Monthly Archives: October 2016

The FOIA also known as “Freedom of Information Act” is a system that was set up for scholars and students in different areas who wished to have access on certain declassified data.  In the article “Unredacted” it is mentioned, “The Archive also serves as a repository of government records on a wide range of topics pertaining to the national security, foreign, intelligence, and economic policies of the United States” (para.1).  Before this act came about many people did not have admittance to such information.  Throughout this article the author explains how important it is for people around the world to be informed about what is going on, whether if it is just for personal knowledge or for a research paper.

The Archive staff members are in charge of locating certain information regarding the U.S. government and their agencies as stated in the article, ”             Archive staff members systematically track U.S. government agencies and federal records repositories for documents that either have never been released before, or that help to shed light on the decision-making process of the U.S. government and provide the historical context underlying those decisions” (para.2).  The American agency that administers the work that is proposed in the FOIA is a non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University.  Another way of accessing information from this Archive collection is through the web on nsa.org. I believe it does benefit citizens all over because it helps us justify certain situations and as it said in the article it also assists on decision making as well. Everyone has the right to know what is going on around the world whether its good or bad.  We deserve to be informed at all times.

David  Weinberger, “Too Big To Know” discusses infrastructure of knowledge. Weinberger mentions that there was always a vast amount of information. With the help of the internet the amount of information can now be seen. The only difference is that the information that was shown in the past was not just information, but knowledge of it as well. The internet has given us the same amount of information but now, some information is useless. The task is left for us to decide whether the information we obtain is what we need. Weinberger gives an example of what books a library has in its collection. Libraries don’t obtain all the books published, they filter to see what books they should have by the users. Weinberger mentions six type of filters we can use to simplify the web, but the web has no shape. The web is endless with no boundaries and no structure for foundation.

An understanding of knowledge infrastructure can make us better researchers by allowing us to see how to tackle the vast amount of information. The web has endless information and no structure. It is up to us to find “filters” for the information the web gives us. Information of the data is useless, unless we have the knowledge to understand it. Since there is no structure to knowledge, the way we understand the information is different for each person.

I believe Martin made his book available as a PDF to further show his support for the freedom of knowledge.  Throughout his chapter he does raise fairly intriguing insight on the fact that the majority of knowledge around the world is controlled by hierarchies and organized by certain disciplinarians. The sad truth about it all is that it is all for the gain of money.  In “The politics of research” Martin explains this, “The important point, though, is that members of each discipline jealously guard their own little patch of knowledge.  They attempt to control teaching of students in their discipline, appointments in the field and the type of research that is published in the field’s central journals” (p.128).  By doing this certain places such as universities are only given access to these databases and knowledge by funding them in a large way.

Another unfortunate fact is that many academics apparently look down on schools and universities that seem to be popular. As Martin says, “The latter are a threat because they have a power base not controlled by the discipline itself”(p.131).  Even though these particular universities may be filled with highly skilled scholars they are still perceived as suspicious and they are not guaranteed access to the wide sources of information that is provided to others.  I presume that scholarship should be liberated and we all should be given access to the many different scholarly data out there to add on to our own knowledge.

Throughout Weinberger’s chapter “Too Big To Know” he explicates infrastructure of knowledge with high importance.  We are constantly overloaded with so much information/data that this structure that has been created overtime seems to work. Weinberger states that, “The same way you justified your investment in data. You’ve refined the data to produce information, and you’ve refined the information to generate something of greater value”.  All of our searches and keywords are strained through the system on a daily basis,  when we are looking to gain knowledge on a particular topic that we search. On the other hand, it does have its negative and positive aspects about it.  Weinberger explains this, “But we’ve paid a hidden price: We have raised the bar so high that we have sometimes excluded ideas that were nevertheless worth considering…”. When our searches are refined we are being given the top sources of information from different databases, but at the same time we are also be limited to other data out there that may be useful to our research.  Although, having an infrastructure of knowledge may have a slight downside about it, it is proven to be very helpful as well.  It in fact helps researches find particular information faster being that everyone is able find what they are looking for by just typing in certain keywords.

Classification is the creating or grouping of  similar qualities. It’s used to classify humans from plants,  mammals from reptiles  and rich from poor. According to Dye, in the use of technology folksonomy  is the mash up of folk and taxonomy, when it comes to the community of people creating metadata through the internet.  Tagging a picture, a URL, status, video or etc creates a group or a classification of a keyword or phrase. For example if a person tags a blog with the important of  Evolution. It will be imprinted on the internet and even time some one lookes up the word evolution or phrase with evolution in it. That tagged blog would pop up with that information someone tagged for the public. Classification is important to were data can be shared and grouped based on common qualifications, words and phrases.