I just walked down the road on the way home and a guy comes up to me and asks me if I have an Anti-Virus CD-ROM. What was that about? Follow the white rabbit? Some weird code? Is that a local pick up line in the gay community or was I supposed to answer something equally abstruse to be able to join some strange club or political conspiracy? Or was he really just looking for an Anti-Virus software? He looked like someone who owns a computer. I imagine him writing an important paper, trying to finish it before the morning, and now at eleven o’clock his computer crashes because of a virus. Cairo is a good place for late night shopping, but software might very well be an exception. And so the poor man is roaming the streets talking to strangers like a beggar in despairing need for this piece of software. When I shook my head in surprise he merely smiled and marched on, determined in his quest, as it seemed.

This post is part of a series. Please also check out the other posts:
Part 1: What is the Web 2.0
Part 2: The challenge
Part 3: Inverse footnotes
Part 4: The exculpation of Wikis

Let us assume for now that availability is not a problem – an issue I have not addressed yet. Let us also assume that a part of the ideas sketched in the previous posts have come true. That means that we have an enormous amount of information available. In result we might actually look back at the good old days, when we did not have that much information. OK. To be fair. If availability and accessibility of knowledge as well as the possibility that knowledge is compiled and made available are no problems, this would save us an enormous amount of time. Time we could invest in reading and evaluating more information. However I assume that the amount of information we would gain would outstrip the amount of additional time by far. Therefore relevance becomes a central issue. Solving the relevance issue might be the most difficult of all and I can only present some very vague ideas on where possibilities could be. I think we have to address the question of relevance by two sides. On one side is the question of what information you can put into a system to give you a better evaluation of relevance. On the other side is which systems to evaluate relevance could be available. The two questions as I will show later are in a certain way interlinked. I will look at the second question first, because this where my Web 2.0 analogy might work to a certain degree. The first question implies a rather a user / client side software solution, which I will therefore look at later.

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This post is part of a series. Please also check out the other posts:
Part 1: What is the Web 2.0
Part 2: The challenge

Literature in humanities and blogs have one thing in common: they both like to quote and reference excessively. However blogs have the advantage of not being stuck on paper. They are not static. They can change over time. Blogs haven used this to introduce the trackback, which has most probably been central in the rise of the blogosphere, as the collectivity of all blogs is called. The trackback is a simple method which works basically like an inverse footnote. While a footnote is showing what the author is basing his argument on the trackback shows you who is basing his arguments on this text.

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Today I will start what will become a series: Humanities 2.0. I am a vivid follower of what has happened in the internet in the recent years. And more than one time I have stumbled over ideas which I believe could be successfully applied in humanities. For those who have not followed the internet as closely, in my first post I will have to quickly recapitulate what happened.

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