The Ethics of Information Organization

May 22-23, 2009
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Information organization (IO), like other major functions of the information profession, faces many ethical challenges. In the IO literature, ethical concerns have been raised with regard to, for example, the role of national and international IO standards, providing subject access to information, deprofessionalization and outsourcing of IO, education of IO professionals, and the effects of globalization. These issues, and others like them, have serious implications for quality and equity in information access. The Center for Information Policy Research and the Information Organization Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee join in presenting this conference to address the ethics of information organization.

The themes of the conference may include, but are not limited to, ethical aspects of and approaches to:

• The role of standards in IO
• Subject access to information
• Description and Metadata
• Folksonomies and social tagging as IO
• Day-to-day practice in IO
• Professionalism and IO
• Education for IO
• Culture and IO
• Economic, social and political factors in IO
• International, multicultural and multilingual aspects of IO

The keynote speakers will be:

• Clare Beghtol, Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
• José Augusto Chaves Guimarães, Professor, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil
• Janet Swan Hill, Professor, Associate Director for Technical Services, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, USA

We invite interested participants to submit proposals for papers to include: name(s) of presenter(s), title(s), affiliation(s), contact information and abstracts of 300-500 words. Presentations will be 30 minutes. Time will be set aside for questions as well as broader discussion. All abstracts will be published on the Web site of the UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research. Full papers will be further reviewed for publication in a special issue of Cataloging and Classification Quarterly.

Abstracts due: January 1, 2009
Notification of acceptance by: February 1, 2009
Full papers due: April 3, 2009

Submit proposals electronically to: Hur-Li Lee, Chair of the Program Committee (hurli@uwm.edu)

Program Committee:

• Grant Campbell, Associate Professor, University of Western Ontario, Canada
• Allyson Carlyle, Associate Professor, University of Washington
• Clara M. Chu, Associate Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
• Edwin Michael Cortez, Professor/Director, University of Tennessee
• Birger Hjørland, Professor, The Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark
• Hur-Li Lee (Chair) Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Steven J. Miller, Senior Lecturer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Hope A. Olson, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Sandra Roe, Editor, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly , Bibliographic Services Librarian, Milner Library, Illinois State University
• Richard P. Smiraglia, Professor, Long Island University
• Michael Zimmer, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Sponsors:

• Center for Information Policy Research, UW-Milwaukee
• Information Organization Research Group at UW-Milwaukee
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
• Milwaukee Public Libraries

…a wave of sophisticated computing and mathematical analytics that is moving into the mainstream. Fueling the trend are the digitization of information, ever faster and cheaper computing, and the explosion of online networks and data collection.

Sorry, Gray Lady, this isn’t some new thang. This has been going on or quite a while.

This is probably best argued in James Beniger’s The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. In this detailed history of the rise of technologies of communication and information processing, Beniger argues that modern information technologies, and with them the “information society,” began to take shape as long ago as the 1830s with the introduction of railroads, and fully materialized after 1880 with the onset of widespread industrialization. Because industrialization involved the large and fast flows of goods, it could not be managed without a high level of information technology (in which Beniger includes things like product standardization, bureaucracy and advertising, as well as the usual mechanical devices); and without proper management, it simply could not work. This need for large-scale management brought about the “Control Revolution”:

The Control Revolution developed in response to problems arising out of advanced industrialization: a mounting crisis of control at the most aggregate level of national and international systems, levels that had had little practical relevance before the mass production, distribution, and consumption of factory goods. (Beniger, 1986, p. 278)

Resolution of the problems created by advanced industrialization demanded new means of information processing and communication to control an economy shifting from local segmented markets to increasingly higher levels of organization – what Beniger labels the growing “systemness of society” (p. 278).

The growing “systemness of society” meant information began to replace industrial capital as the material base for our modern economy, and, well before the 20th century and digital computing, brought about our Information Society. According to Beniger, mass industrial processes and technology began to coalesce in the mid to late 1800s, beginning with landmark inventions such as the telegraph, typewriter, and telephone, extending into the early 1900s with the radio and, eventually, television. More recent developments such as computers, telecommunications, and presumably, the Internet, Beniger would likely argue, are not the radical milestones or emblems of the Information Society that the New York Times might suggest, but merely examples of the smooth continuation of the Control Revolution which began a century earlier. In other words, we have been submerged in this Information Society – replete with advanced information processing and data-mining – for quite a while now.

UPDATE: While the NYTimes seems to be celebrating the rise of data-mining in this article, they simultaneously publish an article warning that companies are selling vast these databases of personal information to thieves, despite evidence their services are used for fraud:

Vast databases of names and personal information, sold to thieves by large publicly traded companies, have put almost anyone within reach of fraudulent telemarketers. And major banks have made it possible for criminals to dip into victims’ accounts without their authorization, according to court records.

The banks and companies that sell such services often confront evidence that they are used for fraud, according to thousands of banking documents, court filings and e-mail messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Although some companies, including Wachovia, have made refunds to victims who have complained, neither that bank nor infoUSA stopped working with criminals even after executives were warned that they were aiding continuing crimes, according to government investigators. Instead, those companies collected millions of dollars in fees from scam artists.

This is criminal.

The ethical, legal and societal implications of ICTs are one of the three main priorities of UNESCO’s Information for All Programme and UNESCO was recently designated as the Facilitator for the implementation of Action Line C10 “Ethical Dimensions of the Information Society” of the Geneva Action Plan adopted by the World Summit on the Information Society.

Moreover, UNESCO encourages the definition and adoption of best practices and guidelines addressing ethical issues for decision makers, media and information professionals, and all major stakeholders concerned by the issue of Info-Ethics.

It aims at providing an outlook to the ethical implications of future technologies in the area of information and communication as well as at alerting to the increasing power of these emerging technologies and draws attention to their potential to affect the exercise of some basic human rights.

I’ll have more comments after I’ve had a chance to read it over…

Perhaps we can make use of a privacy version of the Original Position; call it the “Original Privacy Position.” Thus, as before, imagine a group of individuals behind a metaphorical veil of ignorance. Now, however, the veil only precludes them from knowing anything significant about their privacy position in society. Inhabitants of the Original Privacy Position, in other words, don’t know such things as whether their privacy is generally at serious risk, whether they attach a great deal of value to their privacy, whether they are in a position to make a lot of money through the diminishment of others’ privacy (or whether others are in such a position with respect to them), etc. And behind this veil of privacy ignorance they are given the task of deciding upon the basic norms of “reticence and privacy,” to use Nagel’s phrase, or norms of the “contextual integrity” of personal information, to use Helen Nissenbaum (1998, 2002)’ s equally apt one. The idea would be that whatever basic norms inhabitants of the Original Privacy Position would agree upon, those are the basic privacy norms that any just society should respect.

Maybe they would agree upon norms quite analogous to Rawls’s two general principles of justice. First, there would be the privacy norm:

Privacy. Each member of society is to have a maximal amount of basic privacy consistent with a similar privacy for everyone else.

Then there would be something like the difference of privacy means norm:

Difference of privacy means. Inequalities with respect to individuals’ means of controlling their privacy (e.g. inequalities concerning access to technologies designed to protect their privacy, or to diminish that of others) are to be such that they bring the greatest benefit to the least privacy privileged members of society (i.e. to those members of society who are the least advantaged with respect to controlling their privacy).

There has been much attention paid to Google’s newest feature Google Q&A. Google Q&A (Google’s response to features already provided by Yahoo & Ask Jeeves) delivers factual answers for some queries at the top of its results page, to save users from having to navigate over to other sites and look for the information. For example, if a user enters the query ‘Portugal population,’ Google returns the answer — 10.5 million — along with a link to the Web page where the information came from.

Of course, there are limits to Google’s ability to provide the “correct answer”. A search for “what is the tallest mountain” provides the answer: “Hawksbill Mountain… is the tallest mountain in Shenandoah National Park.” Perhaps my search query wasn’t precise enough, but anyone asking such a general question is likely thinking of the tallest mountain the the world – how Google decided to refer to a Wikipedia article about Shenanhoah National Park for its answer remains a mystery.

This leads to the concern about Google’s role (or search engines in general) as a source for knowledge. The Internet, of course, as a network of computers to share resources. As the WWW emerged, file and document sharing became the main purpose for the Web. The medium also shifted into a communication technology, facilitating chat rooms, e-mail, discussion lists, etc. And now, it seems, the Internet has become our latest “knoweldge tool” – replacing encyclopedias and libraries as the place we go to have questions answered, to gain knowledge.

Another vital question is what levels of oversight are in place to ensure that other answers are indeed accurate? How does Goole ensure there is no bias or misinformation in the results they provide? Also, how does it determine which sites are authoritative in this manner? Is this relevance automated, or are Google employees entering in sites that they see as authoritative on the matter. For that matter, what is their criteria for deeming a site accurate?

For exmaple, the search “where is Palestine” provides the answer “Location: Israel, West Bank” Does this answer make it seem Palestine is a part of Israel? That it exists within Israel? A possession of Israel? Clearly, the Palestine-Israel relationship is highly disputed. From whose point of view, then, is this answer given? Of course, the referring site is provided, so a diligent user can decide to search and see how reliable the source is. But the whole point of Google Q&A is, it seems, to encourage users to just take Google’s answer as fact, and not dig any further.

The timing of this new feature fits nicely with a new version of my dissertation proposal I have been working on this week. This latest approach focuses on the roles of search engines as discourse networks, framing the limits of knoweldge. Here’s the key paragraph (it’s still very much a work in progress):

This project will situate the prevailing contemporary information interfaces – web search engines – as technologies of power and formations of regimes of truth. Building from a historical survey of the role encyclopedias played in the control of knowledge in early modern Europe, this project will provide a material understanding of search engines and their role in determining the framework and the boundaries within which information is presented and knowledge is attained. It will complicate the view of search engines as free and egalitarian gatekeepers of information, and reveal how the design of these contemporary discourse networks shape the information they aim to present and set the limits of knowledge.

Today’s New York Times includes a story on mind-mapping software, “To-Do List: Shop, Pay Bills, Organize Brain.” It suggests that to learn new topics, organize ideas and spur creative thinking, people should draw dynamic and unstructured “mind maps” rather than traditional lists and outlines:

Ever since high school, I have relied on classic I, II, III-style outlines to organize ideas. (The best computerized outliner, in my view, is still NoteMap, $149 from CaseSoft.com.) With MindManager, you create an outline not by writing out a list but by entering one main idea in the middle of the screen – and then having related ideas radiate out, with spokes. The subideas can have their own connections and nodes, and all parts of the maps can be easily linked to relevant side material – e-mail, Web pages, documents and so on.

It sounds gimmicky but seems less so in practice. Here is important news: MindManager’s intellectual effect seems the opposite of PowerPoint’s. As any veteran of business briefings knows, the visual tools in PowerPoint can blur distinctions and impose an artificial sameness on ideas. At a minimum, MindManager doesn’t retard clear thinking, and it might actually help.

“For me, there is a big difference between laying out ideas in this kind of map” and just writing them in a list, says Michael Jetter, Mindjet’s co-founder. “It’s like when you look at ads. The white space can be as important as the words. I find when I am able to space out the ideas in a certain way, somehow I can move around them easily rather than starting from the top. It’s the same information, but you look at it differently.”

This article illuminates my critique of our current information interfaces. The dominant technology for organizing and navigating information on our computers is a two-dimensional and strictly hierarchical system. This is most obviously represented by the traditional “file tree” structure – each file has a single location and a single path to find it. Over recent decades, of course, numerous graphical computer interfaces and data management systems have been developed. The Mac/Windows operating systems invoke a graphical desktop metaphor to guide users in the manipulation and storage of files. Yet, even with is iconic focus, the fixed linearity of the textual interfaces of its command-line ancestors remain visible. Instead of truly immersing ourselves into the graphical potential of these interfaces, we still navigate them in a strong textual sense. One doesn’t think graphically about where files can be located in the interface. In reality, one thinks: I’m pretty sure I put it in the “Things to Do” folder, but maybe it’s in “Unfinished Business.” In other words, information is still organized textually, in terms of strict categories defined by the names of folders within the linear file management hierarchy.

Apple’s experimental HotSauce interface, on the other hand, attempts to move beyond two-dimensions into a more immersive and spatial three-dimensional interface. In HotSauce, your documents are presented as a galaxy of interrelationships between themes, not in a strict hierarchy of folders. The user is able to zoom in and out of the “constellations” to understand how files are related to each other and retrieve data relevant to their search. Buy prioritizing a spatial and three-dimensional method of understanding and navigating the data in your computer, HotSauce presents a break from the traditional hierarchical information interfaces. With the increased sophistication of virtual environments, augmented reality and other “off-the-desktop” technologies, three-dimensional user interface design has become a critical area for researchers to understand.

Another example of a spatial information navigational system comes from the search engine tools used to help navigate the World Wide Web. While Berners-Lee understood the human mind’s ability to link random bits of data and envisioned an online information-space where anything could be linked to anything else – a web of information, his vision has only been partially achieved given the current navigational tools. While the Web is made up of seemingly infinite links among information sites, our navigation of that space remains rooted in the linear, hierarchical interface of the search engine. The results of searches are listed textually with a built-in presumption of what should be clicked on first; then you click the “Back” button to return; then you click on the next site, and so on. These static lists provide no sense of the interrelationships between data on the Web – there is no depth, only length.

By contrast, consider the experimental search engine Kartoo.com, which displays the results of searches through visual and spatial relationships. Using varying colors and shapes to simulate three-dimensional depth, Kartoo presents search results on a cartographic map to help the user visualize the associative relationship between sources of information and other key terms related to their search. Holding the mouse over any topic on the map draws visual links to the related sites, and moving over a site reveals links to the relevant keywords. A similar graphical search engine interface that presents information in a spatial map is Grokker, offered by Groxis. These dynamic web search engine interfaces improve navigation by visually mapping the associative links between sets of information, allowing users to move even further away from the ‘hierarchical straitjacket’ Berners-Lee reviled.

There’s a discussion at Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine about what term should be used to describe “blogs” (the assumption being, apparently, that “blogs” is too techie, or has a negative connotation, or something like that). Jeff has frequently used the term “citizens’ media,” but Bill Keller suggested perhaps “peoples’ media” is a better fit. Jeff’s current offering is Volksmedia: “I like that. It has a funky, retro, populist, Volkswagen feel, of course, with that buggy attitude.” An almost certain response was the connotation between “volks” and Hitler. So, toss that out.

I suggested in the comments that there’s no need to hold onto the “media” handle at all. Blogging doesn’t need to be defined as “something like the existing media, but of the people.” Naming it “citizens’ media” follows the common trend of naming a new technology in terms of the old (often by negating part of its original features): “horseless carraige” or “wireless.” Rather than thinking about how blogs can be related to traditional media, we should think about blogging’s unique formal features: connectivity, conversational, global, informational, and so on.

I would argue that blogs are information interfaces. Information interfaces are technologies for arranging, storing, displaying, retrieving and navigating information, ranging from scientific classification systems, encyclopedias, maps, library card catalogs, computer files sytems, graphical user interfaces, and web search engines. An information interface serves as a kind of translator, mediating between an information-space and the user, making one sensible to the other. An information interface is a necessary medium by which we gain knowledge. As such, an information interface plays a crucial role in not only the communication and representation of books in a collection, files on a hard drive or information on the web, but also in how we understand these information-spaces, and ultimately, the world around us.

While I typically equate information interfaces with file navigation systems, the idea can easily be extended to blogs. Blogs, especially when utilized in conjunction with tools such as RSS feeds and Technorati, represent a interface between users and information – bringing us into closer conversations, closer informational scrutiny, and closer apprehension of knowledge.

Blogs are an interface more than a medium; they bring people and ideas in contact with each other.

Is this a blog, a folkmedia? Or is it something more than the sum of its parts: a conversation, a space where information is shared & critiqued? “Infospace” “Idea-space”

Susan Crawford comments on a recent talk by Benjamin Reeve about the impoverished nature of our understanding of information:

The thesis…is that Shannon’s understanding of information is not helpful — that information is really differences that “make a difference” by causing a system to change its state. Informational things have different qualities than physical things (you can’t run an algorithm against a hill). Most fundamentally, information is not conserved. Information, instead, amplifies. But amplification, just for its own sake, isn’t an unmixed good. Instead, what we should be interested in (and design for) is metainformational depth — quality information about information.

The most important thing we can do is “make things deep” — build for better information. Maybe that means tagging data and having it report back to us about how it’s doing. At any rate, for any amount of amplification we create, we need to create MORE metainformational depth.

I’m becoming very intrigued with the potential of “tagging data” to increase the utility of information, especially its usefullness for visualizing large sets of information. Susan promised follow-up, and I’ll pass her posts along.