Foundations of Information Science
Organizing, categorizing, classifying
What is meaning? How do gestures, sounds, images, artifacts and other perceptible phenomena become meaningful?
Two videos this week. One leads into the next.
Watch this and think about how Paul Otlet used faceted categorization to create the Wikipedia of his day. The video covers a lot more history, but Paul Otlet and his categorization was an example of organizing information for widespread uses.
The second discusses the difference between categorization and classification.
Categorize is a related term of classification.
- As a verb, categorize is to assign a category; to divide into classes.
- As a noun, classification is the act of forming into a class or classes; a distribution into groups, as classes, orders, families, etc, according to some common relations or attributes.
Read a companion piece to the first video.
The Birth of the Information Age: How Paul Otlet's Vision for Cataloging and Connecting Humanity Shaped Our World | Maria Popova
There's more than one way to think about organizing.
Read chapter 3, The geography of knowledge,
pages 46-63 in
Weinberger, D. (2007).
Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder.
New York: Times Books.
A few more to consider if you want to get deeper into the concept.
A bit about the discipline of organizing things.
Read chapter 01, Foundations for Organizing Systems , pages 1-38 in Robert J. Glushko's The Discipline of Organizing, MIT Press, 2013.
Pay particular attention to section 1.4 Organizing this Book. Ask yourself what concepts and decisions led to this organizational structure.
Compare Weinberger's discussion of collaborative filtering on pages 60-63 with Glushko's treatment of social classification.
Which one holds more resonance for you?
Which viewpoint seems to relate more to the world you inhabit?
Read Classification: Assigning Resources to Categories, pages 237-275, by Robert J. Glushko, Jess Hemerly, Vivien Petras, Michael Manoochehri, and Longhao Wang, in Robert J. Glushko's The Discipline of Organizing, MIT Press, 2013.
Pay particular attention the section on p. 237, 7.1.2 Classification vs. Tagging. Think about how this text considers social classification and folksonomies with how the Weinberger considers them.
John Coltrane
John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 - July 17, 1967) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music.
Born and raised in North Carolina, Coltrane moved to Philadelphia after graduating high school, where he studied music. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modes and was one of the players at the forefront of free jazz. He led at least fifty recording sessions and appeared on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk. Over the course of his career, Coltrane's music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension, as exemplified on his most acclaimed albums A Love Supreme (1965) and Ascension (1966).
Coltrane remains one of the most influential artists in music history and has received numerous posthumous awards, including a special Pulitzer Prize, and was canonized by the African Orthodox Church.
Visualize pitch like John Coltrane with this mystical image
Why this is important
The most feared song in jazz, explained
John Coltrane, one of jazz's most revered saxophonists, released “Giant Steps” in 1959. The chord progression that makes up the entirety of the song came to be called the “Coltrane changes”; it's known across the musical world as one of the most challenging chord progressions to improvise over.
It's tough for two reasons: The chord progressions are played fast, and they're in three keys. ...
While this song is one of the most complicated in jazz, it's also the perfect tool to learn a few basic music theory principles that drive Western harmony.