Off the Mark

Saturday, 13 Oct

Goody, Jack. The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

• Preface
• Ch. 1: The historical development of writing (Sat-Sun)

Highly recommended by Dr. Hjørland in several places.

Chen, Hsinchun. “Semantics Issues for Digital Libraries.” In Harum and Twidale, Eds. Successes & Failures of Digital Libraries. 35th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, 1988: 70-79. [Not yet in IDEALS, but will be.]

Sunday, 14 Oct

Zelle, John M. Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science. Wilsonville, Or: Franklin, Beedle, 2004. [LIS452 text]

• Ch. 11: Data Collections

Downey, et. al. How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (2nd ed). at Open Book Project. [Text for LIS452]

• Ch. 14: Classes and methods
• Ch. 15: Sets of objects
• Ch. 16: Inheritance
• Ch. 8 List

Hjørland, Birger and Karsten Nissen Pedersen. “A substantive theory of classification for information retrieval.” Journal of Documentation 61(5), 2005: 582-597. doi: 10.1108/00220410510625804

Assorted draft standards and proposals for standards as part of my ASIS&T Standards Committee work.

Sunday - Monday, 14 - 15 Oct

Goody, Jack. See above.

• Ch. 2: Literacy and achievement in the Ancient World (Sun-Mon)
• Ch. 3: Africa, Greece and oral poetry
• Ch. 4: Oral composition and oral transmission: the case of the Vedas
• Ch. 5: The impact of Islamic writing on oral cultures
• Ch. 6: Literacy and the non-literate: the impact of European schooling

Monday, 15 Oct

Downey, et. al. How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (2nd ed). at Open Book Project. [Text for LIS452]

• Ch. 9: Tuples
• Ch. 10: Dictionaries

Love, Nigel. “The Fixed-Code Theory.” In Harris, Roy, and George Wolf, eds. Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader. 1st ed, Kidlington, Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1998.

Tuesday, 16 Oct

Goody, Jack. See above.

• Ch. 7: Alternative paths to knowledge in oral and literate cultures
• Ch. 8: Memory and learning in oral and literate cultures: the reproduction of the Bagre

Hjørland, Birger. “The Concept of ‘Subject’ in Information Science.” Journal of Documentation 48(2), June 1992: 172-200.

Wednesday, 17 Oct

Santana Martinez, Pedro. “Some comments on the relations between organised knowledge and language: Rhetorical devices and the role of semantics.” In Inchaurralde, Carlos (Ed.) Perspectives on Semantics and Specialised Languages. Universidad de Zaragoza, Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, 1994: 147-153.

Book as a whole cited in this book by Hjørland in “Domain analysis in information science: Eleven approaches — traditional as well as innovative.” Journal of Documentation 58(4), 2002: 443 re semantics and specialized languages.

Goody, Jack. See above.

• Ch. 9: Writing and formal operations: a case study among the Vai (with Michael Cole and Syliva Scribner)
• Ch. 10: The interface between the sociological and psychological analysis of literacy (Wed-Thu)

Dillon, A. (2007). “LIS as a research domain: problems and prospects.” Information Research, 12(4) [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-4/colis/colis03.html]

Found via Caveat Lector.

Friday, 19 Oct

Goody, Jack. See above.

• Ch. 11: Language and writing
• Ch. 12: Recapitulations

As I said above, this book is highly recommended by Dr. Hjørland in several places. I concur. I must say that the last few chapters, especially those read this morning, have resonated greatly with me. Perhaps this is due to my reading them after making a comment at Pegasus Librarian’s post, “Desperately Seeking Search Boxes,” earlier this morning.

There are clearly other reasons, too. Some personal. Some due to much overlap I see between Goody, Hjørland and Harris. I may well need to re-read this book with a definite view to issues such as the Googlelization of search, IM, Twitter, and so on.

Hjørland, Birger. “Nine Principles of Knowledge Organization.” Knowledge Organization and Quality Management (3rd ISKO Conference, 20-24 June 1994). Advances in Knowledge Organization v.4, 91-100.

This article also resonated deeply with me re my comments at Iris’ place and on the “one search box to rule them all” phenomenon. I’ll pull out a few quotes that directly and/or indirectly address this issue.

For practical purposes, knowledge can be organized in different ways, and with different levels of ambition: … (93).

Any given categorization should reflect the purpose of that categorization. It is very important to teach the student to find out the lie of the land and apply ad hoc classifications, pragmatic classifications or scientific classifications when each kind of classification is most appropriate. … It is very important that you teach how to exploit subject-information already at hand, … (94, emphasis in original).

Different approaches, “paradigms” have different implication for categorization. There is no “a priori” scientific method of classification/categorization (96, emphasis in original).

The concept of “polyrepresentation” is important (96, emphasis in original).

To a certain degree different arts and sciences could be understood as different ways of organizing the same phenomena (97, emphasis in original).

It seems as if the priorities become more and more short-sighted, that less efforts are made to develop long-sighted, well-organized and well-cared for bodies of knowledge and literature (98).

Instead, IS much have a much more limited and humble scope: help facilitate the fruitful principles of knowledge organization and avoid the unfruitful ones by analyzing the different criteria for knowledge organization developing in all kinds of human activities, as well as their implicit or explicit goals, functions and consequences (99).

All of these address fundamental issues with the “let’s just give ‘em one search box ala Google” approach, especially in the context of higher education. If we are not going to require that students learn something about the ways in which knowledge is structured, and why, then why are we allowing them into colleges and universities? Why are we even continuing such an institution if this is not a, and perhaps the, fundamental goal of said institution?

And, yes, I would argue that this needs to happen at a much earlier stage of education. We are a long way from that desiderata, though, so it seems to me that this should be the main idea to be imparted by a college education.