Alex Wright -- Organizing information

AW talks about historical and present systems for organizing information

Summary here

Hard to talk about knowledge (knowledge structures) evolving. Recall the most successful organisms in terms of evolution are the bacteria.

Networks turn into hierarchies which spawn networks which coalesce into hierarchies which ...

Theory by Berlin: ALL cultures have folk taxonomies for the living/natural world, and they are all 5 levels deep. Strong analogy between folk taxonomy and family trees.

Note: a folk taxonomy is not the same as a folksomony, a new term (2004) referring to social tagging "the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content;"


Mythology is a form of taxonomy


Ice age forced small hunter/gatherer bands into larger groups, which required hierarchical systems and symbolic objects to conveigh status/ability.

Oral vs written culture. Oral is more collaborative, written provides one authoritive voice.
and what about visual culture? Oral is participatory, re-created each telling, fluid, with less authority. The written word is powerful and fixed. I wonder what would have happened if God had written the world into existence instead of speaking it??

Written language for accounting, temple library.

Scrolls as linear progresson, codex/books as random access. The midievial monestary, monks learned the memory palace method.


The Long Zoom-- a history of information architecture.

Berlin's observation that all societies have folk taxonomies for the natural world, and they are universally 5 levels deep (I need to check this reference, I cannot believe there is no variation in this depth). These taxonomies resemble family trees, and echo them in other ways (brother bear?). The 5-level limit may reflect that human working memory is 7pm 2 items. Also, studies show that people can comfortably navagate 5 levels down a web-page, but if the tree is longer than that they rapidly get lost.

Mythology provides another information system/structure.

Something about what happens when social groups get bigger than family size-- you no longer know everyone, and we see the begining of symbolic objects to conveigh status (is this verified by antrhopologists?? True, but not complete).