VocabControl

The Voice of Reason (or What’s in a name? online) is a fascinating article by David Robson in New Scientist on one of my favourite topics – how language affects the way we think. The “linguistic relativity” theory of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf – one of my favourite hypotheses – is blamed for the “fall from grace” of the idea that language shapes thought. The work of Eleanor Rosch – one of my favourite psychologists – on categorisation appeared to contradict the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, by showing that categorisation rests more on physiological characteristics of humans – how we see, what size things are, whether or not something is edible – than on the names we have for things.

Noam Chomsky’s quest for a universal grammar made the notion that language and thought were essentially common to all humanity more popular than linguistic relativity. However, psychologists have started to note that having names for categories helps infants put things into those categories. Children’s spatial reasoning also seems to be improved when you remind them of spatial vocabulary (Dedre Gentner, Northwestern University, Evanston , Illinois: Cognitive Psychology, vol 50, p 315). People instinctively teach children by reminding them of what category words like “top”, “middle” and “bottom” mean. An experiment with “aliens” indicated that when people were given names for types of aliens they categorised them more quickly and accurately than when they weren’t given the names (Gary Lupyan, University of Wisconsin, Madison: Psychological Science vol 18, p 1077).

Although the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that language dictates and constrains thought – appears unlikely to be true, on the grounds that you could never have a new idea or create a new category – the “weak” version – that having those words available will encourage people to think in those terms seems very plausible. An experiment has now indicated that Russian speakers – who have two different words for shades of blue – are faster at sorting out those shades than English speakers (Lera Boroditsky, Stanford University, California Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 104, p 7780).

Labelling objects helps the memory take “shortcuts” so that minor details do not have to be remembered (Lupyan Journal of Experimental Psychology: General vol 137, p 348). Political activists in many areas have argued that language use encourages stereotyping – hence the attempts to break down stereotypes by changing names for groups. However, when applied to something like sets of documents, not bothering to see them all as individuals can be a useful shortcut. If you want to build a user-friendly taxonomy, using the categories people know and like will make your system quicker and easier to use. Of course they could learn other ways of categorising – they could break the stereotypes – if they spent a bit of time and effort thinking it all through – but in many contexts the job of the taxonomist is to give people what they want quickly and efficiently, not to enter into debates about whether or not they conceptualise things in the most politically appropriate way.

Language has also been shown to affect perception. If you use upwards-moving words (climb, rise, etc.) while showing people patterns of randomly moving dots, they are more likely to correctly detect the predominant direction of movement if the words match the direction (Psychological Science, vol 18 p 1007). Conversely, showing people upwardly-moving dots while saying “fall” confused them. The words seem to “prime” the visual system of the brain.

Another effect is that it is easier to see something if you say the name – so it really does help when you are looking for something to mutter the name of the object to help you find it. According to Andy Clark, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, language was the original form of “augmented reality” – “an overlay that changes how we think, reason and see”.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Linked Data one-day conference organised by ISKO UK last week. You can find my summary of it on the ISKO UK blog.

The last presentation at the DAM conference back in June was by a very interesting DAM specialist – Mark Davey – of Cliffe Associates and Digital Asset Mangement.org.uk who spoke engagingly about the increasing pervasiveness of metadata and how it is opening up a whole new world of connections and possibilities.

Internet of Things

He talked about the emerging Internet of Things and how this will - essentially - be enabled by metadata. The more sophisticated our metadata management, the more use we will be able to make of links and connections. The semantic web is a bold attempt to link information resources, but if the semantic web and the Internet of Things can be linked, the web leaps out into the real world in unprecedented ways and this, according to Davey, is why librarians rock! It is the people who understand how metadata works who will be forging the links that will create an integrated Internet of Services. A smart fridge could send you text messages telling you what you need to buy when you are in the shops (although I worry about mine scolding me for eating too many cakes!), but there are many more business-focussed applications. For example, RFID tags are being used by Hollywood prop and costume hire companies to help them keep track of and retrieve stock. The location data is useful in that case to physically find missing items, but knowing where customers take their purchases may have all sorts of interesting implications for marketing. A car rental company could plot on a map where people have driven their cars. This would be a fun image in a brochure, but could support business decisions such as where to open branches or whether to provide more small cars for city trips or bigger cars for long distances.

The current Internet is not fit for purpose, because nobody agreed any standards, but if we can start developing standards, we can set digital assets and metadata free so that they can interact with each other in a machine-brokered way. This could be incredibly powerful – everything could end up everywhere! Ways to monetise this new world could involve micro payments – you are watching a video, you see a product you like, you click on it and behind the scenes your credit card or online account is charged and the product is shipped to your door. Meanwhile, the sales team know that you bought that product because it was in that particular scene in the film, they know where you live, and they know what else you have been buying.

Hive minds

This all seems rather scary. On the one hand, people are already referring to the distributed cognition aspects of social networking sites as the hive mind – we are, perhaps, creating some kind of Borg-like merging of identities into one big digital stew. Individuals could find themselves subsumed into a digitally imposed conformity to some overriding norm due to the panoptic, big brotherish combination of AI, RFID and CCTV, especially when you factor in neuromarketing and automated classification of behaviour (which will be subjects of future posts). On the other hand, people have always worried about the homogenising effects of anything that brings people together and the misuse of surveillance.

(I think in practice, metadata alone is just a tool that can be used for good or ill, like a knife. The Internet of Services is likely to be patchy, with some very worthy projects – applications in medicine where scarce resources like organs for transplants needed to be tracked and delivered and surgeons kept informed – and some just for fun – like the Tales of Things Project, where you can add memories, as metadata, to objects.)