Saturday evening at the diner after the bar, 22 Sep
Downey, et. al. How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (2nd ed). at Open Book Project. (Text for LIS452)
- Ch. 12: Classes and objects
- Ch. 13: Classes and functions
Sunday, 23 Sep
Harris, Roy, and George Wolf, eds. Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader. 1st ed, Kidlington, Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1998.
- Ch. 3: Harris, R. Making Sense of Communicative Competence
Sunday - Friday, 23 - 28 Sep
Harris, Roy. Synonymy and Linguistic Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973.
- Introduction
- Ch. 1: Synonymy, Form and Meaning
- Ch. 2: Synonymy and Phonological Analysis
- Ch. 3: Synonymy and Grammatical Analysis
- Ch. 4: Synonymy and Semantic Analysis
- Ch. 5: Synonymy and Linguistic Knowledge
Seeing as I ordered myself a copy of the Harris and Wolf Reader, I decided to put it aside for now and began another one.
This book is based on Harris’ Ph.D. I’m not sure how much I’ll read as I’m having a hard time following some of it for various reasons. Ch. 2 especially is just sort of washing over me. The book is not very large, though, so I’ll keep at it for now.
The book treats synonymy as applicable to sentences, and perhaps broader, instead of just to words. Even before I realized it was taking a broader view of synonymy (before I checked it out), it seemed to me that it might be highly applicable to LIS.
Are we not, in some sense, saying that two items are synonymous when we apply the same controlled vocabulary terms to them? When I apply the same tag to multiple items is there not some way in which I am declaring them to be synonymous?
==
Well, as you can see I went ahead and read the whole thing, and simplified the entry by not spreading it over multiple entries, the main reason being that in most cases the chapters ended up getting split across days.
Some of it was more or less beyond my knowledge base, especially in the first 3 chapters. I did a lot better with the last two as they involved more critiques of people and views from philosophy (vs. linguistics) with which I am at least acquainted. Despite my lack of preparation for much of it, it was a typical Harris book; well written and well argued.
A comment he makes regarding the difficulty of determining “systematically all of the types of situation in which a context-bound synonymity holds” addresses one of my complaints about many of the theories/approaches that are adopted or avoided in LIS:
Nonetheless—the theorist of context-bound synonymy might argue—the practical difficulty of the enterprise of discovering in exactly what situation two words are synonymous does not impugn the validity of the concept (127).
Although I have no examples to hand, I have often thought this when reading our literature. “You’re throwing this idea out because it is hard to employ?”
Thursday, 27 Sep
Hjørland, Birger. Information Seeking and Subject Representation: An Activity-theoretical Approach to Information Science. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997.
- Ch. 1: Introduction: Information Seeking and Subject Representation
Oh, my, my. So many points of contact between Hjørland and Integrationism.
Friday, 28 Sep
Davis, Hayley G. Words: An Integrational Approach. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001.
Ch. 1: Orientation: The Word of Linguistic Theory
Blair, David C. “Wittgenstein, Language and Information: “Back to the Rough Ground!”" In Crestani and Ruthven (Eds.). Context: Nature, Impact, and Role. Proceeding of the 5th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Sciences, CoLIS 2005, Glasgow, UK, June 4-8, 2005. Heidelberg: Springer, 2005. 1-4.
Friday - Saturday, 28 - 29 Sep
Hjørland, Birger. “Semantics and Knowledge Organization.” ARIST 41 (2007): 367-405.
Originally read 18 June 2007. Re-read for two reasons: (1) Seems vastly relevant to my CAS project and (2) it is one of two articles referenced for Dr. Hjørland’s Research Fellow lecture [9 Oct 4-5 PM, Rm 126 GSLIS].
I now have a lot to say about this article, but it will be getting its own post.
Saturday, 29 Sep
Readings for LIS452 for next week’s topic of Abstract automata and formal languages
- Finite state machine [Wikipedia]
- Formal language [Wikipedia]
- Kuchling, A. M. “Regular Expression HOWTO“
4 responses so far ↓
1 barbara trumpinski-roberts // Sep 30, 2007 at 5:38 am
damn…you are really impressing me. Of course, all of these are for class as well as for fun. I thought I was doing well with:
The Black Swan not done
The Velveteen Principlenot done
Spook Country
Hotel Andromeda
Assigned reading for LIS:768
Assorted wikipedia articles relating to various things
various blogs
2 Mark // Sep 30, 2007 at 11:18 am
Well, I guess it is now fair to say that they are all “for class.” But I’ve been reading like this for a long time–these posts only go back to mid-Jan this year but I’ve been reading like this for far longer–and they are only now for class since I managed to align my class work (once again) with my interests.
In a direct sense, only the Python and computer science readings are for class, in the sense that I read them only because of class where I would have read the others anyway.
Once you read so much of this kind of thing it becomes useful to bend one’s classes towards it where possible. Luckily, this is extremely possible here. I hope it is for you at Dominican, too [I think that's where you mentioned you are attending].
There are also several other things that I am in the midst of but have put aside for the time being. E.g., I’m about 2/3rd of the way through Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, but I’ve been there for a couple months now. Same for some other things.
You’ll probably find me quite the cultural heathen seeing as I had to look up all of those, well, I had heard of The Black Swan somewhere. I have, unfortunately, not been reading much literature since my Mimesis reading-discussion group ended. Other kinds of popular books rarely get read either.
Seeing as I have made major shifts in reading materials several times in my life, I imagine “this too shall pass.”
3 barbara trumpinski-roberts // Sep 30, 2007 at 8:19 pm
I have to be honest…I am only sort of attending the class at dominican. Someone mentioned it in a blog and I thought it sounded interesting. I have been doing the reading and blogging, but I am not enrolled. Michael Stephens is the advisor of one of the young women who worked for me here at uiuc. She is currently enrolled in the LIS program at Dominican. I got my MLS in 1979 at Eastern Illinois University (the program no longer exists)
It’s inportant to keep experiencing new things…to keep shifting. (I am luckier than most people in grad school, because I can direct my studies…and becuase I don’t feel guilty when I blow off reading for an evening of D&D)
4 Mark // Sep 30, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Ah, OK. I hope to do similar things once I finish and have a “real” job.
I thought that was Michael’s course but I wasn’t sure and I was too lazy to look it up.
I, too, am one of those lucky ones, but I am also doing a 2nd degree. I was actually able to do a lot of directing in my MLS here (we all are) but I constrained myself quite a bit so that I received a fairly broad “classical” LIS education as a foundation. I am really able to explore now in my CAS.
Man, D&D. Been forever since I played.
I really wish I had time for that creative activity.