Well, well. I walked over to the LIS Library in the godawful cold yesterday to get a copy of the Burbules article cited by Gouge just knowing that it was going to cause me to have to rethink my position, be a man, learn, grow, and all that assorted stuff.
Guess what? One really should read an entire article if one is going to cite it to support one’s position. I mean c’mon. It is only 13 (small) pages, with citations.
I guess this is where the philosophy degree comes in handy. One must actually summarize someone else’s argument and understand it, applying the principle of charity, before either agreeing or disagreeing with it. And if you are going to use it to support your thesis, then the previous goes double.
Principle of charity: "Interpreting a person N means making the best possible sense of N, and this means assigning meanings so as to maximize the overall truth of N’s utterances" (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed., p. 547). Or, if you prefer a web resource.
The correlate of, "Emphasis is placed on seeking to understand rather than on seeking contradictions or difficulties" is to not use something to support your position that is not in agreement with it.
Here is what Gouge used Burbules to say:
Burbules offers another concept of how to assess credibility on Web [sic]. He suggests that by linking Web sites together and collectively screening the addition of new material, [online communities] pool their intelligence and expertise to make credibility judgments and to cross-check one another. . . One might term this an instance of ‘distributed credibility’ in that it displaces an individual judgment with a collective intelligence (Burbules, 2001). By applying Burbules idea to the blogging community, this process of networking prevents one blog as standing as the definitive authority. Instead the collective intelligence creates authority. It is from this distributed credibility that the blogging community provides a means of selection (Gouge, 16).
Why yes, Burbules did say what was quoted. But then this was seriously broadened past what he was actually claiming, and possibly more importantly, all of the caveats and dangers of such communities that he goes on to point out were left out completely.
The first point is that Burbules was referring to a different kind of "community" than blog aggregators. Particularly since he was referring to an actual form of online community, the web ring, whereas blog aggregators are in no sense a community. One could argue that the aggregator is just tapping into the collective intelligence of the ring, but aggregators do not just aggregate things from these communities. Communities exist in many different states, and some are healthier than others. What if it is a community of holocaust deniers? Does their collective intelligence make them credible? This use of Burbules point just doesn’t wash, as I will explain further in a moment.
An interesting part of the same paragraph that belongs between the ellision Gouge introduced goes on to say:
This phenomenon is interesting both as an epistemic exercise and as an instantiation of social constructionism at work. However, obviously it is imperfect since shared wisdom can also mean shared misconceptions or biases. While less hierarchical and more democratic than relying on invisible editor/archivists to make judgments on one’s behalf, this approach has the vices of its virtues (447).
That is the complete text that was replaced by an ellipsis by Gouge. It goes on to say a bit further in the same paragraph:
The greatest danger of such communities, as with communities generally, is that they can become exclusionary, hostile to unconventional, or radical challenges to their presumptions and practices (Burbules, 2000). From a credibility standpoint, this means that serious questioning—the kind of questioning that can only come from "outside" a given epistemic framework—is less likely to occur, and it is more likely that over time the shared preconceptions of such communities, even when they have been originally valid, will eventually become credibility blinders.
What I have tried to show here is how the most common responses to credibility issues online, while valuable and reasonable within certain constraints, ultimately turn out to be paradoxical and self-defeating. This does not make them useless, but it suggests a limit to how clear and reliable such credibility judgments can be (447-448).
See, Burbules larger point is that issues of credibility cannot be made solely on issues of objectivity and truth. His point is an ethical one. "In the end, the best safeguard is to check one’s judgments against the judgments of a community with which one has confidence: choosing that reference group prudently is as much a moral matter, involving issues of respect and trust, as a matter of expertise" (453). Seems I said something similar. Far less elegant, but very similar. One must know and trust the community first.
It seems credibility is an ethical issue. It has moral consequences. I may just have to write about the Burbules article seeing as at least one person has misunderstood it.
Burbules, N.C. (2001). "Paradoxes of the Web: The Ethical Dimensions of Credibility." Library Trends, 49(3), 441-453. Highly recommended.
And now a bit more on Google and PageRank from the new Google Newsletter for Librarians:
PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites.
For sake of argument, I’ll allow for a moment that Google is able to determine quality via their crawler and indexer. But, please, what makes something that is linked to by a news site of more value? In some instances, especially if you are looking for news items, then the fact that news sites link to something should increase its possible relevance to your search. But a large percentage of things that I’m looking for will probaby never be linked to by a news site. How and why does Google rank some sites as more valuable than others? That is a question of utmost importance.
As a rule, Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. If two pages appear to have roughly the same amount of information matching a given query, we’ll usually try to pick the page that more trusted websites have chosen to link to. Still, we’ll often elevate a page with fewer links or lower PageRank if other signals suggest that the page is more relevant. For example, a web page
dedicated entirely to the civil war is often more useful than an article that mentions the civil war in passing, even if the article is part of a reputable site such as Time.com.
Oooh, now their giving us reputable and relevant by using "trusted websites." Like www.nytimes.com?
All I can say is that this article for librarians which purports to answer the question, "How does Google collect and rank results?," generates more questions for me than it even begins to answer. I sincerely hope it does the same for any librarian that reads it.