quiet around here.

Pretty much all my attention is going to:
a) reading about classification, categorization, and representation
b) working on a clump of 16 films that suddenly fell into my lap all at once for the Folkstreams.net project

I’ve always liked henna/mehndi art. I used to do it a little, and I designed a line of tshirts inspired by the designs for my old company, leading to getting contracted by A Big Name Jam Band to design two shirts for them.

So, I have enjoyed watching Painted Bride, about the henna done on the hands and feet of brides among Pakistani immigrants in Queens.

All the trouble getting the sound right on the capture and streams? Didn’t enjoy that so much, but so it goes.

Yeah, back to reading.

favorite new/changed lcsh : 4 April 2007

150 Dievturiba [May Subd Geog] [sp2004014647]
550 BT Neopaganism

100 Kristoffersen family [Not Subd Geog] [sp2006006890]
400 UF Kristofferson family
500 RT Christopherson family

150 Nori [May Subd Geog] [sp 85092415 ]
* 450 UF Gim (Algae)
* 450 UF Haitai
* 450 UF Kim CANCEL
* 450 UF Kim (Algae)

(A) 150 Photodegradation [May Subd Geog] [sp2007001664]
550 BT Decomposition (Chemistry)
550 BT Photochemistry

(C) 150 Ten-minute plays [May Subd Geog] [sp2007001480]
450 UF 10-minute plays
550 BT One-act plays

(A) 150 Women spies in motion pictures [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007001777]
550 BT Motion pictures

* 150 Yodel and yodeling CANCEL
150 Yodeling [May Subd Geog] [sp 85149170 ]
450 UF Yodel and yodeling [EARLIER FORM OF HEADING]
550 BT Singing

And also, Pluto gets demoted in LCSH:
* 151 Pluto (Planet)–Satellites CANCEL
151 Pluto (Dwarf planet)–Satellites [sp 95007254 ]
053 QB408
550 BT Satellites

* 151 Pluto (Planet)–Ephemerides CANCEL
151 Pluto (Dwarf planet)–Ephemerides [sp 85103580 ]
550 BT Ephemerides

—http://www.loc.gov/cgi-bin/gourl?URL=%2Fcatdir%2Fcpso%2Fwls07%2Fawls0714.html

favorite lcsh of the [time period]

(A) 150 Cupcakes [May Subd Geog] [sp2007001530]
053 TX771-TX771.2
450 UF Cup cakes
550 BT Cake

(A) 150 Internet videos [May Subd Geog] [sp2007001612]
053 TK5105.8867
450 UF Net videos
450 UF Online videos
450 UF Web videos
550 BT Video recordings
550 BT Web sites

(A) 150 Milk in human nutrition [May Subd Geog] [sp2007001463]
053 QP144.M54
550 BT Nutrition

(C) 150 Portable toilets [May Subd Geog] [sp2005007523]
450 UF Porta-potties
450 UF Porta-toilets
450 UF Portapotties
450 UF Portatoilets
550 BT Toilets

paperless office cites.

(cleaning up some old directories, and there’s some stuff I don’t want to lose. it could even be helpful to someone… here’s a bibliography for a class project, circa 2002. sure to be very useful… 🙂 )

The Paperless Office: Works Consulted

“Is the Paperless Office Working?” Managing the General Ledger 1, no. 6 (2001): 8.

Bielski, Lauren. “So, What Ever Happened to the Paperless Office?” ABA Banking Journal 94, no. 6 (2002): 57-60.

Britz, Maria Bruno. “Giving Documents the Ditch.” Insurance Networking 6, no. 7 (2003): 21.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic Monthly 176, no. 1 (1945): 101-8.

Case, Donald Owen. “Collection and Organization of Written Information by Social Scientists and Humanists: A Review and Exploratory Study.” Journal of Information Science 12, no. 3
(1986): 97-104.

—————. “Conceptual Organization and Retrieval of Text by Historians: The Role of Memory and Metaphor.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42, no. 9 (1991): 657-68.

—————. “The Use of Anthropological Methods in Studying Information Management by American Historians.” In Information Technology: Planning for the Next Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science. Medford, NJ: Learned Information, Inc, for American Society for Information Science, 1988.

Cole, I. “Human Aspects of Office Filing: Implications for the Electronic Office.” In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 26th Annual Meeting. Santa Monica: Human Factors Society, 1982.

Dahlgren, Bruce. “The fine print.” Web page, September 2001 [accessed 21 April 2003]. Available at http://www.lexmark.com/US/virtual_press_room/pdf/printmovemanage.pdf.

Flynn, Gillian. “An Ad Agency Pitches for the Virtual Office.” Workforce 76, no. 11 (1997): 56.

Greengard, Samuel. “Getting Rid of the Paper Chase.” Workforce 78, no. 11 (1999): 69.

Jupitermedia Corporation. “Webopedia.” Web page, [accessed 21 April 2003].
Available at http://www.webopedia.com/.

Kwasnik, Barbara H. “Factors Affecting the Naming of Documents in an Office.” In Information Technology: Planning for the Next Fifty Years. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science. Medford, NJ: Learned Information, Inc, for American Society for Information Science, 1988.

—————. “The Importance of Factors That Are Not Document Attributes in the Organisation of Personal Documents.” Journal of Documentation 47, no. 4 (1991): 389-98.

Malone, Thomas W. “How Do People Organize Their Desks? Implications for the Design of Office Information Systems.” ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 1 (1983): 25-32.

Seifman, Donald H., and Craig W. Trepanier. “Electronic Administration of Personnel, Benefit Plans, and Direct Payroll Payment.” Employee Relations Law Journal 21, no. 4 (1996): 61-90.

Sellen, Abigail J., and Richard H. R. Harper. The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.

favorite new/changed lcsh : March 21, 2007

150 Animal carcasses in art [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007001374]

150 Dignity in literature [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007001471]

150 Godzilla films [sp 86005141 ]
* 550 BT Motion pictures CANCEL

(A) 150 Mexican Mafia [May Subd Geog] [sp2007001375]
450 UF Eme, La
450 UF La Eme
550 BT Gangs

(A) 150 Thou (The English word) [sp2007001391]
550 BT English language–Etymology

150 Vampire films [sp 85141947 ]
* 550 BT Motion pictures CANCEL

—http://www.loc.gov/…

psa.

Local people!

It has come to my attention that not everyone knows the joys of LOCOPOPS and their new Chapel Hill location. Inspired by paletas, Locopops serves one thing–POPSICLES!!!

Today I went and had three popsicles in the following flavors:

  • Mexican gazpacho – made with pineapple, jimica, jalapeno, and cucumber. It was rather mildly flavored, except for theheat of the pepper. OK. Not great. Had to try it, though.
  • Lemon basil – OMG to die for. I think I actually moaned out loud when I first tasted it.
  • Blueberry buttermilk – this convinces me that I am simply a fan of any popsicle made with buttermilk. Divine.

Of course they have plenty of other, more “normal” flavors like chocolate and cherry/pomegranate and mojito (lime+mint). They also have chicken or beef pops for your dog. Blech. A partial list of flavors is available at their Wikipedia page, which I suspect they are using in lieu of setting up a real website…

Anyway, there is now, in answer to all my prayers and magic incantations, a location on W. Franklin Street. It is in The Courtyard, next to Penang, across the street from Chapel Hill Tire.

Open 12-9pm.

Small pops $1.25 (including tax)
Large pops $2.25

I no longer have to make runs to the Durham location with an ice-filled cooler, feeling guilty about burning all that gas. Now there are delicious, intriguingly flavored pops between campus and home. Danger…. 🙂

progress.

Today I started re-reading Lakoff’s Women, fire, and dangerous things.

The first time I read it was in the first year of my masters program (2001-2). It was hard slogging through.

And now… I zip on through. I guess maybe I haven’t actually been getting stupider, despite the way it feels sometimes.

sketchy jottings on relationships between pim and concepts/categories.

Classical/rule based model seems to apply least. Kwasnik’s (footnotebegin)Kwasnik, Barbara H. 1989. “The influence of context on classificatory behavior.” PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.(footnoteend)rules for classification of office documents derived from smaller decisions/considerations more like other approaches.

Exemplar/prototype/similarity based models. Seems to apply a bit. Case’s (footnotebegin)Case, Donald Owen. 1986. Collection and organization of written information by social scientists and humanists: A review and exploratory study. Journal of Information Science 12, no. 3: 97-104.(footnoteend)importance of form, even outside the computer. The importance of topic as classificatory cue. But a good fit? Prototype theory, especially, seems problematic. Is there a prototype document for my “important papers” file? etc. I don’t think so. The only thing really similar among the items is that they’d all be a pain in the arse to replace, especially without the other things in the file. But this isn’t a necessary or sufficient feature for inclusion in the file. Heh, it’s my own ad-hoc (goal derived) subcategory for the canonical example: things to save from my house in the event of a fire. Subcategory, because the overall category also contains laptop and cats.

The theory theory (probably my favorite name ever). Given the findings in PIM about the importance of beliefs about future use for keeping decisions and classification, (footnotebegin)Kwasnik, Barbara H. 1989. How a personal document’s intended use or purpose affects its classification in an office. In Proceedings of the ACM-SIGIR 12th Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 207-10. New York, NY: ACM Press. ; Kwasnik, Barbara H. 1991. The importance of factors that are not document attributes in the organisation of personal documents. Journal of Documentation 47, no. 4: 389-98.(footnoteend) this seems to make a lot of sense. The theory theory also seems to fit with the Sense-Making approach, with its focus on individual as expert and theorist.

Goal derived categories (ad hoc). Yes. Related to intended use as mentioned above. “Things I need to work on PIM lit review” is one way I have organized my personal information environment.

Maybe go through all the cues for document classification/placement/dispensation noted in PIM research and think of what sort of categorization is going on behind it?
I suspect I may draw very spurious connections between these concept/category theories and the categorization/organization of artifacts, but I wouldn’t be the first…

another talk.

Today I attended the following:

EXPRESSIVITY VS. UNIFORMITY: Are controlled vocabularies dead, and if not, should they be?
When: 1:00 to 2:00pm April 2nd, 2007
Where: Pleasants Family Room in Wilson LibraryFrom Dr. Haas: ‘Controlled vocabularies, nomenclatures, LC or MeSH subject headings have a long history in LIS. They make classification, categorization, aggregation, sorting, and other operations easier. But with the rise of folksonomy, recommendors, improved natural language processing techniques and other technologies, are they needed any more, or are they just stifling the creativity of our expression?’

Pretty much everyone agrees. We need both. Different needs call for different means. And it’ll be really cool if we can get systems that actually leverage the metadata (in whatever form) in intuitive, useful ways.

And when we get to the lovechild-combinations of controlled vocabularies and all these tags and so forth… that’ll be really nifty.

As an aside… I’m always curious at the reaction to the use of the word “control” in bibliographic control, or controlled vocabularies. As if control were automatically a bad thing, or at the very least somehow un-PC or something. Control can be a very good thing! Air traffic control! Keeping people and things from going every which way can be very important, and good. We want to know what books we have, how they are related, and where they are–this means we want them to be controlled. We don’t want to use 18 words for one concept, so we want vocabulary control. We are not talking about mind control here. (footnotebegin)I haven’t read it yet (it’s on the list), but the idea I’ve gotten from reading several reviews of Stumbling on Happiness is that it has some interesting things to say about the human desire to feel in control…(footnoteend)

This reaction is often displayed along with some discomfort with “labeling things” or “putting them in bins” or “categorizing things,” as if to do so is a) avoidable (footnotebegin)Categorizing things is a foundational part of our perception and cognition! (footnoteend), and b) by necessity negative, imposing some sort of intellectual hegemony.

Rare is the person these days who would claim that any classification, category scheme, or set of terms actually represents The True Way Things Are. Each is a just tool for a particular application, and there’s no reason why such a scheme cannot be flexible and responsive and include multiple perspectives through reference structures and such. I’m not claiming that they always are flexible and responsive (I know better), but, they *could* be.