From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri 10 Jun 2005 - 03:07:20 GMT
Has anyone heard of Jesse "The Mind" Shera a well
known guru of Library Science from yesteryear that had
some notion of social epistemology and some serious
opinions on classification? I've been reading some
books by him and I've been saying to myself "Man this
stuff, though dated, is really relevant to memetics.'
I think one of his peeves with the Dewey and Library
of Congress systems was that they don't represent
knowledge in a natural manner. They pretty much
suffice for locating a book, but that's about it. It's
something like imposing a unidimensional tag upon a
polydimensional object (ie- a book) that has more
aspects than can be addressed (pun intended) with
these extant classification systems. From what I hear
those in the know prefer LC to Dewey.
A book tends to be hybrid of multiple thought strands,
so how the heck do you adequately represent that with
an address label that will reflect its proper place in
the natural order of human thought? Should a book on
computer software applications for business be placed
with the computer books or the business books? I think
Shera had talked a little on how to represent a tree
which begs the obvious question of whether we put tree
books in with botany, gardening or lumber stuff. But
if its a juvenile fiction book about a talking tree
the point is moot.
Not sure library materials taxonomy has the exact same
problem set as the classification and systematics of
living organisms (extant and extinct) but there could
be some overlap. Horizontal transfer in some living
taxa must be a seeming parallel of that of the content
in books and other media (let's get John Wilkins and
Vincent Campbell to collaborate on this one).
But what the heck is a "book". Must it be paperbound
with yellowing pages or can it be represented online
(like e-books or pdf files)? Could a laptop with files
representing various books then be considered a
"coffee table book" if you tend to keep it there? Is a
CD or cassette representation a "book". Why do they
abridge them so? How can two cassettes adequately
represent all the information an author originally
intended to convey that would require at least 10-15
cassettes or more to be unabridged? The medium
truncates the message or distorts it beyond recogniion
when we see how books have been transformed into
movies (see my ruminations on the Koji Suzuki Japanese
horror theme about the angry girl in the well for a
perfect example of this).
And does what a given book means to me overlap
significantly with what it means to you? Does the
process of thought dovetail sufficiently with the way
books are organized in the stacks of a library? Are
libraries stuck in the rut of dated and artificial
classification systems that don't reflect the way we
think, but it would be too expensive to switch,
something like the QWERTY phenomenon? OTOH why switch
to a more natural system if the prevalent ones work
for the task of finding what you're looking for?
__________________________________
Discover Yahoo!
Stay in touch with email, IM, photo sharing and more. Check it out!
http://discover.yahoo.com/stayintouch.html
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri 10 Jun 2005 - 03:21:13 GMT