An optimistic spirit of progressive pluralism accompanied early digital work in the arts and humanities. The singular “universe” of knowledge would be amplified into a “multiverse” through faceted approaches embodying varied cultural—and even individual–viewpoints. Precisely how this utopian ideal was to be realized—through customized search or fluid ontologies or other semantic web technology—was not clear. But the motivations combined creative impulses for decolonizing and diversifying information systems.
Fast forward twenty years. The outcome is not quite what was imagined from those early visions.
Knowledge organization is no longer only the work of professionals—if it ever was. Tensions between unified standards, those of diverse communities, and otherwise non-conforming systems proliferate. The illusion of control of knowledge was always a delusion, produced by imagining that the domains of archival, museum, and library practices were strictly bounded, and that within their finite precincts, diversification could be managed. In that vision, the “multiverse” was actually just a faceted interface to an underlying universe, ordered in accord with the principles of knowledge organization embodying the core competency of information professions.
But the historically circumscribed era of “modern” information science—the one governed by rational approaches to practice–has played out, eroded by challenges of free-range taxonomies and classification systems made by enthusiastic amateurs, unlicensed individuals, and zealous reformers working within and without institutional guidelines or domains.Footnote 1 The profession struggles with the challenges, even as fears about de-professionalisation continue to haunt the daily life of those in possession or pursuit of an MLIS degree. Combine this with serious commitments to diversification and the issues become charged with urgent agendas.
To begin, professionals confront an ever-increasing mess/mass of systems created ad hoc. Anyone with a spread sheet, capacity for making lists, or obsessively labelling file folders and unique IDs is likely to have created a taxonomy. How to integrate or crosswalk these? What knowledge organization systems can cope with the proliferation of these unregulated ontologies in the many universes of business, entertainment, community archives and private collections? Is this a management issue? A political concern? Or a fundamental challenge to assumptions about epistemology?
Another compelling force arises from the (professional) desire to address alternative models of knowledge. What index of taxonomies would expose cultural differences productively? Show the ways Trobriand Islanders named their artefacts in relation to ancient Babylonian or Confucian nomenclatures? Analyze the substantive differences in their cosmologies—not to mention the contrasts that show the specific shape and impact of colonial systems (what was erased and how)? Where is the analytic interface that displays specificity as difference without subsuming it into uniformity—and makes it legible as the very heart of what constitutes knowledge as an embodiment of cultural identity?
These issues arise at multiple scales. Absorbing an individual collector's naming scheme into a library finding aid is one thing. Searching across the open web for information about an event or reference—or a breakthrough in research—is another. Simply put, the impossibility of uniform standards expands exponentially as information proliferates–a condition calculable only within an absurdist formula of ever-increasing unruliness.
A conspicuous symptom of these challenges was the imaginary solution embodied in the concept of Linked Open Data—the structure that would, the story went, be able to connect everything with everything in some meta-scheme of flexible but capacious proportions. Alas, the myth dissolves, with only a few dedicated insiders still holding their shares in the stock of that bankrupt ideal. The implementation is too expensive and demands too much detailed work, even within the well-resourced domains of elite cultural institutions where technical specialists expertly skilled in the hi-wire acts of forward migration and retro-conversion practice their alchemical arts. The mantra of “standards, standards, standards” only works on the already converted and carefully trained. But more to the point, a single standard, no matter how flexible, enacts the colonial narratives and hegemonic practices that are being addressed.
The point is not to deride these attempts, but to face the reality of what it means to cope with the current challenges posed by taxonomies in the wild and with heterogeneity of information organization schemes. These conditions provoke the basic question of how we understand what constitutes knowledge. The “we” in this sentence begs to be defined—from within narrowest identification with communities of professional information management to the broadest conception of a global citizenry reflecting on the issue of the cultural authority of the definition of knowledge in various, diverse, and distributed communities.
Every case of unique ontologies is distinct. Imagine a passionate scholar, steeped in knowledge of their field, creating elaborate metadata schemes to describe every nuance and detail of objects through their digital surrogates. Without strict adherence to standard vocabulary, controlled terms, AAT or LoC subject headings or Getty Vocabularies, the scholar elaborates an idiosyncratic scheme of description for field notes, oral histories, and photographic records of an extensive collection of historical artefacts from a now vanished community. As the project matures, the scholar turns to the University Library to absorb and adopt it. But at what cost to the original concepts?
In another instance a Black feminist intervenes in a discipline, redressing long-standing issues of bias, through a highly specialized vocabulary of terms. This vocabulary is applied systematically to a massive corpus of documents over nearly a decade, in a work of serious and substantive scholarly labor. Putting this into standard containers strips the substance from records carefully coded in non-binary anti-racist terms according to subtle criteria. The features that make their identity unique are precisely the elements that have to be sacrificed because they do not fit. Change the standards, comes the protest, and perhaps that can be done, but the level of granularity of critical analysis remains resistant to standardization.
Consider the work done by the feminist team who created metadata for the Orlando Project. Their tagset for describing the “Life” and the “Writing” categories was created specifically to describe “the crucial events in and aspects of a writer's life” and the multiple dimensions of literary works within “unique interpretive tags.”Footnote 2 For instance, careful attention to attributes on tags like “Education” allowed modes “to indicate either domestic, institutional, or self-taught learning.” These are categories significant to the intellectual formation of women within cultural conditions relevant to their work. In the Artists’ Books Online project, specific features of books such as openings, gutters, turnings, or sequence and development were defined as fields in order to require anyone using the metadata scheme to perform a reading of the object in front of them through those categories.Footnote 3 These two examples were deliberate efforts to codify interpretative frameworks into metadata for search and retrieval purposes, not only for description and analysis. Preserving these is crucial if cross-referencing or aggregation of materials across collections is to be effective.
Such examples can expand indefinitely. Many, if not all, digital humanities projects contained idiosyncratic or customized metadata as do collections from within specific communities with intimate knowledge of their assets but not necessarily any connection to conventional standards. The number of ways to do things the same? Exactly one. The number of ways to do them differently? Infinite. What are the odds of conforming to standards?
In a moment, our own, when authoritative “knowledge” is under attack in the public sphere and the credibility of expertise is constantly undermined across domains, the question has additional urgency. What is the end-game goal of diversification? Does it necessarily align with de-professionalization in knowledge management? At what point does disregard for expertise simply become advocacy for ignorance? How to embrace the richness of diverse approaches as a serious gesture of decolonization? In the matter of unregulated ontologies, the issues may be more pragmatic than political but separating these is a tricky matter.
If the goal is some degree of interoperability for the purpose of discovery and access, can correlation replace comparison so that points of connection can be revealed without common ground? What are ways to make non-standard metadata and description work without subsuming them into a single system? A system of relative ontologies is required.
The politics of knowledge organization require this solution. The call for decolonization of standards necessarily involves the reworking of classification systems. From the moment when Sanford Berman's 1971 Prejudices and Antipathies made pioneering contributions to exposing the biases in the Library of Congress subject headings to the present up-swell of interest in reworking received traditions, these have become ever-more pressing concerns.Footnote 4 Values and knowledge, and knowledge and power—their relations are hardly news. Legacy systems have been naturalized to neutralize western cultural hegemony and its assumptions. Not just vocabularies, but organizational schema, are both expressions and instruments of such legacies and their asymmetries of power. So, diversity, decolonization, and de-professionalisation become (perhaps unwitting and badly matched) partners in the production of alternative systems of knowledge organization in a time when the rational systematic approaches of modernity appear as aspirations of a vanished era.
But even as corrective work becomes the norm and the take-it-all-apart approach to legacy systems becomes its own new orthodoxy, the true complexity of preserving diversity remains both technical and intellectual in its challenge.
Taxonomies in the wild conform to their own organizational principles. They are not necessarily unruly, except in relation to expectations of standards. The vast realms of classification systems arising from culturally specific perspectives is not populated simply with ad hoc and unruly examples. The codified and carefully constructed taxonomies for organizing cultural objects, bibliographical materials, description of the world and its multiplicity of artifacts are central to the knowledge of each population and its belief system.
The challenge is not how to exercise singular control through a meta-standard to which these can be matched and cross-walked, but to instead engage with the act of reading schema as cultural documents. Taxonomies and ontologies are expressions of worldviews, interpretative objects that are also instruments. Legibility, not uniformity, might become a major goal. Knowledge schemes and organizations are expressive documents. What are the ways they can be studied for purposes of research and utility through modes of correlation?
The principle is political and ethical, as well as practical. No single system can operate to integrate these without violence. Rather than assume similarity, assume difference. Even when data, information, or knowledge systems are like each other, the question is how are they alike and/or different–in what degree, quality, character, and measure? We have scant experience with a metrics of difference as substance, and the traditions of sorting and naming assume that entities themselves are self-identical, stable referents to the surrogates of classification.
The urgent task is an innovation in knowledge design that will support inquiry into the identity and role of an image or object within its systematic relation to a cultural milieu. This would be premised on recognition of relative place and position within an ontology. Where does an item sit within related items and how they connect to rituals, functions, practices and beliefs?
For the arts, the task would begin with an extensive inventory of local ontologies of cultural objects that registers the diversity and difference of their structures as well as their terminology. Where do hierarchies exist and where are relations structured otherwise? How are things and images, objects and representations, named and sorted across cultures and times. What are the terms of correlation–or comparison—on which these can be regarded? The full recognition of difference-as-specificity is required to rebuild the organization of knowledge without a pre-existing hierarchy. The true corrective to the abuses of classification in the past is not amendments, adjustments, additions, and patches, but a reconstruction without a unifying ground or its assumptions. Knowledge becomes local, but according to a universal principle of specificity.
Perhaps the wild in which these unruly taxonomies have been generated could—can—be understood as a full universe in which all players assume the same degree of alterity. An approach that embraces the heterogeneity of ontologies and classification systems would challenge modernist hegemony, but need not do it at the expense of authoritative knowledge. Quite the contrary, it would demonstrate the robustness of epistemological diversity within a range of legitimating frameworks of authority. Or, such is the still-utopian aspiration.
