Lane Wilkinson

In my last post I wrote that librarians are experts on the causal chain of testimonial knowledge. Of course, that’s rather technical language, so I’ve been looking for a friendlier way to explain how and why librarians are experts. We’re the people who act as guides to the network of knowledge claims and cultural expressions that make up our cultural record (or at least that portion of it that fits within our financial and moral constraints), so how can we fit that into 140 characters, so to speak. Then it hit me: the social transcript! I explained Charles Osburn’s social transcript theory in a previous post, but the quick take is that ‘social transcript’ refers to the “oral and written communications that are passed on to subsequent generations as knowledge of many kinds, and therefore to be critiqued, accepted, rejected, or even ignored” (Osburn, 134). It’s not just information. It’s not just recorded knowledge. The social transcript is the record of intellectual and aesthetic works that we choose to represent our beliefs, knowledge, values, and culture. As librarians, our role is to act as stewards and guides to that social transcript. Maintaining the social transcript is tantamount to preserving the causal chain of testimony so that we can situate our beliefs appropriately and come to new knowledge and new aesthetic experiences. In the elevator-friendly sense,  are experts on the social transcript. But, so what?

I’d like to use this post to say something about the potential upshots to thinking of librarians as experts on the social transcript (i.e., the causal chain of testimony). So, here goes it…

On the value of being a librarian…any type of librarian.

One of the things that bugs me most about librarianship is the endless fragmentation and cordoning-off of various librarian ‘types’. Are you in reference? Instruction? Access services? Cataloging? IT? Archives? Are you a public librarian? Academic librarian? Medical librarian? School librarian? I could list off the various combinations all damned day but, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a librarian and you probably already know that the profession suffers from some pretty severe Balkanization. To a certain extent, that’s to be expected, given the relevant differences between various functions in the library, various types of libraries, and various communities encountered. To make the library run, we need to play different roles.

But, then, why are we all called ‘librarians’? You wouldn’t say that everyone who works at Apple is a software engineer. Or that everyone at Disney World is an “Imagineer”. True, there are organizations like schools, where most members are called ‘teachers’. But, that makes sense because teachers play the same general role, just in different domains. Librarians, on the other hand, play very different roles within their organizations…but all in the same domain.

If we do like many librarians, and go the route of defining ourselves in terms of information particulars (e.g., information literacy, organization of information, access to information, etc.) then we run the real risk of marginalizing our coworkers. Librarians are experts in organizing information? Good for the catalogers, bad for the instructors. Experts in information literacy? Good for the instructors, bad for the catalogers. Experts on literacy? Great for the school librarians, not so much for the medical librarians. Hopefully, you get the drift. In contrast, I think that by defining librarians as experts on the social transcript, we can create a more inclusive environment. Whether cataloging, reference, or archives, we all are playing different roles directed at the same domain of expertise: the social transcript. Likewise, whether school, public, special, or academic, we all have different communities of practice  but we all operate within the same social transcript. Whether you’re an academic reference librarian, a public cataloging librarian, or an early childhood literacy school librarian, we’re all applying our expertise within the social transcript and we all deserve the title ‘librarian’.

On the value of fiction

Many librarians want to define librarianship directly in terms of knowledge or information. But, as I’ve asked previously, if libraries are fundamentally places for acquiring knowledge or accessing information, what does that entail for works of fiction? Sure, you could argue that the reason we read The Brothers Karamazov is for insight and knowledge about the human condition, but that’s a rather cynical view of literature and it ignores the emotive and aesthetic value great literature can have. And, of course, the view completely falls apart with popular books like Twilight or the Harry Potter series. Do we read Harry Potter to gain knowledge about child wizardry? Twilight to gain insight into the experiences of teen werewolves?  Of course not. We read these books because they entertain us. We read these books because they are part of the cultural landscape. In other words, they are sewn into the fabric of the social transcript. This is why 50 Shades of Grey makes headlines, and far more sexually explicit books in the same library don’t: 50 Shades of Grey is part of our social transcript (Working Stiff…not so much).

On the value of bad information

Of course, our commitment to knowledge and information is a still a pretty big deal. So, it seems odd that we routinely collect, organize, and make accessible bad information. We say we are committed to information literacy or that we are committed to knowledge creation. And yet we keep on buying books on homeopathy. On astrology. On bullshit medical advice that is killing children. Libraries are full of  misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies. And even with less controversial topics, libraries stock their shelves with books that directly contradict each other. Why?

Part of the reason for this is because, as experts on the social transcript, we understand the difference between primary information and secondary information. By ‘primary information’ I mean the actual claims made by an information source. By ‘secondary information’ I mean the information we can derive about an information source. For example, a physics textbook contains primary information insofar as it reports certain facts about the world. It contains secondary information insofar as that collection of facts, formulae, and theories says something about the social transcript (i.e., secondary information about what we take to be ‘physics’). Likewise, though a book on homeopathy contains a great deal of false information at the primary level, it offers a great deal of valuable secondary information about the social transcript: it tells us what some people think is true. As stewards of the social transcript, we need to provide both what is true as well as what is believed to be true.

Of course, this isn’t to say that any information, misinformation, or disinformation is part of our domain, or that we have to treat misinformation and disinformation equitably. Patrons generally seek knowledge, not deception. So, we generally provide factual information, not fringe theories: I don’t give physics majors articles on astrology or medical students books on homeopathy. Unless they ask for them. Furthermore, scientific and cultural theories are constantly being adjusted. The medical theories of Galen won’t get you through medical school and Newton’s aether theory won’t get you through physics, but at a secondary level of information about information, it’s vital that libraries collect even these discredited theories as a means of enhancing the social transcript and preserving all of the links in the chain of knowledge.

On the value of librarians in a changing world

I’ll add one more upshot: defending the contemporary value of librarians. If we, as a profession, are going to justify our continued existence into the 21st Century, we need to make a strong case. One of the more popular tactics is to reposition librarianship as a social science, which directs our professional focus at information users rather than information itself.  I’d be an idiot to suggest that we shouldn’t pay close attention to the information needs of our communities. But, should that be the core of librarianship? When we go before the city council, the school board, or the budget committee, do we want to justify our value by saying, “well, we’re the people who study how communities use information”? Of course not. Research into the sociology of information use may be what we do, but it isn’t what defines us.

So, why not explain that librarians are experts on the social transcript? We’re the ones that make sure that the chain of knowledge is intact, reliable, and accessible. We ensure that our communities have access to the domain of knowledge and culture in a way that makes sense. That last bit is important. Yes, the amount of information available online is staggering. With an Internet connection, the average person has access to quantities of information that are orders of magnitude greater than even that contained in the Library of Congress. But, which information matters? This is where librarians come in: we make that flood of information manageable.

Moreover, defending librarianship in terms of the domain of knowledge or the social transcript gives us a firm foundation for the relevance of librarians in conversations regarding scholarly communication, open access, copyright, and similar important issues. Rather than describe our value with gate counts and grade point averages, we can point to our unique expertise in dealing with the transmission of knowledge across and through barriers. Not only do we curate information to help our patrons discover what matters, we play an active role in shaping the networks that convey that information.

Conclusion: it’s not about information

I guess what I’m trying to say is that information and knowledge are not the bedrock of a philosophy of librarianship. Yes, information and knowledge are integral to a properly functioning library, but they aren’t the things that distinguish us as librarians: we’re neither information scientists nor epistemologists. Instead, we’re experts on the transmission of information and knowledge through testimony. We understand the networks that preserve and deliver knowledge, if not the knowledge itself. Thinking of librarianship in terms of testimony solves some thorny philosophical issues, but if philosophical issues aren’t relevant to you, then just take the aggregate of all the various chains of knowledge and expression available to us. That’s the social transcript. And that’s where librarians live.

In my last post, I briefly discussed the meaning of the word ‘expert’, ending with a question: “Are librarians experts and, if so, experts on what?” I’m actually working on a paper at this very moment on the issue, but I thought the blog might be a good place to knock around some ideas. So, in this post I want to take a look at how academic librarians understand their own expertise and offer a brief account of how and why academic librarians can accurately be called experts.

Problem

First, I want to start with a problem. An old problem, actually, that goes all the way back to one of Plato’s earliest dialogues, the Charmides. In the passage that follows, Socrates and his interlocutor Critias are attempting to determine how an average person can tell a legitimate doctor from a quack…

Socrates: Then he who conducts his inquiry aright will consider the doctor, as a medical man, in connection with cases of health and disease.

Critias: So it seems.

S: And will inquire whether, in what is said or done in such cases, his words are truly spoken, and his acts rightly done?

C: He must.

S: Well now, could anyone follow up either of these points without the medical art?

C:No, indeed.

S: Nobody at all, it would seem, but a doctor; and so not the temperate man either: for he would have to be a doctor, in addition to his temperance.

[Charmides, 171b-c., trans. W. Lamb]

Call this the Paradox of Expertise: how can a non-expert evaluate the claims made by an expert? If we just blindly accept what an expert says, then we’re gullible. But, it would seem that the only way we can correctly evaluate the claims made by putative experts…is to become experts ourselves. But, then, we wouldn’t need to consult the experts in the first place, now would we?

As librarians, this is especially problematic because we are tasked with managing massive quantities of information, most of which we know little to nothing about. Though we may actually be subject-specialists in one or two disciplines, most librarians are charged with providing assistance across all disciplines. For example, I recently provided some research assistance for a graduate thesis in computational enjuneering ingenearing engeniering…I can’t even spell it I’m so not an expert. How can an idiot like me help a student research a complicated topic without knowing at least as much about that topic as the student asking for help?

What’s more, our patrons don’t seek out misinformation or disinformation; they don’t want to be deceived. No, our patrons seek information “in order to bring about good epistemic outcomes. That is, they want to acquire knowledge, true beliefs, justified beliefs, understanding, etc.” (Fallis, 2006). They come to the library for knowledge…so how can non-subject-specialist librarians facilitate their search? If I’m not an expert on quantum mechanics, how can I help generate new knowledge about quantum mechanics? Put another way, how are students justified in accepting the information the librarian provides?

Well, there are two main approaches to getting around the Paradox of Expertise: criticize the very idea of expertise and show that it is inapplicable or try to figure out some area of expertise that can get librarians through Plato’s trap. First, the negative, or “critical”, approach…

There’s no such thing as experts!

Sure, there have always been the curmudgeonly professors who view academic librarians as mere handmaidens to annotated bibliographies or as merely the people who place book orders. But, lately, there have been calls from within our own ranks to the effect that librarians are not experts…nor should they be. Taking their cues from postmodern theory, some librarians argue that the concept of expertise is tied to knowledge and knowledge to power and that power invariably leads to oppression or subjugation (LeMoine, 2012) . The idea is that being “an expert” is purely a social relationship and that if librarians adopt the “expert” mantle, then librarians are (re)enforcing a relationship of power: we’re experts, you’re not, so we call the shots. As Martin (2009) asks it, “[h]ow can experts assume to know what is right for all people if there is no body of independent, universal truth from which they manifest their expertise?” (p. 3). [This sentiment was recently echoed throughout the comments on this post by Wayne Bivens-Tatum. For the record, Wayne has it right.]

The postmodern approach is to circumvent hierarchies of oppression by embracing relativism, abandoning truth, and focusing instead on the social construction of knowledge, thereby transforming librarians into “non-experts and therefore [making them] more human-centered” (Stover, 2004). As to our relationship with knowledge, Stover (2004) writes that ”a postmodern expert’s knowledge is constructed again and again, and may change depending on the client’s needs and experiences” (p.278). Knowledge, hence expertise, is contextual, relative, and socially determined.

Of course, the obvious question arises: if we’re not experts, and if there is in fact no such thing as truth, fact, or objective knowledge, then what the hell purpose do we serve? If it’s all just competing, equally valid “worldviews”, then there is no reason for a student to come to a librarian in the first place…Google will do just fine. The literature on postmodernism or social constructionism in libraries is sizable, but as I’ve previously argued and then reaffirmed later, postmodern approaches to LIS are antithetical to the educational mission of libraries and they can only lead to disenfranchisement. In the absence of arguments to the contrary, let’s just agree that postmodern librarianship is self-contradictory, elitist, anti-intellectual bunk and that we actually are experts in something. But, experts in what?

Librarians are experts on information

If you’ll recall from my last post, I follow Goldman’s (2001) definition of ‘expert’:

An expert (in the strong sense) in domain D is someone who possesses an extensive fund of knowledge (true belief ) and a set of skills or methods for apt and successful deployment of this knowledge to new questions in the domain. (p. 92)

When librarians attempt to define the domain of their expertise–the place where they have knowledge and the ability to apply it–it usually boils down to some aspect of information. Librarians might be “experts at collecting” information (King and Porter, 2012), and especially experts on “the collections they manage and the writing process as practiced in the disciplines” (Wilder, 2005). Librarians might be “information experts” (Pressley and Gilbertson, 2011; O’Kelly and Lyon,2011; Crosby, 2001). For yet others, we’re experts on information literacy, information ethics, information seeking, or information resources. It almost always comes back to information. But, as Shannon (1953) pointed out,

the word ‘information’ has been given different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory. It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition. It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field. (p. 105)

Basically, the concept of information is too polysemous to be the foundation for our expertise. For example, let’s try a quick show of hands: how many of us spent time in library school discussing signal processing, electrical engineering, or applied mathematics? How many of us are familiar with the Kullback–Leibler divergence or the Shannon-Weaver model? I’m guessing that most of us aren’t familiar because we’re not information scientists (despite the somewhat misleading ‘IS’ in some of our professional certifications). And though there are other, more librarian-friendly aspects of information out there (such as the semantic conception of information), I think we should try to reframe librarian expertise in terms of something more tangible and useful. Information literacy, information seeking, and similar social/behavioral activities are candidates, though I think they are too narrow to be self-sufficient. And we certainly don’t want an open-ended conjunction to describe ourselves in our elevator-speeches: “What’s a librarian, you ask? Well, a librarian is an expert on information literacy and information seeking and access to information and information needs and information technology and infor…hey, where are you going?!”

Librarians and the domain of knowledge

I’ll grant that saying librarians are experts on information management is good for general purpose use. But, we’re experts on information management to what end? Rather than try to situate ourselves as experts in some subject area…rather than try to call ourselves a “science”…I’d like to see librarians take a meta-theoretical approach to what they do. As Abraham Kaplan (1964) argued, librarianship should not be confused with sciences and should instead be placed with the meta-scientific endeavors of logic, mathematics, linguistics, and information science (p. 301). Library theory is not focused on the “substance and content of the endless domain [of knowledge], but only with its form, with its structure, with its order, with the interrelations of the various parts” (p. 304). If Kaplan is right (and I think he is) then librarians are experts on the form, structure, and order of the domain of knowledge, not on any particular subject. So, that’s the direction I want to take: librarians are experts on “the domain of knowledge”. But, what does that really mean?

I should probably say a little something about “the domain of knowledge” and how we come to access it. Historically, philosophers have focused on knowledge acquisition through either direct experience, reason, or reflection, and epistemology has been a highly individualistic enterprise. Yet, the vast majority of what we know doesn’t come from direct experience or ratiocination at all. As Hume put it in his Enquiry,

there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eyewitnesses and spectators (Book X, Part I)

Now, Hume wasn’t talking about courtroom testimony: put simply, testimony is the declaration of fact by a speaker to a hearer/reader/viewer/etc.. For example, I know I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana not by direct experience, but by the testimony of my parents and the testimony of my birth certificate. Likewise, even though I’ve never been there to measure it, I know that Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa by the testimony of those who have. Books, articles, videos, photos, paintings, or whatever information source you choose, these are all candidate means for transmitting testimony. In a nutshell, all those information sources that we librarians collect, organize, and provide access to…they’re means of transmitting testimony.

Of course, we want to avoid the gullibility horn of the Paradox of Expertise, so we have to have an account for where that testimony comes from in the first place. As Michael Dummett writes, for something to count as knowledge, having been told it,

the original purveyor of the information - the first link in the chain of transmission - must himself have known it, and therefore have been a position to know it, or it cannot be knowledge for any of those who derived it ultimately from him. (1994, p. 264)

Jennifer Lackey (1999) slightly weakens Dummett’s claim, explaining that, “[w]hat is necessary for testimonial knowledge is that a speaker’s statement be appropriately connected with the truth, where knowledge on the part of the speaker is only one such connection” (p. 489, my emphasis). And this, I think, is the locus of librarian expertise. A librarian need not be an expert on the subject matter at hand to be a reliable source for knowledge. We just have to provide and guarantee an “appropriate connection” to the knowledge in question so that patrons are connected to knowledge in the appropriate way. Though I may not know a thing about computational whatchamacallit, I can provide a student with the right chain of testimony to get her in touch with the knowledge she needs. Our traditional norms of librarianship (information literacy, accessibility, verifiability, archives, etc.) are all directed at the causal chain of testimony that transmits knowledge from its initial instance to a knowledge seeker.

Librarians are experts on the causal chain of testimony

Like Kaplan argues, we aren’t experts on some particular subject, we’re experts at a meta-theoretical level. Librarians are experts on the causal chain of testimonial transmission. As librarians, we are tasked with ensuring that the causal chain of testimony is intact, accessible, and reliable (i.e., truth-conducive) and to that end we apply (and teach) information literacy, authority control, collection development, and a host of other skills. We promote accessibility, verifiability, and an archival mission. We don’t sit in judgment of particular claims of fact or opinion. Our role is as experts on the transmission of knowledge, not the contents of that knowledge. Following Goldman’s definition, we have domain knowledge of how knowledge spreads through reliable networks and we have the skills needed to tackle new problems in managing those networks.

Basically, there’s a ton of information, misinformation, and disinformation out there. For knowledge seekers, it can be difficult to trace a claim or theory back to the original evidence or justification. That’s where librarians step in as guides. While other experts create new knowledge, we are tasked with managing that knowledge, which requires a type of expertise in its own right. In a strict sense, we’re experts on the causal chain of testimonial transmission. In an elevator-friendly sense, librarians are experts on the domain of knowledge.

Since this is already a rather long post, I’ll hold off on detailing the upshot to my little theory. But, I do think that thinking about librarian expertise can yield specific benefits. In the next post I’ll discuss how a testimony-based view of librarianship gives equal value to all librarian types (public, academic, cataloging, reference, access, etc.), how it solves tricky ethical issues in librarianship, how it admits of both fiction and nonfiction, and how it can be used to prove our value when asked “why do we need librarians anyway?” Later on, I’ll discuss some problems in the epistemology of testimony, and how librarians can help. Here’s a good article, if you’re interested in what those problems may be. In any event, if you bothered to read this far, let me know what you think. I think that librarians are experts on the domain of knowledge understood as the chain of testimony, but I could be wrong. After all, I’m no expert.

Stuff I mentioned earlier

Crosby, O.. (2001). Librarians: Information experts in the Information Age. Occupational Outlook Quarterly, 44(4): 2-15.

Dummett, M. (1994). Testimony and memory. In Matilal, B. and Chakrabarti, A. (Eds.). Knowing from Words, (pp. 251-272), Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Fallis, D. (2006). Epistemic value theory and social epistemology. Episteme, 2(3): 177-188. Online.

Goldman, A. I. (2001). Experts: which ones should you trust. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63(1): 85-101.

Kaplan, A. (1964). The age of the symbol–a philosophy of library education. Library Quarterly, 34(4), 295-304. [Link to review]

King, D. L., & Porter, M. (2012, Feb. 14). Create a library “tech shop”. American Libraires blog. Online.

Lackey, J. (1999). Testimonial knowledge and transmission. The Philosophical Quarterly, 49(197): 471-490.

O’Kelly, M. K., & Lyon, C.. (2011). Google like a librarian. College and Research Libraires News, 72(6): 330-332. Online.

Pressley, L. & Gilbertson, K.. (2011). Librarians as experts: Using the web to assess our value. Computers in Libraries, 31(4): 19-23.

Shannon, C. (1953). The lattice theory of information. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 1(1): 105-107

Weaver, W., (1949). The mathematics of communication. Scientific American, 181(1): 11–15. Online.

Wilder, S. (2005). Information literacy makes all the wrong assumptions. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(18). Online.

If you read TheAtlantic.com regularly, then you may have seen a recent article entitled “Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of ‘Expert‘” by resident Wikipedia-booster Rebecca J. Rosen. According to Rosen, even though Wikipedia is deferential to expertise, changes are afoot:

a new study from researchers at Stanford University and Yahoo Research points to a complementary phenomenon: The definition of what makes someone an expert is changing…Expertise, to these researchers, isn’t who a writer is but what a writer knows, as measured by what they read online.

Actually, what she links to is a summary of a poster presentation from the 2012 World Wide Web conference in Lyon. The poster, entitled “A Data-Driven Sketch of Wikipedia Editors“, presents the findings of an as yet unpublished study by a couple of computer scientists from Yahoo! Research and a doctoral student from Stanford. The longer paper, entitled “Smart but Fun: A Data-Driven Portrait of Wikipedia Editors,” is still under review so I won’t pull any juicy citations from it, but it’s worth a read anyway. But, basically, the researchers pulled data from the Yahoo! Toolbar and compared the search behavior of Wikipedia editors to that of other Web users. They found that Wikipedia users tend to be “more sophisticated than usual Web users” and “deeply immersed in pop culture.” No big surprise. (Except for the “more sophisticated” bit. I don’t know any tech-savvy people who would willingly install the Yahoo! Toolbar.) Anyway, Rosen zeroes in on the researchers claim that “[i]ntuitively, someone is an expert in a topic if their interest is significantly above average.” She adds that “it’s a new and radically distilled understanding of expertise: An expert is someone who knows something.” All this supposedly lends credence to Maria Bustillos’s infamous claim that Wikipedia has meant “the death of the expert.” Or, at the very least, it’s signaled a new sense of expertise that is gradually usurping traditional notions of credibility.

The experts aren’t dead

If you’ve bothered to click on the links, you’ll see pretty quickly that Rosen’s article is ill-informed and that she probably hasn’t read the very study she cites. Likewise, you’ll see that the authors of the study have a weak grasp of what it means to be intuitive. “Intuitively, someone is an expert in a topic if their interest is significantly above average”? In what world is that intuitive? Apparently a world where correlation implies causation, I guess. A world where compulsive gamblers are experts on game theory, teenage boys are experts on the female reproductive system, and toddlers are experts on differential geometry. I think we all can agree that merely showing a great deal of interest in a subject does not make you an expert on said subject.

By now I’m sure you’ve read about the spate of little, free libraries popping up all over the place; if you’re lucky, you may have even seen and used one. The idea is simple: volunteers build and install small book depositories in public spaces, inviting passers-by to take a book, leave a book, or both. The Little Free Library Project of Madison, Wisconsin is one of the more successful projects, though a lot of attention is also given to urban hacking Department of Urban Betterment project in New York City. Wherever they find a home, these DIY libraries are rightly heralded as testaments to reading, sharing, and community.

I think institutional libraries can learn a lot from these tiny upstarts. DIY libraries reinforce that libraries are social institutions, they fulfill needs that library theorists often ignore, and they provide an indirect commentary on the relationship between libraries and media. Here’s a short list of lessons that I think librarians can learn from the DIY library movement.

1. Librarians don’t define what a library is.

Pretty much everyone associated with the DIY library movement is comfortable using the term “library.” However, I doubt most institutional librarians would be so comfortable, at least assuming the library literature/blogosphere reflects the interests of the “official” libraries. DIY libraries have no circulation policies, no collection development policies, no reference assistance, no substantive organization of information, no archival mission, no information literacy programming…you get the idea. Micro libraries retain almost nothing of the institutional library services and activities that we usually take to be the foundations of our field. Indeed, recent studies have shown that most people have no idea what libraries are even talking about. It all goes to show that, ultimately, a library is a social institution and the meaning of the concept “library” is fixed externally. Librarians don’t decide what is or is not a library–a community decides.

2. Libraries aren’t just about knowledge and information.

“Libraries exist to give us access to information.” So says Thomas Frey in a widely shared post from a few weeks ago. (EDIT: I should have read up on Frey before quoting him; this guy is a kook and in no way a spokesperson for libraries. Mea culpa.) “The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.” So says David Lankes in his award-winning Atlas of New Librarianship. Poke around and you’ll soon realize that the institutional library-world places a premium on things like information literacy, knowledge management, information technology, organization of knowledge, and so on. Hell, most of the posts on this blog are about libraries and epistemology. But, shelf-read a little, free library and you aren’t likely to find a heavy insistence on learning or knowledge. Instead, as the Utne Reader describes it you’re more likely to find “anything from Russian novels and gardening guides to French cookbooks and Dr. Seuss.”

I suppose you could argue that we read Dostoevsky in order to gain knowledge about the human condition (or Dr. Seuss to gain knowledge about the merits of hopping on Pop), but it seems absurd to recast every work of fiction in terms of knowledge creation. The fact of the matter is that the mission of libraries is more than just “knowledge creation” or “access to information;” it’s also about the shared literary experience. Yes, truth, fact, and information are enormously important to libraries, and society has to a large extent entrusted institutional libraries with upholding certain democratic principles relating to knowledge. All I’m saying is that DIY libraries demonstrate that society has also entrusted libraries with cultural works. In particular, the micro libraries mostly share fiction, that is, the same fiction that drives public library circulation statistics and the battle over ebooks. Clearly, communities are not formed around DIY libraries because of social justice, empowerment, knowledge-seeking, or access to information; they are formed around the desire to share (and share in) stories. Yet, major library theorists like Lankes and Frey have (literally) nothing to say about the aesthetic and cultural value of literature or fiction in libraries. So, I think the DIY library is a nice reminder that knowledge creation is only part of what we do in libraries–it would be nice if our mission statements reflected that.

3. Printed books are still relevant.

Here’s a thought experiment: take a bunch of librarians, put them online, and tell them to talk about books. Now, how many tweets will it take before the discussion turns to the differences between print and e-books? If you answered “three”, well, congratulations! Public librarians online and at conferences just love talking about ebooks. Yet, DIY libraries succeed precisely because they abandon the electronic option and deal straight-forwardly in printed books. I suppose someone is working on a kiosk with free ebooks available over wi-fi, but that misses the point of community building. Yes, digital stuff is great. But, print books are totems of written culture and they play an invaluable role in the way we bond as a group over the written word. Maybe it’s just a sort of print fetishism that leads people to lament digital solutions like ebooks or the Internet, but fetishism is still evidence of deep-seated conviction.

4. Libraries will always find a way.

With all the doom and gloom over the future of institutional libraries it’s nice to see evidence that, come what may, libraries in some form will always find a way. Google can’t completely kill-off the library and no matter how pervasive social media becomes we will still want to gather in person in a physical place dedicated to a shared interest. Think of it like watching live music or visiting an art gallery (or, for many librarians, attending conferences). DIY libraries tap into the desire to freely gather around a shared passion for reading and/or learning. Of course, not every library patron is necessarily passionate about libraries. Full-sized, institutional libraries serve a lot of social and cultural functions, and they provide much needed services in their communities. A given patron might only want free Internet access or a 1040EZ and not give a damn about reading and learning. But, just as the heart of a museum isn’t the gift-shop, the heart of the library isn’t in providing free Internet access or tax forms. The heart of a library is in the social transcript and people’s desire to gather around it. That desire isn’t going away anytime soon and as long as we want to gather in person we’re going to have libraries. They might be entire buildings, single rooms, or even repurposed birdhouses. They may or may not have a trained, professional staff. I don’t know what will happen to librarians in the future, but I do know that the DIY libraries prove that libraries in some form are here to stay.

So, there you have it: some stuff I think institutional libraries can learn from the DIY library movement. Just to reiterate, I’m not saying that DIY libraries are a replacement for institutional libraries. I’m not saying that librarians are unnecessary. Institutional libraries serve an essential purpose that should not be diminished and professional librarians are absolutely vital. All I’m trying to point out is that the DIY movement highlights certain social attitudes that libraries and librarians shouldn’t neglect. So, what do you think? Are tiny, do-it-yourself libraries “libraries” at all? Do they point to anything important about the library as a social institution? If you want to chime in, just write something in a moleskine and put it in a milk-crate on the corner. I’ll pick it up later.

MacGyver. Bart. Doogie. Theo. If you were a boy in middle school in the early ’90s, the playground arguments over who was the coolest guy on television featured some predictable characters. I’ll admit I thought these guys were pretty rad but, at the time, the television personality I most wanted to be was “the kid with a report due on space”:

That’s Donavan Freberg–the Encyclopedia Britannica kid–and when I was 13 I thought he was the coolest guy on television. I wanted to be the Encyclopedia Britannica kid. Of course, now, in retrospect, I’ll admit that in the pantheon of late-’80s/early-’90s, irritating advertising campaigns, the Britannica Kid ranks somewhere between the Noid and Richard Lewis selling juice boxes. But, at the time the Kid had something I wanted: he could get away with back-talking the grown-ups. From his first appearance ”eating fiber and all that stuff” to his infamous red-shirted condescension, the Kid never failed to answer that timeless question: “What if Doogie Howser was an asshole?” Throughout the ad campaign, the Kid constantly belittled and mocked the Announcer and the audience (and his hair stylist) and he always got away with it…thanks to his Britannica-enhanced super-brain. The Kid taught me that even though adults were authority figures, access to knowledge was the great equalizer.

The Micropædia(or “the encyclopedia wars”)

Why do I bring this up? Well, as the Gray Lady reports: after 244 years Encyclopedia Britannica is stopping the presses and calling it quits on print. As the editors of the EB were quick to point out, Britannica will continue to exist as an online publication, but the cancellation of the print-version has lead to quite a bit of emotional outpouring. The feel of the print, the “countless hours of entertainment and wanderlust”, the inspired awe, the cookies-and-milk comfort of “Grandma’s living room,” and…excuse me…I’ve just got a little dust in my eye.

Of course, all this outpouring is accompanied by a strong emotional backlash against Wikipedia; so strong you’d think that Britannica was calling it quits across the board and prostrating themselves before the capricious evil of “the crowd.” Comments are angrily excited that this means the “death of knowledge” and conversations invariably turn to crowd-sourced alternatives. The conservative old-guard issues ill-informed arguments against “Opinionpedia“, decries the fact that “on any given topic…Wikipedia is likely to contain thousands of howlingly incorrect statements“, and laments the “Dark Ages upon us.” In defense, some Young Turks laugh at Britannica “running on the fumes of history” and declare Wikipedia the “winner” of an ill-defined contest with continually moving goalposts. If anything, it just goes to show that the trolls live under both sides of the bridge. For my part, whether it’s 32 volumes of Britannica, or 1,643 volumes of Wikipedia, when it comes to how I acquire knowledge, I tend not to summarily accept or reject information based solely on where it’s published. The former is deferential gullibility, the latter is abject cynicism, and neither are reliable paths to knowledge. (Of course, not every commentator is crying foul and, interestingly, many of the most calm and measured responses come from Wikipedians.)

Anyway, I don’t want pick sides. For me, these encyclopedias are profoundly different resources and each deserves praise and blame for various intellectual virtues and vices. Neither is a replacement for the other because in many cases each does well what the other does poorly. What I find more interesting are the questions raised by the Britannica versus Wikipedia debate on matters of testimony. I don’t mean testimony in the courtroom sense. I mean testimony in the epistemic sense: assertions of fact offered as evidence. For example, the only way I know my date of birth is through the testimony of others–specifically my parents, the hospital, and the Social Security Administration. Given that most of our claims to knowledge rely on testimonial evidence, it’s important to think about how we should evaluate testimony. In the case of encyclopedias we need to ask whether we should “trust” the crowd-vetted factual claims in Wikipedia, or whether Britannica is more trustworthy because it relies on (putative) experts. These questions aren’t new, but I think it might help to provide some context.

The Macropædia (or “two views on testimony”)

Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid argued that we have an innate “principle of credulity“, which he described as “a disposition to confide in the veracity of others.” The idea is that claims to fact or knowledge are trustworthy unless otherwise shown. By corollary, we have the “principle of veracity”, which is a natural disposition to make claims that are factual. For Reid, testimony is prima facie trustworthy and should be trusted in the absence of clear evidence of deceit. This view is known as anti-reductionism about testimony. In contrast, there’s reductionism about testimony, with which the Scottish bad-ass David Hume is associated. Hume argued that testimony is always reducible to more basic forms of inference; testimony is always “founded on past experience” (Of Miracles, p. 117). So, on the one hand there’s Hume the reductionist who would hold that we should only trust the claims made in an encyclopedia insofar as we have further, non-testimonial evidence that the claims are likely to be true. On the other hand, there’s the anti-reductionist Reid who would hold that testimony in and of itself is trustworthy provided there is no countervailing evidence. You know what? Here’s a great online, peer-reviewed encyclopedia article that explains the difference. Moving on…

If we concede to the pro-Britannica extremists their arguments, then what we can accept as fact becomes limited to just those information resources that include independently, inductively verifiable causal chains of evidence from direct perception to justified belief: in other words, Hume’s reductionism. The problem, of course, is that what we can then accept as fact becomes circumspect to the point that virtually none of our claims to knowledge will count. For example, based on his online profile, I think I know that Joe Grobelny lives in Colorado but, lacking any direct and independent evidence about either his whereabouts or his trustworthiness, the reductionist would say I am not justified in believing it. Same goes for Wikipedia: lacking direct and independent evidence about the trustworthiness of Wikipedia editors, we shouldn’t trust the claims in Wikipedia. For the global reductionist, Britannica offers both quality information, and independent evidence (credentialed experts, rigorous fact-checking, etc.) that the information is trustworthy. In the early days of Wikipedia, The Economist provided a funny example of the reductionism inherent in the anti-Wikipedia crowd:

Somebody who reads Wikipedia is “rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom,” says [Robert McHenry, Editor-in-Chief of Britannica 1992-1997]. “It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.” One wonders whether people like Mr McHenry would prefer there to be no public lavatories at all.

(The Economist, April 20, 2006. Quoted from Don Fallis’s excellent article “Toward an Epistemology of Wikipedia“)

Of course, this sort of global reductionism is problematic because, in the majority of cases, we don’t have independent evidence to support the trustworthiness of testimony. But, as the anti-reductionists will argue, that’s okay. All we need is some sort of epistemic principle to the effect that sometimes we are justified in believing factual assertions, even in the absence of independent evidence. For example, the non-reductionist can argue that we ought to accept testimony insofar as testimony is a reliable source of truth. Wikipedians often resort to this stance when confronted and, as numerous studies have shown, Wikipedia is, indeed, as reliable a source for true claims as Britannica. That doesn’t mean that everything in Wikipedia is true, only that most of it is, and therefore we are justified in believing what we find in Wikipedia (so long as the claim being considered isn’t undermined by countervailing evidence). Same goes for Britannica.

Propædia (or, “I didn’t understand any of that other stuff”

Encyclopedias are sources of testimony and our epistemic attitudes towards Wikipedia and Britannica are reflections of our general attitudes towards testimony. Those who insist on only believing what can be independently and directly verified are in the reductionist camp. That’s a legitimate position, but the onus is on the reductionist to account for the majority of cases where we lack direct evidence. Honestly, if you read the arguments of the more extreme pro-Britannica you’ll see that they are committed to incredulity about not just Wikipedia, but also to the majority of knowledge claims. When you say you flat-out refuse to accept the truth of a claim if it hasn’t been vetted by credentialed experts, you’ll have to be skeptical about the majority of your beliefs including, for example, your own birthday.

On the other hand, if you point to the reliability of Wikipedia as evidence of its trustworthiness, you may be adopting an anti-reductionist position. Again, this is a legitimate position, but the onus is on the anti-reductionist to provide an account that avoids mere gullibility. The anti-reductionist needs to describe the special, epistemic norms that are unique to beliefs based on testimony, and that’s a big task. I think Wikipedia’s core content policies are great step in the right direction, but there’s plenty more work to be done. Personally, I’m in the anti-reductionist camp and I see a veritistic social epistemology as the best way forward.

So, the debate over the virtues and vices of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia is important because it allows us a lens through which we can look at broader issues involving belief and justification. If we categorically dismiss Wikipedia because it hasn’t been vetted, we’re tacitly adopting skepticism about almost everything we believe. If we blindly embrace either Britannica or Wikipedia, we’re just gullible. I’d like to think there’s a middle way and I’ll probably revisit the role of testimony in information science in future posts. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I never did get my Britannica. But it’s just as well…I mean, have you seen the Britannica Kid recently? I should have picked MacGyver instead.

SOCRATES: In the matter of just and unjust, fair and foul, good and evil, which are the subjects of our present consultation, ought we to follow the opinion of the many and to fear them; or the opinion of the one man who has understanding, and whom we ought to fear and reverence more than all the rest of the world: and whom deserting we shall destroy and injure that principle in us which may be assumed to be improved by justice and deteriorated by injustice; is there not such a principle?

CRITO: Certainly, there is, Socrates.

      -Plato, Crito, 47c-d [trans. by Benjamin Jowett] [link]

It seems that Wikipedia is getting into trouble with the experts…again. As he explains in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education), Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse, an academic with years of experience researching the Haymarket Affair (i.e., an expert on the topic), ran into difficulty editing the Wikipedia article on the event because his suggested improvements constituted original research, contradicted the scholarly majority opinion, and lacked sufficient source attribution. Basically, Messer-Kruse attempted to correct commonly believed factual inaccuracies and was summarily shot-down.

Of course, the comments thread on the article exploded with academics crying foul against Wikipedia’s supposed disregard for truth and its supposed anti-intellectual populism. On the matter of truth, critics point to Wikipedia’s appeal to the “flash mob” of consensus instead of the authority of fact. On the matter of populism, scholars are peeved that Wikipedia gives non-experts the ability to rebuff experts. Messer-Kruse knows more about the Haymarket Affair than any of the editors on the Wikipedia page, so why should we give credence to their version of the facts over his? To the anti-Wikipedia crowd, this is yet more proof that Wikipedia is an inherently corrupt service. Then again, to other commentators, this is yet more proof that the expert is dead. The funny thing is, the ‘Haymarket Affair’ affair goes a long way in proving that both groups are wrong.

Consensus about the truth is not the same as truth by consensus

You see, Wikipedia does disregard truth. Wikipedia does give more weight to consensus. Wikipedia does allow non-experts to edit the experts. And, there’s nothing wrong with that. By its very design, Wikipedia has never been about adjudicating fact and fiction, or true from false. The epistemological project of Wikipedia is merely to report the facts and theories described by scholarly consensus, common knowledge, and reliable news sources. Put another way, Wikipedia is an exercise in descriptive epistemology (what people do believe); Wikipedia is not founded on normative epistemic principles (what people should believe). Actually, if anything, the whole farrago of criticism just goes to show that Wikipedia is surprisingly deferential to expertise, if not parasitic on it. The real problem is that many scholars are unable to accept this epistemological difference in the way Wikipedia works and they tend to treat it in inappropriate terms.

So, what are these descriptive epistemic norms? Wikipedia self-identifies three, the first of which is the core principle that “the threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth.” The intent of the verifiability criterion is to construct Wikipedia in such a way that (ideally) if Wikipedia is wrong about something, then that’s because the scholarly community is wrong about something (and not the other way around). In addition to the verifiability criterion, Wikipedia also includes two other core principles: ”neutral point of view (NPOV)” and “no original research (NOR)“, both of which are intended to minimize the impact of non-expertise. NPOV effectively prevents the scholarly consensus from being overshadowed by fringe theories and NOR ensures that Wikipedia editors are not placed in the position of peer-reviewers. Together, the core principles are an attempt to ensure that Wikipedia remains a place of descriptive, rather than normative, epistemology. Both the critics as well as certain naïve supporters fail to appreciate that the goal of Wikipedia is to provide a consensus about truth, not truth by consensus.

Sure, there are editors who don’t abide by the rules and there are many putative facts and theories that lack acceptably verifiable sources. There’s also the problem that novice researchers use Wikipedia uncritically and shallowly. But, it’s not like more traditional scholarship is safe as milk, as even a cursory glance at the recent state of scholarly communication will prove. Of course, all this gets lost in the proclamations that Wikipedia has fundamentally changed the nature of truth or, conversely, in the comments to Messer-Kruse’s article, as the anti-Wikipedians throw red herring after red herring but never land a substantive criticism (and there are plenty…but “it’s not peer-reviewed” is not one of them)

What’s a non-expert to do?

So, Wikipedia is a descriptive project. But, where does that leave Messer-Kruse? Shouldn’t the Wikipedia article in question report his findings? Well, not necessarily, and I think this whole Messer-Kruse affair boils down to the more general problem of how non-experts are supposed to evaluate claims to expertise. This is a tricky problem: should novices accept expert testimony by fiat, or are there rational means for a non-expert to evaluate the experts? And it isn’t just tricky, it’s important; as Hume reminded us: “there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men” (Enquiry, Book X, Part I). If not a majority, then at least a substantial portion of our claims to knowledge ultimately rest on the testimony of others (for example, I know that David Hume lived in Scotland purely based on the testimony of his biographers).

But, many times, when we seek truth we are met with false claims to expertise: quack doctors, mail-order doctorates, falsified research, and so on. So, how are laypersons to determine which experts are reporting the truth? This isn’t a new question either. As Plato discussed in Charmides (cf. 170a ff.), for a non-expert to adequately evaluate the claims of an expert, it would seem that the non-expert would have to know as much about the topic at hand as the expert…which would make the non-expert an expert. Awkward!

This is where Wikipedia’s descriptive epistemology comes into play. By merely reporting the findings of the scholarly community, Wikipedia editors can avoid the trap and push normative epistemic issues back to the scholarly community. For the Wikipedia editor, it is the job of the scholarly community to decide the facts; in most cases, the Wikipedia editor lacks sufficient expertise. So, when a scholar like Messer-Kruse goes to a layperson and presents findings that contradict scholarly consensus, the non-expert can either become an expert or defer to scholarly consensus.

Citation needed

Now, I’m not really that big of a fan of Wikipedia, if only because I hardly use it. I’m not usually after simple, descriptive facts like “X number of people died in the Haymarket Affair.” I’m generally after theory, which the looking-glass of Wikipedia has a more difficult time reflecting. It’s not that Wikipedia is wrong about theory, it’s just that it lacks the depth and breadth of coverage I want. But, that’s just because at a certain level scholarly consensus ends.

So, if you think Wikipedia is flawed because it won’t allow non-experts to defer to a single expert, then you don’t understand Wikipedia. If you think Wikipedia has meant the death of the expert or the end of truth, then you don’t understand Wikipedia. And, just in case you were wondering, I think the Haymarket Affair article has been edited to incorporate most of Messer-Kruse’s suggestions.^{[citation needed]}

If David Weinberger is to be believed, the Internet hasn’t just changed how we access information, it has altered the very meaning of ‘knowledge’. In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Weinberger claims that “for the coming generation, knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument.” Supposedly, the networked, collaborative, and social nature of the Internet has changed our very understanding of knowledge to the point that knowledge is no longer tied to concepts of truth, objectivity, or certainty. Instead, as Weinberger argues in his recent book, Too Big to Know, “knowledge is a property of the network” (p. xiii). That is, the Internet has profoundly changed what it means to be a fact, to be true, or to be known. This book has been making the rounds among librarians, so I thought it might be a good idea to try to explain Weinberger’s argument and what librarians should–and should not–take away from it.

Rethinking knowledge…

Weinberger begins by challenging our assumptions about what it means to be a ‘fact’. For centuries, facts were “relatively sparse, painstakingly discovered, and used to prove theories” (p. 38). This “Age of Classic Facts” has been torn asunder by the Internet age, insofar as the vast network we’ve created allows us to quickly and easily find disagreement about truth. As Weinberger explains, “push on a fact hard enough, and you’ll find someone contradicting it. Try to use facts to ground an argument, and you’ll find links to those who disagree with you all the way down to the ground” (p. 41). Sure, there’s always been disagreement about what is and is not true, but the vast size and networked nature of the Internet magnifies contradictions and dissent to the extent that mutually incompatible “facts” can exist simultaneously, equally, and democratically.

All this, because the hyperlinked and social environment of the Internet has supplanted the historic dominance of paper as our means for recording information. As Weinberger repeatedly insists, paper is a medium beset with limitations: books are limited in size, limited in distribution, and relatively expensive to make. Thus, he argues, traditional knowledge is a product of physical limitations–an “accident of paper”–and

if your medium doesn’t easily allow you to correct mistakes, knowledge will tend to be carefully vetted. If it’s expensive to publish, then you create mechanisms that winnow out contenders. If you’re publishing on paper, you will create centralized locations where you amass books. The property of knowledge as a body of vetted works comes directly from the properties of paper. (p. 45)

Given that “facts” are the putative foundations for knowledge, when that nature of facts change, the nature of knowledge must change as well. We have developed a tendency to reduce the number of things we’re willing to count as “facts” only because we have been historically conditioned to think in terms of the limitations imposed by paper. Yet,

because the Internet shows us how much there is to know and how deeply we disagree about everything, our old strategy of knowing by reducing what there is to be known–knowledge that is shaped like the data-information-knowledge-wisdom pyramid–is badly adapted to the new ecology” (p. 81).

The bulk of Weinberger’s book pursues this line of thought. He touches on the epistemic benefits of collaboration (Chapter 4), that the Internet allows greater voice to a diversity of opinions (Chapter 5), how hyperlinking has changed the (previously linear) way we think (Chapter 6), how science is flourishing in the Internet age (Chapter 7), how the Internet has affected decision-making (Chapter 8), and best practices for encouraging the growth of the Internet in light of how knowledge has been changed (Chapter 9). It’s an ambitious project, and Weinberger has certainly opened the floor for a compelling dialogue. (And I do hope I’ve presented his argument fairly.)

…now that the facts aren’t the facts…

I think part of the reason librarians have gravitated towards this book is that we realize that the library is in a state of flux. The rise of the Internet has complicated how we seek information, how we communicate information, and how we preserve information. It’s only natural during a sea change to shake the foundations a little bit. And, given that the historical foundations of librarianship are rooted in the collection of recorded knowledge in the form of print books, Weinberger’s ideas must seem enticing, to say the least. However, we owe  it to ourselves as information and knowledge professionals to take a philosophically coherent approach towards the objects of our trade; and on this count, Weinberger’s book falls flat.

Evgeny Morozov has already pointed out that Too Big to Know is ultimately a “shallow” and “incurious” project. Indeed, Weinberger’s handling of epistemology is about as philosophically sloppy as you can get; he comes across as deeply confused about the difference between  (1) justified, true belief and (2) what is believed to be true and/or justified. The former is what philosophers generally mean by “knowledge” (Gettier cases aside). The latter is more properly the domain of the social sciences. It’s “what do we know” versus “what do we think we know” and it’s a distinction that philosophers have long appreciated…and sophists have long abused. When you factor in the numerous straw-man arguments against classical views of knowledge, truth, objectivity, and information, the book is clearly bad philosophy.

Then again, Weinberger is coming at philosophy from a postmodernist standpoint (his dissertation was on Heidegger), so some of his more egregious fallacies can be explained away as mere rhetorical devices. What’s more salient here is his avowed debt to postmodernism. Supposedly, the Internet has proved the truth of the familiar postmodern tropes that “all knowledge and experience is an interpretation”, that “interpretations are social”, and that “there is no privileged position” (p. 89 ff). I’m not going to rehash the many, many, many, many problems of postmodernism, though I would like to add that if Weinberger were correct, and ”the Internet showed us that the postmodernists were right” (p. 90), then we’re not really left with any reason to agree with his arguments in the first place. After all, Weinberger is only offering one interpretation among many and there is no disinterested position from which we can evaluate competing interpretations, no “experts” or objective description of the world in which to appeal. So, if Weinberger’s right, then I’m correct in asserting that he’s wrong. As Steven Poole wryly observed, the argument of Too Big to Know only proves that a “flashmob of Wikipedia editors [would] probably have done better in a few weeks.”

…experts are everywhere…

Yet, despite the philosophical incoherence of Weinberger’s discussion of the new world of knowledge, there’s still something valuable for librarians: namely, the questions that the book raises. Postmodern critiques have always been powerful and adept at exposing problems in our worldview. That their proposed analysis of those problems is usually inconsistent and incoherent shouldn’t detract from the importance of the problems raised. At the very least, Weinberger’s book does point to some interesting issues in which librarians are very well versed. Actually, if anything, the value of Too Big to Know is best found in the way it draws attention to issues that bring librarians to the forefront.

For example, Weinberger is concerned about knowledge creation in a networked and social world and his proposal is that we abandon (or at least heavily modify) things like fact, truth, reason, and objectivity. However, what he fails to realize is that we already have an entire field of study devoted to knowledge in a social world; it’s called social epistemology and it was first introduced by none other than Jesse Shera…a librarian. Not only is social epistemology a core part of library science, it also avoids the postmodern fallacies by properly focusing on the impact of social networks on justification, rather than focusing on truth as Weinberger does. For librarians, who are already heavily invested in social epistemology, most of Weinberger’s observations are already objects of study, even as his analysis falls short.

In a similar vein, Weinberger tackles the sheer magnitude of information accessible via the Internet. He would have us redefine ‘fact’ from the sparse, hard-won facts of the past, into “networked facts” relying on “Linked Data” (p. 39). Of course, wrestling with massive quantities of data is also par for the course in library science. We’ve always wrestled with massive quantities of information: linked data, metadata, classification, you name it. Librarians, better than anybody, understand that the problem isn’t that there are more facts (the number of facts is and has always been not just infinite but uncountable) or that facts are now more accessible. Most facts are mundane and uninteresting: my name is Lane, the Earth is bigger than a marble, 47 is greater than 46, 48 is greater than 47, and so on. No, the problem is not that facts have somehow changed. The problem is that most of them aren’t interesting. Sorting the interesting and pragmatically useful facts from the fluff is a chore that requires more than mere networking, it requires understanding of the kind practiced by librarians.

As a final example, Weinberger makes a big deal of the changing importance of expertise–how the democratic Web seemingly gives everyone equal voice and therefore equal value. He writes, the Internet’s “massiveness alone gives rise to new possibilities for expertise–that is, for groups of unrelated people to collectively figure something out, or to be a knowledge resource about a topic far too big for any individual expert” (p. 52). And, you know, crowdsourcing of the kind practiced by projects like Galaxy Zoo or Wikipedia really is a wonderful thing. Distributing research across thousands (or even millions) of individuals is one of the greatest achievements of the Internet. Of course, if you know anything about the Oxford English Dictionary or the Longitudinal Prize, it’s certainly not a new idea; the Internet just sped things up, it didn’t change the meaning of knowledge or expertise. By analogy, we wouldn’t say that parallel processing changed the nature of computer processors, it just allowed a new technique with new advantages. Librarians get this. In social epistemology, we study the role of expertise in knowledge creation. In reference and instruction, we teach strategies for identifying expertise. We have a robust and coherent account of how we should and should not evaluate information, whether it is from one or one million sources. It’s the information that matters, not necessarily who provided it or how many people were involved in speeding up the discovery process.

…and the smartest person in the room is the room.

So, by all means read Too Big to Know; it raises important questions that need to be discussed in the Internet Age. Just don’t put much stock in Weinberger’s analysis; it’s inconsistent, incoherent, and purely rhetorical. Instead, read the book as a librarian. As librarians, we’ve been discussing these issues for centuries and we have robust and pragmatically useful means for answering them. Remember, we’re not about “books”, we never have been: we’re about information. Maybe Too Big to Know is a good reminder of that. If the Internet has changed anything, it has changed the scope of our mission and the importance of our craft. And both for the better.

EDIT: For a more philosophically robust and coherent take on knowledge creation in the Internet Age, take a look at Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012). 

On Sunday, I had an interesting exchange on Twitter with none other than Duke professor and HASTAC founder Cathy Davidson. At issue was the tone of her recent blog post, “How Digital Humanists Can Lead Us to National Digital Literacy.” I wasn’t going to write anything about it, but you know, it’s been bugging me a little bit. Allow me to quote her introduction to the post…

“Here’s the entrance exam question for 21st century literacy:

QUESTION: If SOPA/PIPA had been passed into U.S. law in 2002, would Wikipedia exist today? If either law had passed in 2012, would Wikipedia exist in 2022? Why or why not? Discuss.

If you cannot answer that question, you are not literate nor are you in control of your life—even if you think you are.” [my emphasis]

Now, I don’t know about you, but when a leading scholar (the leading scholar?) in the digital humanities argues that a nuanced understanding of SOPA and PIPA are necessary conditions for both literacy and personal autonomy, it strikes me as hyperbolic at best, and elitist and condescending at worst. I, for one, have no idea what Wikipedia would be like in 2022 if SOPA had passed. Apparently, I’m an illiterate slave to the system. Surely, Davidson doesn’t really think that personal autonomy is a function of how Web-savvy we are. Well, I posed the question and she responded: ”If we live our lives on the Web and don’t understand its positives AND negatives, we do not control our lives. All of us.” This is equivalent to saying that if we do control our lives, then either we don’t live on the Web or we do understand the positives and negatives of the Web…or both (which is weird).

Logic aside, I have trouble getting behind the belief that the personal autonomy (i.e., the ability to make informed, rational decisions free from coercion) of Web users is predicated on their ability to understand specific, Internet-related legislation. Now, maybe I could see it if Chris Dodd succeeded in becoming a Sith Lord and really could control our minds, but that seems unlikely. Tying autonomy to specific domain knowledge is just patently absurd. Can you imagine someone arguing that if you vote and you don’t understand Citizens United, or if you’re gay and don’t understand the implications of the Defense of Marriage Act, then you’re illiterate and have no control over your life? It’s not just absurd; it’s bordering on offensive.

Hyperbole aside, Davidson goes on to explain that most of us can’t answer the question posed, because most of us are “inheritors and perpetrators” of an educational system rooted in misguided Industrial Age theories about labor, consumption, and social progress (here’s Ken Robinson on the issue). As it turns out, if you’re an educator, you are actively participating in an antiquated educational system that favors the elite and is designed solely to prepare the rest of us for the workforce. Oh yeah, and don’t forget, you have no control over your life…that is, “unless you happen to be a Digital Humanist” [original emphasis]. That’s right. According to Davidson, you are “inheritors and perpetrators” of a corrupt system “unless you happen to be a Digital Humanist.” Suck it, physicists, philosophers, engineers, art historians, and the rest of you: your only option is to join the Digital Humanities.

Now, I’ve got no problem with the Digital Humanities. As defined by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘Digital Humanities’ refers to:

“a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities, or…ask traditional kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies.”

This is a great  field of study. An important field of study. In fact, I admit that a lot of my work falls under this definition. Sure, I’m baffled by the silliness of some of the Postmodernism 2.0 stuff like “Critical Code Studies”, “The Ethno-Hermeneutics of jQuery” or “Postcolonial Client-Server Architecture”. But, that’s just me objecting to a certain methodology, not to the importance of studying the digital as a part of the humanities. Like I said, I’ve got no problem with the Digital Humanities.

However, when a leading scholar like Davidson makes patronizing and divisive comments to the effect that if you don’t get SOPA, then you “do not control your life”, and that you’re perpetrating a broken system “unless you are a Digital Humanist”, well, something is amiss. Yes, as Web users, we should learn more about SOPA and its effects. Yes, as educators, we should think carefully about educational reform for the 21st Century. But one thing we should not do is hold SOPA and education reform up as litmus tests for literacy, autonomy, and effectiveness as teachers.

So, what do you think? Should familiarity with SOPA be used to measure literacy and autonomy? Are educators outside of the digital humanities perpetrators of a corrupted system? Am I just being overly sensitive?

Back in October, the geeks were crapping their collective shorts in anger at some ill-advised changes coming out of Mountain View. If you’ll recall, Google tweaked Reader and rolled out some crappy apps in what was called the week Google messed up. “We’re leaving Google!” the geeks proclaimed. This sort of “you changed your service, so I’m going elsewhere” bloviating is rather common with social media, so I decided to call the bluff: is it really possible to quit Google? Well, for the past 84 days I’ve been Google-free as part of my Life after Google experiment. That’s twelve weeks without using Google search or any other Google products. I am (almost) completely Google free*…and what an 84 days it’s been.

Since I started this experiment, Google has (arguably) violated anti-trust statutes with a social overhaul of the Google search algorithm, and, just this week, Google announced sweeping changes to privacy across the gamut of Google products and services. And I’m talking about some serious changes to privacy. Like, highway rest area level privacy concerns (See Fig. 1) . Google has effectively rewritten their privacy policies with the succinct, yet catchy, “LOL privacy WUT?!” As an official Google mouthpiece explains it, “our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services.” This isn’t a little thing. Did you watch Marcel the Shell with Shoes On on YouTube? Now you’ve got Kraft Shells & Cheese ads in your search results. Did your creepy uncle email you more Obama birth certificate crap? Great! Now you’ve got Google+ suggesting Michelle Bachmann as a friend. Did you search for Intelligent Design websites while researching scientific literacy? Congrats! I hope you like those bat-shit crazy Kirk Cameron videos that YouTube will keep suggesting. By their own admission, Google wants to “treat you as a single user across all our products.” It’s been pointed out that this really isn’t much different from what companies like Facebook and Yahoo already do. The problem is that that’s not how we want to use Google.

You see, Google wants to take the social media thunder from Facebook but Google forgets that we didn’t start using Google because we wanted to be social; we started Googling because we wanted the best search results. Facebook has always been about integrated services: we knew that the videos we watched, posts we wrote, and games we played were being tracked to enhance the immersive experience (or at least we should have known). Facebook’s “privacy” agreement has always had scare quotes. But, Google has grown by accretion, slowly purchasing wildly disparate services (like YouTube and Picnik) and developing one-off  enhancements in the now defunct Google Labs. We’ve been accustomed to using these services as distinct–almost siloed–entities united by a common Google username and password. But, now, in pursuit of likes, pokes, and +1s, Google has abruptly changed focus. Services are being killed off, interfaces are being redesigned, search results are being impacted, privacy agreements are being rewritten, and the passive voice is being abused in this sentence. At one point in time, search engines like Yahoo, Altavista, and (later) Google were our alternative to walled gardens like AOL and (later) Facebook. Not anymore. As was recently argued on Lifehacker, Google is Facebook is AOL: Google is heading straight towards a walled garden. Next thing you know, Google will be buying out CD manufacturing plants.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with yet another post analyzing Google’s many problems. (At least not today…I’ve got a draft post that pits David Weinberger and Evgeny Morozov against each other in an epic battle of Google-related derp.) Instead, I want to tell you that you can actually survive fairly well without Google. If you’ll indulge me, here is a quick rundown of what I feel are outstanding alternatives to popular Google products. First, the list:

Desktop Web Browsing: Maxthon or Iron

If you’re like me, you fell in love with Google Chrome and never looked back. Fast, stable, and secure, Chrome set the bar for browsers and recently surpassed Firefox in market share. Of course, there’s also the pesky little issue of Chrome tracking your online behavior by default. If you really want to stick with Chrome, at least do yourself a favor and download the Keep My Opt-Outs extension. If you want something that looks like Chrome, but isn’t, I recommend downloading SRWare’s Iron browser, which is simply a version of Chromium without any of the privacy-related problems. Another option is the Maxthon browser: the best browser you’ve never heard of. Not only does Maxthon run the Webkit engine (like Chrome and Safari), but it also runs a Trident engine like Internet Explorer. What does that mean? Well, for starters, you get the same speed and stability of Chrome, but when you run into one of those irritating sites that only works in Internet Explorer, Maxthon can handle it. This is big. How many of you keep an Internet Explorer icon on your desktop just to access your library’s Sharepoint or Exchange servers? To boot, Maxthon offers a built in RSS reader, customizable skins, and tons of interesting tweaks. Actually, the only downside to Maxthon is that it may offer too much customization.

Mobile Web Browsing: Maxthon or Opera

The fact that the mobile browser on Android phones tracks my location is creepy as hell. So, I recommend downloading either Opera Mini or the Maxthon mobile browser. Both offer more options than Google’s browser, both are significantly faster than the native browser, and both sync with their desktop counterparts.

Web-based RSS Feed Reader: Netvibes

I’ve covered Netvibes before, so I won’t spend much time, but it’s a really cool alternative to Reader. You can use it in the exact same way if you’d like, but the personalization options are where it shines. For example, I’ve got my webcomics feeds set to display in a mosaic/thumbnail view. Awesome.

Search: DuckDuckGo, Wolfram Alpha, and Yahoo/Bing

If you stop and think about how you really use search engines, I bet you’re like me: you don’t use the basic Google web search for research. Instead, 90% of your Googling is for something you already know. Here’s an example: A few weeks ago, Khristy and I were cycling through the new releases on OnDemand and trying to figure out what to watch. When we came to a movie we thought might be interesting, I quickly Googled DuckDuckGo‘ed it and I knew what I wanted: the page on Rotten Tomatoes, the IMDb page, and maybe the Wikipedia article on the movie. In short, I was using the search engine as a federated search across websites I would otherwise have in my bookmarks folder. I wasn’t researching the films. I was searching for links to websites I already knew about and, as I found out a year ago, pretty much all of the major search engines will give you the exact same results for 90% of your searching, albeit in a slightly different order. Google has no monopoly on using search engines as shortcuts. (Incidentally, we wound up watching Water for Elephants, a surprisingly good period drama with excellent camerawork by Rodrigo Prieto and a surprisingly unsparkly Robert Pattinson.)

What Google does have a monopoly on is tracking your search behavior. So, go with a safe alternative like DuckDuckGo that doesn’t filter your results based on some sketchy advertising profile and doesn’t track you around. Try it out for a week or two and you might be surprised at the quality of results. Even better, if you’ve switched to Maxthon, you can manage, search, and compare multiple search engines simultaneously with the browser’s multisearch feature. (It’s really cool. Truest me.)

Image Search: Yahoo Images

I covered this before, too, but Google’s image search is god awful. Really. What’s worse, they’ve removed the ability to filter by license, so if you’re looking for Creative Commons works, you’re out of luck. However, Yahoo! Image Search more than makes up for Google’s failures. Not only is there a prominent way to filter by license, but Yahoo! owns Flickr and it’s six billion photographs.

Office Suite: Office Web Apps

This one is tricky. Google Docs is great, and I’ll probably go back if only because everyone at work uses Google Docs. But, Microsoft’s Office Web Apps is pretty amazing (and both Maxthon and Opera will get you around any Internet Explorer requirements). Basically, Web Apps a suite of browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that seamlessly integrate with your desktop versions. And you get 25 gigabytes of free cloud storage. There is a bit of a learning curve, but, then again, there was with Google Docs, too.

Life after Google

So, there you have it. There are viable alternatives to Google. Now, we can nitpick just how good these alternatives really are and, truthfully, Google’s services really are pretty spectacular. If anything, what this experiment shows is that we should think twice about using Google by default. Think about it, from search to video to email to photos and beyond, most people instinctively go the Google route. If anything, Google is like the Wal-Mart of the Internet. Great prices, great selection, great locations. Yeah, they’ve got their problems, but they’re just so danged convenient. And just as Wal-Mart has defined the shopping experience to the exclusion of local and independent retailers, so to does Google define the Web experience to the exclusion of nifty alternatives. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Honestly, going forward, I’ll be using Google again…and frequently I might add. But, it won’t be by default. Remember, the Internet is a big place: you have options.

(* There are some Google services for which I simply couldn’t find a comparable alternative. YouTube is a good example. Likewise, Google Books is an excellent research tool. I’ve also kept my GMail account active, though it’s only used for setting up and managing accounts on other services…I’ve got Exchange at work and friends/family just use Facebook and Twitter.)