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Henderson Lecture to feature Dr. David Weinberger
Oct. 23, 2006 — The 2006 Henderson Lecture will feature Dr. David Weinberger who will present, “Everything is Miscellaneous” at 2 p.m., Thursday, December 7, 2006 in the Murphey Hall Auditorium (room 116). A reception will follow.
Abstract
Ever since Aristotle, we have organized knowledge according to some basic principles. By odd coincidence — that is, by no coincidence at all — these are the same principles that guide how we organize objects in the physical world. The most common structure of knowledge is the branching tree, found in everything from books (volumes, chapters, sections…) to the tree of life (animals, vertebrates, mammals…). We've assumed that to know a field is to see how everything has its unique place.
Then the digital revolution happened, eliminating the restrictions of physicality. For example, a real world librarian has to put a book on one and only one shelf whereas Amazon files books under as many different categories as possible. And, while traditionally the owners of the information own and control the organization of that information, in the digital realm, the users own the organization.
You can't make changes in the basic principles of organization without changing the nature of knowledge itself: What knowledge is, who gets to decide, what constitutes a subject or topic, where does knowledge's authority come from? We are in the midst of this revolution that touches how we organize our businesses, our customers' control of the information they touch, and the “who” and “what” of trust.
About the Speaker
Dr. Weinberger began his “career” in the late '70s teaching philosophy at New Jersey's Stockton State College for five years. (He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.) During this time he maintained his steady freelance writing of humor, reviews and intellectual and academic articles, publishing in places as diverse as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Smithsonian, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and TV Guide.
In 1985, after being denied tenure because the tenure quota was filled, and after an enthusiastic but well-mannered student demonstration in his support, he became a junior marketing guy at Interleaf, an innovative start-up with new ideas on how to create and structure documents. At Interleaf he helped launch the industry's first document management system and its first electronic document publishing system, years ahead of the Web. He left Interleaf after eight years, as VP of Strategic Marketing.
He founded the one-person strategic marketing company, Evident Marketing, in 1994 and within two years counted among his clients a wide variety of companies, including RR Donnelley, Intuit, Sun Microsystems, Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 and CSC Index.
In late 1995, he joined Open Text as VP of Strategic Marketing because he saw an opportunity to help shape the way intranets are used. As part of the senior management team, Dr. Weinberger helped Open Text move from one of the first Web search engine companies (the engine behind Yahoo!) to market- and thought-leadership in Web-based collaborative software.
After helping to take Open Text public in 1996, Dr. Weinberger returned to consulting, writing and speaking, helping to found a couple of dot-coms, and serving on industry and company boards. In 2000, Perseus published The Cluetrain Manifesto, of which is is a co-author. It became a national best-seller.
In 2002, Perseus published Small Pieces Loosely Joined to enthusiastic reviews. Dr. Weinberger currently writes three weblogs, articles for Wired, Salon, USAToday, Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, and many more.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, he was Senior Internet Advisor to the Howard Dean campaign, consulting on Internet policy. In 2004 he was made a Fellow at Harvard's prestigious Berkman Institute for Internet & Society.
He is currently completing work on Everything is Miscellaneous, to be published in spring 2007 by Times Books.
The Henderson Lecture
The Lucile Kelling Henderson Lecture Series was established in 1990 to honor the memory of Lucile K. Henderson, SILS faculty member (1932-1960) and dean (1954-1960). The lecture is free and open to the public.