Jason Griffey

In a recent interview, Cory Doctorow discussed ontology, so I feel ok about pulling out some philosophy for this particular discussion.

One of the thoughts that’s been rattling around in my head lately is for an article related to the issues that librarians have with digital sources, specifically things like Wikipedia. The cry of most librarians is that digital sources (things like wikis, webpages, blogs) have no authority, no one standing behind them that lends them credence. Wikis are created by the masses, and can often be changed by anyone, and so, the argument goes, will simply devolve into the least common denominator of information.

But that assumes that knowledge is best judged by it’s origins, which is a highly debatable position. My favored epistemological position is a coherence theory of knowledge that is grounded in ontological realism. Knowledge (or Truth, as philosophers like to talk about it) is judged real when it is supported by a network of like facts. That is, if I were to attempt to convince people that I was 25 years old (by posting it on my website, putting an entry into the Wikipedia, etc…) that would only last so long as the surrounding pieces of knowledge weren’t known (no one checked my birth certificate, no one asked my mom, or many other ways of checking my claim). As soon as you start checking the coherence of my statement with other statements, it falls apart (and is thus now neither Truth nor Knowledge).

This speaks to basic information literacy skills. Blindly trusting one source, even if that source is the Oxford Dictionary of Biography is probably not a good idea, and why authority would naturally lend itself to information evaluation as a central criterion has always been beyond me. A criterion, certainly, but no more or less important than the other things surrounding the positited knowledge.

At some point all of this will come out in a nice academic article relating coherence theory to information evaluation as it pertains to reference work and library instruction. But that will take work and research. So for now, just the basic idea, captured and (hopefully) commented on.

Suddenly and without warning, yours truly has become the blog expert at MTSU. It began slowly enough, with doing a workshop on academic uses of blogs and wikis at the MTSU IT Conference. Then we decided that actually having a blog for the conference would be a good thing, so that fell to me as well (never mind the fact that the campus had never even turned on PHP on the webserver). Once over that hurdle, and a few days of struggle to get MySQL happy with talking to PHP, the blog was born. Now I’m in the middle of putting together instruction pages, since this is a very, very new thing for everyone here. In addition, I was just asked to write up an article for the on-campus IT publication about blogs/blogging, so there’s another 300 words or so to pump out on the subject.

EDIT: also, I was just contacted today by the Library here at MTSU…seems they have 3 blogs that they are interested in moving off of blogger and onto our servers. Guess who’s gonna get to help with that?

On top of all that, I’m helping LITA with their blogging efforts, attempting to evaluate different blog software and figure out what they want to settle on as the official LITA blog.

Who knew that this would be a valuable job skill way back when we all started these damn things?