Joan's Blog

Playbill reconstruction documentation

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final portfolio site

Momkai is a digital creative agency in the Netherlands that specializes in interactive design that is clear and functional. Their attention to detail results in clean yet creative work. I am choosing to research on Momkai because of their web design strengths.

http://a.parsons.edu/~wongj769/week03/myPortfolioWeb-4-1/html/

An inspiring story about the experience of a brain scientist who had a stroke that allowed her to discover how the shut down of one’s brain can affect one’s awareness. It transformed a horrifying situation into a rare but invaluable experience.

Ontology is the study of what exists and how these elements relate to each other. Ontology classification or categorization is a system of organization that groups entities with relations that is relied on too much in the digital world because it can never be perfect. It leaves room for bias. Yahoo was the first significant attempt to using organization on the Web. A professional ontologist was hired to make up this hierarchy. The problem is that there is no universal way of categorizing different elements. For example, books and literature is categorized in its own link when some would consider it an entertainment entity. Part of the success of Google is their choice in organization based on user feedback instead of initial assumption.

This reminds me of my personal experience on the Web. There were many instances where I would go to a website with a purpose and going straight to its search option instead of trying to figure out its categorization or hierarchy system. Although this system of organization is not as effective in the digital world, it can be useful (the author admits) in cases with a small and fixed number of elements with coordinated users.

A very interesting fact pointed out by the author is the “voodoo” quality of categorization. It seems that categorization done by people of authority can have huge influence on the reputation of the object on the public. This is a condition that happens to all of us even though naming things do not change the essence of what they are. A convincing argument for this is the naming of countries. “Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions.” If the United States were to be renamed, it is nothing more than a change of the name. The land that is part of it and the people residing in this land did not.

The Web is trying hard to “read our minds” and “predict the future” by categorizing. In a way, the Web overestimated its authority. A better way to run the web would be through a tagging system. This system has benefits of individual motivation as well as group value. It also gets better with scale and allows everyone who has access to the Internet to be its editor with his or her own preference. Ultimately, tagging is a much more organic way of organizing. It allows people to put in their own points of view and categorize in a way that makes sense to them. It is much more natural, more free and less binary.