Sunday, 11 Mar
Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:
Shakespeare, The Ghost’s Speech (from Hamlet)
John Donne, “The Flea”
Green, Rebecca. “Relationships in the organization of knowledge: An overview.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 3-18. Re-read for Representation & Organization.
“Mereology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Read because Allen Renear suggested I do so in relation to my trying to elucidate the difference between P88 and P89 in the CIDOC CRM. I made a rather lengthy class forum post trying to elucidate this difference, and will probably write my first paper on it.
And, yes, portions of it were beyond my current abilities. And other portions were beyond the work I was willing to put into it. But he also said, “You don’t need to read all to get the basic introduction to standard axioms for mereology.” So I was going “above and beyond” again. Glutton. Punishment.
Monday, 12 Mar
Thomas Gruber. (2005) Ontology of folksonomy: A mash-up of apples and oranges. For Representation and Organization, with nice overlap for Ontologies.
Good, but simple [not simplistic] article about the development of an ontology for tagging. I’ve had thoughts along this line myself on occasion, so I was happy to read this. I found myself wishing for a bit more in way of technical details, though; perhaps a little XML or RDF, say. But I imagine that is to be found at http://tagcommons.org/. Oh well, another blog added to my aggregator. Then again, I promised myself I’d look into more projects and actual practical things and remove some of the biblioblogosphere echo chamber.
Tagging for me, though, is at best secondary and perhaps even tertiary. But since I can actually get my mind around an ontology for tagging it may be a good project to use to learn more about ontologies, XML, RDF, and whatever else they are using to implement.
Smith, Barry and Achille C. Varzi. (2000) “Fiat and bona fide boundaries.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LX (2), March 2000: 401-420. [pdf]
Same as my entry on “Mereology,” except Barry Smith recommended, in general, for his work on bona fide and fiat boundaries.
Smith, Barry and David M. Mark. (2001) “Geographical categories: an ontological investigation.” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15 (7): 591-612.
See above entry. Excellent article that happened to be an awesome congruence of ontologies, categorization, Lakoff and CIDOC CRM. I’m not sure how much of this mereology stuff I’ll actually use in my paper on P88 vs. P89, because I honestly don’t think some of the ultra-analytic philosophy issues need to be gone into to clear up the CIDOC CRM issues, but there is some useful material in this paper. The issues can be easily cleared up with some reference to basic thesaural principles and other KOS work, and experiential work in categorization, without anything useful being contributed by “deep” philosophical analysis of mereology. Even the bona fide vs. fiat boundary issue—while immensely interesting and useful (in some sense)—is not directly applicable. This paper, though, brings the best of all those areas to bear and, while not necessary to the defense of my pulling P88 and P89 apart, it can add something to the discussion.
Tuesday, 13 Mar
Budd, John M. (2006) “Toward a practical and normative ethics for librarianship.” Library Quarterly 76 (3), July 2006: 251-269.
Stumbled over browsing the current issues of print journals in the LIS Library. Pretty good, all in all.
Noy, Natalya F. and Deborah L. McGuinness. Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology.
Re-read for Ontologies. Read 30 Nov 06 for Information Modeling.
Lakoff, Chap. 14.
Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:
John Donne, Holy Sonnet I
John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV
Wednesday – Thursday, 14 – 15 Mar
Green, Rebecca. (2000) “Locating sources in humanities scholarship: The efficacy of following bibliographic references.” Library Quarterly 70 (2): 201-229.
Re-read. Originally read 22 Jan 2007. Maybe I’ll get it blogged this time.
Just went back looking for the link to my previous mention of this article. I had forgotten that this was the article that led to my “Intellectual crushes and more mature relationships” post. It’s amazing what a good article, a quiet bar on a Monday evening, and $2 pints of fresh Guinness will lead a boy to say.
Foucault, Michel. The Discourse on language.
Made a lot more sense than the book it comes in, The Archaeology of knowledge.
Friday, 16 Mar 2007
Kemp, Rebecca. (2007) “Catalog/cataloging changes and Web 2.0 functionality: New directions for serials.” The Serials Librarian 53 (4): 33 pages. Preprint found via post at NGC4LIB list 14-15 March 2007.
Worth the read; is actually much shorter as it is a double-spaced Word doc converted to pdf.
Asheim, Lester. (1983) “Selection and censorship: A reappraisal.” Wilson Library Bulletin November 1983: 180-184.
I was quite excited when I found out last night that Asheim wrote a follow-up to his famous article 30 years later. One of my earliest posts was on an Asheim article. I probably should’ve gone back and read the original, but didn’t. The follow-up deserves a read, though.
Beall, Jeffrey. (2007) “Search fatigue: Finding a cure for the database blues.” American Libraries March 2007: 46-50.
Not a bad article all-in-all. The shame is that it even needs to be written in this day and age, and at such a basic level. But it does, and I find that truly sad. Honestly, any degreed librarian ought to be able to write that article in its essence! The sad truth that they cannot is attested to by the Calhoun Report, numerous blog posts and posts on assorted list servs.
Other than the general sad state of affairs just mentioned, I have 2 small complaints with this article.
First, there is really nothing “natural” about alphabetic order. It is simply a historically contingent arrangement of symbols, which admittedly seems natural since most literate folks are used to it, but it is in no way natural. And relevance ranking (Oh, please don’t get me started on that!) is not the only alternative.
Second, while I fully agree that quality metadata can compensate for the weaknesses of keyword searching, it is not the case that “every document” is assigned the correct indexing terms, nor that “no relevant information is excluded from the results” (49). There is the issue of interindexer consistency, failure to provide retrospective indexing when new or changed terms are introduced, and other issues which affect the quality of metadata enabled searching. The professionals within our field who seem to think that keyword indexing is all that is required are (usually) well aware of this, and ignoring the issue entirely only provides them with (perceived) ammunition. Please, do not do this! We have rock-solid ground to stand on, but we cannot ignore the sometimes rock strewn ground that makes the footing a bit unstable at times.
Shapiro, Lawrence A. “Can psychology be a unified science?” Philosophy of Science 72 (5): Dec 2005 Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Part I Contributed Papers, ed. by Miriam Solomon: 953-963.
I got this issue the mail yesterday and, yes, I am a member of the Philosophy of Science Association despite the fact that much of what these folks are after just baffles me. And while some of it is beyond me (one sense of baffle), it is mostly the fact that they actually pursue these things which baffles me. Much of it is so vastly disconnected from the world and what goes on it that it is hard to believe that it is, in fact, the world that they are trying to describe and reason about.
This is a mighty big issue, of which I’ll only read some of. Just over 800 pages big. There are 3-4 papers (generally) on all of the following topics: Topics in philosophy of biology; Topics in philosophy of physics; Quantum mechanics; History of philosophy of science; Observation and experiment; Causality, confirmation and inference; Philosophy of social science; Gender and science; Topics in evolutionary theory; Realism and underdetermination; Natural selection and evolution; Decision theory; Race and science; Science models; General relativity; and Structural realism.
I read the Shapiro article because he was taking on Jaegwon Kim’s argument that there cannot be a unified science of psychology due to multiple realizability of mental states. I used to read a lot of Kim on consciousness, multiple realizability, supervenience, and so forth.
This is actually a pretty good article and, despite my rustiness in these areas, it seems well argued. Even better, it may actually have some impact in the world even though many of these arguments do not.
One good reason to continue reading philosophy is that “these kids” know how to argue and call each other names in a highly civilized and humorous manner. Many of us could learn a lot from them. I absolutely loved this put down by Shapiro:
I hate to rest on reductio arguments, because there is a disturbing trend among philosophers not always to agree with me about what is absurd, but this will have to do for now (958).
Masterly and snarky, all at the same time.
Well, I can’t swear that I won’t read anything else this week, but I should be writing and perhaps re-looking some of the mereology stuff so I can write. But writing is my mission at the moment.
See you next week.
