Everything is Miscellaneous

“David Weinberger’s new book covers the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He explains how methods of categorization designed for physical objects fail when we can instead put things in multiple categoreis at once, and search them in many ways. This is no dry book on taxonomy, but has the insight and wit you’d expect from the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and a former writer for Woody Allen.”

The video starts out a little slow and I kept thinking, “yes, this is obvious,” but it picks up pace and puts all the things that are happening in the taxonomy / folksonomy field into perspective. Also Melvil Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System, sounds a lot more insane than I ever realized. David Weinberger really gets to some issues that I hated about the way that Universities somewhat arbitrarily divide learning into Colleges.

How does it make sense that Computer Science and Painting are both in the College of Arts & Sciences, yet Electrical Engineering is in the College of Engineering, for example. Some important cross fertilization is missed simply because students are physically separated into different buildings. Damn you Aristotle, damn you! Shakes fist

Update: just read an article in the NY Times about a library abandoning the Dewey Decimal System