The second edition of the World Information Institute’s Deep Search conference series took place in Vienna on May 28. Where the first Deep Search symposium, held in November 2008 (find a review here) dealt with the history of information retrieval, the automatic classification of data, civil liberties, digital human rights, the power embedded in search systems and the visibility of online content, this second edition promised to look more deeply into both the history and future of classifying information, and large datasets.

Panel 1: Visions of Organizing the World

Introducing the first panel, Felix Stalder notes how the ‘grand title’ of the panel emphasizes an important issue; the urge to organize the world’s information is as old as human culture. Themes reemerge – organization cannot exist without an operating model and an array of judgments as to what constitutes information and knowledge. An historical perspective is important in this respect, as seemingly new issues are seldom unprecedented.

Chad Wellmon: Google Before Google, or, On the History of Search.
First speaker Chad Wellmon is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Virginia
.

Wellmon starts off by quoting a New York Times article in which a Media Studies professor claims that Facebook’s unwillingness to let Google crawl part of its content threatens the open and democratic arrangement of information on the Web. To such advocates the hyperlink is no more than a ballot, an embodiment of freedom. To the individual user however the Web in its fullness does not exist. Active linking confers a structural integrity to one document, and not to another. The hyperlink method of organization may be said to be less hierarchical than categorization, but to say that the Web is democratic in nature is to ignore the means by which we access it. Search technology and linking make the Web seem smaller and more manageable than it is, and highlight its fundamentally contingent nature.

In order to gain a historical perspective on all this, Wellmon traces the history of search technology, “a story of constraint and expansion”, back to what he feels is the prototype of the Web’s hyperlink: the eighteenth century footnote. The enlightenment project is a complex of footnotes and citations, one pointing to the next. Reflexivity is in the footnote. Books ‘talked to each other’ in a constant citing process in which the relevance of one text was decided by footnotes which point toward other texts. Reading enlightenment as a series of technologies to manage the intense proliferation of information however invites the question; what kind of knowledge is deduced from this citational logic?

Using a recent computer visualization of the citation process within an eighteen century encyclopedia, Wellmon shows the emergence of multiple subsystems within the encyclopedia, exposing the double character of search technology: Citing leads to inner circling, it establishes an inside and an outside, inclusion by means of exclusion. This double logic, Wellman suggests, may well produce the distinction between information and knowledge.

Read the rest of this entry »

Panel 2: Sociometry, Networks and Classification

In a brief introduction, Konrad Becker mentions that the first speaker of this panel, Greg Elmer, is unable to make it to the conference. He is happy to welcome Sebastian Giessmann, as his focus on networking as a ‘technique of the social’ works well within the context of the historical vision of organizing the world’s information; not only things but also people. We can see this development in the rise of mass society when the need to classify social relations emerged. Interestingly, the roots of these social classification systems are often murky and obscure – criminology for instance, has a background in rather non-scientific and occultist themes. Sociometry finds its origin in a slightly more progressive idea.

Sebastian Giessmann: From Sociometry to Social Networks. Networking as Technique of the Social. Sebastian Giessmann is a research fellow at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI in the cross-sectional group “Cultural Theory and its Genealogies” of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

As a cultural historian, Giesmann is professionally passionate for the occult. He specializes in the history of networks and networking, and intends to recount here the story of the ‘wild love affair’ between sociology and the visual form of the network diagram. His argument will frame both the history of knowledge and what William Mitchell has called ‘diagramatology’.

Net diagrams are systemic pictures, constantly reaching the boundaries of inscription spaces. They become network diagrams only if their nodes represent heterogeneous entities. Once a net consists of hybrid agents, interconnectivity and heterarchy become the standard, instead of ‘mere’ connectivity. But it is near impossible to draw the extendibility, aggregation and disillusion of networks in an iconic form – the classic conflict between time and space and media theory, and the reason why social images often resort to the dynamics of animation and simulation techniques. Grappling with the (im)possibilities of the topological, relational, visual form that has come to represent the network society is something Giesmann feels we must address critically and historically. Network diagrams offer only a measurement of sociality; out of the micro dimension of groups emerges the macro dimension of the network society.

Giessmann moves on to talk about the classics of sociology. Comte, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel rarely used graphics, but the 1930s introduced new methods with Jacob Levy Moreno’s psychological geography and Otto Neurath’s visual statistics, both as a way to deal with huge numerical datasets and to appeal to a wider audience. Moreno’s graphics imported the image practices of chemistry, making the ‘social atom’ the basic element for sociological visual augmentation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Panel 3: Rent and Bias

After dwelling in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century in the morning panels, Felix Stalder comments that the program’s strict chronological order will now lead us into the twenty-first century. Keeping the metaphor of the map and the mapmaker alive, the next two speakers will talk about the politics and interests involved in processes of ranking, mapping and creating order in search results. Two such politics are ‘bias’ – why does a certain ranking exist – and ‘rent’ – how are all these practices transformed into a business.

Elizabeth von Couvering: Economic Bias in Search Results
Elizabeth von Couvering is a recent PhD graduate at London School of Economics
.

Contrary to the earlier presentations, Von Couvering’s talk shifts from what a search engine should be to what they are today. Her major concern is in the responsibilities information vehicles have to the public interest. Bias gets embedded in search results in a number of ways; first of all, search engines do not index the whole Web. Secondly, they do not index reliably. Furthermore, some engines systematically favor certain sites and the local advertising market has also proven to play a major role in the quality of the indexing process and subsequent size of the index: If you don’t have enough to offer, you will get a reduced quality of service. Search engines are a matter of public interest since they help people find things they don’t know about, and people are unsophisticated in their queries; they tend not to look beyond first page of results and tend to trust the rankings. Bias, then, has major implications.

Many early engines have merged over time. From 1996 on, media companies bought up search engines as they proved to attract large audiences. The ‘integrated portals’ that emerged were selling an audience to advertisers; the classic media model of production, packaging and distribution. Many search engines died under this audience-based model, as the engine itself was often not developed anymore. Currently we have moved toward paid performance advertising, pay-per-click, a traffic-based value chain. Google is no longer looking at an audience but at the movement of users from one site to another. Search engines have become online media giants with an incredible market share and ‘gaming the system’ has become a profitable professional activity.

What has been done to address the problem of bias? Von Couvering points towards search engine efforts to improve search quality by focusing on relevance and customer satisfaction. What constitutes a relevant result is based on a customer’s frame of mind. In terms of the technology, relevance is an objective indicator of search engine retrieval quality. Relevance – not fairness, diversity, objectivity or formative value for instance. Defining quality as relevance is problematic. You can’t succeed in working toward a less biased search engine, unless you get beyond the idea of relevance, and introduce an alternative mode of framing search results.

Von Couvering argues that there is the need for a discussion of professional codes of ethics for information scientists. Engineering goals are primarily described in terms of efficiency, or sometimes ‘elegance’. She feels that there is room for standards such as they exist in library science for instance, which is access for everybody, or perhaps in journalism where seeing both sides of a story is a central element for professional development. There is a need for public debate on an Internet that is other than a market place or a retail store, which she found was a recurring theme in her research. She concludes: “This is not information retrieval, this is sales.”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Panel 4: Contextual Modeling

An unstorable and unmanageable amount of data is coming at us, bringing with it a host of new strategies for grasping and analyzing the huge amount of bits and bites, such as visualization models.

mc schraefel: Beyond Keyword Search
Dr schraefel is reader in the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group at the University of Southampton, UK
.

Schraefel first emphasizes that in contrast to what people may assume from a visualization expert, she is not ‘in love with graphs’ and actually most of the time, big fat graphs suck. The research she will present here deals with the circumstances of serendipity. Following the idea that ‘fate favors the prepared mind’, she argues that discoveries never happen by chance and an important challenge lies in designing tools that support serendipitous discovery.

She then presents the audience with a 1987 video by Apple computers, which introduces the ‘Knowledge Navigator’; a tablet-like personal device with a natural language interface, a virtual ‘digital assistant’ and access to a global network of information. Outdated as the device may seem today, the digital assistant seemed able to create graphs by getting data out of its embodied context (such as other people’s documents), and be mined and combined to answer a variety of questions. In 1987, schraefel comments, this was a vision of exploration, heterogeneous sources, representation and integration that still inspires research into knowledge building today.

Schraefel notes how Google is the current search paradigm – “what else do you need?”. Drawing a parallel, she notes how Newton’s model of Mathematica set the tone for seeing the world for ages until it turned out that in some spaces, the model was flawed. It is much the same with Google’s document-centric, single source search without interrelations – the model frames the questions that may be asked. In order to enable knowledge gathering, we need a different one.

In a 2005 Scientific American article, Tim Berners-Lee, Ora Lassiler and Jim Hendler introduced machine readable mark-up and the Semantic Web as a new paradigm that moved away from keyword search and toward structured data and ontologies. Ontologies in this sense are subject-predicate-object joints, such as a composer-is a–person, or a person-has a-name etcetera. By giving data a rich (and often multiple) metadata context and using some logic, one may infer properties to objects that are not explicitly labeled, and enable knowledge gathering from heterogeneous sources.

Does this imply a reprise of Victorian taxonomies? Nope, quoting schraefel: “it is more pomo than that”, objects are described from multiple contexts. There is no über-ontology and we are slowly learning to be ‘ok’ with the fact that we don’t know everything controllably, and be messy. Following Berners-Lee, she emphasized the importance of liberating our data; placing sources freely on the web so that we may ask questions other than the document kind, and create information rather than merely retrieve it.

Read the rest of this entry »