lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

I’m just back in the Netherlands after a week in India for the 12th International ISKO Conference “Categories, Relations and Contexts in Knowledge Organization, University of Mysore, 6-9 August 2012.”

To say it was an exciting event is the understatement of the century in KO. We had four jam-packed days of contributed papers, invited sponsored lectures, Indian dance, Indian food, and Indian culture.

The opening ceremony was the most elaborate I’ve ever seen, with the lighting of the torch of knowledge: a choir to sing the anthem of the university, and the launching of IOrg’s new book Cultural Frames of Knowledge, , which was presented in a package of golden paper, unwrapped on the dais by Prof. Naik (a noted physicist) and the president of the university. I gave the keynote really, I did . So there. The text (except the last bit) is in the proceedings.

Appalling was the near total absence of North Americans and western Europeans. There were about 6 Americans, 2 Canadians, a couple of French and Germans. There were a host of Brazilians, who turned out in force. Even more appalling was the number of papers from North Americans who did not show up but had them read by people who did.

I’ve lots more to say, of more substance, in future posts. This is the official “whistle whetter.”

The 11th International ISKO Conference was held in Rome in February 2010.

An analysis of the Proceedings will appear in my editorial in Knowledge Organization v. 38 no. 3 (May 2011).

The spreadsheet of papers and references I used for the analysis is here: Rome_11th ISKO_References

As editor of the journal Knowledge Organization I have been observing the citations in various papers by different authors. My casual observation that there was little conformity among authors has led to a few small studies of literature in knowledge organization. It is particularly simple to analyze the proceedings of individual conferences to discover whether the papers illustrate any common core. Last summer’s North American Symposium was discussed in v. 34 no. 2; this summer’s 10th International Conference is summarized in v. 35 no. 4. For the latter I produced an Excel spreadsheet, which is somewhat messy, but you can download it from here should you want to play with it. (ISKO_10_citations)