Category Archives: Classification

I need categories. Not for neatly dissecting the world, but simply for sorting. Because unsorted lists require fast context-switching. That’s why I prefer Downes’s articles in a categorized list
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An interesting presentation at the DHD 2014 Digital Humanities conference covered different attitudes towards ontologies. Continue reading →

An interesting study identifies a type of academic homepages as sycophants, mainly because they link back to their departments. It is true that there are problems with these pages but IMO they are different.
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How would the “library 2.0″ look like? Users’ tags for emerging knowledge, librarians’ classifications for older, settled knowledge?
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How much work should the RSS aggregator do for me? Should it try to group the various feeds by some sort of context such as authors’ topics or tags, or by day, or by geographical location? No, just count and perhaps cache them.
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In her Cognitive analysis of tagging, Rashmi Sinha hits the core problem when she points to our fear that we would make a wrong categorization decision. “We need to consider the overall categorical scheme.” I think this fear can be mitigated when using cross reference links.
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Collaborative library (ColLib, via S. Downes) sounded very promising to me, since I am hoping for the peaceful coexistence of amateur tagging and professional classification that C. Shirky denies (Aug. 27th). His most plausible argument ist cost: Tagging is cheap. But for whom is tagging cheap? For the providers of the tags – okay. But for the consumers?
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Our university library is starting off into a new era of Open Access and RSS Syndication, categorized by Dewey. Here is the RSS-Link of the ten most recent self-archival publications, and if you have an aggregator similar like mine (see the 146 kB screenshot), you can sort them by DCC just clicking on the heading of the subject column. I think this is a pretty promising approach, which might soon combine both the capabilities of smart aggregator filters of the users and professional cataloguing by LIS staff.
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