensible only to computer scientists. All individuals and groups can start contributing their intelligence and interests to the content and organisation of corporate clips collections or the World Mind, right now using simple tools and tagging devices like ClipMarks.