One of the chapters of Everything is Miscellaneous uses Hamlet as its example of the difficulty of specifying—and thus providing a unique ID for—a book. There are three established editions of the play, so when you want to point to Hamlet, which one do you point to? Not to mention the various publishers, editions, and versions, from large print to translations to ones with modern spellings to parodies to coloring books. It’s a big stinking problem that cannot be solved once and for all with precision because Hamlet is a cloud, although projects such as the OCLC’s xISBN and LibraryThing’s thingISBN try to solve it with an acknowledged degree of fuzziness..

I’ve been reading Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars and enjoying it despite his incredibly annoying quirk of turning dependent clauses. Into independent clauses. That distract the reader unnecessarily. Why, Ron, why? And what were his editors thinking? Anyway, the first part is a detailed account of the battles among scholars over the editing and significance of the three early editions of Hamlet. Rosenbaum clearly likes Ann Thompson’s approach of publishing an edition with all three. But her publishers, Arden, at first were reluctant because it would turn it into a 1,000-page volume too expensive for undergrads. She came up with the clever idea of publishing a heavily footnoted volume of the Good Quarto and a second volume containing the other two. Rosenbaum admits that this requires more work from the reader than would a single finished document that does not acknowledge that Hamlet is not a single, canonical work, but, he says, that sort of reader engagement is a good thing. (See pages 75-83 in Rosenbaum wrt Thompson.)

Back when I worked at Interleaf, we introduced a feature we called “effectivity,” a term taken from the airplane manufacturing industry, I believe. Intereleaf had an object-oriented tech doc word processor. Every element of any doc could be tagged with a term and a value. You could specify which elements were in effect and the system would instantly recompose the doc to meet those specs. So, you might tag a repair procedure with the model number of the unit it repairs and be able to dynamically assemble the repair documentation for an airplane based on the model numbers of the units that composed it. Back in 1990, this was a new idea and a very big deal. We called the documents we produced “active documents,” but today we’d call them “a Web page.”

So, when we’re routinely publishing books digitally rather than on paper, we still won’t have a single Hamlet, but we’ll be able to manage the Hamlet cloud in way that does justice to the work and to our interests.

Books will become playlist. [Tags:everything_is_miscellaneous books hamlet publishing taxonomy libraries]

The WGBH Lab lets anyone download and mash video clips from their archive. And they’ll air and post some of the results. The clips whose rights have been cleared (now licensed via Creative Commons) are here. Click on the categories and you’ll find some pretty cool videos, including of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, scientifical animations, and ants eating a caterpillar.

[Tags: wgbh mashups everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 creative_commons ]

The US Food and Drug Administration has decided tentatively that meat and milk from cloned animals are the same as from normal animals, so it is not going to require those products to carry special labels.

Too bad.

It’s not that I think cloned food is dangerous. I’m not a scientist, but I believe them, and from what I can see—and, I haven’t looked into this at all, so the following opinion is worth less than the time it’s taking you to read it—cloned food is safe. But that’s not the point. I’d still like the labels to note that the animals were cloned because more metadata is always good. If people don’t want to eat clones for whatever reason, they should be enabled to make that choice. In fact, we’d be better off with full access to the information about what we’re purchasing. Where was the cow raised? What was it fed? What was its weight? What was its body fat ratio? How old was it? Did it get to roam free? Did it have a sweet smile? What was its sign? We’re better off being able to access it all, no matter how farfetched.

But, because of the nature of non-digital reality, taking up label space with a notice that the meat is cloned would itself be metadata indicating that the government thinks such information is worth noting. Metadata in the physical world is a zero sum game.

And that means not only is it true that (as Clay Shirky says) “metadata are worldview,” physical labels are politics. We are forced to make value-driven decisions by the constraints of the physical (labels take up valuable space), the biological (human eyes require fonts to be sized above a certain minimum) and the economic (it is not feasible to attach an almanac of information to every chicken wing). But online, all those limit go away…

…except for the economic. It would be expensive to do a cholesterol count for every slaughtered cow (assuming that cows have cholesterol) simply to gather information that so far nobody cares about, but there’s plenty of information that we’re gathering anyway or for which there is predictable interest—e.g., cloning—that we could make available online (via a unique identifier for each slab of flesh). There would still be politics in the decision about which information to put into the extended set, but it would be a more inclusive, bigger tent, allowing customers to decide according to their own cockamamie values.

And isn’t cockamamie consumerism what democracy is all about? [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy metadata clay_shirky cloning ]

Computer Gaming World after many years has dropped its numeric reviews. Instead it reviews in prose. But, probably in response to reader complaints, it has recently re-introduced numeric reviews…just not its own. Reviews now include the numeric reviews given by other other publications. Thus does CGW climb the meta-tree, aggregating information even from competitors. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous metabusiness reviews computer_gaming_world ]

I’m listening to Love, the Beatles mashup by George Martin and his son.

Yes, it’s part stunt. The Beatles left such a rich selection of song styles and pieces that you can create a version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” without a dominant guitar. But the CD is also an act of love that makes that song—which I always found slightly embarrassingly George-ish—more lovely than the original. The Martins often reveal an essence of melody, harmony, voice, meaning or mood. (Keep in mind that I am a sentimental Beatles fool. They were our music in a way that my children have yet to find for themselves.)

The first track is a version of “Because” rendered less sentimental by highlighting the beautiful vocal work. The second track, “Get Back,” is fun. But the third track, “Glass Onion” overwhelmed me. It pulls together many pieces, most recognizable if not actually familiar. Each of the parts is so resonant that it sank me into the feelings those songs had engendered. No, not feelings. Meanings. What the songs meant to me.

This is the part of what I’ve been calling the “miscellaneous” that that word doesn’t capture. Categorization puts like next to like. The miscellaneous category consists of that which does not share likenesses beyond their shared domain—the kitchen’s miscellaneous drawer contains implements that have nothing in common beyond the fact that they all belong in a kitchen. But the digital miscellany we’re building for ourselves is an over-abundance of likenesses, across every domain. The likenesses are drawn by every link we create, each made of intention and meaning. In some ways, it is the opposite of the miscellany. It is the surfeit of connection, a potential unlike anything we’ve had before short of language itself. [Tags: beatles taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Public Library of Science has gone beta with PLos ONE, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes everything that passes the review, not just what it considers to be important. So, if it’s good science about a nit, it’ll find a home at PLoS ONE.

And at that home, readers can discuss and annotate the articles. They can also read them and reuse for free since they’re all published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. It does, however, cost a scientist (or her institution) $1,250 to be published by PLoS ONE. This is, alas, an improvement over what traditional journals charge scientists. PLoS ONE will waive the fee for authors who don’t have the funds.

Fees aside, if you were designing a society, wouldn’t you want scientific research to be handled this way? If it’s good science, make it available! (And if it’s not clear if it’s good science, make it available anyway, but that’s not PLoS ONE’s niche in the knowledge economy.)

(Note on the beta: The site could use tagging. And more feeds.) [Tags: plos plos_one open_science science everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

Polar Rose is doing what it can to identify people in photos on the Web. Unlike the previous generation of face recognition software, it turns a photo’s 2D array of dots into what it hopes is an accurate 3D rendering of the face depicted. This gets past the problem of not recognizing yor Aunt Sally’s profile because it only knows what she looks from the front, and maybe of confusing your Aunt Sally with Adolph Hitler because the sun is above her, casting a shadow across her upper lip.

Polar Rose —currently in beta—is going to be available as a browser plug in and it’s opening up its API’s, trying to to increase the Web’s IQ when it comes to the stuff that doesn’t form into letters. And because Nikolaj Nyholm is involved, I’m confident that they’ll get the privacy and ethical issues right. [Tags: polar_rose face_recognition photos nikolaj_nyholm everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

Discover magazine runs two letters this month that bring up two more problems with the International Astronomical Union’s criteria for planets. Jerry Svoboda points out that because Neptune’s orbit is crossed by Pluto, Neptune fails to “clear its zone,” thus failing one criterion for planethood. Brett Bochner argues (in a reductio ad absurdum sort of way) that Jupiter is 300 times larger than the Earth and is made almost entirely of gas, and thus shouldn’t be lumped with the Earth.

Fortunately, I have the solution.

Everyone knows the IAU’s tortured criteria were designed to give us back as many of the nine planets as possible. Even so, the IAU failed. At best we got eight planets and one dwarf. So, let’s skip all the weird distinctions and just declare the Solar System a constellation. After all, no one says that some other star really “deserves” to be part of Ursa Major even if it means the bear now becomes a unicorn. Nope, a constellation is what we say it is, and the same is now true for the nine planets of the Solar System.

Welcome back, Pluto!

[Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous IAU planets pluto solar_system astronomy taxonomy]

Discover magazine runs two letters this month that bring up two more problems with the International Astronomical Union’s criteria for planets. Jerry Svoboda points out that because Neptune’s orbit is crossed by Pluto, Neptune fails to “clear its zone,” thus failing one criterion for planethood. Brett Bochner argues (in a reductio ad absurdum sort of way) that Jupiter is 300 times larger than the Earth and is made almost entirely of gas, and thus shouldn’t be lumped with the Earth.

Fortunately, I have the solution.

Everyone knows the IAU’s tortured criteria were designed to give us back as many of the nine planets as possible. Even so, the IAU failed. At best we got eight planets and one dwarf. So, let’s skip all the weird distinctions and just declare the Solar System a constellation. After all, no one says that some other star really “deserves” to be part of Ursa Major even if it means the bear now becomes a unicorn. Nope, a constellation is what we say it is, and the same is now true for the nine planets of the Solar System.

Welcome back, Pluto!

[Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous IAU planets pluto solar_system astronomy taxonomy]

Lisa Williams over at PressThink breaks the news:

Over the weekend, the Watertown TAB of Watertown, Massachusetts, revamped its website. The result is, for now, strikingly bloglike: a wide center column with items in reverse chronological order. And at the very bottom, a small silver badge with a line of text that reads: “Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license.”

Our local paper, the Brookline Tab, has done the same. Frankly, I never thought I’d say the Brookline Tab is cool, but, dang it all, they just turned their Web site from a glass-based front page to a place with some local life. [Tags: cc creative_commons tab newspapers blogs lisa_williams pressthink everything_is_miscellaneous]