The Net as the Structure of the World [Powerpoint]

Bruce Schatz:
Rice University: Public Lecture for the University Library
March 12, 1998

Revolutionary System Models, The Net, & The Public Interest [Powerpoint]

Bruce Schatz:
NRC CSTB Workshop on Advancing the Public Interest through Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence;
National Academy of Sciences,
September 25, 1997

Revolution & Kids: Building the Future of the Net & Understanding the Structures of the World [Powerpoint]

Bruce Schatz:
Special Holiday Lecture sponsored by IRIS-CISE National Science Foundation, Dec 16, 1997

GLOBAL CULTURAL MEMORY
"A Millennium Project to Enable Everyone to understand
How They Have Lived and
How They Will Live"

The World has undergone enormous radical changes throughout the 20th century. As we approach the 21st century, there is much concern about what the future holds. A truism in predicting the future is that technology changes but people don't. The environment changes, but people's problems remain much the same. Many claim this will be the Net Millennium where people live in a world of abstract information instead of a world of concrete things.

If everyone could, at a very personal level, compare and contrast the world as it has been over time and space, they could gain some understanding for themselves of what to expect in the new millennium. A grand project on Global Cultural Memory would enable such understanding -- recording the structures of everyday life in striking multimedia form and building global systems to correlate the information within them to gain appreciation of the past and prediction of the future.

The technology for building such an understanding is finally possible on a grand scale in a pioneering research experiment. It is possible to build information collections of many sizes from large to small, and to search these collections easily across the Net. Thus a (virtual) national digital library of cultural information is technically feasible. Furthermore, the new information infrastructure will routinely support analysis environments, which enable easy correlation of information across multiple sources. Thus problem solving and question answering will be within the reach of everyday people, just as fetching and browsing are now.

Scholarly works exist that demonstrate that collecting an adequate range of materials is possible. For example, the historian Fernand Braudel's book on The Structures of Everyday Life discusses how people lived in the 15th century with many of the same problems of the 20th. But to engage ordinary people, the concentration must be on recent history and the collections generated by local sources. A good initial assumption is to concentrate on post-World-War-II America as a model and to do a staged Interspace of 10 Large, 100 Medium, 1000 Small repositories. The collections will be primarily pictures (static images) with some accompanying text to simply illustrate how things change. The contents of these collections will be organized around the primary structures of everyday life, which represent the primary components of cultural memory.

Structures:

Professions (What jobs for adults?)
Schools (What education for children?)
Houses and Cities (urban and rural)
Food and Clothes
Transportation and Energy
Communication and Information

Collections:

The collections will consist of text and images from numerous sources that either mirror or preserve recent cultural history. Collections can be static (pre-existing from verified sources) or dynamic (newly created and flexible in format).

All of the pictures and text must have classification metadata indicating how they relate to the Structures. Automatic indexes will be generated by the system, but much of this classification can be collected from the authors or curators when they place the information into the space.

The collections will vary in size and structure, including the following large, medium, and small groups of institutions and individuals:

Large (Public)

Libraries (Library of Congress, NY Public Library)
Museums (Photography, Historical, Cultural Objects)
Archives (Advertising, Maps, Letters and Correspondence)
Publishers (Popular Magazines, Books of Everyday Life)
Demographics (Census Records)

Medium (Community)

Historical Societies at a County Level
Natural History Surveys at a State Level
Local Cultural Preservation Groups

Small (Personal)

Individual Schoolkids taking pictures of their neighborhoods with digital cameras
Individual Families scanning and classifying their family albums and records

Questions

Events of the past fifty years have greatly shaped our transition into the next millennium because they affect our personal lives, the nation's political climate, our cultural development, and our collective research agenda. School children, scholarly researchers, and ordinary citizens alike wonder about questions such as the following which relate to events that have shaped our contemporary views: The GCM system would enable all of these people to correlate information from many sources to gain understanding of these complex issues. Such questions relate the impact of national events to the individual. They are of national importance, but they also represent to each individual the element of self-reflexive responsibility.

Easy

• "How did my grandmother get to school? How did my mother? How will my children?"
• "What did people eat for dinner and where they eat it, in my kind of town all across the country, 20 years ago and now?"
• "How did kids swap information with their friends in the past, in the present, in the future?"

Medium

• "What education was needed for a good job 50 years ago? 25 years ago? 5 years ago? 5 years from now for me? 20 years from now for my children?"
• "Why has there been a resurgence of interest in the music and movies of the 1960's and 1970's? Why were the prettiest actresses in their 20s in the 1970s and in their 40s in the 1990s? Why were 20somethings lame in the knees in the 1970s and lame in the hands in the 1990s?"
• "How have the baby boomers broken every institution in society as they stress it with unusually large numbers? What will happen to the educational system now that it has expanded and now must shrink? What will happen to the health care system as the boomers bodies begin failing?"

Hard

• "Why did people move out of big cities in the 1950's and 1960's, and why are they moving back to big cities now? Is this a population cycle from rural to urban to suburban, now returning back to rural?"
• "What are the differentiating factors between the "we" generation of the 1960's, the "me" generation of the 1980's, and the current generation Xers? What effect do these shifts in outlook on life have on social policy? The education system? The economic structures?"
• "What is the significance of the shift from an industrial to an information economy? What were the major effects on our country in that shift? How will everyday life change in the future?"