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And when all these things exist, what will happen to our memories? As the Atlantic article suggests, we may find that the net effect is to "scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration," - or, as it argues in another part, we could spur a "golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom." The result may well depend on the quality of the efforts.

Sensemaking is the process through which humans put together understanding of related information. Sensemaking has been said to involve changes in cognitive representations during a human information processing task. Collection sensemaking involves understanding a collection of media entities, as a whole. One example of a sensemaking task is to compare the damage from Hurricane Katrina to homes, personal effects, and community buildings in different areas of New Orleans. Connected visual and semantic representations provide perspective to support users involved in collection sensemaking tasks. A zoomable map organizes images based on location at varying scales. Multiscale clusters based on zoom level organize images associated with events. The clusters afford contextualized thumbnail browsing and also maintain uniform information density on the map. Metadata enhances context and memory in the process of collection sensemaking.

Annotating is a pervasive element of scholarly practice for both the humanist and the scientist. It is a method by which scholars organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right. Yet scholars remain dissatisfied with the options available for annotating digital resources. Scholars wanting to annotate have to learn different annotation clients for different content repositories, have no easy way to integrate annotations made on different systems or created by colleagues using other tools, and are often limited to simplistic and constrained models of annotation. The importance of annotating as a scholarly practice coupled with the real-world limitations of existing practices and tools supporting annotation of digital content has had a retarding effect on the growth of digital scholarship and the level of digital resource use by scholars.

Natural languages are easy to learn by infants, they can express any thought that any adult might ever conceive, and they accommodate the limitations of human breathing rates and short-term memory. The first property implies a finite vocabulary, the second implies infinite extensibility, and the third implies a small upper bound on the length of phrases. Together, they imply that most words in a natural language will have an open-ended number of senses - ambiguity is inevitable.To achieve a comparable level of flexibility with formal ontologies, this paper proposes an organization with a dynamically evolving collection of formal theories, systematic mappings to formal concept types and informal lexicons of natural language terms, and a modularity that allows independent distributed development and extension of all resources, formal and informal.