>(Mike) Huh? Arbitrary? Only if you consider the whole decimal system of
>counting to be just "arbitrary".
Of course decimal counting is arbitrary. It's advanages have nothing
to do with the shape of knowledge and everything to do with creating
tidy-looking numbers. You see it over and over in Dewey—shoe-horning
arbitrary complex subject divisions into a decimal scheme. A
well-designed tree can have different numbers of leaves on every
branch. Dewey can't. It's ten ten ten until the cows come home.
States? Apostles? Flavors in Heinz katsup? Stuff them in as best you
can, and make sure to leave a "junk drawer" heading. Let a 19c.
provincial 20-something design a subject system and you end up with
Buddhism in the junk drawer of a junk drawer.
Certainly there's a case to be made for tidy numbers. They're easier
to write and to remember. So long as you plan them well (eg., give
Buddhism a number) they're also easy to shelve by. Tidy numbers are,
however, much more important in the pre-digital world than in a
digital one. This email gets to you by a series of numbers neither of
us need to remember and which make no concessions to human
readability. It is likewise a matter of complete indifference where on
the "shelf" of our hard drive this email is stored. In the digital
world we can organize things however we want, and in as many ways as
we find useful. And we can change that organization as the information
and we change.
>(Nathan) and the West
I have no multicultural axe to grind. My own library is organized for
use, not cultural sensitivity, and participates in the interests and
divisions of my culture, which is certainly Western. I have my
junk-drawer shelves too. I've got sections for the languages I care
about—Greek, Latin, French, German and Turkish; the rest is jumbled
together ignorantly. Tagging allows me to transcend some of the
limitations of the physical—I don't need to choose whether to put the
book on Hellenistic archaeology in Turkey in with my Hellenisic books,
my archaeology books or my Turkey books. But I've also got a
"barbarians" tag, for books about Greek/non-Greek interaction. It's a
good short-hand but not very inclusive.
The trick is, no matter how useful, I don't assert that the way I
order the world is universally useful, accurate and timeless.
Received on Tue Jun 05 2007 - 07:38:49 EDT