At the end of the rainbow, there's a pot of...

Words are a cheap substitute for Meaning. Verbal communication is rife with misunderstanding. Ever heard someone say: They took my words out of context! Well, even with full quotes, words are inherently out of context. They are by definition verbal summaries of a life time of experience and a parallel universe of subconscious biases that defy articulation.

That being said, we live in a world where knowledge is transferred primarily through words. And increasingly, the words we read and hear are trite, over-generalizations of complex, nuanced issues and ideas. In the age of the 15 second update, 25 word blog post and 3 bullet-point powerpoint slide, we live in an era where we have too much of too little.

But it's not to say that there isn't a lot out there. That's the problem. There is too much out there. So much that it is beyond most people to experience it first hand. So while we are in the midst of the Golden Age of Dissemination of Information, we increasingly rely on secondary and tertiary summarizations of data rather than going to the primary source itself.

The problem is, nobody's summarizing our email for us...

But even if there was someone summarizing our email, I have a hunch that wouldn't be good enough for most people

Because deep down inside, we all know that while we're willing to rely on secondary summarizations of information to get our news and to keep track of who dissed who's outfit at who's latest pool party, it's fault-prone knowledge and ultimately unreliable.

So instead, we slog through our email, one at a time, even checking up on our SPAM once in a while in case a legitimate email fell victim to an overzealous auto-magic SPAM slayer.

Clearly however, the situation has come to a head. And we need to get off the runway and start cleaning up with something larger than a toothbrush. This is where visualizing data, visualizing meta-data such that people can get a high-level understanding of their information in context comes in.

Given such an ability, information transfer is a bottom-up, data-driven process, not a top-down, impressionistic process

So rather than getting the 15 minute elevator pitch based on someone's top-down impressions of their research, you can get a high-level summarization of their research yourself. A summarize built on the very data it attempts to summarize is a summary that is transparent and contextual. A summary based on words and top-down impressions is a summary that is opaque and taken out of context. (You start to wonder how The Communist Manifesto or the US Consitution might have been interpreted differently if Marx or the Framers had access to such a tool.)

Rather than parsing your information one item at a time and then struggling to synthesize some high-level understanding of it in your head, you can interact with and reflect upon a system-generated summarization of your data.

What does this mean beyond what's already been stated?

A living document.

Because the summary is data-driven and system-generated, it is always up to date and never just a "snapshot" of time.

Transcends time thereby allowing people to objectively reflect on and make decisions based on their data.

Because the summary is a summary of data you would have otherwise had to parse individually over time, the summary becomes a physical artifact of your data that you can reflect upon and objectively evaluate, relatively freer of the biases that would have colored your impressioned based synthesis of the information in your head.

And my personal favorite, effectively turns data into Knowledge.