Question Spaces, Discourse Engines and the Resonance Metaphor: Rethinking a Digital Library Initiative (Note 1)

by Paul C. Schroeder (Note 2)

Introduction

Early in 2002, New Directions in the Earth Sciences and the Humanities became the catalyst for several interdisciplinary efforts. This chapter will focus on one of the affiliated projects, titled New Directions Downeast: Visualizing a Digital Library for the Gulf of Maine Region, as it engaged in a process of transformation during ND’s first phase, completed in the fall of 2003. 

Each of the projects, termed “case studies” by the leaders of the New Directions (ND) initiative, composed a unique mix of participants, organizational structures and project goals. A central theme for all of them was the juxtaposition of partners whose disciplinary commitments were presumed to be as “earth scientists” or “humanists.” The concept of disciplinarity was itself questioned in the course of this project, as reflected in the declaration by USGS’s Fausto Marincioni, “I am a human scientist.” Despite the flavor of arbitrary academic convention that goes along with the concept of disciplines, as an organizing principle for the ongoing conversations within ND the concept of interdisciplinarity has been very fruitful. Through the ND process, my attention has been drawn to important interdisciplinary efforts in the information sciences, such as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1949-1955).

What follows will be a personal account of questions and conceptual advances experienced by one participant in New Directions Downeast (NDDE), situated in the context of an overview of the origins and outcomes for the project taken as a whole. Novel ideas such as “question spaces” and “discourse engines” emerged unpredictably from what at first was thought to be a workgroup convened to improve a specific, existing public information resource. In the end, that resource, the Marine Realms Information Bank, was improved. More importantly, the ways that project participants now think about what is involved in improving a public information resource have been fundamentally changed. 

Convening New Directions Downeast

Several established projects and informal conversations were underway in the Gulf of Maine region that in effect merged into the NDDE effort. To call ND a catalyst would be appropriate, since participants in separate existing efforts were looking for a way to move forward together. The structured components included the Gulf of Maine Environmental Information Exchange (GoMINFOEX), an ongoing series of quarterly meetings spanning the Gulf of Maine region; the Marine Realms Information Bank (MRIB) being developed by the Coastal and Marine Center of the U.S. Geological Survey at Woods Hole, Mass.; and various information and outreach projects underway at the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine. Informal contacts had already been established across all of these groups. In addition, there were several ongoing conversations at the University of Maine in Orono on topics such as the relationship between the traditional concept of ontology in philosophy and the current interest in machine and database “ontologies,” as well as on the digital future for constructs such as the “memory theaters” of classical times. These conversations were the source of the participant philosopher and medieval art historian in NDDE.

The call by ND for participating projects was welcomed as an opportunity to advance several local project agendas while strengthening links across these projects. After three years of discussion, GoMINFOEX was about to define the creation of a “digital library” as its operational goal (Schroeder et al., 2001). One of the Canadian participants in GoMINFOEX was a proponent working to create institutions that support the collection and access to geographically referenced digital data and documents (Boxall, 2003). The developers of MRIB at USGS conceived of it as an example of a “distributed geolibrary” within the spirit of a National Academy of Sciences initiative (National Research Council, 1999) and had presented their concept and its implementation at a GoMINFOEX meeting. The potential for extending MRIB’s mission to a wider community than the USGS coastal and marine scientists who were its core resource. The group in Orono, which included an historical cartographic designer, along with a philosopher, a medieval art historian and a librarian / spatial information scientist, adopted NDDE as an opportunity to explore practical applications of theoretical thinking about information systems design. 

A collaboration was proposed that would link participants in three nodes (Woods Hole, Rockland and Orono) toward “visualizing a digital library for the Gulf of Maine Region,” a region that is defined as the marine area from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in the east to Cape Cod in the west, along with the watersheds that drain into this from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. This collaboration act as a design consulting team that would advise MRIB developers in creating an interface that would be regionally rather than globally defined, and in refining MRIB’s internal structure in terms of its categories of representation ( or “ontologies”) and toward making it more responsive to its contributors and users. Our explorations returned often to these questions: is information more about facts, or about the categories that structure the facts? Beyond their utilitarian roles, systems of shared categories seem to be close to the heart of what we call “culture.” 

Framing the NDDE Effort

The role of the humanist is integral to the concept underlying New Directions. In the case of NDDE, all of the humanists were located in Orono, Maine, about 350 miles from the scientists in Woods Hole. The practitioners who represented the interface to the general public and to the people involved in the fishing industry and in coastal and island community research and planning efforts were in Rockland, Maine, a two hour drive from Orono. This project challenged the realities of communication and collaboration over distances, with a premium placed on several inter-node meetings and participation in the ND national conferences. 

The project began with a series of intensive bi-weekly meetings within the Orono group, which were reported in detail to the other two nodes via electronic mail and posting of meeting summaries as web pages. Several strategies for inter-node communication were attempted, including two videoconferences connecting Orono and Woods Hole, and an experiment in desktop video. Creating documentation of the NDDE effort was a particularly strong outcome, with approximately two dozen meetings recorded on video and audio tapes with written summaries of many of these posted on the Web.

The initial focus of discussion was aimed at evaluating the “ontologies” of MRIB in terms of their usefulness to citizens of the region who may have local needs or particular coastal and marine research interests. Database ontologies existed within MRIB through its use of classification systems, scientific taxonomies and controlled vocabularies. For instance, how were geographic regions being classified within MRIB, and would these formalized definitions of regions fit with local understandings and meet the access expectations of those outside the USGS research community? It was also conceived that these discussions of ontologies and classification systems generally would lead to the development of an interdisciplinary course on topics related to categorization.

This early focus was interrupted and eventually submerged in other discussions and goals, most immediately because of the departure of the group’s philosopher due to competing personal and professional commitments. Added to this was an institutional unreadiness within MRIB to directly engage in this discussion. The nodes were out of phase in the early period, and the process of coordination and reorientation of contributions and goals in effect became a dominant theme of the project. Geographic and institutional distances joined disciplinary distances in frustrating the group’s best efforts at linear thinking. Instead, the group’s organizational structure, its “network of conversations and commitments (Winograd and Flores, 1986, p. 186)” was marked by indirect paths and unexpected outcomes. 

The process of reframing the NDDE effort was first expressed at the initial national conference for ND held during the first months of the project. The concept of digital library was replaced by that of a “learning environment.” The restated goal had become “to envision a learning environment for mutual education of scientists and coastal communities.” This statement was made as a direct, affirmative response to ideas about interactive learning environments that had been introduced in that meeting by participants in another ND project, the Georgia Basin Digital Library in British Columbia. Over time it could be said that NDDE essentially became a pluralistic conversation about the role of discourse in the creation of equitable learning environments.

The word “mutual” as applied to learning in NDDE’s new self-description pointed toward a key problem that lies at the heart of public involvement and use of information system that is organized around the management and presentation of technical and scientific information. Most of the rest of this chapter will present one participant’s exploration of this problem, including the advances that emerged in the form of the concept of a “question-centered learning environment” and in the fruitfulness of a “resonance metaphor” for information.  

Common Languages and Question-Centered Learning Environments
	
A recurrent phrase that came up in thinking about mutuality in a learning environment was “leveling the field of inquiry” across the knowledge and interests of participants. How this leveling of the field may be accomplished through the creation of a “question-centered learning environment,” and how this would differ from more conventional information system design, are the topics of this section.

Embedded in the idea or mental model of a library, including the idea of a digital libraries, is the management of a stock of resources and documentation that somehow is made accessible to a community of users. The concept of information that is held by library users is one component of the idea of a library (and to the extent that the metaphoric repertoire of the information concept might be refined or broadened, the design choices for creating a library or learning environment will also increase).  MRIB  is an interface to such a storehouse of resources and documentation, constrained as originating in the research of USGS coastal and marine programs, with an added dynamism of being entirely made up of web-based digital data and documentation. A shortcoming of this stockroom model is the notion that knowledge exists somewhere (in the library), has been created by those who know (the scientists and other experts) for the purpose of being accessed and hopefully used by those who have “information needs,” that is, who are lacking the required knowledge. This is an intrinsically inequitable setup, brought into focus through frequent disconnects between the products of public science and the expressed needs of the public.

Whatever we would wish to create in the form of a mutual learning environment would have to be grounded in an alternative model of information, its creation, management and use. It was precisely at this point that the group could engage in the task of “visualizing,” inherent in the stated goals of the NDDE effort, toward rethinking the kind of environment that would be needed for mutual learning to take place. This visualization would not be constrained by pre-existing notions of what a “digital library” might be. The value of a multidisciplinary conversation became apparent as this reframed discussion went forward. 

For myself the problem eventually stabilized in the following terms: How can we construct question-centered learning environments, in contrast to the more customary knowledge-based information systems? Could design of such an environment in effect create a technical constraint that would be helpful in processes of re-orienting inquiry and enhancing commonalities? The resonance metaphor and the concept of question-centered learning environments co-emerged, perhaps giving validity to the idea that design choices are increased when the metaphoric base is broadened. 

Initial discussions about ontologies evolved into discussion of the needs for or existence of common languages, often distilled into the shorthand phrase “between scientists and fishermen,” acknowledging the different wordviews that are in place. In our region it is common to hear the question raised as to how the perspectives of these two (idealized) groups might be better heard, and how can their particular ways of knowing best be shared? The problem is sometimes stated in terms of the absence of a common language. 

Could there be a strategy by means of which a small interdisciplinary group that is interested in information systems design would be able to define the terms and relationships of such a language? Early in the discussion there was discussion of interviewing, content analysis, convening working groups, and other strategies toward advancing this needed “common language.”  It seemed that more than a lack of time and funding were standing in the way of such an effort. There was also a bootstrapping problem, in that common languages can only arise through histories of interaction within communities of discourse. An environment for this kind of interaction was missing, except in the form of fragmentary and often contentious public debates concerning marine policy issues. An attempt to define terms, to create a common language, seemed in a sense to presuppose the result that is intended to be achieved. Also, was creating such a “language” an appropriate goal? The whole notion seemed to be rooted in the program of logical empiricism that itself might be part of the global problem that NDDE was trying to solve (Feigl, 1973). 

At about this point the notion of a “discourse engine” was introduced into the discussion by Tom Aldrich of the Woods Hole group. In essence this can be conceived as an automated translator that would mediate across different communities of knowledge. Discussions of the discourse engine pointed toward a strategy for solving the common language problem. Making the idea of discourse an integral component of our system design made sense, especially since movement was already away from digital libraries and toward conceptualizing an interactive learning environment. Why was the absence of common languages so often taken to be a problem? In part, because the distances between communities of interest often have been expressed in the form of competing knowledge and data wars, often spawned in conflicting descriptions of reality. If our digital library were only about the distribution of more and better facts, via whatever “common language,” it might contribute to rather than solve this ongoing problem.

These thoughts set the stage for the concept of “question spaces.” The design of question spaces might work toward leveling the field of inquiry for communities of interest around the Gulf, while avoiding the problem of how to actually create a common language, without first having a place for the negotiating the meanings that such a language would involve. This was a turning point for my own sense of what this project could be about.

Information: Multi-Metaphor Approaches

At stake throughout the NDDE effort was the improvement of an existing public information resource, MRIB, and making its information contents available to a wider public and specific communities of interest beyond the coastal and marine scientists. The work of NDDE was in many ways parallel to the Georgia Basin project mentioned earlier, and much discussion was aimed at seeing how the Georgia Basin model might be imported to serve MRIB. The Georgia Basin initiative in many ways attempted to bring multimedia in the form of interactive online mapping, digital “flyovers,” access to news, and presentation of local knowledge through narratives and stories, into the service of creating a digital library. 

In distinction to Georgia Basin, the present approach could be seen as a “multi-metaphor” approach to information. Various core concepts and metaphors connected to the information concept were explored, leading to the suggestion of an emerging “resonance” metaphor for the information process. An intimation of this direction was made earlier through the concept of “leveling the field” between the presumed producers of information products, and the users. 

The spatial content of information metaphors was a major theme for my own research during the NDDE effort. One of the prevailing concepts of information could be termed the pathway metaphor. In this view, there is presumed to be a starting point, the question, and a destination, thought to be an answer or other form of satisfaction of information needs. A path is presumed over which the inquirer either travels to reach the destination, or across which the needed information is somehow “retrieved” and brought back to serve the needs of the questioner.

There is spatial content embedded in the pathway metaphor which suggests qualities such as distances, topographies, and obstacles in the path. This metaphor also is compatible with the information-as-resource-object concept. In this view, information is essentially a transportable object that somehow may be stored, hidden, shared, or owned. Information as resource object also fits comfortably into the established categories of  scientists whose primary concerns are centered on the natural resources of land, air and water. 
	
Another leading view that fits with these has been named the “conduit metaphor” by Reddy, who has called attention to some of the negative implications this metaphor holds for system design (Reddy, 1993). This is based in the signal / channel / noise model of classical information theory, often represented by inputs and outputs from a black box, with information content disturbed by “noise” and quality of signal controlled by feedback channels (Shannon & Weaver, 1964). 

All of the standard concepts of information point toward an entity that somehow exists outside the user, the living, cognizant human subject. These concepts, encapsulated in the pathway, resource and conduit metaphors, may not adequately serve when the task is aimed at reducing the relative distances and inequalities found in the relative positions of experts and lay publics.  A number of theorists have extended the critique advanced by Reddy in an attempt to find room for the participation of the inquiring human being as an essential part of the information process, as seen for instance in Krippendorff, (1993).  In the view of these theorists, information does not exist independently of living persons, their consciousness, purposes, and actions. Whereas such phenomena as the transfer of knowledge, information flows, data warehouses, intellectual property, and the information economy may fit well with the idea of information as resource object, this construct does not afford much room for creativity, the participation of the knower in what is known, the negotiation of meanings, or the importance of context in all communication and knowledge. The problem of creating an equitable learning environment for the co-production of questions and answers led to a design solution that arose via a new information metaphor and its graphic visualization. Rather than facilitating paths from questions to answers, this solution would bring  legitimate questions into mutual proximity in a shared ground, the question-centered learning environment.  

This represented a direct approach to the problem of  “leveling the field” between the users and producers of information. The intuitions that ultimately suggested the resonance metaphor for information parallel what Brenda Dervin calls “sense-making” as being the essence of the information process. She claims that because of a pervasive “ontological chaos” there will always an inability to “attain complete information,” leading her to speculate that it “may be more useful to conceptualize human beings as information designers rather than information seekers and finders (Dervin, 1999, p. 41).” The “seekers and finders” image fits well with the resource object view of information. Dervin argues that it does not address the most essential qualities of the information process. Her insight is important for our work. It is not only specialists who design information, but rather information design is an activity that is engaged in by all. Creating an environment where all are included is exactly the “level field” that is sought here.

In sum, the various metaphors for information should be seen as complementary rather than as competing, put to work together in a multi-metaphor approach to information. It should be noted that even when information is conceived as resource or as object, this must be taken metaphorically. Although information has aspects that are object-like, its behavior is not governed by rules of the physical world, which must apply to resources and objects. As Anthony Wilden notes, “... matter-energy exists independently of its being perceived, but information does not (Wilden, 1987, p. 305).” We might say that information does not exist in its storage, but only in its use.
		
How the Resonance Model Was Conceived
It can’t be said in truth that a perceived gap in the metaphoric repertoire of the information concept had been identified, and that a new metaphor was suggested to somehow fill this gap. There was indeed a sense of “something missing” with those in most current use, the conduit, pathway and resource object understandings of information. Instead, it was within the broad discussion of how these larger questions might be applied to the MRIB design project that the creation of particular graphic images allowed what might be thought of as the organization of the resonance metaphor around them. Once introduced into the discussion, it became clear that this new metaphor would be a candidate to fill at least part of the metaphoric “gap.”

The Orono group began a general discussion about the conditions under which questions might be introduced into any system where there was hope for an answer to be found. Even the language of “finding answers” is embedded in the information-as-object construct, and sorting out our own thinking about these terms was integral to the discussion. The pathway metaphor that envisions the questioner as being on an often indirect and obstructed path, thought to lead from uncertainties to solutions, began to be questioned.

The alternative view began to emerge with the general question of how it might be possible “to bring questions into mutual proximity” rather than asking how best to create paths from questions to presumed answers. An image was evoked of throwing a stone into a pond, or putting a message into a bottle and throwing it into the sea. This stone, this message in a bottle, could be conceived as the question’s originating moment. Emanating from the point where it has entered the water, waves propagate, eventually encountering islands, shores, other intersecting waves, propagating the news that a question-event has occurred, if not its particular contents, into its wider environment of the unknown. Other images were explored, such as the metaphors of flow embedded in the idea that people, their knowledge and their questions could be represented by discrete networks such as branching trees or riverine nets – for a while we were hard at work on visualizing the “grape stem model,” while examining dried grape stems in hand. 

While engaged in these conversations, almost by chance a graphic passed our way that could be used as a grid for visualizing this sort of question-propagation process (Diagram Group, 1984). This “scatter graph” was superimposed on the intersecting nets derived from the grape stem model, and the “resonance metaphor” was born. The discussion self-consciously explored the implications of a wave-propagation image, in terms both of its dynamism, its harmonic peaks and dead interspaces, and its affordance of multiple centers of origin. As well as information contents, the concept of “vast nothingness” served to mark the absences that were integral to a learning system. For Orono node member Michael Grillo, “the vast nothingness are the missed opportunities of communication. How do we bring them into sync with one another, so that they will resonate? I think that’s what our problem is. What our brief is in this project.” (For the flavor of these conversations, see Orono discussion summaries for the meetings between July 12 and August 30, 2002).

The graphic that seemed to reflect these discussions best was titled This Corner of the World, and was presented at the NDDE three-node meeting convened at Rye, NH on Sept. 7, 2002. Its origins were outlined in notes of the July 12, 2002 meeting of the Orono group: “Looking for a metaphor that can be translated into a form that is helpful in bringing people and their questions into closer proximity.” Slightly reframed, this became the guiding question of the NDDE digital library design effort: “What metaphors might help us to conceive of a space where questions can be brought into proximity to each other, rather than searching for paths from questions to answers?” The presentation of the This Corner of the World graphic claimed that it could be used to illustrate processes as various as the interpenetration of discrete networks, the clustering of nodes of significance and meaning, the propagation of information as waves over surfaces and through three-dimensional spaces, and the representation of periodicity as an essential component of information processes.

An important connection was made at Rye that helped to ground this concept in already existing work. This was suggested by Fausto Marincioni of the Woods Hole node, who mentioned that the image reminded him of the concept of “reverberation” as presented by Sarah Michaels in her research into the diffusion of earthquake knowledge through “information issue networks (Michaels, 1992).” Her work aimed to identify the many informal connections through which natural disaster information passes among researchers, public safety officials, policy makers and the general public. The publication of her issue network / reverberation model did not include any graphics, but described the sort of process that we were trying to illustrate with ours. In retrospect, it also seems particularly appropriate that this model derives from the domain of earthquake knowledge diffusion. The earth, as a resonant sphere, is the most general physical model for the kind of process suggested by the graphic created through our discussions.

The resonance metaphor which resulted from these discussions afforded recognition and inclusion of such things as attention, intention, motivation, interest, and receptivity, all with a bearing on successful information system design. In addition, the element of time, important in all forms of learning as well as in the integration of structures of information relations, was represented in the periodicities, synchronicities, and harmonies of the information process. Figures of speech such as being “in tune” or “rang my bells” had now become more at home as reflecting true elements of information processes.
										
In addition to these figures from our own culture and language, Tan (1999, p. 109) notes that “in the concept of yin we also get an idea of how the Chinese cultural tradition has tried to capture ‘sound’ through networking. Chinese have their old word for post office in yinyou or yinyi which may be translated as ‘sound-transmission service.’ This correlates to . . . the Chinese longing for the sound of their near and dear. The postal service was established to transmit the ‘sound’ of the people in a figurative sense. How unique that in ancient China sound was carried through long distances by messengers in the absence of sound-recording and sound-transmitting gadgets!”

Question Spaces: Leveling the Field of Inquiry

As outlined above, the resonance metaphor was an outgrowth of discussions about how questions might be included in the design of a digital library, now conceived as an interactive learning environment. The customary ways of thinking about the question-asking process, often involving a path that leads from uncertainty to knowledge, are counterparts to the idea that information exists that exists prior to the question, that may be a discoverable object, and that may be transported to places of need much as is done with natural resources. Are we now able to think of a spatial environment in which questions can be situated in a way that is closer to the emerging resonance model? 

First of all, this environment should be thought of as an actual space. Though digitally realized, this space provides an actual place where people can present themselves, and can engage in the transformative process called learning. Rather than providing a path to traverse from uncertainty to knowledge, such a space might bring people into juxtaposition in terms of their shared uncertainties, toward discovery of possibilities until then unknown or unimagined, affording room for creative problem solving that is the dream of any community of learners.

Basic to this approach is the simple assumption that everyone has questions, and everyone has some knowledge on which those questions stand. Knowledge and uncertainty then may be seen more as part of a shared spectrum, rather than as discrete points in opposition or obscured from each other. Why not approach the problem of leveling the field, inclusive of all participants, by paying somewhat more attention to the questions being raised than to the answers that are sought and are presumed to be already available? The process of inquiry could be reconceived toward a method that emphasizes the negotiated resolution of shared uncertainties. This method would aim to recognize the shared knowledge discovery of all who are involved, based on bringing diverse questions into close proximity within a shared space. The resonance metaphor suggests a single shared reverberating environment, minimizing the distinction between those who know and those who don’t, to the detriment of shared creative problem setting and problem solving. 

In contrast to the pathway and conduit metaphors which play nicely into the image of the notorious Nuremberg Funnel (through which knowledge is poured directly into the head of the receiver), our new metaphor emphasizes that  “scientists” have questions, “fishermen” have questions, and the chance for discourse may be greater if a space is provided that recognizes the equality of all. We now assume that this equality can be more easily established through the juxtaposition of questions than through the competition of knowledge. There may be many reasons why questions go unasked, why answers are presumed, or why questions mask answers that will never be displaced. A knowledge-based digital library is situated in an often contentious environment of competing professional and institutional turf and economic interests. Who likes to sit at a table where the positions are intrinsically unequal? At issue is whether some of these unbalanced forces can be mitigated through appropriate, innovative system design. 

The focus on questions, along with the design of a space to bring questions into proximity, seems to be a good match for the resonance model. Questions are active, while answers are static; questions embody contextual information such as motivations and situational relevance, while answers are often packaged context-free; questions are abstracts of existing knowledge in many dimensions, while answers are often one-pointed or one-dimensional. 

The existence of questions indicates a kind of creative disequilibrium, while answers may embody stable states from which it may be hard to move. The open-ended, unstable nature of questions may be what leads information systems designers to build around the relative stability of knowledge structures. Alternatively, questions can be seen abstracts of the multidimensional conditions that characterize knowledge and uncertainty. As abstracts, they might be a very efficient means through which to bring diverse and distant people together toward the kind of sharing that lies behind the dream of a common language. 

The actual design and implementation of such question spaces, beyond their visualization, remains to be accomplished. NDDE has explored the possibility of federating information resources and managing distributed conversations through the use of topic maps (Hunting, 2002). It is possible that similar federating strategies might be used in bringing questions into proximity, which is the core idea being explored here. 

Summary, and Continuing Work
	
New Directions Downeast brought together three groups, located in three places within one large geographic region, with the aim of assisting the development of an information resource devoted to coastal and marine research. The developers of this resource are working toward making it public and accessible to all, and aim to expand the scope and numbers of its contributors. 

Interacting over the span of a year and a half, NDDE participants attended three national-level meetings (at the Biosphere 2 in Arizona, at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, and at Pennsylvania State University); held two meetings of NDDE as a whole (in Orono, Maine and in Rye, NH); met dozens of times in local nodes; and experimented in communication via an online bulletin board, desktop video and broadband video conferencing. The project became a pluralistic conversation about how to devise public learning environments, including specific improvements to a unique information system under development. Throughout these interactions the dominant themes of public science, digital libraries and interdisciplinarity have been constant points of reference against which new possibilities and departures were measured.		

The projects of ND all were based in interdisciplinary approaches. There are at least two distinct senses in which a project might make advantage of an interdisciplinary team. The first brings people with different but well defined and relevant skill sets together to more effectively accomplish a defined goal on which all agree. The second involves making opportunities for the creative introduction of new ideas into processes that are open to constant redefinition and change. It is in the second realm that the NDDE process seemed to excel, though without ability to directly implement most of the new ideas that emerged. Public funding agencies should be encouraged to support such creative cross-pol efforts, even in the absence of well-defined agendas and outcomes.

Our local experience has shown that the disciplines themselves, as one NDDE participant puts it, have "their distinct cultures framed less by their subject matters than by their modes of structuring thought." Inquiry into these sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary frames and structures is tied to establishing effective means of cross-cultural and cross-community communications. As was the case in most of the ND projects, NDDE found that individual participants gained more in terms of advancing their own work, than was apparently gained in terms of advancing the explicit group project. In any case, knowledge from diverse and sometimes conflicting sources needs to be available both for problem solving and creative problem setting as design of public interaction systems, or "discourse engines," goes forward. 

Several fundamental differences in approach were apparent among NDDE participants, including: scientists vs. humanists; process-oriented vs. product-oriented persons; communicators vs. noncommunicators; rationalists vs. emotivists. It might have been an interesting exercise to adopt something like the Myers-Briggs personal preference characteristics toward understanding this diverse mix. Reflecting on the process, the ideas of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1996, pp. 21 ff.) seem pertinent, from their work on “organizational learning.” Based on concepts originating with cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, they contrast “single-loop learning” where tasks are well defined and the organization only needs to find the best way to accomplish them, as against “double-loop learning” where goals as well as capabilities are always open to evaluation and change. Double loop refers to two feedback loops, one affecting strategies of actions and the other related to the assumptions on which actions are based. "Strategies and assumptions may change concurrently with, or as a consequence of, change in values."

Speaking from the standpoint of one participant of the dozen or so who were involved during its term, NDDE facilitated the emergence of essential new concepts that have become part of my daily vocabulary and part of the toolkit being used in my ongoing work. The concepts of “resonance metaphor” and “question spaces” are helpful advances in my thinking about information system design. Now, having new names and new images available, I have better tools for exploring and elaborating the theory of information suggested here, aiming eventually toward successful implementations.

At the Rye meeting where many of these ideas came together there was discussion of the role of serendipity in the learning process, as experienced in the value of browsing the stacks of a bricks-and-mortar-and-books library, and in the chance encounters of the epistemological kind that seem to be absent in most of our online interactions. Along the way I’ve learned about the importance of weak ties and crooked paths that manifest through the “small world” phenomenon (Buchanan, 2002). Certainly the chance matching of a graphic whose design emerged from the discussions among the “humanists” in Orono with the knowledge of a particular model of natural disaster information known to a participant from the Woods Hole group can be seen as a significant “small world” event. The vision of New Directions provided a context for this event to take place. The NDDE encounters taken as a whole are worthy examples of Gregory Bateson’s definition of information, “the difference that makes a difference (Bateson, 1972, p. 453).” 

Perhaps one way to conceive of our ongoing efforts would be as aiming to design a digital library in such a way that “weak ties” events that are fruitful for its users would be recognized, not submerged. This would lead both toward the production of answers to questions and toward the creative emergence of something that is new. Such a place, or space, cannot be an abstraction or a metaphor – it needs to be thought of as a real space, where real things take place between real people with varieties of real commitments. Because we often only see what we come prepared to see, and what we think is in our interest to see, the problem becomes not so much one of providing access to data and accumulated facts, but of finding ways to attain a readiness to see – a problem of enabling discourse toward learning. 

The New Directions, along with New Directions Downeast, had some weaknesses that left a feeling of an opportunity lost, as well as much conceptual ground gained. A great bed for the cultivation of new ideas, these were often contrasted with the lack of concrete progress on tasks at hand. NDDE was widely scattered geographically, without integration of the nodes. A weak structure of governance and communication characterized the project as a whole. Whereas many summary reports were requested and submitted, time and resources for local problem solving was inadequate. One unintended negative consequence was that the ongoing Gulf of Maine Environmental Information Exchange conversation was absorbed by NDDE, leaving the actual implementation of a digital library for the Gulf of Maine region for future work.

On the other hand, each of the participating groups that made up NDDE reported specific advances that can be directly related to the New Directions process. On their way home from a NDDE meeting, the Island Institute group hit upon a successful idea called LobsterTales that now links the consuming public with the lobstering community. The developers at MRIB report that it has a much sounder institutional base now than when the NDDE process began. The course proposal originally conceived as an interdisciplinary approach to categorization has been realized in a more general proposal titled Tools for Thinking.

The flat image that formed the basis of the resonance metaphor, This Corner of the World, has been elaborated in a 3-D digital environment that incorporates and expands on its characteristics (Schroeder, 2003). Its segmented sphere, reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s global geographic projection, the “dymaxion globe,” has led us to explore applications for current research in global grid tessellations (Dutton, 1999; Sahr, 2003). Aiming at an organization for knowledge and uncertainty in a common shared space, I have now worked through such geometric concepts as intersecting tetrahedra, torus knots and scanning orbits.	The tensegrity structures of Buckminster Fuller and sculptor Kenneth Snelson now appear to address the need to represent multiple information relationships within a single multidimensional space. Fuller’s cosmology, a universe made up of forces of continuous tension and discontinuous compression (rather than of static objects) seems well suited to the dynamic space that is required (Fuller, 1965).

In moving forward with these ideas, particular works and thinkers have taken on new relevance. For example, Ivan Illich’s concept of “convivial tools” seems particularly pertinent to the design tasks that have been taken up here. His concept of “radical monopoly” seems particularly pertinent in a world that is increasingly digital: "That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly (Illich, 1973, p. 52)." Online services are becoming such a radical monopoly which needs to be recognized and designed against. Similarly, the emergence of the concept of question-centered learning environments has be informed by the concept of “inquiring systems” advanced decades ago by C. West Churchman (1971). Future work across the ND spectrum likely will include consideration of the new “Constitution”proposed by Bruno Latour in his recent book, Politics of Nature (2004). With an intent similar to our attempt to “level the field of inquiry across scientists and the public,” Latour presents a program for getting beyond divisions that were established in our culture as far back Plato’s allegory of the cave. He presents the situation in this way: "In [the present] Constitution dispensed by (political) epistemology, how are the powers in fact distributed?  The first house brings together the totality of speaking humans, who find themselves with no power at all save that of being ignorant in common, or of agreeing by convention to create fictions devoid of any external reality. The second house is constituted exclusively of real objects that have the property of defining what exists but that lack the gift of speech. On the one hand, we have the chattering of fictions; on the other, the silence of reality. The subtlety of this organization rests entirely on the power given to those who can move back and forth between the houses (p. 14)." His new Constitution would include all voices, human and nonhuman, all with equal standing as what he terms “propositions.” 

The question remains, what “is” information? Unfortunately, the popular view increasingly is along the following lines: “... information, by which he means the sort of exact, instantly accessible, easily distributed digital information which goes into computers and can be used to find and attack military targets with awesome precision in near-real time.” (Powers, 2003, p. 19) Those of us whose disciplines touch on the “information sciences” should be very concerned that this is the image that prevails. My hope is that the word information will increasingly express Wilden’s alternative understanding, that  "Information is a relationship, not a thing (Wilden, 1987, p. 183)” and that our task as information designers is toward understanding and expressing the relationships that matter. For this a multi-metaphor approach might help.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was published as “A Resonance Model of Information and the Design of Question Spaces: A Report from New Directions Downeast,” in the Colorado School of Mines Quarterly 103:1 (2003). 

2. Paul Schroeder received a PhD in Spatial Information Science and Engineering from the University of Maine in August, 2003. A librarian by training, he has been involved in issues of  information access for local community citizens, and provides community documentation services. He may be contacted at .

3. Online resources for projects mentioned in this paper may be found at the following URLs:

Digital Library of the Gulf of Maine: http://www.gomdl.org
Georgia Basin Digital Library Project: http://www.georgiabasin.info	
LobsterTales: http://www.lobstertales.org/index.jsp
Marine Realms Information Bank: http://mrib.usgs.gov
New Directions Downeast: http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~schroedr/newdirections/ndde.html
New Directions Downeast, Rye Meeting Summary: http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~schroedr/newdirections/ryesummary.html
New Directions in the Earth Sciences and the Humanities: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/newdirections/
Nuremberg Funnel (graphic): http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/math/ign/xyz/ca00-v5.htm
This Corner of the World (graphic):
	http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~schroedr/newdirections/resonancemodel.html		
Tools for Thinking (course proposal):
	http://www.commoncoordinates.com/thinkingtools/thinkingtools3.html

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