Proto-ontologies in social reconfiguration

This morning, I was thinking about a presentation that Katy Börner made while presenting at the School of Information last semester. After the talk, there was a small group standing in the back of the room looking at a large and complicated poster. The content represented some network clustering algorithm that had been run on a very large database of movies (along with a number of their attributes - actors, director, year, etc.). One of the ideas behind this type of work was that clustering could be used to identify new patterns, groupings, ways of understanding this large dataset. One thing I noticed was that the movies were color coded according to a set of 10 or 12 (I can't recall the exact number) movie genres. While this might be marginally interesting or useful for, say, a recommender system where you want movies that are broadly agreed upon to have similar themes or qualities, it missed the point for me. Most of the other data (again...actors, director, year made, etc.) are purely objective statements of fact. These are hard data. Including a subjective and constructed variable such as genre, in my opinion, foregoes the opportunity to do some of the truly interesting categorical and taxonomic work. If genres are provided within the visual representation, it primes viewers simply to recreate and confirm the existing categories. Why not create a visualization that encourages people to experiment with defining new genres? Seeing new connections on the subjective level and figuring out their flaws, consistencies, and revelatory qualities?

This morning thought led me to wonder how social experiments could be designed to prompt people to abandon their current ontological frameworks (at a certain level of analysis...not all the way back down to the level of primitives, necessarily) and do the work (collectively or individually) of thinking through to new and useful taxonomic structures. I can think of a number of places this has been talked about in quite a bit of depth. Sensemaking, for one example, addresses aspects of what do to with information that doesn't fit into a logical or concordant mental structure, and the processes by which we adapt to fit new information. (I'll have to think through how this changes with flavor of sensemaking - Dervin, Weick, Russell, etc...each interpretation of the sensemaking idea likely has different implications and consequences). What I'm thinking of, though, isn't about new information. It's about seeing new things in the information we already have. Kuhn discusses this in terms of Copernican revolution. Copernicus didn't see anything in the heavens that others couldn't. He simply allowed himself the freedom to let go of a foundational categorial assumption (that the earth is the center of the universe), which led to a host of other radical (and, as it turned out, heretical) implications across the knowledge disciplines, as well as religion and politics.

In this letting-go, Copernicus kept the objects in his world constant, but let go of some of the relationships among them to arrive at different conclusions and groupings. Much like neurons can be forced into a plastic, or proto-specialized state...can we induce some sort of proto-ontological state in our relationships with information to arrive at new and potentially useful taxonomies?