NASKO musings no comments
The 3rd North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (the biennial conference of the ISKO chapter for Canada and the United States) was just held in Toronto at Ryerson University. It was an exciting conference, replete with emerging science from several directions, and several continents as well. There were 40 or 50 people present for the two days, and 20 or so of them gave papers. It was all fascinating. I haven’t had any time to analyze the proceedings in any way, which I will do eventually. My perceptions at this point therefore are more personal.
It was exciting to see 
how the chapter has grown, and also to see the very high-level of research the symposium attracted. It was also exciting to see so many of my students all in one place, as well as to connect with colleagues from all over. Here are a couple of photos. This is a photo of my participating doctoral students (L-R: Sergey Zherebchevsky, Christine Marchese, Elizabeth Milonas, from Long Island, and Melodie Fox, and Jihee Beak, from IOrg at SOIS, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee).
Elizabeth gave a paper on Wittgenstein and web facets, which was referred to continuously afterward by the other speakers, which just shows she’s on to something. Melodie gave a fascinating paper on prototype theory, which she used analytically on the case of categorizing sex and gender. Her paper was one of the four highest ranking papers at the symposium. Jihee gave a paper on metadata schema for children’s digital libraries in which emotion, frame, and genre played a special role. In all three cases I have to say I can’t wait for the next papers!
It also was gratifying to be able to stand alongside some former students who now are colleagues. In this photo I’m standing with Jane Greenberg, who now is Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and David Jank, Assistant Professor at Long Island University.
Jane was not my doctoral student; she was a student in the long-ago program (brilliant of days then) at Columbia University. She has used some of my research in innovative ways to inform her own work, most directly with regard to life-cycle modeling, which is another way of looking at instantiation. Jane and I have been working on a meta-analytical paper for awhile, and we had great fun presenting a 90-minute exploration of instantiation in workshop form at the symposium. David was my doctoral student; he graduated a year ago and has survived his first post-doctoral year of professoring and is still standing. He brought a poster on curricular issues, which was (interestingly enough) one of two presentations at the symposium on teaching KO.
Christine (in the photo above) graciously acceded to my request to follow everybody around and photograph them; those photos are in an album on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150209802622587.310265.640492586&l=b081f24d81).
I digress, I suppose. My overall impression is that we sure have a vibrant domain, and it certainly is inspiring to be able to spend a couple of days with all of these folks thinking together. I’m looking forward to more such opportunities.