When the conversation goes “meta”: Organizing knowledge in collaborative online environments

David M Pimentel
School of Information Studies,
Syracuse University
245 Hinds Hall
Syracuse, NY 13244

Abstract: Conversations are proposed as a useful lens through which to consider the creation of knowledge and, by extension, the organization of that knowledge. Given a Web environment pervaded by conversational forms – social tagging systems, blogs, and wikis – the collaborative organization of resources warrants further exploration and analysis. Knowledge organization systems that result from mass collaboration are considered for their potential to augment library practice.

1. Conversations and Knowledge Creation
Investigations into the theory and practice of knowledge organization must ultimately engage with questions surrounding the nature and creation of knowledge. The discipline of information science has largely moved away from “information-as-brick” models, where messages can be transmitted from sender to receiver without loss of meaning. Rather, the nature of knowledge is increasingly viewed as an iterative process, with each individual attempting to make sense of the world s/he encounters (Dervin and Nilan, 1986). Such attempts result in cognitive changes for the individual, creating a contextual, personal meaning.

Various philosophies and theories have endeavored to address the nature of knowledge and knowledge creation. In an analysis of information science metatheories, Talja, Tuominen, and Savolainen (2005) draw distinctions between three broad approaches: constructivism, collectivism, and constructionism. The approaches differ on several epistemological points, but can be distinguished largely based on the role played by language. The constructionist model, in particular, characterizes knowledge as being “produced from limited viewpoints as parts of ongoing conversations” (Talja, Tuominen, & Savolainen, 2005, 90).

Outside the field of information science, and seemingly aligned with the tenets of constructionism, Conversation Theory (Pask, 1975) identifies conversational exchanges as the basis of learning and knowledge construction. While developed to model cognitive processes for machine learning, Conversation Theory also operates at a broader conceptual level: “for Pask, anything that can be sensibly said about ‘conversation’ is part of [Conversation Theory]” (Scott, 2001, 346). Such broad applicability is likely a result of Pask’s background in cybernetics, and Conversation Theory has been described as having the “aim of unifying theories and concepts across disciplines” (Scott, 2001, 346). [1]

At its core, the framework of Conversation Theory centers on participants communicating and seeking a shared agreement, or mutual understanding. Pask’s understandings are specific to the conversation participants, as well as for the given domain and topic (Pask, 1975, 49). As a result “correctness” is relative to the participants and not measured against some external absolute (Pask, 1975, 120). Conversation Theory fundamentally treats knowledge creation “as a process of knowing and coming to know” (Scott, 2001, 348).

Given the nature of knowledge and knowledge creation afforded by Conversation Theory, this paper employs the notion of conversations as a lens through which to consider knowledge organization. Building on the participatory paradigm introduced by Lankes, et al. (2007), this paper explores the knowledge organization practices emerging in online collaborative environments. This paper will also consider the potential utility of mass-collaboration knowledge organization for library systems, with particular reference to recent developments at the Library of Congress.

2. Knowledge Organization Practices and Possibilities
Methods for organizing knowledge have a considerable history in libraries and other information environments. These methods have long been the purview of a relatively small number of individuals, with trained professionals typical in 20th-century libraries. LIS scholarship has become increasingly attuned to the limitations of these traditional knowledge-organization practices. Svenonius (1992) summarized the criticisms “leveled at the procrustean structures of our great monolithic classifications,” noting “their rigidity in the face of change, the limited linearity of their relationships and their difficulty keeping pace with the dynamic and kaleidoscopic world of knowledge” (10). Similarly problematic is the bias embodied in controlled vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings; the critiques against its representation of marginalized peoples span over 30 years (cf. Berman, 1971, and Olson, 2002). It would seem that knowledge organization theory and praxis must find a way to evolve and overcome the shortcomings inherent in a past dominated by imposed deterministic hierarchy.

The treatment of information resources in the legacy LIS paradigm is also problematic. Typically, information resources are assigned a handful of subject representations, in the form of subject headings and classification designations. Despite such subject indexing being performed by professionals, these representations are inevitably limited to one individual’s perceptions of an information object at one particular moment in time. Once such indexing has been completed, it is rarely revised or modified. Overall, the process attempts to eliminate semantic ambiguity by integrating the information object into the existing knowledge organization structure.

Even allowing that this largely static approach to the organization of information resources was optimal, it seems increasingly clear that it is not sustainable (cf. Calhoun, 2006). Practical approaches to knowledge organization must take into account not only the dynamic nature of knowledge, but also the alacrity required to cope with the expanding universe of resources. (The expanding universe might be better characterized as an explosion, with a proliferation of digital information objects already vastly outpacing the ability for expert human catalogers to classify resources at the rate of production.) In her articulation of “Cataloging 2.0,” Simpson (2007) suggests that libraries should focus on “enhancing resource discovery through all available avenues” (510). One such avenue that merits consideration is to focus knowledge-organization practices on making explicit the many types of relationships that exist among/between resources. This approach centers on a document’s potential to be simultaneously “about” something in one context, yet still “mean” something different in another context (Beghtol, 1986).

Consider the myriad conversations that can be prompted by a great essay or a provocative documentary. Different individuals engage with such works from their own personal contexts; they derive meaning from the information they encounter in the resource, or they relate it to other resources or contexts. As an information object endures (or simply gains wide audience), a multiplicity of contexts centers on it through use by various people. All these contexts coexist simultaneously – and each context was relevant to one or more individuals at some point in time. This potential for an information object to relate to a multiplicity of contexts is not inherent in the document itself, but rather the result of people engaging with and using its content or ideas. In other words, the information becomes part of a conversation. Multi-conversational approaches to knowledge organization would allow for these networks of context and use to organically relate information objects to one another.

Delineating strict lines between knowledge, context, and use is beyond the scope of this paper; suffice it to say that such constructs have a complex and intricate nature. The point here is that conversation seems an apt metaphor to encompass the multifaceted, inclusive, opportunistic nature of humans engaging with ideas. These ideas may come from the person sitting by your side, or these ideas may by facilitated by an information artifact. In the latter situation, the conversation exists in the cognizing individual’s mind: perhaps grappling with the thoughts of a “dead Greek,” or perhaps getting inspired by a piece of Afro-Cuban music on her iPod.

3. Conversation Features for Knowledge Organization
Consider the traditional knowledge organization process in terms of a conversation paradigm. While a document may be perceived within the context of prior conversations (the sources it cites, etc.), these are rarely made an explicit part of the knowledge organization system. By extension the object, as it is represented in the system, is also typically divorced from the multiple future conversations of which it might later become a productive part. (Namely: a priori enumeration of an item’s use is inevitably limited to some notion of “conventional” or “expected” users – so creative and unexpected uses are difficult/impossible to predict.) Incorporation of citation networks into knowledge organization systems may help to articulate these very clear artifacts left behind as evidence of conversations. When the object’s representation exposes these conversations, it helps make more transparent how knowledge is created contextually and in turn creates new knowledge. [2]

Formal, academic citations represent a linkage between documents: a statement that a relationship was made connecting the ideas in an earlier source to the current one. In the hyperlinked environment of the Web, Google’s PageRank algorithm works on a similarly conversational principle, relying on millions of users creating literal links among web resources. In short order, those same users were also linking and conversing among one another: reading, writing, and commenting on personal blogs. A great deal of conversational exchange occurs on the blogosphere; Weinberger (2007) characterizes blogs as being “in conversation with one another…captur[ing] a global dialogue of people with different backgrounds and assumptions but a shared interest” (146). Other Web 2.0 phenomena are similarly conversation oriented, and much attention has been given to the phenomena of social tagging and folksonomies (e.g., Golder & Huberman, 2006). These bottom-up classifications offer new opportunities for researchers to unobtrusively observe real-world knowledge-organizing practices involving photos, bookmarks, and Web pages.

One area that has not garnered close examination is the knowledge-organizing practices that occur in collaboratively created wiki environments. Sites such as Wikipedia invite users to actively participate in the creation of content, refinement of this content, and resolution of content disputes. Wikipedia makes such conversational exchanges explicit, not only by archiving changes over time (providing access to previous edits, allowing readers to see how the content has changed), but also by maintaining a parallel discussion (or “talk”) page for each article. Participants exchange ideas and opinions, engage in discourse, and debate how best to change an article: quite literally carrying on conversations to produce new knowledge.

The conversations generated in such collaborative online environments offer opportunities to observe, not only how knowledge is created, but also how users participate in various knowledge-organizing activities. Before discussing the different types of knowledge-organizing practices observed in Wikipedia, it is important to underscore a particular distinction here: that the knowledge-producing and knowledge-organizing activities on wikis are all subject to collective review. Any single edit must endure the scrutiny of other interested participants. In terms of the knowledge organization system, this means that uniquely personal indexing terms – such as “toRead” or “me” commonly seen in tagging environments – do not survive Wikipedia’s classificatory landscape. Knowledge organization tools and indexing terminology evolve over time as the community of participants attempts to reach consensus. (In keeping with the rest of Wikipedia, parallel discussion/talk pages also exist for various features of the knowledge-organizing systems.) Since all users potentially have a voice in how content is organized in wikis, these massively collaborative environments offer a different approach towards knowledge organization.

These participatory systems allow users to be directly involved in organizing knowledge, shifting reliance away from institutionalized controlled vocabularies towards more democratically derived terminology. In addition to the collective agreement on terminological matters, Wikipedia has cultivated several other explicit knowledge organizing mechanisms. Some are prosaic (e.g., section headings within articles, per the manual of style [3]) or automatically generated (such as the table of contents within articles). But others knowledge-organizing features of Wikipedia display a relatively high level of sophistication, commensurate with standard LIS practices: disambiguation pages [4] resolve the problems of synonymy, while “infoboxes” [5] assist users in navigating among related articles. The most fundamental level of knowledge organization on the site entails the use of an extensive, collaboratively generated system of categories. [6]

Further empirical study is needed to assess the overall scope of knowledge-organizing activity that pervades Wikipedia. The effort involved in simply maintaining the current knowledge-organizing structures would suggest that the scale of active, participatory knowledge organization is considerable. Whether or not Wikipedia proves an enduring feature of the Web, it seems unlikely to be the last online massively collaborative authoring environment. [7] Understanding the behaviors and motivations currently underpinning such participatory knowledge organization practices may help to form theories about distributed, collaborative knowledge organization. Such a framework may benefit from leveraging a conversation paradigm, allowing for holistic consideration of knowledge-organizing activities that range from social tagging, to wikis, and beyond.

4. Opportunities for Knowledge Organization
Others have proposed the notion of conversations as a worthy approach for LIS practice. Tuominen, Talja, & Savolainen (2003) specifically suggest “reorienting our knowledge organization strategies from the description of the contents of documents as relatively stable entities toward mapping and visualizing conversations, perspectives, and debates” (562). The community of knowledge organization professionals has a unique opportunity to focus attention onto dynamic and changing conversations instead of solely on the information objects themselves. Such a shift requires a fundamental examination of how to treat information objects: moving from anticipated contexts to actual contexts, from definite order to spontaneous order.

Current knowledge organization practices are based largely on anticipating the potential use and context of information resources. If conversations are accepted as the building blocks of knowledge, with their attendant robust context, then actual use would seem to offer a valid approach for knowledge organization. In this regard, one can imagine navigating through a digital collection where resources are arranged based not on a single linear dimension, but instead on multiple dimensions that result from behaviors such as linking, annotation, adaptation, etc. The resulting environment would be rife with trails and paths that reflect actual uses and contexts.

An analogy to the physical world may prove useful here. Most college campuses have a central outdoor area that is a focal point, e.g. the quad surrounded by notable or landmark buildings. While this area typically has a number of paved routes, it likely also has one or more shortcut footpaths worn into the grass. Contrast this with a typical information system: the paths for users exploring organized information environments are provided by formal metadata. The LIS tradition has paved a number of routes through these environments, but has historically not developed systems that accommodate the user-generated footpaths as well. Enabling users to participate in the organization of resources in digital environments offers the potential to capture a number of interesting things about any particular footpath: who created it, when, how helpful others found the path for their particular need, etc.

Embracing this type of evolutionary, organic approach may be particularly important when multiple, competing viewpoints focus on the same information resources. Such contested grounds are inherently biased and/or political, and efforts to describe or classify such resources rarely concede multiple knowledge claims as equally valid. By accommodating and making explicit the myriad conversations that convene on an information object, knowledge organization systems could transform an apparent ambiguity into a new kind of clarity. Exposing the nature of the classification – not a single classification, but many classifications – and contextualizing the various conversations would be at the core of such a knowledge organization system. Creating richer knowledge organization structures may entail discarding traditional LIS notions of neutrality in favor of a more perspective-explicit framework. By allowing users “to challenge existing perspectives, classifications, and vocabularies” (Tuominen, Talja, & Savolainen, 2003, 564) – in short, allowing them to participate in the practice of knowledge organization – massively collaborative environments become locations where the tension of ideas is accepted as essential to the nature of knowledge.

5. Implications for LIS Practice
A recent report commissioned by the Library of Congress (2008) predicts that “[t]he future of bibliographic control will be collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based” (4). While it remains to be seen which recommendations will ultimately be accepted by LC, the tenor of the report is clear: the status quo approach to knowledge organization practices in libraries must be broadly reconsidered. Several of the report’s proposals suggest enhancing future systems with a focus towards user-contributed data: namely, designing systems not only to accommodate data from multiple sources, but also to link and relate user-contributed data appropriately. The logic of LC’s report seems very much aligned with an appreciation for the power of massively collaborative participation. The Library of Congress is currently investigating the opportunities afforded by participatory networks. LC and Flickr announced a joint partnership in January 2008: encouraging users of the online photo-sharing site to describe – through free-text tags and comments – some 3,000 items from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division (Oates, 2008; Havenstein, 2008).

If the recent LC report and the partnership with Flickr are any indications, it would seem that the world’s largest library is readying to reinvent LIS practice. Yet unlike LC’s pivotal role in the centralized preparation and distribution of library cataloging throughout the 20th century, reinvention now entails the mediation of different types of data from multiple sources. A key challenge for LIS practice will be the transparent representation of data sources at appropriate levels of granularity. Participatory information environments will not only rely on the nature of the relationship between two entities (e.g., Shakespeare is the creator of Romeo & Juliet), but also the identity of who established that particular link and when.

Knowledge organization is ultimately about establishing relationships. Relationships exist between and among different types of things, connecting and linking them together. The FRBR model (IFLA, 1998) provides the LIS community with a range of entities to be linked and related in the bibliographic universe: works, persons, concepts, etc. While the link between a creator and a work might often be unproblematic, [8] other types of relationships may not be so straightforward. These are the interstitial locations where conversations occur: what is Romeo & Juliet actually “about,” according to whom, what does the work “mean,” to certain people, over time, etc. In such cases, knowing who has established a relationship (created a link) between a particular work and a particular concept might be quite important if the source turns out to be your colleague, your professor, or your professional society. In effect, knowing the source of – the who behind – a link connecting two entities communicates something about who values that particular relationship. The above scenario plays out on multiple levels: with links being established by both individuals and on behalf of various communities (e.g., academic organizations, nonprofits, etc.). While this is partly about credibility (e.g., I trust when my colleague establishes a relationship between a work and a concept in our field), it is also about the conversation going on in a particular community. Making the sources of the links/relationships explicit in a knowledge organization network holds potentially important value propositions for users: be they already ensconced in the conversation of a community, or attempting to familiarize themselves with the conversation in an unfamiliar community.

Involving users in helping support knowledge organization has already begun on the commercial Web. Sites such as Amazon.com extensively employ user comments and rankings to build a robust conversation around books, music, movies, and other objects. Amazon now involves users to “help others find” an item by making “search suggestions.” By specifying relevant indexing terms that the user believes should retrieve a particular item, “Search Suggestions are intended to improve Amazon search by helping people find relevant items which otherwise wouldn’t appear in search results.” [9] Such involvement and trust of users stands in stark contrast to the austere nature of the surrogate records in most library OPACs. Analysis of successful commercial enterprises, coupled with the results of projects such as the LC/Flickr partnership may inform innovations for LIS practice and system development.

In an examination of new technologies that will likely form the foundations of a more semantic web, Borland (2007) characterizes a blending of the Web’s current “capacity for dynamic user-generated connections” blending together with “a dash of data mining, with computers automatically extracting patterns from the Net's hubbub of conversation” (66). It would seem that Pask’s (1976) notions about machines engaging in, and learning from, conversations might be ideally suited to our current Web environment.

6. Conclusion
Conversations have been suggested as a valuable way to consider the creation of knowledge, and by extension the organization of knowledge. Conversations pervade our daily lives, and artifacts of many such conversations now feature prominently in a Web environment of weblog trackbacks, wiki edits, etc. As more individuals contribute to both the implicit and explicit organization of knowledge, participatory knowledge organization behaviors merit further investigation. Current collaborative authoring environments offer a potentially important perspective on knowledge-organizing practices, with users participating in conversations around emerging classifications. Users are becoming empowered to supplement and/or revise existing knowledge structures, adding their voices to a larger conversation – ultimately shaping how information is organized and discovered. Such collaboratively created classifications need not necessarily replace existing or established schemes, but instead could connect numerous relevant knowledge-organizing schemes as part of a multi-vocal knowledge-organizing conversation. If noted technology commentator David Weinberger (2006) is correct that “better knowledge is a property of conversations” (17), then perhaps conversations can also be the source of better knowledge organization.

Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2007 North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization in Toronto.

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Footnotes
[1] Pask (1976) applied Conversation Theory in the realm of educational pedagogy.
[3] Clearly the idea of citation networks and citation indexing originates with Garfield, but is raised here to be considered as an aspect of the conversation paradigm.
[3] See Wikipedia Manual of Style, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Section_headings
[4] See Wikipedia guideline on disambiguation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation
[5] See Wikipedia Manual of Style, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(infoboxes) ; see also Wikipedia’s navigation templates, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Navigational_templates
[6] Wikipedia guideline on categorization, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization
[7] The expert-oriented Citizendium wiki launched in March 2007.
[8] Notwithstanding claims of plagiarism, or attribution of Shakespeare’s plays to Francis Bacon, etc.
[9] Amazon.com. Search Suggestion FAQ. Retrieved January 20, 2008, from http://www.amazon.com/gp/associations/help/faq.html