Archive for the ‘cultural heritage’ Category
Iconic Knowledge, Iconic KO* no comments
“Iconic .…” According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online the word means “Of or pertaining to an icon, image, figure, or representation; of the nature of a portrait.” The first usage reported there was in 1656. OED also has variant definitions for “use in worship” and Semiotics. Ah, there we are: … “pertaining to or resembling an icon” (first usage reported in 1939. And finally: “designating a person or thing regarded as representative of a culture or movement; important or influential in a particular (cultural) context.” WordNet has: “relating to or having the characteristics of an icon.”
We all know, I hope, what an icon is. I have many that I have collected on my travels to Crete. In Orthodox spirituality, these icons are pathways to prayer. It is a bit difficult to explain, but the idea is that in praying with an icon (by focusing on the figures in meditative prayer) the saint in the icon is able to enter your consciousness and become a vector for your prayer.
The word has become ubiquitous in the news these days, to mean “emblematic.” I have to laugh, because once not so long ago when I used the word “iconic” in a manuscript I was told it would not be understood by LIS readers (people, mostly, with PhDs). At the same time I was writing regularly for the Philadelphia Gay News with instructions to write at a fourth grade reading level, and of course, the word “iconic” was part of that vocabulary. Well, we hear the word constantly these days. Unfortunately, that means it has lost a lot of its meaning as it has become colloquially “iconic.” It should mean “stands for a gate to spirituality.” Too often instead it just means “looks familiar.”
In KO what does the word mean? In KO it preserves aspects of its original connotation: something precious that is a gateway to better understanding, particularly with regard to visualization of culturally representative entities.
How do we at IKOS turn our own work into iconic work? We are rooted in empirical methods. Our work is eminently replicable. We report our references impeccably. For us, references are the evidence that what we describe is truly representative of a concept. Dahlberg implied and other since have written that the concept was the “atomic” element of knowledge organization (Dahlberg 2006; Smiraglia and Van den Heuvel 2013). This means that concepts paint pictures in people’s brains, those pictures are shared culturally, and from the very tiniest impression (what Peirce (1991, 181) might have called a “representamen”), the shared conception grows. There is “cultural synergy” (Smiraglia 2014)—the concept enters a knowledge organization system (KOS) that is itself a cultural disseminator and thus the concept becomes part of the cultural consciousness. This is then the iconic status of a concept.
At IKOS we are dedicated to sorting out the particularities of concepts, including the concept of “iconic.” We invite you to help us reclaim this critical term from public incoherence.
References
Dahlberg, Ingetraut. 2006. “Knowledge Organization: A New Science?” Knowledge Organization 33: 11-19.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Iconic,” accessed 12 October 2019. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.lib.uwm.edu/view/Entry/90882?rskey=ZPEl2n&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1991. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. by James Hoopes. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Pr.
Smiraglia, Richard P. and Charles van den Heuvel. 2013. “Classifications and Concepts: Towards an Elementary Theory of Knowledge Interaction.” Journal of Documentation 69: 360-83.
WordNet. Search 3.1, s.v. “Iconic.”accessed 12 October 2019. https://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/
*Published in print as: Smiraglia, Richard P. 2019. “Iconic Knowledge, Iconic KO.” IKOS Bulletin 1, no.1 : 6-7.
CRM as footprints of knowledge (originally posted 1/24/2009) no comments
In the exercise of developing the CIDOC-CRM it became apparent that using the ontology to map information objects would reveal certain patterns of entities, properties, and relationships.
Furthermore, these patterns, when analyzed, reveal essential footprints of information objects. That is, like a genome, a CRM mapping records the essential informative properties of mapped
objects. The region for research here is pure theory. What categories can be observed among mapped information objects? When is a sailor’s deck-log like a terracotta hut urn? I have constituted a research team and with a very small grant from Long Island University we have begun developing techniques for mapping, and a calculus for data-mining the maps in order to generate clusters (or classes) of information objects. We had one poster at the ISKO conference this summer (“Classifying Information Objects: An Exploratory Ontological Excursion,” by Sergey Zherebchevsky, Nicolette Ceo, Michiko Tanaka, David Jank, Richard P. Smiraglia, and Stephen Stead. Poster presented at 10th International ISKO Conference, Montreal, 5-8 August 2008). The poster can be seen here (or have a look at these pdfs from ISKO and ASIST).