Knowledge and the Shock of Hypermedia: Thoughts From ISKO UK 2017

A week on from the ISKO UK 2017 conference: Knowledge Organisation – what’s the story? (#ISKOUK2017) I’ve finally had time to gather some (actually quite a few) thoughts on two days mixing knowledge organisation systems and narrative.  It’s a full and thought provoking story full of fake news, future shock, linked open data and ingenious knowledge organisation systems.

These are my thoughts in response to the conference theme and presentations but where they refer more directly to a conference paper, or an external reference, a hyperlink is provided so you can go and seek out the original inspiration.

All the conference papers and recorded audio will all be available on the ISKO UK website shortly.

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Fixed, Fluid and Finding

(Teodora Petkova via @lucacorsato | #SemanticWeb)

I discovered the intriguing, category defying blog of Teodora Petkova via her post Semantic Web, Relationships and a Piece of Conceptual art . This was a fascinating enough article in itself a philosophical, textual musing on the Semantic Web but the whole blog was full of great writing about texts, things and the relationships between them.

Her exploration of intertextuality reminded me of Peter Morville’s latest book Intertwingled and the growing critical interest not just in text or content but the inviting space between them where meaningful connections live. I am sure the Libraries and Publishing in an Information Society folk on #citylis will be getting their teeth into Brave New Texts over the coming weeks.

The idea that “we write is only a small part of the whole process of creating new forms of relationships” fits well with Ernesto’s metaphor that trying to fix documents in the more fluid world of hypertext is like ‘pinning butterflies’. For my #LISF essay I read an interesting article David Levy wrote on the subject of document stability: Fixed or fluid?: document stability and new media and some of the challenges new media forms with different dimensions of fluidity that require different “technologies of fixity” pose for publishers, libraries and information services.