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Side by Side: The Use of Multiple Subject Languages in Capturing Shifting Contexts around Historical Collections
Full text linkArchival representations strive to convey the original context around historical collections, but perspectives on certain topics and materials may change over time. Such shifting perspectives pose problems for providing appropriate subject access without obscuring contexts or misrepresenting resources in their broader cultural settings. This study seeks to examine these problems through an investigation of historical materials associated with American sideshows, public opinions on which changed drastically from the 19th to the 20th centuries. Using as a case the Ronald G. Becker Collection of Charles Eisenmann Photographs, an archival collection of digitized images of sideshow performers, we explored a variety of systems of subject representation for major concepts and terms relevant to sideshow performers and activities. Combining keyword extraction and descriptive analysis of current collection metadata (e.g., LCSH) with comparisons to other popular systems of subject representation, we found complex and conflicting perspectives on concepts such as dwarfism, hypertrichosis, and obesity. Results revealed that current LCSH-based subject metadata for these materials tends to reduce historical and demographic context around performers and highlight contemporary medical perspectives. At the same time, original language used in these images is now often seen as demeaning, exploitative, and offensive. Furthermore, neither of these perspectives may match with self-identifying language used in contemporary society. Taken together, however, these sets of terminologies and their relationships may provide a more robust representation of changing perceptions and terminologies over time. Findings from this study reveal the potentials of utilizing a faceted approach and multiple subject languages together to further clarify and contextualize archival collections
Exploring Geopolitical Realities through Taxonomies: The Case of Taiwan
Full text linkIn the face of heterogeneous standards and large-scale datasets, it has become increasingly difficult to understand the underlying knowledge structures within complex information systems. These structures may encode latent assumptions that could be susceptible to issues such as ghettoization, bias, erasure, or omission. Inspired by a series of current events in the China-Taiwan conflict on the sovereignty of Taiwan, our research aims to develop methods that can elucidate multiple, often conflicting perspectives and hidden assumptions. We propose the use of a logic-based taxonomy alignment approach to first align and then reconcile distinct but overlapping taxonomies. We specifically examine three relevant taxonomies that list the world entities: (1) ISO 3166 for country codes and subdivisions; (2) the geographic regions of the US Department of Homeland Security; (3) the Center Intelligence Agency’s World Fact Book. Our results highlight multiple alternate views (or Possible Worlds) for situating Taiwan relative to other neighboring entities. We hope that this work can be a first step to demonstrate how different geopolitical perspectives can be represented using multiple, interrelated taxonomies
Machine translation and author keywords: A viable search strategy for scholars with limited English proficiency?
Full text linkAuthor keywords are valuable for indexing articles and for information retrieval (IR). Most scientific literature is published in English. Can machine translation (MT) help researchers with limited English proficiency to search for information? We used two MT systems (Google Translate, DeepL Translator) to translate into English 71 Spanish keywords and 43 French keywords from articles in the domain of Library and Information Science. We then used the English translations to search the Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database. Half of the translated keywords returned relevant results. Of the half that did not, 34% were well translated but did not align with LISTA descriptors. Translation-related problems stemming from orthographic variation, synonymy, differing syntactic preferences, and semantic field coverage interfered with IR in just 16% of cases. Some of the MT errors are relatively “predictable” and if knowledge organization systems could be augmented to deal with them, then MT may prove even more useful for searching
A Cross-cultural Comparison of Medical Science Subject Classification in the KDC and the DDC
Full text linkThis study reports the preliminary results of a cross-cultural comparison of Medical Science in the Korean Decimal Classification (KDC) and in the Dewy Decimal Classification (DDC). Despite having similar purposes, to serve the public and emphasize the significance of standardization in medical science, a comparison of the two classification systems shows the influences of social and cultural inferences of classification systems in medicine
The Colonial Efficacy of Casta Paintings
Full text linkHow can we understand artworks as classification systems? Is art a valid object of study in information science? If we answer “yes” to the latter question, how do we examine the first question? Casta paintings in colonial New Spain present a robust opportunity to understand art’s classificatory and documentary powers. In order to evaluate the efficacy of casta paintings as a classification system, it is necessary analyze how these works, as objects of colonial visual culture, enacted subjugation on multiple levels. Complex networks of power produce every classification system. Colonial power, particularly in urban New Spain, was often performed in seemingly paradoxical manners. Casta paintings responded to colonial anxieties about miscegenation, but they also acknowledged the realities of racial amalgamations in colonial New Spain. Put simply, New Spain was simultaneously a jewel for the Spanish Empire and the heart of an evil, non-Christian Other. This context reveals the critical necessity of social classification systems for European colonial expansion. To evaluate the knowledge organization casta paintings produced for colonial powers, I will focus on those held in the Denver Art Museum’s (DAM) New World Department. The DAM’s holdings include a complete set of sixteen casta paintings by Francisco Clapera, along with individual works by Jose de Alcibar and unidentified artists. Recognizable signifiers in these paintings enacted social classification at several levels in colonial New Spain.1 For the methodology of this project, I follow Jonathan Furner’s approach to evaluating classification systems.2 Furner’s prompt for classification researchers to evaluate how classification systems represent identity begets evaluation classification systems’ ideological and material structures. In the case of casta paintings, it makes sense to appraise their functions of identity representation on the one hand, and their descriptive power and retrieval functions on the other hand
The Contribution of James Duff Brown to the Analytic-Synthetic Method: Comparisons with Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan
Full text linkConsidering that the analytic-synthetic method is still one of the main methodological approaches to knowledge organization, the present paper aims to highlight the contribution of James Duff Brown to the development of this method. We conducted a comparative analysis based on William James's pragmatism in order to investigate the convergences of Brown’s work with other authors of the analytic-synthetic movement, namely Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan. Our pragmatist analysis reveals that Brown developed a similar stance to the aforementioned authors based on the analysis and synthesis of subjects for knowledge organization
Ways of Being and Ways of Knowing: Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology and Knowledge Organization
Full text linkThis paper examines some of the problems within the field of knowledge organization that arise from its roots within the Western philosophical tradition, specifically in relation to the technological view of the world as expressed by Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology. It attempts not only to outline the weaknesses of this worldview, but also to provide a path towards expansion and inclusion of a larger variety of worldviews. Given the importance of ontology within Heidegger's philosophy, this paper considers epistemology as rooted in ontology, and attempts to center knowledge organization within ontology. The goal is the development of a human-centered approach to knowledge organization which encompasses the creator and the world of the creator as well as the user and the world of the user, and builds upon community and connections between them. The goal of this approach is to arrive at a philosophy of knowledge organization that can successfully interact with knowledge expressed in a wide variety of forms (tools and works of art in addition to verbal treatises) and from a variety of cultures and socio-economic groups
Warrant Revealed and an Institutional Response: The AAT and Graffiti Art
Full text linkKnowledge organization concerns itself with the process of documenting the products of various domains of scientific and cultural research and expression. Disciplines with the longest history of intellectual inquiry often have the most granular systems in popular use to describe their respective processes and products of endeavor, such as the hard sciences, age old religions, mathematics, and philosophy. Yet the world is a place of continuous exploration, discovery, and development. Newer disciplines such as gender and sexuality studies, nanotechnology, and social media studies have shorter histories and have undergone challenges as terminologies adapt from older, parent disciplines to provide descriptive support for related, yet new concepts. One such discipline is that of street ar
Decolonizing Knowledge Organization Systems: Hawaiian Epistemology, Representation and Organization
Full text linkThrough examining controlled and natural language representation of Hawaiʻi, this research aims to contribute to an understanding of how Hawaiian epistemology may enrich Hawaiian cultural heritage representation in conventional knowledge organization systems
MEGALITHIC JAR SITES OF LAOS: A COMPREHENSIVE OVERVIEW AND NEW DISCOVERIES
Full text linkThe megalithic jar sites of central Laos remain one of Southeast Asia's archaeological enigmas. These sites, more than 90 known to date, comprise large stone jars, discs, apparent lids and imported boulders located in elevated positions on hillslopes, mountain ridges or saddles. While the sites were first noted in the late 19th century, the first systematic research at these sites only began in the 1930s with the work of Madeleine Colani. Since that time, attempts to understand the culture that created the jars, their distribution and purpose have been limited not least because of the presence of unexploded ordnance (UXO) dating to the conflict in Indo-China in the 1960s and '70s. Renewed archaeological research by the authors commenced in 2016. This paper provides an inventory of known sites, matching historical accounts with more recent survey and lastly lists new sites identified in the recent research programme