My final project for LIS590RO, Representing and Organizing Information Resources, was an annotated bibliography of all of the things I’ve been reading in and around the topic of relationships for the last half year or so. I also gave a presentation on the topic, which primarily centered around Bean & Greens’s (2001) edited monograph, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. This is also the book I did my book review of.
Included below is the introductory matter to my bibliography. It is somewhat “chatty” as are portions of the bibliography itself. Kathryn and I have spent a good deal of time discussing some of this. She was well aware of everything I explained about my method and content and, thus perhaps, it is included more for me than for her.
The annotated bibliography is available here—be forewarned, it is 32-pages single-spaced in RTF format and the same as a PDF. I am not entirely happy with it. I simply ran out of time in some cases to write a decent annotation, could not put my hands on things I know I have in print, and there is a small handful that never got read. I included them all anyway as explained below. Of course, there are a huge number of sources that I marked but never actually managed to acquire. Then there are all the others that could have been included, e.g., Svenonius, ….
[And for the vast majority of folks who find this through a search engine ... this will not help you "pick up" anyone of opposite, or even the same, sex. While most relationships are associative ones, these aren't that kind of "association." I cannot help you with that issue. Heck, I seem unable to help myself. And while the woman I desire might well find paradigmatic and syntagmatic arousing concepts, I doubt you do. "These aren't the relationships you're looking for. Now move along."]
Oh well, there has to be a where and a when to stop. Often they are not of your own choosing. So, without further ado:
One boy’s journey into relationships, or the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
My journey into the topic of relationships began in the late fall of 2006 while working on my paper for 590TR Information Transfer and Collaboration in Science. My paper was a “representative literature review on the topic of mapping different thesauri and the uses of such for the organization of information to meet the needs of interdisciplinary scientists.” As such, some article I read—now lost to me—pointed me to an ARIST article by Khoo and Na (2006) “Semantic relations in information science.”
Many of the articles I was reading on mapping thesauri raised the issue of whether or not inter-concept relationships within a single thesaurus could truly carry over into a multiply-mapped thesauri, especially in the context of multilingual thesauri. I was considering my problem of mapping across scientific domains to be very similar to “true” multilingual mapping, thus, I decided this might be a highly relevant piece to read. I ended up finding this excellent article fascinating! It is also the piece which put me on to Bean & Green and Rebecca Green, period. For that I shall be ever grateful.
This annotated bibliography is an attempt to provide some reflection on the things I have read in the intervening five plus months, to situate them amongst themselves, and perhaps among the larger set(s) of literature on the topic of relationships.
I am grateful for this excursion into this topic as it has gently reminded me that there are, in fact, whole branches of learning of deep relevance to library and information science—even the “little” corner I have made myself comfortable in—with which I am not even qualified for the label of neophyte; e.g., linguistics and grammar. This came at a time when I was beginning to get smug with myself about the lack of fields of direct relevance for me to venture into; not, of course, that there was nothing left for me to learn—I will never reach that hideous point of view, nor state—but more as a defense of my chosen second graduate degree. See, e.g., my blog post “Words.”
The vast majority of these articles, standards, books or book chapters were read between November 2006 and late April 2007. A few were also read for the first or a previous time in the preceding year and a half or so. There are approximately six articles included that I have not yet had a chance to read. These are primarily citations from Beghtol (2001); all are annotated as such. There are also a handful which I am unable to put into my hands for some reason and am thus unable to do a proper annotation. I have attempted in most cases to give a minimal account, even if only to list associated keywords assigned to them in my Zotero database. There are also about a dozen that are available to me but which I ran out of time to properly annotate. As unhappy as that makes me I must accept the reality. I have included all of the citations to the above categories because, as inadequate as the annotations are, they reflect my journey through this most interdisciplinary of topics.
I have attempted to give recommendations for specific contexts and individuals in most cases. Dates in brackets are the dates the annotations were written. These are often vastly different from when read, or perhaps first read. The dates I read most of them are available to me in the vast majority of cases. I try to record this information by writing it on any paper copies and recording it in my Zotero database. I also try to record this information in any electronic copies as the Mac makes this extremely simple. This information is probably of little value to anyone except myself, and seeing as I ran out of time to do the task to my own expectations, that information is not recorded here. If someone else were interested in it for some reason they could find it for a large percentage of these items by checking my weekly “things read this week” blog posts that began in January 2007. I have also assigned keywords to each source to provide another kind of access to the concepts covered in each source.
I had hoped to list all of the citations in and amongst these sources, also, but that is another portion that I had to let go. This data is available to me in many cases, as I have been trying to record it for myself. In a few cases I did list these intertextual links here, but the few that I was able to incorporate do not accurately reflect the amount of intertextuality that exists. Seeing as this could be useful information to others I feel worse about this lack of inclusion than I do about the lack of dates read.
All in all, this exploration into the topic of relationships has been a pleasant uphill climb ever since I began, and one I look forward to continuing.