Taking notes
You can make public actors accountable just by reporting on what they've said. If there's too much going on, collaborate on taking the notes.
But notes alone may produce too much text for anyone to handle efficiently. What if there were ways for groups to collaborate on creating visualizations of the notes, and a graphical language that was commonly used to share the output? Like a radar screen — “this issue is big and coming towards us, click through to read the details.” Or “These are outlying issues.” Some kind of graphical outliner that would actually add water/meaning rather than taking it away.
If only someone would throw a lot of money at graphical groupware.
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2 Responses to “Taking notes”
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Graphical representation of information is not easy and, as you correctly point out, it often diminishes the overall “knowledge-producing value” of textual information. However, I think the basic problem lies elsewhere.
What I am wondering is exactly which kind of “relevance” are we looking for here - i.e. am I correct in understanding the graphical representation highlight the importance of a certain issue? But “importance” is a very nebolous concept in the first place, and surely it varies accordingly to the personal preferences of people.
A potential solution would be to rate the importance of an event, speech, issue, etc, by the number of people that value it as important, which might or might not be a good idea - there are many issues that are deemed highly important by large groups of people, yet one could argue whether they are really *that* important if the goal is to discuss and further the democratic discourse (writing from Italy, soccer comes to mind).
In the end, the method “lots of people think something is important -> that something is important” is what Google and other services use in order to tackle the “information overload” problem.
Maybe one first step in the right direction could be in the field of semantics. Right now, a link (which I'm taking as meaning “an interest in something”, not specifically a web link) does not convey a precise meaning. I could link to a speech because I think it is irrelevant (and I want the world to understand why I think it's crap) or because I think it is, after all, highly relevant. And of course, semantics could be extended to specify why I think the speech is relevant, what it is relevant for, etc, etc. Without even noticing, we have entered the dangerous ground of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and how we give sense to the world around us (and how we can express, in a formal, machine-understandable way, such understanding).
As for the graphical representation, once the underlying model is in place - and this is, in my opinion, the most difficult piece of the puzzle - there is a lot of research going on on how to meaningfully and efficiently express meaning in a graphical way. A good place to start browsing on the topic is:
Information Aesthetics Blog (form follows data - towards creative information visualization).
Cheers!
Andrea
Thanks so much for pointing me to the blog — it's excellent. I very much appreciate your comment. We clearly need many more meaningful link types, ways to weigh them, ways to have them peer reviewed, in order to make leaps from mounds of data to to meaningful graphics. But I think you'll agree that we have to do this. We've got these great networked interactive screens, and we're scrawling on them as if they were clay tablets. thanks again for the pointers. Susan