Posted on:: September 4th, 2004
Found another wifi hotspot in town, so now I can post the table of contents of the new issue of my newsletter, JOHO…if my anonymous benefactor doesn’t decide to pull the plug and call it day.
Why
Dewey’s Decimal System is prejudiced: The DDC’s aging
value system shows the pernicious influence of reality.
There seems to be a disturbing message
hidden in the Dewey Decimal Classification system, the organizational
scheme first published in 1876 and now used in 95% of US
schools: Of the hundred numbers set aside for topics concerning
religion, 88 — numbers 201-287 — are reserved
for Christianity. Jews and Moslems get just one each. But
those single-digit religions are still doing better than
Buddhists (294.3) who share a decimal point with the Sikhs
(294.6) and Jains (294.4), looking up enviously at Christian
"Parish government & administration" which
gets its own whole number (254).
Why is the Dewey Decimal Classification
(DDC) system so embarrassingly behind the times?…
In
defense of small talk: The virtues of being trivial.
I made a new friend recently. We’d been
reading each other’s writings for a year or so and, when
we met in person discovered not only that we are mutual
admirers but that we actually like each other. But then
we hit a little bump. Nothing we won’t get over. But in
an email exchange, I suggested that she tell a little white
lie in response to a particular awkward question, on the
order of getting out of a social invitation by claiming
you’re busy, without pointing out that you’re busy ironing.
She doesn’t believe in lying, no matter what the color.
…I’ve become a fan of small talk. Here’s
why…
Cool
Tool : PowerDesk beats Windows Explorer. And Mozilla
Thunderbird beats Outlook. What a surprise!
What
I’m playing: That damn Zuma. But Doom 3 is here.
Internetcetera:
Hotels go wifi.
Links:
Miscellaneous leads.
Email:
Your response to last issue’s proposal |
Categories: Uncategorized dw
“The plug? What plug? Show me a plug, and I’ll pull it. There’s no plug, …only a wall.”
Line from Masked And Anonymous–Bob Dylan’s new movie.
upon further thought today, the line goes–
“The plug? What plug? Show me a plug, and I’ll pull it. There’s no plug. There’s no socket. There’s no wall. …”
Your critique of the Dewey Decimal Classifcation system is something I can relate to: I worked as a librarian for a private collection with a lot of titles on religion and philosophy, and DDC stopped being used (and useful) very early on. Instead, *custom* classification systems for the collection were used.
Many libraries (especially university and private libraries, in my experience) now use the Library of Congress Classification system (LCC), or are switching from the DDC to the LCC. It’s got some advantages over the DCC, in terms of the issues you cite.
All that being said, these sytems (in terms of the numerical schemes) are a lot about the geography of books on shelves. I am not an expert in this area, but I think the LCC has a much more extenhsible way of mapping its subject taxonomy to its shelve numbering scheme.
So, while I think your critique of the DDC is correct in that its numeric scheme reflects a limited concept of subjects, which effectively eliminates (or, at least, obscures) the importance of those subjects, this is an issue not simply with a taxonomy, but with how that taxonomy is represented (in numerical notation, in this case).
I think this is actually a slightly different issue than your point about the inflexibility of taxonomies.
Also, I had a “marketing lingo” reaction to the words “objects”, “metadata”, and “taxonomy” in your statement:
“Second, the most important job of the new generation of librarians is to build into information objects sufficient metadata that any organization can create its own taxonomy.”
But, nonetheless, I think I agree with your point!
Can Tagging Create a Noospheric Taxonomy?
http://www.hyperorg.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/2170
http://www.hyperorg.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/2747
http://www.hyperorg.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/2714
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://journalism.nyu.edu/mt/mt-tb.cgi/861
Can Tagging Create a Noospheric Taxonomy?
David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies. Weinberger eloquently described the dilemma of losing meaning during the quantization process by explaining how the Dewey Decimal Classification s…
Can Tagging Create a Noospheric Taxonomy?
David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies. Weinberger eloquently described the dilemma of losing meaning during the quantization process by explaining how the Dewey Decimal Classification s…
Can Tagging Create a Noospheric Taxonomy?
David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies. Weinberger eloquently described the dilemma of losing meaning during the quantization process by explaining how the Dewey Decimal Classification s…
Can Tagging Create a Noospheric Taxonomy?
David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies. Weinberger eloquently described the dilemma of losing meaning during the quantization process by explaining how the Dewey Decimal Classification s…
Can Tagging Create a Noospheric Taxonomy?
David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies. Weinberger eloquently described the dilemma of losing meaning during the quantization process by explaining how the Dewey Decimal Classification s…
Can Tagging Create a Noospheric Taxonomy?
David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies. Weinberger eloquently described the dilemma of losing meaning during the quantization process by explaining how the Dewey Decimal Classification s…
csharphack
^_~
手机图片
David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies