Rigorous Systematic Bibliography, Bates

Bates begins article by drawing a distinction between two branches of the field of bibliography:

• Systematic, or Enumerative, Bibliography; and
• Descriptive/Analytic bibliography

Descriptive/Analytic version is more technically complex, but systematic bibliography is more practical for everyday use.

Her goal in the paper is to more fully develop descriptive bibliography for the purposes of making it as rigorous as its counterpart.

Carla Hesse, Books in Time

Hesse begins by arguing the “civilization of the book” or the “modern literary system” was not a natural outgrowth from the codex technology, but rather a complex negotiation between society (or, more accurately, multiple different societies) and technology of the codex.

She argues that research in her field has often conflated the “means of cultural production (the printing press)” with the “mode of cultural production,” i.e. what she calls the “modern literary system.” In other words, she wants to call attention to the sociotechnical arrangement that conspires to produce the idea of the book in Western society.

Note: the codex far precedes the printing press, and it was the dominant literary cultural form long before the printing press came around.

An important aspect of the modern literary system is the notion of the author as creator or originator of the knowledge contained within the book.

Rowley and Farrow, Enumerative Classification

Classification is a fundamental behavior of humans in which we attempt to determine the similarities and differences between two or more phenomena.

From two year olds to experts in a particular knowledge domain, everyone employs classification schemes. Information professionals use classification in order to bring together similar information items and dissociate info items that are unrelated.

ANSI/NISO Controlled Vocab Guidelines, Chaps. 1 – 5

Introduction

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) developed this Standard for creating and using controlled vocabularies. As stated in the abstract, “the primary purpose of vocabulary control is to achieve consistency in the description of content objects and to facilitate retrieval.”

(The entire document from now on will be called “the Standard”.)

The need to control vocabulary arises from two basic features of natural language:

1. Synonymy – two or more words can be used to represent a single concept (e.g. salinity/saltiness)
2. Polysemy – two or more words sound and look the same, but have different meanings (e.g. Mercury – the planet, the chemical element, the automobile, the mythical being)

Controlling vocabulary reduces the complexity of natural language and facilitates retrieval of relevant items in a search.

Kipp, Online Indexing

This is a summary of a powerpoint presentation by Margaret Kipp. Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch the presentation; I can only read the slides. So my understanding of the content is limited to what is written in the slides.

She begins the presentation by highlighting some online social bookmarking tools, i.e. Delicious, CiteULike, and Connotea.

She seems to then move to a discussion of those who contribute to what she calls “indexing.” Her term here probably relates to idea of tagging.

Three distinct groups are involved in indexing:

1. Authors
2. Users
3. Intermediaries (librarians, etc.)

Each group has a certain relationship to the content that, in turn, affects how they index the content.

Golder and Huberman, Social Tagging

Golder and Huberman conducted research on how social tagging functions on the popular website Delicious.

Differences between social tagging and taxonomies:

1. Taxonomies are administered by some authority; tagging is “democratic” (my scare-quoted term)
2. Taxonomies are usually hierarchical; tagging is “flat”

Semantic and cognitive aspects of classification:

Polysemy – a term describing a word that carries a number of semantic meanings.

Synonymy – multiple words having the same or similar meanings

• This is a huge problem for tagging because the non-standardized or “uncontrolled” vocabularies of user-generated tagging makes for problematic search queries.

Gillespie, Wired Shut Chap. 3

“We must avoid the claim that the design of the technology wholly determines what is done with it, while also recognizing that the shape of a tool can have real, political consequence; we must recognize that technology is shaped by its designers and users in material and symbolic ways, while not also assuming that it is infinitely malleable and therefore of little concern” (Gillespie 67).

Gillespie argues at the beginning of chap. 3 that technologists, particularly those interested in the cultural and societal implications of a technology need to “carve out a space” between the two poles of social and technological determinism. We need to understand the ways in which the materiality of a technology influences its use protocols, while also understanding that social and cultural practices develop as a negotiation between a particular culture and a particular technology.

“sociotechnical matrix of practices, meanings and institutions” – I like this phrase

Speed bumps and the bridges over the Long Island parkway each enact a kind of material/technical regulation of human behavior. In this way, they each exhibit a particular politics, however subtle it may be.

Gillespie uses the phrase “built environment” which reminds me that the architecture school here at UW changed its name to “Built Environments.” I like this phrase insofar as it calls attention to a spatial dimension of technology and the embodied interaction with technology. Here, I am using the term technology broadly to include any human-made device.

Markup – the inside scoop

Sorry for the terrible title for this post.

Markup is for structure, formatting, metadata and, more generally, context.

Markup is structure in that markup identifies what the thing IS, it identifies the unique structure of an information item. In this sense, markup isn’t just formatting, or how and where an info item appears on a document. Markup describes the ontological status of the information item.

Markup is structure: this is a very traditional way of thinking about markup. This is the HTML function.

Markup is metadata: this is very similar to the idea of markup as structure, in that markup is the information about the information. Markup describes the information in such a way as to give it “facets.” I know this term facets is used in info organization and I’m not aware of its disciplinary meaning in that context, but it makes sense to me. This idea of facets spatializes the information item and allows me to conceptualize it in an embodied way. To think about information as faceted make sense to me. Each facet is a location and way of approaching and information item. In terms of information retrieval, it would seem that more facets are better than less. Although this has issues because it doesn’t make it unique. The more facets an info item has, the facets it has in common with other items and hence makes it less easy to retrieve an individual item.

The Future of Info

Despite my concerns with the term “information” (as voiced in this earlier, slightly incoherent post), it remains a popular term in popular and scholarly literature. Hence, if I were to ignore it, I risk appearing out of touch. So, here I am using the term anyway.

What are models of the bibliographic universe?

P. Wilson: “… the bibliographical universe, the totality of things over which bibliographical control is or might be exercised, consists of writings and recording sayings.”

Wilson makes the distinction between a “work” and a “text” using the words, “he has ordered the words into a certain sequence” and so produced a text.

Are we to believe that the unordered words are a “work”? How could a jumble of words constitute a work?

Update: I understand now that Wilson doesn’t mean an “unordered” collection of words, an abstract, somewhat Platonic notion of the work, prior to physical instantiation.

I understand the bibliographic advantage of developing the idea of a “work,” at least in the world of card catalogs. But it doesn’t seem to make sense anymore.  We can easily draw relationships between “manifestations” without having to create a hierarchy that at its apex exhibits some abstract ideal of the “work.”

Then a particular instantiation of a text, i.e. in material form, constitutes an “exemplar” of the text. This seems wrong.

The work should be the sequence of words and marks while the text should be the material instantiation of the work. Although, I’m not particularly fond of the abstracted work, as if a work could exist in the ether and then somehow manifest exactly as it was in the abstract in a material form.

As many media and literary historians have shown (spin words, I know), the medium, the material form, is as important to a work as the abstract idea of the work.

Novels only came along when printing became relatively cheap. Dickens novels were often originally serialized precisely because the predominant mode of fiction story telling was in periodicals. This not only affects how the reader would encounter the text, i.e. over a period of time, but how Dickens would write the story, i.e. with punctuated, episodic drama.

This idea of work needs to  be thought about a little more.

One interesting example of this problem would be the abridged versions of classic books that break down the language for, say, an ESL population.

For Wilson, a work is a collection or family of texts that all point to that work as its source.