Ethnoclassification: adapting formal classification schemes
"Ethnoclassification in the broadest sense refers to 'how people classify and categorize the world around them (Merholz 2004).' Star (1996) used the term ethnoclassification in reference to the work of her research group who were exploring the convergence of the sociology of science and the sociology of work with digital libraries. Their work, as ethnographers in a way, involved tracing the web backwards by observing how readers and writers routinely adopt and adapt formal classification schemes with their own personal everyday classification systems in their local work spaces, filing cabinets, computer desktops, web browsers, and group-level software (Star 1996)."
(Maureen Flynn-Burhoe, 16 June 2007, Speechless)
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
CETIS: JISC Pedagogical Vocabularies Review
"The JISC Pedagogical Vocabularies project was a short study, managed by CETIS, to scope the potential for identification, development and use of pedagogical vocabularies for the UK post-16 and HE communities. After a period of data gathering and community consultation, a Working Group of experts from various sectors and communities developed two reports along with recommendations to JISC that will be used to inform future development in this area, in collaboration with JISC partners."
(Joint Information Systems Committee, UK)
1). Pedagogical Vocabularies Review, which inventories existing pedagogical vocabularies, including flat lists, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies and classification schemes, relevant to the UK post-16 and HE education sectors, with reference to current work in Europe. Final Draft, 23rd December 2005.
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A folksonomy is an integrative technique
"A folksonomy is an integrative technique used for organising online content. The technique works through allowing content to be indexed in a multi-taxonomic manner. While a taxonomy unifies content through compliance to a single common ontology (index system), a folksonomy integrates content through the juxtaposition and intersection of various taxonomies (index systems). With a folksonomy content within a web site (digital photos, mp3 audio files, 'podcasts' etc.) can attract multiple indexes that are able to contest and collide with each other. Information producers and consumers can assign keyword tags to content according to their own ontological frameworks (without the need for an agreed compliance). In this way folksonomies are able to respond to generative and associative impulses. They provide a means for integrating heterogeneous content based on a principle of good company rather than on a logic of compliance and unity."
(Simon Perkins, 31 July 2008, unpublished PhD thesis)
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Joseph Cornell: navigating the imagination
"American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) ... forever altered the concept of the box - from a time-honoured functional container into a new art form, the box construction. ...
His ... exhibition is organised thematically to suggest his understanding of the imagination as an echo chamber where possibilities and connections can be discovered through subtle repetition and variation. Each thematic section mingles the series, media, and time frames in which he worked. ...
It is also central to the modern concept of creativity as the collision and recombination of ideas. Traditions can be reinterpreted; connections can be forged between the seemingly random or disparate. Cornell believed that artists renew and transform materials, experiences, and ideas, and this belief fuelled his ability to communicate the beauty and magic in ordinary, often forgotten things."
(Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Peabody Essex Museum)
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Scrapbooks Were A 'coping' Strategy For Old Media
Matt Locke from TEST
Scrapbooks were a 'coping' strategy for old media at a time when distribution via railroads and cheap printing processes led to an overwhelming surplus of popular magazines and newspapers. [Ellen Gruber] Garvey describes them as "a new subcategory of media - the cheap, the disposable, and yet somehow tantalizingly valuable, if only their value could be seperated from their ephemerality". Scrapbooks were one just one strategy for indexing and archiving cuttings, including commercial clipping services, but scrapbooks represented a private, vernacular response to this information revolution. This remaking of popular media is clearly a precursor of the current blogging phenomenon, and Garvey's analysis of scrapbook making introduces some concepts that are useful in discussing blogging as part of our contemporary media culture.
Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
