Swirling concepts in the vortext of sense-making and content creation

Preparing for my “Honey, I shrunk the Cat with Metadata” slide for a NEXT MBA upcoming lecture about data and dialogues, part of a Digital marketing track (thanks Gennady Polonsky for inviting me, and more about it soon), I found a beautiful way of seeing metadata in a diagram by Paul Otlet.

I found a beautiful way of seeing metadata in a diagram by Paul Otlet.

Contemplating it, I saw it communicating a scenario where we compress things into concepts in our heads, then decompress them in a dialogue 🙂 They enter the swirl of meaning which hapens in the public sphere where concepts need to be aligned (if seen from the above, a hermeneutic circle). 

Then these concepts get into some kind of binder (I am saying some kind of binder, aware of the cool Introduction in Negroponte’s book Being Digital – The Paradox of a Book). having ended up in a, let’s call it corpus, then concepts get extracted, compressed again into the library card, or currently into love notes to the futre (read metadata).

And then all kinds of representation might follow. Of course, I think about that as the basics of connected content.

Image: Diagram by Paul Otlet representing a system of classification of human knowledge, 1934. Source:  https://enseigner.modulo-info.ch/enjx2/grandes-thematiques/histoire_culture_num_2.html