Curiosity Cabinetwork

Through unknown paranormal mechanisms, I find myself returning to my initial inquiries into the role of folksonomies in regards to vernacular architectures of information surrounding fortean phenomena. In essence, the folksonomy seems to be a return to curiosity cabinets of the 16th century. Housing all manner of marvelous bric-a-brac including: plants, fossils, minerals, medicinal items, unicorn horns, shells, stones, etc., these cabinets offered a glimpse of the world. Representational short-hand, accumulated in accordance with any one collector's means. In this primordial phase of the modern museum, collections were often ordered up in constellations of corresponding visual characteristics .

At the Anatomical Museum in Leiden, for instance, there was "a corner...dedicated to twoness -- two-tailed lizards, conjoined twin foetuses, forked carrots and a two-headed cat were ranged side by side." (Shiralee Saul, 1998) This non-hierarchichal manner of management is not unlike the method of the modern folksonomy. Folksonomies emerge from clusters of user-generated tags attached to images, videos, webpages, et cetera...on-line. Following the imitative magic of curiosity cabinets, tag clouds echo the curiosity cabinets nicely. Flickr is a more exemplary homage to the museum in Leiden, as you can see from this tag search on "two". Quite a curious collection indeed!

In an essay on curiosity cabinets arranged via corresponding features, UCSB's Microcosms group writes "For the sixteenth century, such [correspondences] confirmed the sense of an underlying logic to the world at large. For us, it allows us to recognize that objects within the world yield different sorts of information, or have different values, according to the questions we ask about them. In all cases, comparison requires access to a large enough body of material to make such analysis meaningful." ( Pangolin and Pinecone, 1995)

Within globalized networks of information today, "access to large enough bodies of material" is not so much the issue. Access is eclipsed by sheer volume of data. I find it interesting to entertain current debates on post-folksonomic constellations, such as collabularies in light of curiosity cabinets transmogrifying into taxonomic models. Is there an echo in here?