PORIDGE: postmodern rhizomatics in digitally generated environments — do we need a metatheory for W3?
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045322 |
| Date | 01 June 1994 |
| Published date | 01 June 1994 |
| Pages | 345-351 |
| Author | Josef Wallmannsberger |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Article
PORIDGE: postmodern
rhizomatics in digitally
generated environments —
do we need a metatheory
for W3?
Josef Wallmannsberger
English
Department,
University of
Innsbruck,
A-6020
Innsbruck,
Austria
E-mail:
Josef.
Wallmannsberger
@
uibk.ac.at
Abstract:
The World Wide Web
(W3)
has
proved
to be an
important
step towards realising truly integrated
information
ecologies.
The radical openness
of the
Web
model
of information processing
poses a
number of
fundamental
problems that
cannot
be
tackled
in
a
technology-oriented
framework
alone.
What is at
stake,
it
will be
argued,
is a large scale restructuring
of information
processing environments affecting both information
providers and
end-users.
The basic strategy
of the
Web,
the
global
HTML (hypertext mark-up language)-based
hypertext,
will be
discussed with
particular reference to
methodological implications in
text-oriented fields.
The
central claim
will
be the importance
of
the
Web
as
a
generator for
new leading metaphors
of globally networked
information processing.
1.
Introduction: not
the
methodological
moaners
again?
The
growth
rate of
W3,
or the World
Wide
Web,
is being
chal-
lenged only by
a
small
number of somewhat hyperactive
bac-
teria cultures, and generally everything seems to be going
perfectly
well,
but the methodological
moaners
from
the
epis-
temology and philosophy of science quarters are here again
and find this an appropriate time to ask some fundamental
questions (Wallmannsberger 1990e,
1990f;
Winograd
&
Flo-
res 1986). In this paper an attempt will be made both to re-
spond enthusiastically to the apparent success of
W3
and to
tap the
new resources
for providing
new vistas
for the philoso-
phy of
science.
The immediate and
real
context of
this
enter-
prise is the development of an electronically mediated ency-
clopaedia of postmodern knowledge, PORIDGE, which will
react to the increasingly complex information ecologies of
contemporary scholarship by creating a virtual agora instead
of
a
knowledge base in its printed or electronic form (Wall-
mannsberger 1990d). The implementation strategies of the
postmodern encyclopaedia, which
is in
the
process
of moving
from a local computer-supported work system to the global
W3
environment, are not however
the
focus of
this
paper.
The
central question to be addressed here is the relevance of the
W3 phenomenon to a philosophy of science motivated and
driven by what scholars actually do, rather than by some
crazed notion of scientificity (Neumaier 1987; Wall-
mannsberger
1990c).
It will be
shown,
it
is
hoped,
that episte-
mological reconstructions are in turn highly relevant to the
further development of
W3:
metatheoretical reflections may
prove to be useful in probing the full potential of globalised
communication ecologies.
It
will be
argued that
W3
offers itself
in a
threefold
way
for
a methodological discussion: namely as an object, medium
and — tentatively —
as
a paradigm of inquiry.
2.
W3 as an
object of inquiry
The
role as
object of inquiry
appears
to
be the
least controver-
sial; following Knorr-Cetina's (1981) framework for the
analysis of
the
social manufacture of knowledge,
we
can ex-
tend
the
domain of inquiry from
the single
laboratory
to more
complex networks of communication. It will be shown how
the Web informs discussion
in
interdisciplinary
fields,
such as
computer-oriented research
into natural
languages (Dahlbäck
& Jönnson 1988; Wahlster 1988). New styles of interaction
and discussion are emerging against the background of
do-
mains
of discourse that
are
decentralised —
both
literally
and
metaphorically.
2.1.
What is the World Wide Web?
The online community
has
had its share of only vaguely de-
fined concepts and theories, such as end-user searching or
distributed databases, but generally speaking
the
present day
disciples of Boole and Babbage have been able to agree on
what
a database is
— when they
see
one,
that
is;
the
minutiae
of relational data matrices
have
not kept
online
professionals
from developing
viable strategies
for interacting
with
a pleth-
ora of information resources in real world
contexts.
Phenom-
ena such as
W3,
however,
challenge some
of
the
fundamental
assumptions of the information processing model. It can be
assumed that most online professionals at this point in time
have come
into contact
with W3 in one way
or
another.
At the
same
time,
a considerable number of information specialists
would
be
hard put
to
define exactly
what the W3 is all
about,
The Electronic Library, Vol. 12, No. 6, December 1994 345
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