When you read a lot, you find connections. I recently found an example of this through the Marginalian, with the article “The Source of Self-Regard: Toni Morrison on Wisdom in the Age of Information“1.
We could all use a bit of wisdom in the Information Age.
The quote she pulled that got me interested was by Toni Morrison, who was many good things but was not an information scientist – yet she got to the crux of much of information science in her quote, with a difference.
The full quote, which can be found in a copy of “The Source of Self-Regard” online free here, is:
For the purposes of the rest of this talk I want us to agree that in all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see at once how dispiriting this project of drawing or building or constructing fiction out of history can be, or that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.
Toni Morrison, “The Source of Self-Regard“, 2019
I was floored by this because she connected data to information to knowledge… to wisdom, which is something you see as the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) pyramid in Information Science. Gobs and gobs of data make up information, gobs and gobs of information make up knowledge… and gobs and gobs of knowledge gives you wisdom.
Maybe. We hope, anyway. It takes a lot of data to make information, and information is basically purposed data – we look into a cloud of data and try to make sense of it within a context. Information, in turn, is purposed information, which builds knowledge. The elusive wisdom comes from knowledge.
With that simple quotation from her book – and it’s a great book, I read it before writing this – she connected it all to we humans in a very human way. That’s one of the gifts great writers have. I recognized it because I’ve read much on information science and thought much about it, but maybe a lot of people who read Toni Morrison haven’t but she’s exposed them to it.
Maybe more people who are well read on information science will read more Toni Morrison.
Maybe that’s a path from some knowledge to some wisdom.
- If you don’t read the Marginalian, I strongly suggest you do. Maria Popova’s managed to do what I had originally intended to do with KnowProSE.com in her own flavor, and she’s worth subscribing to. You can also follow the Marginalian on Mastodon here. ↩︎