Can we really capture and represent knowledge?
Do (symbolic & artifactual) representations hold meaning and knowledge? I do not believe so - unless the artifact is co-designed and co-created by a community. Even then, the essential meaning must be refreshed by reflective rituals and validated as an ongoing practice.
Consider a wine product
No sherry or wine (artifact) tells us the whole story, the energy in the sunlight, the climates past that shaped the vine, the vintner’s knowledge that made that special color or the oak vat that imparted the flavor. Those are not things that can be captured in chemistry or completely revealed through product analysis or reverse engineering - they are a situated part of the community & ecology of wine making.
Mediating in collaboration
Prototyping, 'strawman' and mock-up activities (reification) allow participants to draw on their experiences and practices more directly than abstract descriptions. Representations mediate the relation between collaborators and their products, between individuals in a group, between the group and their sponsors and between the group and their users / market. Once captured in a representation, there is a resistance that sets in as descriptions are manifest & objectified that tends to balance the affordance offered. It is the multitude & diversity of interpretations that carries the strength of a representation rather than consensus around shared meaning.
Representation as container
Boundary objects (concept maps, ontologies, source documents) serve as a vehicle, container and carrier, for ideas. When a representation crosses community boundaries, there is a loss of meaning and context, which is counter-balanced by an opportunity for new negotiations, different views and reconstructed / emergent meaning. Points to the importance of establishing rationale & context in use or practice, an essential non-represented aspect associated with any formalism. All representations are situated in use. An important aspect of a memory object is its trajectory, i.e. the consequences of later use and the feedback loops.
So then how exactly do you store, capture, preserve and scale knowledge?
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