Tim,
Great post. No, I know what you are saying here. Dewey certainly could have done better (LCC does, but not at such a "popular" level) - but I'm willing to give him a little bit of sympathy. After all, the hopelessly industrial rationalist that he was, his main goal was that maximum efficiency through simplicity was desirable. One must admit, it was really quite a pragmatic system, whatever its flaws.
Paul Frame: "Dewey deserves full credit and undying applause for simplifying, codifying, and creating a book classification system that is ingenious, adaptable, symmetrical, orderly, and quite clever in its use of mnemonic devices."
All I was saying is that I think the 10 major categories are decent categories that people can understand - and my son, for example, is responsibly educated by them. Again, I admit the system has its flaws, and isn't really fair, and should be tweaked as much as it can. Before we trash it though, maybe we should ask ouselves this - who else in the world at that time was concerned to make such a system that took account of *everything* to make it accessible to *as many as possible*?
For us who know a little something about knowledge in the world, this should bring up all sorts of questions in our mind.
Why did so many thinking men and women of the West encourage the ideal of a liberal arts education, featuring literacy (and literature!), math, and science , for instance? Why did the West pick up where the Greeks began and develop modern science, utilizing extensively what became known as the scientific method? What made it so important for men like Linnaeus to introduce the thorough, common classification systems that he did? Why were so many in the West compelled to write so many books about practically everything - things very particular and things very general - and others like Melville Dewey for example, compelled to organize and make accessible this unprecedented amount of learning, born of this unprecedented amount of curiosity? Why did the desire, which grows even today, to recognize all people and give a "voice to the voiceless" arise so powerfully in the Western consciousness? Why has the West, ever exploring and observing, embraced such a broad view of the!
world and its people? Indeed, the ground in the West as a whole seems to have been quite fertile for these many admirable and idealistic quests - people felt these many things ought to be pursued in spite of the many flaws and evils that often accompanied them.
Today, when education is all about "self-discovery", the most basic exercises in respect, and "real-life" job training, these questions seem particularly appropriate to ask. And I am *not* implying there are easy answers.
As I said before:
"[we need to teach] really serious research and interaction with the thoughts of others - and not just quickly finding information to perhaps recategorize and put into just any "new and exciting framework" that appeals to us and others at the present moment. This means hard work that actually deals with the complex discoveries, insights and arguments from the past that have been preserved for us at some length - usually in books. This also assumes a rather broad liberal arts background, I think, something else that is evidently not too important to many educators - and librarians - these days."
Regards,
Nathan Rinne
Media Cataloging Technician
ISD 279 - Educational Service Center (ESC)
11200 93rd Ave. North
Maple Grove, MN. 55369
Work phone: 763-391-7183
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 9:38 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Aristotle, "Everything is Miscellaneous", and the lib's "educative function" [was: Prof. Burke's wish list]
So, for the sake of fun, I'll have a go at your assessment of Dewey,
"I don't find much to gripe about here." This has been done
before--better. But why not have a go?
1. The organization into tens is arbitrary and limiting. The "tree of
knowledge" (if there is a tree) is on no better terms with ten than
time is with twelve. These are arbitrary; Dewey uses tens to make
numbers shorter and nothing else. Every level has a choice,
Procrustean hilarity.
2. Let's look at the distribution in languages. Greek gets ten
numbers, Latin another ten. So too English (woo-hoo!), German, French,
Italian and Spanish (Portuguese tags along). All the "others" get
another ten, including a numeral for Chinese (1 billion speakers),
Egyptian (zero speakers, excluding priests during Coptic mass),
Semitic, Indian, Iranian, Celtic, Slavic and Scandinavian. The final
number, 499, is reserved for the truly "Other" Others, like say, other
braches of the Indo-European family, all Asian languages other than
Chinese, Turkic languages, all Dravidian languages, all the language
families and languages of Oceania, North America, South America and-oh
yeah-Africa. Together they get the same space as "Greek Synonyms"
(484). Christ, I have ten times as many books in the 499s than I have
on Greek synonyms--and I was a student in a Greek PhD program!
3. The big eight-Greek, Latin, English, German, French, Italian and
Spanish get ten digits for their literatures. Chinese gets one. All
genres of Japanese, Basque, Georgian, Akan, Thai and Cree literature
jostle around in a single numeral. The remarkable thing here isn't
that people were so limited in 1876, it's that anybody let a
provincial like Dewey decide this stuff. When it comes to
international literature, the Victorians were not our inferiors but
our masters. This is the age that made the Arabian Nights and
classical Persian poetry a big deal in London, Berlin and Paris, that
deciphered everything from Sumerian to Tocharian. What the heck?!
4. Will someone explain to me why Afghanistan gets its own number and
Korea and all of South East Asia falls under "Other." Is it because
poor and liminal Afghanistan is more important, or because the British
were there (indeed, fighting there while Dewey published his 1876
edition)?
5. In what universe do Christian topics get 287 numbers, and Judaism
one? Who but a New Englander could think Unitarianism about the same
subject size as Catholicism, or, for that matter, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Taoism, Shinto and just about everything else, except Islam and
Zoroastrianism, put together!
6. "Divinatory Graphology" and "Psychology"--same size?
Educative? So was the Titanic.
On 6/4/07, Rinne, Nathan (ESC) <RinneN_at_district279.org> wrote:
> Michael,
>
> Thank you for your kind and encouraging words.
>
> Tim,
>
> Some very interesting and good points. I think LCSH subject headings and, when done well though, absolutely rock (My wife and I have always marveled at the careful and insightful detail - the love! - that goes into those things). Further I love the interconnected web I've described and the "browse" displays Thomas Mann is begging for us to keep: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA623006.html I am not a reference lib, but use them all the time.
>
> Karen,
>
> I think I agree with everything you said in your post. I also want to address you last sentence at length: " The really interesting question to me is what happens when we all manifest our personal viewpoints over some collection -- do we get chaos, a "common denominator" that is mediocre, or can we, as a collective, turn out to be brilliant?"
>
> I say it is brilliant! Though of course, it could be better.
>
> In my mind - and I sincerely hope in the minds of some others - all of what follows relates to the new catalog and the library's educative function (true "info literacy"). It is heavy on what I think is necessary philosophical thought (in addition to being very long), and if that is not your cup of tea, you may want to skip this post...
>
> In her book "Sacred Stacks", Nancy Maxwell says:
>
> "One of the only definite laws governing the postmodern academic world is that there are no definite laws. Belief in an overarching reality - one that purports to be the same for everyone regardless of perspective or personal stance - is no longer accepted at face value. When rationalist thought itself is called into question, belief that any structure can adequately organize knowledge also grows suspect."
>
> "If there is nothing absolutely the same for all, how can one organizing principle apply? Attempting to organize all of human knowledge into ten categories - or even a thousand categories - seems a futile, even impossible task. According to this theory, if every person on earth has a legitimate way of viewing and organizing the world, there must be at least that many organizing systems." (46)
>
> Maxwell goes on to talk about how "despite these limitations on their ability to organize knowledge, a perception still exists that libraries manage the task well enough" (46), and closes her chapter with a feel-good story from a favorite author.
>
> In my opinion, perceptions are not a very strong thing to base the future of libraries and their systems of organization on.
>
> David Weinberger says of his new book "Everything is Miscellaneous" that it is really an argument against Aristotle's idea that there is "one right way of organizing the world"
>
> I think this could mean that order, and hence meaning, cannot be recognized or discovered in any real sense - namely in a way that we can even begin to really agree on (truth).
>
> Or, it could mean that Weinberger really doesn't like the idea that everything has one place and only one place in any taxonomy. He says Aristotle does this. Therefore this second option, I think, is clearly what he means.
>
> The thing is that I suspect Weinberger has fallen prey to a naïve reading of Aristotle. There is a sense of course in which Aristotle believed in "one truth", but I think it is a bit more complex. Evidently, Aristotle explicitly talked about the possibility of some pieces (of the whole) being "part this, part that" (i.e. "both-and"). Therefore, I believe his idea of taxonomies and their representations of reality are not necessarily purely linear, top-down taxonomies, but are actually a complex interrelated web, deriving from a common center. In other words, there could be a center (the "uncaused cause", for example) that branches out in every direction with lots of interconnections among the branches (heck, make it 3-D as well). In this model, everything would have its "place" in one sense, but that place would be defined most accurately as the relationships that do exist (with the concept of hierarchy included in there somehow) and the possible relationships that c!
ou!
> ld potentially exist via human creativity, etc. (some couldn't exist, no matter how hard we try). In other words, just because something is related to the world in definite ways does not mean that it only has one possible function or can only be labeled in just one particular way. There should be no concern over "tidy, *non-overlapping* boxes" which stifle us here - the overlapping is, in fact, immense.
>
> With his logical syllogisms, Aristotle obviously had some purely logical, linear thoughts - and they are thoughts that I think a lot of us might find we could share in certain contexts. Still, I don't this precludes something like the above (perhaps he himself said something like this, I do not know).
>
> In other words, reality is not infinitely malleable, but has boundaries. Even Weinberger himself admits that reality can not be carved up in just any way - though sometimes he seems to mitigate this by some of his statements. For example, Weinberger says "How we organize the world is a deep issue and we are just not going to agree on it. There is no single way of organizing the world. There wasn't for Plato, there can't be for Dewey". But in my mind the real question is not: "Can we determine one perfect way of organizing the world?". Rather the practical question is "Can we not agree on some boundaries that are not necessarily perfect (Aristotle, according to Weinberger: "Everything is perfectly ordered and ordered by perfect definitions") but are *still meaningful, make good practical sense, and hence, responsibly educate?"*
>
> When I take my five year old into the Dewey library nearby and introduce him to the following broad categories I think I am giving him a (not "the") helpful view of the knowledge of the world. I don't find much to gripe about here:
>
> 000 Generalities
> 100 Philosophy & psychology
> 200 Religion
> 300 Social sciences
> 400 Language
> 500 Natural sciences & mathematics
> 600 Technology (Applied sciences)
> 700 The arts
> 800 Literature & rhetoric
> 900 Geography & history
>
> Likewise with LCC (when he gets older!):
>
> A GENERAL WORKS
>
> B PHILOSOPHY. PSYCHOLOGY. RELIGION
>
> C AUXILIARY SCIENCES OF HISTORY
>
> D HISTORY: GENERAL AND OLD WORLD
>
> E HISTORY: AMERICA
>
> F HISTORY: AMERICA
>
> G GEOGRAPHY. ANTHROPOLOGY. RECREATION
>
> H SOCIAL SCIENCES
>
> J POLITICAL SCIENCE
>
> K LAW
>
> L EDUCATION
>
> M MUSIC AND BOOKS ON MUSIC
>
> N FINE ARTS
>
> P LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
>
> Q SCIENCE
>
> R MEDICINE
>
> S AGRICULTURE
>
> T TECHNOLOGY
>
> U MILITARY SCIENCE
>
> V NAVAL SCIENCE
>
> Z BIBLIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY SCIENCE. INFORMATION RESOURCES (GENERAL)
>
>
> Now, I am sure there are lots of other reasonable ways to do this (but the main categories seem pretty sound and useful to me!), but could it be that the LCC and its subject headings schema (LCSH) are the "most commonly used and widely accepted subject vocabulary for general application... It is the de facto universal controlled vocabulary and has been a model for developing subject heading systems by many countries (Dean, Rebecca, "FAST: Development of Simplified Headings for Metadata" for a very good reason (and more than this one I'm sure), namely that its main categories are "meaningful, make good practical sense, and hence, responsibly educate"?
>
> Getting back to the beginning of this email, I think Aristotle and Weinberger may have a lot in common. Aristotle contended that by examining the objects of the world and their relationships, we could determine purpose in the world. The universe was surrounded by and behaved according to the order and purpose of nature - and that this is essential to understanding life and meaning in life. He then went on to identify a lot of these purposes (and makes some mistakes too, based on the fact that his system does not really balance logic [deduction] and actual experiences of physical reality [induction, empirical methods]) I am not sure if he claimed to have a corner on how and why everything works as it does. I suspect he did not.
>
> Given all the different presuppositions and "faiths" about the world that are out there, I am tempted to agree with Weinberger that "You can't make *a classification decision* that's right for everybody - it just can't be done...." But I think this is not the way we operate.
>
> After all, whatever may think of Aristotle or Weinberger, all of us must categorize - we can't avoid this. And no matter how much "both-and"ing we might do, all of us believe and operate with the assumption that there are things that demand "either-or"ing as well (this, not that). I would argue that this is true not just regarding how we must organize physical reality, but also other aspects of life: emotions, ideas, etc.
>
> For example, would not all of us "tag" the physical objects rolling down a little girl's face whose father has just died "tears" - or should we insist that this physical manifestation cannot point to a non-physical thing that all human parties could meaningfully and decisively label "sadness"? I suggest in such a circumstance, "joy" is not a meaningful or appropriate tag in any sense.
>
> To close, one may "tag" a certain kind of insect as "tasty" - a categorization that is meaningful to you and perhaps you alone - but should we insist that it cannot be meaningfully labeled and decisively something like "animal" (as opposed to a plant) by all human parties, possible confusing classification exceptions (like platypuses!) aside?
>
> We must classify not only the physical world, but beyond - and using reason, presuppositions, faith, etc. as their guides, people have always done so as best they could.
>
> This is why I don't want new catalogs of the future to lose the traditional systematic treasure troves - with all the more "holistic" linkages I've previously mentioned. The past treasures of library science AND user tagging - both/and! - should be part of our mission, I humbly suggest.
>
> Nathan Rinne
> Media Cataloging Technician
> ISD 279 - Educational Service Center (ESC)
> 11200 93rd Ave. North
> Maple Grove, MN. 55369
> Work phone: 763-391-7183
>
Received on Tue Jun 05 2007 - 06:18:37 EDT