#knowledge organization

[andletforsakendidodie]

my article about autism's ontogeny in the ddc is finally out 🎉 science about autism should be done by autistic scholars

birger hjørland emailed me about it and i fell of the chair in the work break room.

[socialjusticelibrary]

[libreas]

Birger Hjørlands Kritik des facettenanalytischen Ansatzes der Wissensorganisation

Birger Hjørland (2013) Facet analysis: The logical approach to knowledge organization. In: Information Processing and Management. Vol 49. March 2013, S. 545-557. DOI: 10.1016/j.ipm.2012.10.001

Zentrale Erkenntnis:

Das Paradigma der Facettenanalyse, wie es von S.R. Ranganathan und der British Classification Research Group gestaltet wurde, trägt als rationales Konzept, bedarf um anwendungsfähig zu werden jedoch einer Ergänzung um empirische, historische und pragmatische Perspektiven. Auch wenn Ranganathans Ansatz einleuchtend scheint, bleiben einerseits sein methodologisch nur bedingt genügendes, weithin spekulatives Grundgerüst, dass auf apriori formulierten Beziehungen zwischen den Konzepten beruht. Sowie andererseits die Frage, ob dieses tatsächlich für alle Kontexte der Wissensorganisation gleichermaßen geeignet ist. Um diese Frage zu beantworten, braucht es Vergleichsstudien mit Klassifikationskonzepten, die auf anderen Methodologien aufbauen.

Weitere Erkenntnisse:

Der Autor betont im Anschluss an Francis Miksa, dass Ranganthans Ziel der Entwicklung der besten Klassifikationsmethode die Möglichkeit unterschiedlicher Anwendungszwecke vernachlässigte. Das Anliegen der Formulierung eines allgemeingültigen Klassifikationsstandards steht damit der Anspruch entgegen, Klassifikationen für bestimmte Kontexte (unterschiedliche Sammlungen, Nutzer, Perspektiven) zu optimieren.

Bestandteile der Knowledge Organization (KO) als Forschungsfeld der Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft nach Hjørland:

der facettenanalytische Ansatz

die Tradition des Information Retrieval

nutzerzentrierte und kognitive Konzepte

bibliometrische Ansätze

der domänanalytische Ansatz

(bk)

[mymongo-blog]

Well... it's simply genial. The most amazing infographic that concentrates in few minutes how the knowledge representation has been radically changed. Should use it as introduction in my Ph.D. dissertation ;-)

[mrlindner-blog]

But the great paper encyclopedias of the past had other, grander ambitions: They aspired to provide an overview of all human knowledge, and, still more boldly, to put that knowledge into a coherent, logical order. Even if they mostly organized their articles alphabetically, they also sought ways to link the material together thematically—all of it.

...

It might be argued that mapping out human knowledge has always, necessarily, been a quixotic project, akin to Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies.”

...

But the ambition mattered. It mattered that one could look at a stack of volumes and say: Here are vast libraries, distilled down into an essence of human knowledge, and organized in a logical order. The books testified to the hope that, ultimately, human beings had at least a measure of control over the overpowering torrents of facts and ideas that they collectively produce. Perhaps no single human being could truly have control—what more quixotic enterprise is there than reading through an encyclopedia from cover to cover? But at least the existence of the books gave us the sense that some points of dry land remained amidst the floods, some fragments shored against our ruins. The disappearance of these grand printed volumes, while inevitable, is yet another depressing sign of just how much we are now adrift in the limitless oceans of information.  

Another “we’re all lost in a sea of information now” screed. Some of us still work at organizing knowledge, or at least the products of knowledge, and it is still no less of a quixotic enterprise than it ever was. Today we just have a much better sense of how absolutely quixotic it is. Nonetheless, the attempt goes on and thus his conclusion is misplaced.