The Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” has been generating buzz for some time, especially since Stephen Wolfram, its eccentric progenitor, announced that it would be going live in mid-May. Expect the twittering to reach a crescendo.

Since the Wolfram|Alpha (WA, let’s say) promises to answer questions typed into a simple text box, it’s being described in the press as a Google-killer. The idea, in an alpha nutshell, is that WA interprets a natural language query and then combs through a gigantic pile of databases, both public and licensed, in order to respond with an answer — rather than Google’s list of web pages that may or may not contain an answer.

Wolfram recently gave a demonstration of WA at Harvard’s Berkman Center. The whole presentation is posted, but you can get a quicker sense of what WA aims to do in this surprisingly murky collection of screenshots:

From this demo and other the-Wolfram-is-coming reviews blooming like tremulous flowers in the rain, WA looks to be a fancy calculator, an atlas on steroids, a deft collator of visualized data.

But is it more than that? Beyond looking up and presenting information, will it give us genuine and new answers? Will it represent a significant push beyond Google’s suddenly modest ambition to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”?

Wolfram himself seems to think so:

…what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?

A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.

But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.

So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.

… I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.

Wolfram is know for making audacious claims about the power of computation; his massive boiling down of all complexity into relatively simple mathematical rules, A New Kind of Science, was a ‘surprise best seller’ on Amazon even though Wolfram posts all of it for free. The promise of a simple handle on an immensely complex world–frothing up into a good dose of post-religious hype–is irresistible. It’s quite congruent, when you think about it, to Google’s keyword-search doorway to the infinite.

But Google is best used to locate information, not to solve problems. Sure, if you type into its search field “square root of 81″ it will offer you a quick answer atop the usual pagerank results. Google has dabbled, in fact, with calculator functions. This slippage between search and calculation, though, is what alarms me.

A pernicious information illiteracy takes root — the world of clear ascription of responsibility suffers another blow — anytime someone starts assigning oracular power to the Google search algorithm. “It says [fill in information claim here].” I’ve seen college students actually cite a Google search in research–not research on Google search, mind you, but research on a subject informed by something that the search dug up one night. Who wrote and published the data is unimportant: in the middle of that dreary night, “It says….”

At an extreme point, we reach the absurdity of Carol Beer in Little Britain, overriding every thought and instinct as she dabbles on the keyboard and announces, after desultory searches, “Computer says no…”

Of course any decent web calculator will draw on good data, and won’t be nearly as mechanistic or useless or funny as Carol. But even an amazing one — and WA promises to be amazing — shouldn’t be confused with actual intelligence; assembling and synthesizing only gets you so far. One of WA’s biggest cheerleaders, Twine founder Nova Spivack, makes a similar point:

Wolfram Alpha, at its heart is quite different from a brute force statistical search engine like Google. And it is not going to replace Google — it is not a general search engine: You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon. It is not a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example — there is still no substitute for manual human-guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of questions about factual data.

Spivack’s distinction between (WA’s) computation and (Google’s) look-up is helpful, as is his concession that WA, as elegantly structured as it may be, will only be useful in presenting and recombining known facts. Wolfram himself, no stranger to hyperbole, may wish to characterize WA as generating new knowledge. But until it develops algorithms for context, nuance, interpretation, influence, critique, seriousness, incoherence–until it embraces all of human expression, in all of its messiness–it will never offer sufficient answers to questions more debatable than “What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?”–just as Wikipedia cannot extend beyond professed neutrality.

So my fear of WA, knowing little about how it actually will work and feel, is that it will offer a fancy dashboard of pseudo-expertise, subtly diverting human inquiry into what’s pre-known. This seems an old fear, a fear of robots, and maybe, like many old human fears, it will melt away in the light of new threats.

In any case, by WA seems poised to offer a counterpoint to the semantic web, a different model of bringing structure to information to make search more responsive to the questions we ask. The road is strewn with various ‘natural language’ search disappointments — Ask Jeeves was deaf, Powerset seems blind to all but Wikipedia — and there’s reason to hope that Wolfram’s interpretation of natural language will be smarter, that it will process our questions and deliver them to large and various datasets. If it then answers authoritatively, though — caveat emptor.

This photo, from a collection of early news photos housed at the Library of Congress, is part of an experiment that has that venerable institution dipping a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. Compare the photo on LC’s own website, versus on Flickr.

By publishing some of its holdings into Flickr, where items can be annotated by anyone, LC is taking seriously what you often hear now but rarely see yet: in a digital environment, libraries have to move beyond providing access and into facilitating use.

Access has been traditionally provided by libraries by the application of pre-determined, hierarchical subjects; that’s what allows physical objects to be sorted and found. It’s a system that puts the onus on one cataloger to master a relatively fixed universe of related subjects, and apply this system to an object so said object can be placed and later found in its correct place.

On the web, of course, objects are easily replicated, dispersed, recontextualized. They can be represented in any number of places, found through any number of pathways and connections. They travel unpredictably across an increasingly read-write landscape, wherein someone just might improve and embellish the guess of that lonely cataloger about what an object is ‘about,’ making it thereby more discoverable. Accommodation to an endless amount of comment and annotation seems a nascent effect of the dynamically networked use of objects.

But back to the photo: how has being Flick’d out of LC’s precincts improved our sense of its subject? Somebody had scrawled a title, “Mrs. Belmont at gunmen’s trial,” and the LC record left it at that. Just a few days after it appeared in Web 2.0-land, commenters had connected the photo to a Wikipedia entry about Alva Erskine Belmont –a rather remarkable socialite and promoter of the women’s suffrage movement–as well as another photo in the same LC collection documenting the sensational Rosenthal murder of 1912.

Wikipedia, blog postings, tags, and comments are bringing this photo to life on Flickr, giving us a better sense of its context and content. But lest we get carried away with the wisdom of crowds, we should also acknowledge a misogynistic annotation on the photo in Flickr: “dr_ass2001″ has taken up himself to draw a square around Ms. Belmont’s head and write, “Stop crying, you moron.”

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So will LC be modifying its records based on the annotations these digitized photos catch in Flickr? Their FAQs about the project demure:

The Library will decide what to do with data added through Flickr once the pilot is over. Because resources to update catalog records are limited, the Library cannot promise to incorporate contributed data into its own records.

Still, on Flickr pages such as that housing Ms. Belmont, an LC librarian has promised to alter records based on contributed information; and as of this writing, a search for ‘flickr’ in LC’s Prints and Photographs online catalog calls up 127 instances of metadata being added or altered as a result of the “Flickr community project, 2008.”

So what are the criteria for bringing information contributed through this “community project” into LC’s more authoritative catalog? How much time and effort are LC librarians putting into that crosswalk? It will be interesting to learn answers. As a member of RLG Programs observed three months into this experiment:

Social tagging in this framework doesn’t mean letting others catalog your collections for you – it really means offering up materials for a conversation which you have to follow closely to extract the bits worth bringing back.

“Conversation” seems to be the operative word here — but until LC makes its activities in this experiment a little more transparent, it’s rather like a conversation held in a confessional booth. In any event, the move towards opening up cataloging into a conversation with the public over the web is certainly a paradigm shift. Web 2.0 endeavors like LibraryThing have for years now facilitated the interplay of LC Subject Headings and free-form annotation. But now here’s LC itself, the very mortar of brick and mortar libraries, striking up conversation.

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This has implications that range into epistemology. A recent article by David Pimentel traces the implications of treating knowledge-making as conversational: “the nature of knowledge is increasingly viewed as an iterative process, with each individual attempting to make sense of the world s/he encounters.” We live in a world increasingly impatient with indexing done by professionals, “inevitably limited to one individual’s perceptions of an information object at one particular moment in time.”

A conversational world, growing out of Gordon Pask‘s Conversation Theory, Pimentel reminds us, is one of “participants communicating and seeking a shared agreement, or mutual understanding.” What is correct is formulated by participants in this communication, not some “external absolute.”

As Pimentel suggests in passing, an iterative and unfixed arena of exchange is of increasing importance in an world so often formulated as heterogeneous or interdisciplinary–the only way, perhaps, to “unif[y] theories and concepts across disciplines.” To be sure, most any uncontrolled conversation contains trivial or inane or erroneous noise, and crowd-tagging experiments seem especially full of that. It may be the price to pay for being able to talk at all in an environment that is still often known for the big stern Shushhhhh.

A post on Flickr that accompanied the launch of this LC experiment last January was cheerfully titled “Many hands make light work.” I doubt the LC librarians trolling the comments on the two photo collections so far released onto Flickr would agree–but assuredly, many hands make different work, and perhaps more interesting work all around.

Librarians get to come into a closer and more collaborative relationship with users of the objects they collect. Those ‘users’ (or patrons?) are able to participate in the detective work that is so often at the heart of subject identification, perhaps gaining a stake in culture as a result. The collection gets marked with new pathways through it, becoming less of a sterile pile and more of an ongoing seeding of discourse.

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The very first aim of the pilot though, as outlined in the “Many hands” post, has less to do with rethinking cataloging or conversational theory or anything like that, and more to do with publicity: “to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world.” Indeed, if you look through the LC collection on Flickr, a goodly number of comments are, shall we say, merely appreciative:

Like so much else about this pilot, this mere enthusiasm expressed for objects that have been online for many years –as if they have just now been made accessible–is striking. If LC had simply switched on annotation tools on their own site, I doubt that so much enthusiasm and activity would have arisen around these photographs.

The trick seems to have been to bring these objects to Flickr, a “major gravitational hub” that is “driven by network effects,” to borrow terms from Lorcan Dempsey. The willingness of LC , no slouch itself when it comes to gravitational hubs, to open up a dialog with a very different kind of hub, is heartening — less for the new exposure it can bring to the vast collections of august institutions (though that’s always valuable) than for the dynamic friction that is bound to arise from the commingling of authority and the crowd.

Though the immediate impulse is to breathe a vast sigh of relief that Mrs. Belmont has been released from the gloomy dungeon of LC’s sterile, unchanging gallery and is now facing a new public on Flickr, I suspect the ultimate value of such liberation will be renewed appreciation for the thin skein of metadata so laboriously pieced together by specialists over the years that can now be embroidered, tested, interrogated. From what little I now know of Alva, I think she would value the old standards, even while pushing for new ways of living.

…in order to support ongoing efforts of historians and archivists to preserve the record of this event by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts.

It’s worth keeping an eye on this project as a model of user contributions, clustered around a contemporary and tragic event. How do we use new media to process such things? What does it enable us to capture and collect and learn?

So far the April 16 Archive is fairly bare-bones; it only accepts ‘images,’ ‘stories,’ and the vaguely termed ‘other files’. And as of now it’s impossible to search, hard to browse. There is some tagging, but the lumped-up organization makes you wish for some other ways in to the content–perhaps a map interface along the lines of the CHMN’s last tragedy-archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. A simple uploading interface provides a cut-and-paste field for Virgina Tech stories, or an upload field for files (maximum 5 MB). You can choose to just contribute to the archive, or to have your contribution appear on the website (with or without your name). Submitters are told that they retain copyrights to anything they contribute, which broadly bans use for any public purpose without the permission of the April 16 Archive and the original contributor. No CC options here.

The April 16 Archive FAQs take on the question of veracity: How do I know that the content of the April 16 Archive is factual? The answer here:

Every submission to the April 16 Archive–even those that are erroneous, misleading, or dubious–contributes in some way to the historical record. A misleading individual account, for example, could reveal certain personal and emotional aspects of the event that would otherwise be lost in a strict authentication and appraisal process.

Besides, this FAQ rather blithely continues,

…the April 16 Archive harvests metadata from every contributor–including name, email address, location, zip code, gender, age, occupation, date received–and suggests that these metadata be examined in relation to one another, in relation to the content of the submission, and in relation to other authenticated records. Sound research technique is the basis of sound scholarship.

After picking my way around the Archive for a little while, I’m struck by the number of images of Second Life memorials. I just don’t know what to think of such screen grabs. Collective therapy, sure — but an historical record of this tragedy? You tell me.