How is a Book like a Can of Beans?

After my recent post on spimes, a reader comment pointed me to Clay Shirky’s 2005 talk Making Digital Durable: What Times Does to Categories. I was immediately intrigued and would recommend it to anyone interested in categorization, social tagging and preservation of information in the digital age. Shirky, who, according to Wikipedia, teaches New Media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has a fascinating and engaging way of exploring the world of digital and analog information systems.


What interested me most were the questions of how we organize what we know and then how we find it again. Shirky examined the flaws of classic library classification schemes like Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress. They have always been necessary, he says, because a book is like a can of beans – without the label, how can you tell a can of chick peas from a can of tomatoes? You have to find some way to organize them, and a flawed system – even one that has nine categories for Christian religion and only one for all the others – is better than none at all. But information on the internet is fluid, no longer encased in tin cans, and isn’t classified by one people or by a hundred but by millions. The problem with rigid classification schemes found in traditional libraries is that they are necessarily hierarchical and cannot overlap. The beauty of folksonomy – the process of collaboratively creating tags to manage and classify content on the internet – is that this rigidity no longer exists.


There are of course many potential problems when using this kind of system to classify information. Without terminological control, multiple words can be used to tag the same concept, and the same word can be used to tag many different concepts. We have to ask ourselves which we would prefer: a flawed, but predictable, system designed by professionals, or a spontaneous and ever-changing collection of tags created by the anonymous crowd? Shirky suggests identifying communities of practise, which means you can look at the tags just from the people that you care about – those with the same interests or expertise as you. A controlled vocabulary could be created, but it would need to evolve gradually, or the whole thing will simply return to the kind of hierarchical system we already have. In the end, this sort of collaborative classification is generally quite useful – and can be used to tell us about the way people think about information.

But would this kind of thing work on the scale of an academic library? Even though our current classification schemes are flawed, we all know how to work within them. But what would it be like if we could tag the books we take out of the library? We wouldn’t have to get rid of the Library of Congress, but imagine the links and connections we could find, and what we could learn about the users of these books. Maybe books don’t have to stay like cans of beans forever.

The Way of the Future?: Spimes and the Internet of Things

I usually don’t understand much that goes on in the digital realm; computers are generally beyond me. In the past few months, I have only just begun to develop an appreciation for the far-reaching implications of changing technology – the way we obtain, organize and process information is undergoing a revolution right under our noses, whether we pay attention to it or not. In our digital history class, we have discussed technologies like OCR (optical character recognition) that are probably quite obvious to the computer-savvy among us, but I have to be honest – it had never crossed my mind to wonder how Google or JSTOR worked, even though I use them all the time. Although it has sometimes been a struggle for me to wrap my mind around these new concepts, I am starting to appreciate how important it is to try and understand this very foreign world. And when I came across something called a spime in one of our readings for class, I actually got kind of excited.

A spime is a term coined by Bruce Sterling, a science fiction novelist and design critic, to explain a theoretical object that has a computerized tag that can identify it and allow it to communicate. It can be precisely located, and tracked, in time and space. They are networked and reveal metadata about themselves. Owners would be able to personalize this data. Eventually, all of this information would become an Internet of things, through which we could see relationships between objects and users.

Sterling first introduced the idea in 2004, when he coined the term for the theoretical object because “it needs a noun so that we can think about it”[1]. Now, Spime Inc. is a Silicone Valley company which advertises several products on its website, several of which are software for mobile phones, but one of which also claims that “It can be deployed at homes to track your assets and locate children”. I’m certainly not going to pretend that I understand the technology or even most of what’s on the website. But I am intrigued.

There are several interesting implications. Sterling emphasized the non-renewability of many of our resources and the importance of knowing the resources we have, and using them:

“Our material culture is not sustainable. Its resources are not renewable. We cannot turn our entire planet's crust into obsolete objects. We need to locate valuable objects that are dead, and fold them back into the product stream. In order to do this, we need to know where they are, and what happened to them. We need to document the life cycles of objects. We need to know where to take them when they are defunct.
In practice, this is going to mean tagging and historicizing everything. Once we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.”[2]

So yes, there are very interesting implications for industry, and for the potential to improve the products we use every day. But there are also implications for history. Imagine if every object dug up in an archaeological expedition was a spime. What more could that teach us? How much easier would the jobs of historians be? It’s true that we are talking about an internet of things, not of ideas, and while objects are incredibly valuable tools for understanding history, they alone are not enough. Nevertheless, this idea could have far-reaching implications for how we understand the present and (in the future) our past.

Despite the possible problems with theft, fraud, and invasion of privacy, the idea of being able to embed our objects with this kind of tag is an intriguing one. Interestingly, however, although three and half years have passed since Sterling first coined the term (and speaking of new ways of organizing information), there is still no Wikipedia entry for spimes. It seems the internet of things has not arrived quite yet. But I’ll be ready when it does.

[1]Bruce Sterling, "When Blobjects Rule the Earth", SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August 2004
[2] Bruce Sterling, "When Blobjects Rule the Earth", SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August 2004

Sometimes we'd rather be drinking . . .

I spent the holiday season this year in London (England, not Ontario) and visited a few of my favourite museums. To be honest, however, I spent far more time hanging out with my friends and telling myself I should be visiting museums than actually visiting them. But on the occasions that I did actually make it to one of these hallowed halls of learning and culture, I couldn’t stop thinking about Tony Bennett’s "History and Theory" (in The Birth of Museums: History, Theory and Politics) which we read in our public history class last semester. In his historic discussion of museums, fairs and exhibitions, he argues that they “regulate the performative aspects of their visitors’ conduct” and are “instruments capable of lifting the cultural level of the population.” [1]

London is full of world-class museums, but also of other tourist attractions like the London Eye and Madame Toussaud’s that exist purely to entertain (or, as the more cynical might say, to make money). In the past decade, most of London’s best museums have waived their entry fees and so, in theory at least, welcome every segment of the population. But the brutal truth is that most people who live in London will never make it to the V & A or the National Gallery. I know – I worked in Hackney, one of the roughest areas in the city, for a year and met many people who barely knew these places existed, let alone had the remotest interest in visiting them.

The tone in these museums is very definitely one of high-brow elitism. The guided tours are led by genteel retired women who, if they don’t exactly take on an attitude of superiority, assume a considerable general knowledge base that is probably beyond the scope of many of their visitors. Said visitors walk around slowly with their hands clasped behind their back, high heels echoing through the marble halls. Maybe Bennett is on to something – our behaviour is regulated once we enter a museum. This is not the real world.

And many of us are guilty of a certain sense of superiority when we visit one of these institutions. There is a sense that is it is a far better use of our time than shopping or gossiping with friends at lunch. There is a sense that we are better people for exposing ourselves to “high culture”, whatever that is. I’m guilty of it myself. Several times during my trip as I lay on the couch watching tv or sat in the pub with a pint I felt a certain stab of guilt that I wasn’t out lapping up all the best that London had to offer. But in the end, I enjoyed my trip just fine. And I spent a total of about three hours in museums, most of it in gift shops.

Do museums really lift the cultural level of the population? Sometimes they most definitely do. During the year I spent in London, I honestly did visit museums quite often, sometimes returning again and again, and some exhibits I saw introduced me to new information and schools of thought that have remained with me to this day.

But let’s stop faking it. Sometimes museums are great. And sometimes there’s nothing wrong with just going down the pub instead.

[1] Tony Bennett, “History and Theory,” The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, and Politics
(London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 6-7

Image of Henry VIII courtesy of http://www.npg.org.uk/live/index.asp

Image of the Tate Modern courtesy of me