Stumbled across The 325 Factlog, an effort to "document the year 325". Read that again, soak it in: "document the year 325." As in, here's everything we know about the people, places, and events if you are interested in the year 325. Okay, it isn't there yet, and it's really concerned with Rome and the West, but it's still a massive undertaking with an enormous amount of information.

One thing I find exciting about it is that it is such a good example of one of my favorite technologies, the Resource Description Framework (RDF). With RDF, each person, place, or thing is a 'resource', and the framework defines the relationships between those resources. So the 325 Factlog lets you start with a resource and the connections/relationships to other resources bring the knowledge out. Or, as the project says in an essay here.

A set of technologies that make up the "semantic web" offer a new way to describe. Using the Resource Description Language (RDF), you can make simple assertions about any topic, claims along the lines of "Constantine married Fausta" or "Constantius killed Ablabius". With RDF, a browsable list of assertions replaces a collection of synopses. For example, an RDF browser would let you hone in on Constantine and see assertions about him. You could see who he was related to and who he effected and the events he was involved in.

Here's where you start to choose a resource:

There are nearly 1200 resources to choose from, quite enough to keep me busy for a while. When you select, say, a person like Constantine, the Factlog brings up the texts that mention him.

Or, you can choose to just get the basic info about the person, as here. Then, start clicking on anything you can to chase through the connections, bringing up the same kinds of information for each. TONS of easily-browsed information!

It also exites me because it represents the ability to collect and serve up from one place such a wealth of information--and is smart about how to approach that wealth. Here's what they say about their store of information (factlog):

A factlog presents artifacts such as texts or statues that best capture a particular time and enumerates the facts they justify

. More importantly for education is this:

Of course, artifacts may contradict, their facts may be at odds. Contradictions are a key attribute of a factlog. It doesn't decide or edit beyond its choice of artifacts, it just presents what they say. As such it doesn't narrate but is a tool for narrators.

The process of narration seems to me like another way of saying "find the patterns, make sense of them, and explain them." This is what I used to teach, especially in first-year composition, but is a fundamental part of any instruction in any discipline. Different disciplines just have different approaches to the task. That makes such a wealth of information both exciting and difficult. Currently, I see students struggling with this kind of narration/pattern finding. As more and more treasure-troves of information appear we'll need to concentrate efforts not just on finding and the technical details of using the information sources, but mostly on approaches to education to help students produce a coherent narration of it.

That's not new--a good library calls for the same thing. However, the quantity of information in one place could make finding patterns that much more difficult.