3A Lecture Notes
October 20, 2014
Friday — all OK? Labs OK? Francesca?
Confusion about blog posts, etc.?
Next step is to try to refine your topic a little better, which is what we’ll be doing on
Wednesday, with Zoe Borovsky’s help.
Rewind to Wednesday:
Define terms:
 Classification
 Archive
 Metadata
 N-dimensional space
 Controlled vocabulary
Relate terms to Week One terms?
Look back at Dublin Core classifications.
 Why did groups differ on how to classify objects?
 How can we control for this?
 What assumptions does DC make about the object you’re classifying?
Show dp.la
Today:
Discuss the ways that any classification system is a worldview, and thus an ideology.
Talk about ways to mitigate this. Do digital methods afford new ways of opening up
classification? Or do they worsen old divides?
You read in the Wallack/Srinivasan piece that an ontology is a formal framework for
representing knowledge. It’s a very metaphysical idea — that there’s a way of
dividing up the world that has rules and fundamental categories.
If an ontology is truly successful, it feels so “natural” that it’s almost impossible to
identify it as ideology. In a way, the more natural a classification system feels, the
more important it is to question it.
For example, the Dewey Decimal System seems really neutral, but it actually makes
some questionable assumptions about the way knowledge is organized. Books can
only physically be located in one place on the shelf, so anytime you choose one
category, you’re excluding another. Christina Jorgensen’s biography is shelved
under “transsexual” but not “woman.”
But sometimes classification systems that felt totally natural, at least to some
people, at one moment, feel laughable and even unjust to us later.
SLIDE 1.
What does this ontology suggest about the people’s view of the world?
SLIDE 2.
What about this one?
SLIDE 3.
What about this ontology?
SLIDE 4.
What about the Netflix ontology? What are its assumptions?
Does the Netflix system of categories operate the same way as the LC call system, or
are there differences? (location vs. discovery)
So the Netflix categories are descriptive metadata, but not actually classification by
Bowker and Starr’s definition. They’re not exhaustive and they don’t start out
general and work down to specific. What are examples of classification systems?
So we know that ontology reflects worldview, and that ideology is embedded in any
ontology.
Srinivasan and Wallack give us some other ways to think about ideology. They
distinguish between meta-ontology and what they call local knowledge.
What is meta-ontology?
What is local knowledge?
Can you give any examples of times when meta-ontology clashes with local
knowledge?
SLIDE 5. (picturing race)
Is there a good reason for counting race at all? Why do we do it on the Census?
SLIDE 6.
How does the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal attempt to conjoin meta-ontologies with
local knowledge?
Return to projects from Week 1B. What are their ontological assumptions?