Week 5 Reading Notes

Database article on Wikipedia

I found that this reading overlapped nicely with readings for LIS 2005 this past week. In fact, this Wikipedia article also fed into readings I’ve done for Music 2111 (Research and Bibliography). The overlap occurs here: breaking down database structure into external, conceptual and internal levels.

While I was working at a law firm in Chicago, I interacted with a database called Concordance on a daily basis. It was a bland program, a black screen with fields for information input. I seem to recall that there was red text every now and again, too. Up until this point, I’ve always thought of databases in those terms: mostly monochromatic, lifeless windows into a digital world. The database was simply a digital thing that existed solely on a computer. Now, I think I’m beginning to appreciate databases for what they are: physical collections of history (however mundane or forgettable) that exist somewhere beyond those lifeless windows.

In our reading for LIS 2005, we read an argument that databasing has been a central act in modern society from Proust to IMDB. We create databases of all those things in the world that mean something to us, that allow us to blanket our worlds with meaning. Perhaps it’s the conceptual level of databases that allows us to do this?

When discussing the three levels of databases (external, conceptual and internal), the Wikipedia article mentioned that accuracy is reduced for the sake of clarity—outliers are removed, and the database is pure. (As a side note, this also reminded me a lot of readings for MUSIC 2111, Research and Bibliography, in which it was said that the creation of an effective citation structure is necessarily a conceptual structure where the odd entries, those that don’t fit well in real practice are left out until the transition to physicality necessitates their inclusion.) I find that this is generally a common practice in Library Science, and indeed in any science that seeks to treat or explain large-scale phenomenon— superimposing generalized conceptualizations simply makes it easier to perceive of order.

(And now for something completely different.)

Does anyone have any examples of ‘post-relational database models?’ I’m having a hard time with this one…

Setting the Stage (metadata article)

Is anyone else as fascinated with the idea of user-created metadata, such as tags, as I am? I think it’s the democratization of the classification process that attracts me to it so much. There just seems to be such potential for organically, publicly derived classification systems for data! By allowing user-created metadata derived from an open-ended ability to apply adjectives to an object (say, an emotion-related adjective or a temporal adjective, e.g., ‘morning’ to an artifact that is about neither morning nor emotion directly) can potentially shed so much new light onto the ways that information users interact with artifacts of all types from books, to signs, to images and those things represented in images… This process could yield such a font of data for analysis!

Dublin Core Data Model article

What strikes me the most about this article and the DCDM idea is the linguistic barrier it potentially faces with regard to its ‘internationalization’ goal. Even with a drastically limited set of appropriate, agreed-upon modifiers, it seems likely that linguistic barriers will be met.

It’s an old-hat notion that different languages have different words with different connotations for similar concepts. (There is, for example, no word for ‘home’ in French—there is only the word ‘maison,’ which is the equivalent of ‘house.’ Similar concepts, but different connotations entirely.) Given situations like this, it seems that DCDM would require the use of an artificial language like Esperanto, or else would require acceptance of certain linguistic barriers that cannot be crossed short of widespread possession of multilingual capabilities on the part of catalogers and users.

Maybe this is shortsighted on my part? Too nitpicky?

Furthermore, it seems possible (though I’m not making this point as a whole-hearted supporter of it) that such homogenization of classification protocol could serve to diminish the cultural eccentricities we’ve all come to know, love and study as scholarly researchers. Again, maybe this is only an over-simplification on my part.

How do we establish universal classification schemas without overriding distinct cultural schemas? Is this question an over-reaction?