Yesterday, in the quest to narrow down my fall classes, I caught up with Dr. Carole Palmer. She was my MS advisor and is the prof for the above class this fall.

The syllabus isn’t posted yet, but she was able to show me a draft syllabus that we went through. It looks extremely exciting!

There are currently 7 students enrolled in this class; just about a perfect number IMHO. Four are PhD students of very diverse backgrounds and interests, one is a well-qualified MS student who has been in several previous classes with me, one is a complete unknown as she doesn’t show up in the “complete” class rosters, and me.

The projects are completely open and we’ll be able to craft our work to our own interests. The main requirement is that we will share our interests, thinking and direction, and our work with the rest of the class as we go along.

I really hope I can fit this class in. That, though, means that Ontologies in the Natural Sciences with Allen Renear will have to go. Oh well. I do have Info Modeling with Allen, and I heard a rumor that he has an Ontologies in the Humanities class drafted up. I need to verify that with him.  It would be nice to get an ontologies class in.
My previous public comments on these classes: here here

Something I said earlier about Carole’s class:

Then there’s Carole’s new class on info transfer in the sciences. Yes, it is peripheral to my main focus. But it is a huge interest of mine: Inter-, trans-, and multidiscplinarity, scholarly communication, info transfer, knowledge construction, and so on. I really enjoyed 590CD2 Current Topics in Collection Development with her, and this, this is her specialty.

You know what? Carole’s class isn’t the slightest bit peripheral. I just have to think of it as part of the user-based portion of my education. I have read enough of her work to be worried that all of the info organizing we’re doing might not actually be helping scholarly users. If they find and use information in ways different, or at least orthogonal, from how we are organizing and classifying it then we are doing them a serious disservice and even hampering “progress.”

Exactly. As of now, I hope to investigate issues in cataloging and classification (or knowledge org. more broadly) that directly impact the accessibility and use, or non-use, of our resources by scientists, particularly the inter-, trans-, and multidiscplinary scientist.

We’ll just have to see how it works out.  If I get the new assistantship there’ll be a learning curve involved, including brushing up on my admitted limited abilities in W. European languages.