lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

Classification interaction is empirically demonstrated, and I’m thrilled about that. For the “Big Data” workshop at SIG/CR I proposed a preliminary survey research project in which a sample of the nine million UDC numbers in the WorldCat would be used to match deconstructed components of the UDC expressions to content-designated components of the respective bibliographic records. The purpose was to learn about the interrelationship between a faceted classification and the artifacts it represents. All of the variables (except age of work) were nominal-level, so I used Chi-squared to look for statistically-significant correlations. It was thrilling to find correlations all through the study. Results (and definitions of all of these terms!) are in the paper “Big Classification: Using the Empirical Power of Classification Interaction” in the 2013 SIG/CR Proceedings (or will be). The outcome is preliminary but exciting nonetheless.

But just when I thought it couldn’t get any better I took one more look at the largest results table and realized it was revealing a network among the correlations. I was therefore doubly thrilled (with some coaching from Laura Ridenour) to be able to create a visualization of that network structure using Gephi 0.8.2. Here is an early version (not the one that appears in the paper):