Off the Mark

Sunday - Saturday, 4 - 10 May 2008

• Ch. III : Relevance (Sun)
• Ch. IV : Bibliographical Instruments and Their Specifications (Mon)
• Ch. V : Subjects and the Sense of Position (Wed)
• Ch. VI : Indexing, Coupling, Hunting (Thu)
• Ch. VII : Consultants and Aids (Fri)
• Ch. VIII : Reliability (Fri)
• Ch. IX : Adequacy and Bibliographical Policy (Fri-Sat)

What can possibly be said about this work in a few pathetic sentences?

This work needs to be in print. It needs to be available on the web. It needs an index; needs a bibliography; needs to be marked up in TEI; needs an outline of its arguments; needs to be read widely and discussed widely.

I would gladly give a year or two of my life to facilitate most of that, if someone would only pay me. The University of California Press is completely failing us by letting this languish and remain out of print.

I hope to say more about this wonderful essay if I can ever get my hands on a copy of my own. The kind of close reading and engagement that it really deserves cannot be accomplished (by me) with a library copy.

If you’ve never read this then do so. If you have, consider reading it again. My advisor said she had one of her classes read parts of it recently and it blew most of their little minds. Good!

Monday, 5 May 2008

Is a call for the rejection of the Kuhnian paradigm in favor of Popper’s views.

Monday evening dinner: crab cakes, 2 pints of Guinness and 3 articles

One of the best opening sentences ever in an LIS article:

The major challenge for information science at the dawn of the millennium is to establish an appropriate epistemological foundation for the field (231).

Of course, he was at the Royal School in Copenhagen at the time. A small influence perhaps?

The paper argues that information science in general and organization of knowledge in particular needs to establish a clear epistemological foundation, which takes into account that the field should be studied as a human science. It is argued that the definition of knowledge is needed, and suggests that Wittgenstein’s concepts of ‘form of life’ and ‘world pictures’ could be used as frameworks (abstract).

As usual, I’m not exactly sure what the author is on about—although he’s a wonderful guy when I see him at conferences—but this seems as if it might be quite useful when I turn to metalanguage/metalinguistic issues in the future.

Hmmm. “Instantiation, essentially, is a generic term for the phenomenon of realization in time. Other terms are associated with the concept, but with more problematic overtones in their definitions” (1).

Saturday, 10 May 2008

Being 13 years on this seems an odd piece on one level. On another it is the words of a pioneer and leader looking to the future with a long career behind him. In 16 pages it runs the gamut from libraries, information jungle, “three-minute attention span of attention,” creativity, serendipity, predictive power of science, reflection, interrelations between media, facet analysis, data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and much more.

This can be read so many ways. And it needs to be read generously. I have objections to much of the phrasings, even outright to some of his ideas. But I also love parts of it. I’m going to take it as a moment in time versus some tightly argued thesis as I agree with most of what I take, anyway, to be his major arguments.