SubscribeMy continual frustration with search engines and navigation of data to find relevant, specific information has me wondering if heirarchized searches are the way to go. Everyone is familiar with the concept of the democratic forest, even you are unfamiliar with the term itself. The idea of the democratic forest is that, now that millions of people have internet access and there are hundreds of ways to put information on the internet, it creates a dense thicket of information that is totally disorganized and difficult to navigate. We have access to as much information as we want, but we have no way to find the exact information we require. Take, for example, an uncurated online artist registry. The face-value function of a registry is to help interested parties find new and undiscovered artists, but with every artist tagging his/her work under every category (to appear in more searches), it becomes impossible to navigate. An even more popular example would be facebook. Try to find something one of your friends posted 3 months ago, and you'll find that there is no good way to go about it.
I'd like to suggest that geographical organization is a better way to navigate data, especially when there is so much out there. A simple way to visualize this is to remember back to elementary and middle school when we would all have to gather our thoughts into a "web" before we began writing something. It's not so great of an organizational tool, but it has potential as a way to sort data. Imagine that you want to discover a new band that sounds similar to The White Stripes. You begin with "The White Stripes" as a seed. You have several objective connections to the band, e.g., band members, producers, record label, opening acts, etc. If you were to pick "band members" as the type of connection you want, you would draw two lines from the band: a "Meg White" line and a "Jack White" line. Meg's would lead nowhere, but Jack's would lead you to The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather. By re-seeding "The Dead Weather" at the center of the web and going through the same connections, you see connections to The Raconteurs, The White Stripes, The Kills, The Waxwings, The Queens of the Stone Age, The Greenhornes, etc. By continually re-seeding each of these bands, you find limited yet highly relevant amount of information. You can probably understand the advantages, especially as compared with the randomness of Pandora or any other current music discovery site.
This has potential as a new way to understand art history as well, especially as it pertains to current artists who have access to images from a wide range of history. Picasso, cave painting, and Basquiat may be highly relevant to a current artist's practice even though they are temporally unrelated. Geographically speaking (that is, if we view these hypothetical influences on a flat plane), it's pretty easy to see connections flow through Picasso, cave painting, and Basquiat.