lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

I’ve been toying with WordStat™ software from Provalis Research again. It is very useful for the kind of qualitative analysis required in domain analysis. One valuable tool in the content analysis package is a KWIC index. Ancient students of KO will recognize that acronym for “Keyword-in-Context,” a kind of indexing once thought potentially fruitful. Here is an example including three “contexts” for the word “model” from ISKO 13’s proceedings.

As you see, it is very useful for comprehending the precise context of those big words that show up in the center of word clouds or the foreground of MDS plots.

However, the interesting thing I’ve just learned is that most of the presence of the term “information science” in our domain comes not from the keywords in research papers, but rather from the title of the third most cited journal in our domain JASIST (forgive me for not spelling out here, and using  that term again). Thus it is not that that term is a topic of critical interest, rather it is that as much as 20% of our research appears in a competing journal.

If our science is going to continue to thrive and grow, our authors need to stop sending their research to competing journals. Better a world in which our journal Knowledge Organization has to split into an A for ontology and a B for epistemology and a C for domain analysis, etc., than one in which the dispersion of our science hinders exploitative power and weakens the scientific structure of our domain.

I famously wring my metaphorical hands about the number of authors who submit manuscripts to Knowledge Organization reporting research that is topically relevant, but showing absolutely no inculcation in the theories or values of the science of KO. Emotions range from demoralized to furious on these occasions. Fortunately, rational academic policies dictate manuscript acceptance, and in almost all cases we return these errant papers to the authors with instructions to go do their homework. Some of them do, happily.

I am in the midst of a domain analysis of the 75 papers presented at the recent ISKO International Conference in Krakow (http://www.isko2014.confer.uj.edu.pl/en_GB/-start). The complete results of that analysis will appear in an editorial in a future issue of KO. But the interesting thing I am seeing this time is that there is, indeed, a core of knowledge organization. Seventy-five papers, 1200-some citations, from 20 countries, citing over 400 journal articles, 300 books and 200 anthologies. And yet, most of the citations are to a tightly-knit intellectually coherent core of KO. Most journal citations by far (44%) are to Knowledge Organization, the majority of conference papers cited are in ISKO international conferences or regional chapter conferences, and the most-cited monographs are by Hjørland and Ranganathan.

It is good news, that there is such a strong and resilient and theoretically useful core of knowledge organization. The challenge, it seems, is to require those interloping into our topical areas to encounter our theoretical base.

I recently completed a rich analysis of the entirety of American Documentation in order to trace the evolution of the concept of a concept across that era of the growth of the emerging field of information science. I wrote a short paper on the subject for CAIS 2014 (available here: http://www.cais-acsi.ca/ojs/index.php/cais/issue/current.

The “abstract” is this: A core entity of information science is the “concept.” Agreement on the basic definition as a mental construct representing a concrete instance, conceals divergence in understanding of the nuances. A case study of the domain’s nascent era represented by American Documentation reveals some of the contours of the terms evolution.

There were lots of fun things to be encountered in those years of AD, and I was going to upload some photos of things like the rapid selector and Termatrex and so on, until I went to do so and found all of those “further reproduction prohibited” notices. Oh well. The whole run is available to ASIST members in the ASIST Digital Library.

I thought it was fascinating to see how interwoven knowledge organization was in those early days of documentation into information science. There was a lengthy evolution of something called “the duality concept,” which was an expression of the dichotomies between known-fact and browsing, between simple and complex terminology, and thus between isolate and hierarchy.

Stay tuned: a lengthy journal article is forthcoming.

As a KO scholar enamored of what domain analysis can reveal, and unphased by the challenge of unindexed source material, I spend way too much time manually indexing things like conference proceedings. This always means reformatting and “cleaning” something like 1200 citations at a pop, to get them into some form that can be manipulated or mined for statistical parameters.

It’s a wonder I don’t get whiplash from all the shaking of my head that goes on during these sessions. Of course, as a journal editor I experience a lot of errant citing practice as well. At least in that case I have the prerogative to require the author to do it over and get it right.

I remember when I was a masters student at Indiana University a zillion years ago; one of my scholarly mentors explained to me how to prepare notes when engaging in literature review. She said, open the book and place it on the table at the right of your typewriter. Put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter and before you do anything else type out the elements of the citation for the book. Then you’ll always have them. And then, as you read along (instead of highlighting or underlining, which not only destroys the text, but which you can never find again anyway) as you come to something interesting type the page number then just type out the text. When you’re finished, you’ve got block quotes or potential paraphrases ready to insert into your analysis, together with the appropriate material for text references. Now, I don’t expect everyone reading this to rush out and buy typewriters, but I do commend the method to you. It has served me well for decades.

What is not appropriate is to just cite willy-nilly to show you did some searching. And what is just plain wrong is to cite from online citations instead of directly from the source material. (Note to authors: we know when you’ve just plopped citations in from citation databases or from software because when we convert your text to edit it all of the citations either disappear, or, they become URLs and we can’t edit without opening hundreds of windows. Don’t do that!)

A key point to keep in mind is that the purpose of a citation is the same as the purpose of a precise methodology and that is replication. Another scholar should be able to follow your path by finding the sources you cite, precisely.

So I won’t tell you what I’ve just been indexing so as not to embarrass anybody (not that you won’t be able to guess), but here are some of the more interesting things I discovered:

§Aristotle. Aristotle is important to knowledge organization, I give you that. But nothing he wrote is likely your actual source. This resource: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html is cited as:

Aristotle. 1994. Metaphysics, trans. W.D. Ross. The Internet classics archive. Cambridge: MIT.

Why? The date is the date of publication of the resource, not the date of writing. “Aristotle. 350BCE” is not an appropriate reference.

§OCLC is not an author. Well, usually. You don’t have to cite OCLC if all you’ve done is make reference to it in your text. Let’s say you’ve written “Often, in bibliographic utilities like OCLC’s WorldCat, [blah, blah, blah ….].” That does not require a citation in the reference list. What you can do, although even this is not really necessary, is place the URL in parentheses in the text: “Often, in bibliographic utilities like OCLC’s WorldCat (http://www.oclc.org/worldcat.en.html), [blah, blah, blah ….].” Don’t litter your reference list with URLs of websites from which you have not cited or paraphrased. On the other hand, if you are citing something specific, then please follow the general instructions for doing so.

§Reprints should be described using their own details of publication. Here is the classic example from my own writing: Wilson, Patrick. 1978. Two kinds of power: an essay on bibliographical control. Berkeley: UC Press. Reprint of 1968 ed.

§Works by classic authors, contained in anthologies, are described as chapters in the books in which they appear: Otlet, Paul. 1990. The science of bibliography and documentation. In Rayward, W. Boyd, ed., International organisation and dissemination of knowledge: selected essays of Paul Otlet. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 71-86.

(Note, it is very impressive that you know this was written in 1903, but the date for the citation is the date of publication of the resource in which you read the material.)(Note 2, just think how Boyd Rayward, a really nice guy, would feel seeing his name next to a 1903 publication date!)

I’m thinking it would be fun for a doctoral seminar to give them this particular set of citations and give them fifteen minutes to figure out what the real citations should have been so they can actually lay hands on the resource. Hmmmmm.