User:Δεριζαματζορπρομπλεμιναυστραλια/thesis1: Difference between revisions

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki
 
(71 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
==''intro-abstract''==
last update 15/5


Humans have been always bound with the act of collecting. From the food collector to the collector of tools, possessions, art. As James Gleick (2011) points out in his book Information : a theory, a history, a flood, the food collector man of the prehistoric age reappears as an information collector in the postindustrial age.
==''abstract''==


We are information collectors. We operate in fixed structures, databases and their lists, seeking to collect information.
The web is the world of classified information. Individuals as information collectors operate within databases and their lists in order to access information and gain understanding and meaning of the world. The research explores the effect of the list on the online information collector by looking at its political and ideological dimensions. Later on focuses on online lists of search results and and why I believe they enforce a flat online experience.
Lists nowadays function as, or are part of, search interfaces to online information.  


The list is not something new. It is precisely one of the first constructs that emerge following the technology of writing.
==''INTRODUCTION: THE LIST''==


The  construction of the list on the one hand supports memory, provides easy and time wise effective access to information, on the other hand brings  a specific way to look at things and as i will argue, a  flat online experience.
Moreover it can be seen as a technology of the self, after Foucault's concept.


WHAT IS THE EFFECT OF THE LIST ON THE INFORMATION COLLECTOR?
Internet users are online information collectors. Looking for information inside the web, they  operate in fixed structures, databases and their lists. Lists nowadays function as, or are part of, search interfaces to online information and the online information collector is constantly confronted with them.
It seems useful to approach the politics and ideologies behind classification, and the aesthetics of the list that reflect them to explore such an issue.
I am interested in the list as a construction of culture that affects the act of (information) collecting through the enforcement of  order. This order could be numerical, chronological, alphabetical, even random. Still I see order as an ideological construct, an outcome of ideologies of effectiveness and productivity within a certain economical system based on knowledge, which demands order in the vast ammounts of information that surround us.
To me the use of the list brings somehow something wrong in the way it makes us see and construct our selves and the world because it enforces a very particulary navigation within information. There is a political dimension in the list.
While the online environment offers many possibilities to create dynamic and interesting information spaces, the lists through which databases are accessed , so the way our search results are presented to us , doesn't seem to invest in these potentials.
The popular search interfaces used online  and their lists of results are extremely predetermined, they destroy the sense of play and of the hunting of information, they even destroy the sense of (online) space. The results of a search could be displayed in a much more playful way that would emphasize collecting of information online not as picking items from a list but more as exploring a world of possibilities. List of results in different providers could also be different and diverse, but they don’t. So different providers, from a corporate web indexer to a free acess and open online archive lets say, share a very similar design of their lists which reveals  similar desicions that have been made on their structures that provide information.
In my personal practice I have been dealing with lists either in libraries I have been working in or as an artist working in the online environment. Cataloguing in libraries is based in a list of ten categories, together with the use of controlled vocabulary terms. Working with online databases and recontextualising classified objects towards the design of a subjective online space consists as a reaction to the template choice of the cataloguer. Through my practice I exercise an extreme example of an online user that deals with how information online is organised and responds in extreme ways. In this context I  realize that I am confronted with the apparatus of the list almost in every aspect of the online experience. Either working within online platforms of user generated content such as Sketchup’s Warehouse Library, or social networks and user profiles, the list appears as a form that is constantly present.
Moreover, during my working experience as an information literacy instructor I have been instructing kids on the Dewey Decimal Classification and how to use the library’s online catalogue to satisfy their research question. I realised  that subjectivities and identities are not only shaped by  information in terms of content but also in terms of structure, through which information is accessed.
I want to explore what is the effect of the list on the online information collector. With this term I mean the general user of the internet who is constantly seeking for information online, constructing offline and online collections.
It seems useful to approach the politics and ideologies behind lists and global classification systems, and the aesthetics of the list that reflect them to explore such an issue. Alltough lists and classification systems are widespread everywhere in the whole of our lives, at least in library science, the political dimensions of classification are somehow overlooked, while its aesthetics are totally ignored. They are both taken for granted .
Exploring the list effect on the user of the internet is important to extract insights that would be taken into account in the design of different search interfaces, and their possibilities of providing a different online experience as a response to the established one.
To do so, I will first introduce the list as an information technology. Then I will look at how it relates to global classification systems and how the list as their material form constitutes a technology that shapes subjectivity.  Later on I will explore the explosion of the list as a form in the web, and will explain how I think it affects online experience.


And to extract insights that would be important to take into account in the design of a
==''THE COLLECTOR AND THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY''==
different online navigation as a response to the established experience with the list.


Humans have been always bound with the act of collecting. James Gleick (2011) who wrote the book Information : a theory, a history, a flood, a study on humans understanding on information, quotes Marshall McLuhan: ”the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer” (p.9).
This is an important observation that highlights that the act of collecting is present in human society from the level of collecting food for survival in the prehistoric period but exists still in our societies in another mode. It also emphasizes information as a vital element of our survival. The act of collecting food transformed throughout societies into collecting goods, tools, artifacts. Its contemporary mode is this of collecting online information, activity significant for living, in a world where knowledge and information are interconnected with power.
If humans are naturally collectors, the technology of the list seems a meaningful and very useful tool. On the one hand supports memory, provides easy and time wise effective access to information. As library scientist Maria Kazazi(1994) explains , in her book Classification principles, of the main goals of classification is anyway to support memory and to require the minimun effort by the user.(p.24) . The list seems then as the material form of classification and as a structure that supports its purposes.
But on the other hand we should look at it as all technologies and media. It shapes us and constructs us in a certain way.
The list is an information technology and one of the first constructs that emerge following the technology of writing. In fact, some of the first writtings of humanity where lists. As Jack Goody(1997) writes, in his Domesticatiof of a savage mind,  the first writtings seem to be the clay tablets of Summerians that were lists for administration.(p). The image shows an administrative list in table from 2370 B.C. in southern Mesopotamia. (credit: Max Planck Institute).  (image)
Throughout the book Gleick emphasizes also on how  information technologies  transform the way human perceive information. He sees the alphabet as the major information technology that dominates our culture. But the alphabet, the way we know it is a really new construction.
Alltought writing is an ancient technology, it was not for everyone for a really long time in history. It was only the second half of the seventeenth century when the alphabet became an “arbitrary” system, according to Michel Foucault(1966). As he writes in the Order of things, the technology of the alphabet “reconstitute[d] the very order of the universe by the way in which words are linked together and arranged in space”.(p.42) By becoming a system used by all and one that everyone must use, the decisions made on the alphabet design,  affected and reconstructed the order of things, in a very list format. If the very function of the list is to stand as a structure that holds information in fixed positions in space, the technology of the alphabet becomes a model of understanding and expressing which falls under the problematics of listing because it becomes a classification system.
Further, Gleick  brings interesting insights on the list and the alphabet by saying that “..alphabetical lists were mechanical, effective, and automatic”, while he compares them to what he calls “topical lists”, that different cultures created before the alphabet and were local classifications which he characterized “creative” and “imperfect” (p.63).  The author draws on Al. Romanovich Luria ‘s research on illiterate people in remote Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, that do not recognize the categories of the written cultures, and understand for example categorisation through geometrical shapes. The major finding of his research was that oral culture people did not “accept our logical correlations” (p.40). It seems then that the different operations of alphabetical or topical list reflect wider issues of logic.  And allthough all people are (information) collectors, following global, mechanical standards is obviously a different approach than creating own, topical lists.


==''chapter1''==
==''PROBLEMATICS OF CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS: FROM THE LIBRARIAN TO THE DATA INDEXER''==


'''what is a list?'''


I see classification as the act of arranging things in space.
According to Kazazi, classification is a key to knowledge (p.17). It is a system of classes and their relationships. However, she also believes  that classification is abstract. It gives a general view of the world (p.20).
On the one hand, it is impossible to imagine the world without lists and classification. There are great reasons for creating lists and there is a great functionality within them which makes life easier.
There are also philosophical origins in the construction of the list. Umberto Eco (2009) in his Infinity of the list essay, (p.) claims that people do lists in order to comprehend the unknown and to defeat death .We list in order to create meaning of ourselves and the world around us, which can be both seen as Eco’s “unknown”.  By listing things are broken down in pieces, arrange them in a certain manner that brings meaning and logic to the chaotic word of possibilities that surround us. “We like lists because we don't want to die” he writes  in an extreme statement(p.). Defeating death brings us back to the idea of survival and collecting that was stated previously. Moreover, if one considers that even for ancient cultures to defeat death was to achieve immortality through memory, also highlights the value of memory, which is being supported through information technologies.
On the other hand, the list, as bound with the concept of classification , carries the later's problematics and challenges. Kazazi explains also some crucial problems of classification: First of all, knowledge gets outdated. Additionally, classification systems reflect older values. Furthermore, we do not classify the objects themselves, but the concepts (p.27). And not even the concepts themselves can be listed, but their material existence, their name, the word.
Another issue of classification is the idea of classes of similarity and not of difference lets say. The exclusion of difference and the abstraction of grouping things. And the normalization of this grouping. Classification affects the relationship between concepts / objects, which can be hierarchical, syntactic or semantic.
I see library cultures as pre database cultures. However, both cultures do not deal with organisation of information in the same way.While in library classifications the structures that hold information are adopted by libraries and cataloguers are using them, together with controlled vocabulary thesauri, the digital / online database classification brings a greater variety of classification systems. The cataloguer gives his position to the general internet user,who operates now on as a data indexer as Manovich observed in his “Database and symbolic form” essay. (p.9).
Moreover, since folksonomy, tha practise of tagging by users, emerges, huge ammounts of subjectivity enter the wider cataloguing practise of online information , often times outside controlled vocabularies. The web brings the notion of the topical list much closer to the information organising practise. User can affect with their opinions the online content, and they can create their own collections classified in various personal ways. But what is in the core of my question is why this persisent form of the list as we know it appears dominant as an aesthetic expression of classification?
Online information is accessed within structures that are ruled by global classification principles which are standardised. For example, users can create their own topical systems of classifiying their desktop collections, but they have mainly accessed this information through the same kind of lists either from search engines or in online libraries. In other words, users as online data indexers can arrange things in space in many differnet ways than librarians, but one the one hand they collect their information in lists with very fixed spatial arrangement, and on the other hand most of times they reprocude this normalised sparial arrangment because they are familiar with such an organisation form.
As the concept of classification is so relevant to the online world, a world which is precisely classified information, it is interesting to see how it  problematics are embedded in the database criticism of Mark Poster (1990) in his work The mode of information, and Evgeny Morozov (2012) with Net Delusion.  Poster extends Foucault’s ideas of the panopticon and surveillance to the database which enforces participatory surveillance and normalization. He believes that surveillance is exercised in a peer to peer manner, for example through social networks the exercise of control is not bound to a Panopticon model where people are watched through one eye. In the superpanopticon database mode all eyes are open and working for the common surveillance of peers. Morozov sees the database profiling of people as creating an abstract and normalized representation of them. He refers to the movie the Life of the Others to illustrate how police can get only a very abstract and generalized image of individuals through databases.
What is common in the library and database world then is  the problematics of classification systems. How they become standardised and normalising.


The   list is a data structure. a form that organizes, brings order, to the   content with which is being filled. It is a structure that holds   information and makes its access and manipulation easier and faster. A   list shows data in a specific order format.
==''POLITICS OF CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS: WHO IS THE CLASSIFIER IN THE GENERAL ARCHIVE''==


Lists   and practices of listing take part in every day life of everyone and   can be seen with different types and formats almost everywhere. They   appear as shopping lists, best or worst movies lists, library card   catalogues or online catalogues (OPAC), to do lists, Facebook friends   lists, search results from google lists, bibliography lists, list of   irregular verbs in grammar, lists of planets in a solar system, to name   just very few of them.


They   can be written, visual,  but also oral or imaginary. The first writings of humanity  were catalogues. Lists  have a structural relationship with written language, text.
There is a critical issue with classification related to power and control: who is exercising classification. This question can be divided in two parts. who is doing the classification as a cataloguer and who created the classification system at the first place. In this chapter I will look at the sigfinicance of the work of Melvil Dewey, Paul Otlet and Otto Neurath, all modernist visonaires of information organisation.
In the world of libraries and archives, at least in western culture, two main systems of library classification have been used and adopted by the majority of libraries or similar institutions. The most popular classification system is DDC, Dewey Decimal Classification. It was invented by the american librarian, educator, entrepreneur, Melvin Dewey in 1876. Next would come the UDC, Universal Decimal Classification of belgian information scientist and documentation scientist, and entrepreneur Paul Otlet, published around 1907.  
The two systems rely on a fixed structure of the first basic categories, which are divided in more subcategories each. Within this structure items should be classified and described through numerical systems which indicate their category and their specific place within it. The images how the basic design of UDC and DDC.  


Lists are hierarchical structures that contain the names of things and not  things themselves and enforce order through similarity, so by creating   classes and defining their relationships.


Lists can be manipulated, updated or totally changed.
[[File:Universal-decimale-classifaction-system-1.png|250px|unframed|center|]]


Oftentimes they fall in incompleteness. Some other times they can be complete, at least permanently.
[[File:Deweydecimal1.jpg|250px|unframed|center|]]


They  can give us remote access to collections (remote here is not seen only as  an online property, but rather as comment on space, highlighting a distance   between the collection itself and its catalogue.)
The main library classification systems of the western world have been developed very closed the one to another , at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century. Here Kazazi's observation that classification systems reflect older values becomes easy to recognize. First of all, these systems are very old. Moreover, they, and particularly DDC, rely on Aristotelian views on classification. the idea of categories as classes, the approach of general to narrow and grouping based on similarity.  So not only these systems are based in ancient values, they invest on the idea of grouping “similar things” within established entities. Categories are classes, distinct, huge, stable entities. And every (new) concept fits into them as a narrower term, therefore adopting new knowledge means always to go even narrower within existing categories and rarely creating new categories. UDC expresses a different model though: semantic links are present in the design of this system. UDC emphasizes  on semantic interconnections of objects, through a different numerical system that uses symbols like + from algebra to indicate two different fields that they item can be assigned in.Its important here to notice that DDC is much more widely used than UDC.
UDC and DDC have been designed through personal efforts and views of these individuals that were envisioning organizational systems. Both Otlet and Dewey have been very passionate and visionary in their field. But on what kind of background did they operate?
They both have been very early interested in the world of complex information, and its organization, and have been dealing with information science even before its formation as a science related with cybernetics, control and communication.
They were both also involved in business, in fact they have been both selling their catalogue cards and systems. They shared standardization and globalization visions.
However, they had mainly social visions, that would be imagining organizational systems of information that would promote communication, knowledge and peace.They seem to have believed that the world would become a complexity of information territory and the power will come together with knowledge.
Particularly Paul Otlet was talking about a "collective book" a "universal book of knowledge". He created the Office International de Bibliography in 1895 together with Henri La Fontaine, an office with a goal to create a universal library, the Mundaneum ,where the classification system of Paul Otlet , UDC, would be applied. The Palais Mondial, which later on became  Mundaneum, opens in  1920.  Its collection was accessed through a system of thematic index cards . In the following photograph we can see some of the drawers of Mundaneum that contained the index cards.  The institution was in the beginning hosted in the city of Brussels.  


Within   disciplines that deal with data, information, and its organization,  the  format of the list enjoys a pretty important role.  Library and   computer science are two good examples of them.


The  concept of lists and catalogues has been very important in the   formation of the whole field of library studies. An influential figure   of the past for the field, Charles Ammi Cutter(1876) , writes in his "Rules   for a Printed dictionary catalogue" that the goals of the   catalogue within libraries are three. To enable users to find library   items like books under the name of the author, title or subject, when   these are known. To show what the library has, so to open up  the   collection in a sense. And to assist in the choice of the book or other   material selected, therefore stands as a guide in searching.
[[File:800px-Mundaneum_Tiräng_Karteikaarten.jpg|250px|unframed|center|]]


For   computer science a list again is a  data structure which puts the data   in a particular order. Then data can be much easier manipulated .   Different programing languages treat or use list in various ways, but mainly again  here a list is constructed by writing items or values in a  sequence.


With the explosion of the  web and web2.0 particularly, the practices of listing have been widely  opened to the internet users, and the list becomes an emblematic form of  our web culture. With online catalogues of libraries for example, users could access remotely collections. And web indexers like google provided huge databases of catalogued information, accessible through mainly textual interfaces and with search results presented in the form of the list almost strictly. Web 2.0 brought the act of collecting in another level  than before. Users could now create and manage their online collections in their  online spaces  via practices of listing.
Otlet became an important figure in Unesco. He was convinced that the global spreading of knowledge and the exchange of it would promote world peace. as R.Boyd Rayward(1991) writes about in this reflective biography of Otlet. He was dreaming of a world where the transmission of information would overcome geographic boundaries.
Dewey was dreaming of a "free library for every soul". He particularly talked about free schools and free libraries and the significance of what we would call today free access to information. As described in his biography in the website of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) , he helped to establish the American Library association. In 1877 , while working as the librarian of Columbia College he founded there the first library scool of the world. He also initiated programs for traveling libraries. Dewey emphasized mainly the idea of open and free access and he was very influential in the american library world.
The work of both influenced the wider world of library cultures but particularly their views on connected and free information can reflect todays world and possibly are more relevant to our experience than they were to the societies the lived in. Their point of view contained the understanding of the power of information and data together with the understanding of their social significance.
Another important figure of the same period, philosopher, sociologist and political economist Otto Neurath, seems to understand the importancy of pictorial language, in a similar manner. Where Otlet and Dewey created a vision of a proto-database, a srtucture that would hold together universally big amount of information, Neurath proposed methods of information visualization. Together with illustrator Gernt Arnzt and his future wife Marie (Neurath) Reidemester they designed the project Isotype. The International System Of TYpografic Picture Education contained 4000 symbols designed by Arntz, that represented key concepts of the fields of industry, politics, demographics and economy, as explained in Arnzt web archive. Otto Neurath  focuses on “uneducated persons and to facilitate their understanding of complex data” as Frank Hartmann writes. (2008, p.279) . In other words Neurath and his colleagues were dreaming of a universal system of information exchange, like Otlet and Dewey, only that Neurath was taking a distance from alphabetical  norms, recognizing that illiterate people were by default excluded by powerful knowledge.
All these ideas should be taken into account when we attempt to describe the ideology behind classification systems of our times because they were visions of a proto- web society. The need of a universal language is always present as it seems within the ideas of organization visionaries. And universal language (is it a classification system, or a museum signing system, or a method of illustrating books), can be constructed only through standardization and institutionalization. They even seem to realize that getting involved in an institutional context was the only way to go. They all were  influential  within institutions like American Library Association( Dewey)  United Nations (Otlet), Museum of War Economy and the socialist party (Neurath). They attempted to change society, Otlet towards peace, Neurath towards knowledge for the low class, Dewey towards free access in information. It is important to realize that they operated in the modernist context, which has given space to the ideas of transparency, universal collection and storage of information, reform and globalization.  Its exemplary that Otlet collaborated with the pioneer  of architectural modernism, swiss Le Corbusier, for his Mundaneum.This join of forces highlights the modernist perspectives in towards a universally accessible and unified reality. The World City, was Otlet’s and Le Corbusier’s  extension of the Mundaneum proposal, designed in the city of Geneva. Although again not realized,  the project seems at the ultimate modernistic vision, the realization of a global, world archive.
According to Michel Foucault(1986) in his Des Espaces Autres, the concept of the “general archive” and the “idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside time and protected from its erosion” both belong “to our modernity” (p.182). From a point of view the modern fathers of information organisation  can be seen as reformers, from another point as social engineers that operated within burreocratic institutionalised practises in order to engineer a new society . Moreover, in our society, their views and dreams are translated through the lens of corporate knowledge capitalism, and effective production. Corporations are the knowledge institutions of our days. Google’s  web indexing extends the concept of the Mundaneum or the Global Polis and embeds them clearly in the knowledge capitalism. Otlet’s ideas about semantically connected gathered information and universal books of knowledge leading to a world peace are challenged by the corporate and state power on information.The ideas of freedom of access of Dewey are quite challenged within corporate practices when online content is still bound on corporate servers. The visions of the fathers of information organisation during modernism become extremely utopic in the advanced information societies we are in, as information became so commodified that what matters mainly is to find it easy.


I am interested in the list as a construction of culture related to the act of
(information) collecting and that enforces order. In my personal practice I have been dealing with lists either in libraries I was working in or as an artist working in the online environment. Working with online databases and recontextualising classified objects towards the design of a subjective online space. Being an extreme example of a user , I realize that the online man is confronted with the apparatus of the list almost in every aspect of his online experience.


I  see the list as a form that manages free/ empty space with thin lines and box shaped subforms, with the scope to control and bring a specific   order to the listed names of things, and the ideas/concepts they   represent.
As   an empty form,it seems that  anything can happen within it.   However, the names of items listed have to share a minimum similarity,   otherwise this is not a list. Therefore the relationships among them   become fixed and  the space among the concepts that they   represent  is also becoming fixed. The items are assigned a significance as a whole, they become a concrete knowledge entity.


I am mainly interested in the expression of order within  lists. This order could be numerical, chronological, alphabetical,  even  random. Still I see order as an ideological construct, an outcome of ideologies of effectiveness and productivity within a certain economical system. To me it  brings  something wrong somehow in the way it makes us see and construct  our  selves and the world. There is a political dimension in the list .
==''POLITICS OF CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS: STANDARDISATION AND BURREAUCRACY''==


The list is the expression of template choice.  If one is asked to pick some items from a list, he is asked to select  from  an already curated group of possibilities. We often  operate  within the limitation of the incomplete list and this makes it even more limited.


Looking   at the model of the list in online space and particularly spaces of   information collecting, like online archives or search engines of the   web, I see it as an expression of a flat online experience.  Online man collects within collections,  searches for information in  databases and their lists. Moreover , this  lists are boring visually and  look bureaucratic, therefore they reduce a  possible interesting online  experience to a very flat one. Search interfaces online with their lists of results are extremely fixed, they destroy the sense of play and of the hunting of information, they even destroy the sense of space.
It seems that there is a collaboration of two factors then, important for the cataloguing practice. What kind of classification system the library is using, and what is the cultural capital of the cataloguer, which possibly makes him or her do specific choices in where a book should be classified and what keywords are going to be assigned to it. An interesting tension can emerge from this question: is there a certain degree of "freedom of choice" for the cataloguer? According to critical librarian Emily Drabinsky (2012) in her work Teaching the radical catalogue, no.  Nothing lies outside of the system as she says (p.) . Categories and controlled vocabularies represent fixed values. Therefore, seems more relevant than to examine each cataloguers ideology or culture , to understand that he is operating under a template choice standard. To explore what the cataloguer is carrying in terms of ideology , is to explore what template choice means. And this is not only relevant to the cataloguers in the libraries.        In the online context, people have become cataloguers. Users access, classify, store online information constantly and operate within content which is classified under the standards of online giants.  
The results  of a search could be  displayed in a much more playful way that would  emphasize collecting of  information online not as picking items from a  list but more as  exploring a world of possibilities.
So the problematics and politics of classification systems are not anymore relevant only to library cultures, but through the web culture they become crucial for all . The idea of the template choice is transformed within the networked paradigm, particularly because controlled vocalubaries seem to fall apart oftentimes. However, the list as a form seems to express still a standardized view on things.
A significant research that explores the political, ethical, social implications of classification is the one of Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1991) in their critical study Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. In this book they explain that "all classifications, including those in libraries, ... ..apply a system of classificatory principles to a given set of objects…",( p.). The authors understand classifications as systems that demand certain principles to be applied. They state that they are different than standards, but they are to be standardized, while “a standard [..] is a way to classify the world”. (p.12). To me the template choice is precisely this form of choice upon a given set of principles. As classifications become standardized, choices become also. Models of how to work, to communicate and to think. And these standards are applied to a truly variably and heterogenous mix of objects. Classification systems are meant to be able to conceptually fix any given set of objects in a certain manner and the list serves this function.
When standardized, classification systems can also can become global, as happened with DDC and UDC for example. Here another issue emerges, the possible conflicts between standardized and local classification systems, as brought up by Bowker and L.Star (p. 326) and explored above thourgh Drabinsky’s example. The two authors think that local classifications are pushed away by the standardized ones, notion that aligns again with Gleick’s idea on “topical lists” and their replacement by “alphabetical lists”. Furthermore, for Bowker and L. Star, classification systems are part of modern Western bureaucracy. “Assigning things, people, or their actions to categories” is a ubiquitous part of work in the bureaucratic state”. (p. 285). Alison Adam’s (2008) view aligns with this notion, when in her essay "Lists" quotes Bruno Latour: "the main job of the bureaucrat is to construct lists that can then be shuffled around and compared" (p.175).
Bureaucracy acquired a new dimension in information, service based societies. We live in the society of not only a state bureaucracy but also a big companies bureaucracy. Databases and catalogues of goods, services, people, are organized in an attempt to offer a great productive result. As Manovich explained, users not only search and access but they classify and archive in a variety of media and this consists in a great amount their online experience. They do it for themselves, by organizing personal material and found information, they do it for the companies, by listing metadata and experiences in order to construct online profiles in a bureaucratic and standardized way that operates in favor of the company and the advertisers. As explained before, this online data indexing and listing practises take quite a distance from the librarian/ cataloguer practise. The ways approaching content to be listed can be much more diverse and manytimes reacting on the main unified model.For example many facebook users do not use their real names or other pragmatic data , so to say they challenge the obligation of listing a specific type of content and challenge the universality of classification systems. However, what does remain same is the formal aesthetic expression of the list, which seems still to “serve” the globalised burreocratic ideologies.
Bureaucracy is a system that relies in writing and information technologies of storing and classifying information, relies on citizens that acquire certain literacy skills. With its endless lists and form filling, needs alphabetically literate people that are able to be a part of its system. Therefore,the practise of template choice is widespreadwithin writeen cultures and webcultures particularly. While the globalised list becomes a device for the literate, standard options are stored in its materiality which enforce predetermined possibilities. 
Overall it seems to me that the aspekts of the universal language, the general archive , standardisation, all concentrate in an utopic view of an information world that suffers from the lack of serendipity.


==''THE LIST AS TECHNOLOGY OF THE SELF''==


Not only libraries, but also individuals mainly adopt classification systems rather than create. Media theorist Stuart Hall (1997), in his “Media and representation” lectures, explained that: "the capacity to classify is a genetic feature of all human beings." Humans not only share collecting nature but also classificatory nature. Collecting is bound with being able to classify what you collect, to access it again, to remember what it is and where. Additionally, as a collection expands, classificatory needs start show up.
On the other hand, following Halls argument, "the particular classification system used in a society is learnt". To Hall, without any notion of classification we cannot comprehend the shared conceptual maps of our culture. “To become a human subject is precisely to learn or internalize the shared maps of meaning with other people in your culture" he states in his talk and this is not necessary something we learn within formal knowledge processes. Moreover he specifies that it is about becoming a "cultural subject" rather than a biological one.
As he highlights then, lists are constructions of culture which if we do not appropriate and reproduce we cannot at least culturally become. But if they are learnt within a cultural or social context, then we can approach them as means of training.
Hall's approach in what is to become a human subject is maybe indicating that we need to understand the shared meanings of our culture in order to be productive and creative, in other words socially useful. This notion comes close to the ideas of Michel Foucault about biopolitical govermentality as presented in the publication edited by Michel Senellart “Michel Foucault: the birth of biopolitics”(2008).
The notion of biopolitics for Foucault  “deals with population(p.)". Through it he explores how life is governed through power and processes of what he calls subjectivation. (p.)  He connects biopolitics with liberalism, as a form of governance of the social and the individual body and which has made the idea of power and control an extended version of itself. Power becomes biopower when it manages to control the bios, the life. Meanwhile, subjectivation, as a process of constructing the individual , works together with objectivation, they together constitute not what things are but the rules and forms through which we become human subjects. (p.)
The idea of a state which produces a normalized subject has been related by Foucault with the first bourgeois societies. He thinks that the notion of a state caring about the individuals formation was not keen in sovereign societies. In the bourgeois societies and on, the concept of govermentality he introduced becomes biopolitical. In that sense the art of governing is directed towards governing also the individual in order to produce him or her in a suitable manner suitable to the exercise of power and control and their reproduction.
Govermentalities are based in sets of practices. The technologies of production, sign systems, power and control and technologies of the self are each a “matrix of practical reason”. (Gutman et, p.18) These technologies that hardly work independently.I am mainly focusing here, related to classification systems and lists, in the technologies of the self . Maybe global classification systems could be seen the technologies of power and their lists as the technologies of the self. It is interesting to note that the technologies of power are, always according to the author, working towards an "objectivation of the subject” , while the technologies of the self "permit individuals to effect … a certain number of operations on their own bodies… and to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality" (p.18) . Both technologies compile the concept of govermentality. As he explains in his lectures The culture of the self, each technology brings certain modes of training of individuals, and are not just about gaining specific skills but also certain attitudes as he calls them. Moreover, as he describes, these technologies have been filtered and transformed by mass media, to illustrate that the culture of the self is not an independent culture.
In his History of Sexuality, Foucault explains that western man was "gradually learning what is to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence".(p.142).  Global Classification systems can be seen as this means of training through which an individual, part of a wider culture, can learn what is to be under particular existential conditions, categorical devisions of a fixed logic.
If the  modernist visionaries were seeing knowledge as a tool for power in order to promote peace or a tool for power in the hands of the low class, for Foucault power and knowledge are interconnected and totally dependent in a different manner.  His power/knowledge scheme (1980),  rejects global language / and the global taxonomy. He brings the idea of the “insurrection of the “subjugated” knowledges, which are “naive-popular knowledges” (p. 82)  disqualified within the knowledge hierarchy.  It seems that Foucault's views on the disqualified, abandoned, topical knowledge allign with Gleick's view on topical lists but also with Bowker and Star’s on standardisation and conflicts  of the universal with the local. What motivates  Foucault to talk about the resistance of subjugated knowledges is the fact that he believes that they reveal “struggles”.(p) They are not only about the hidden, historical content but mainly knowledges that are pushed behind by “a functionalist coherence or formal systemization” (p.83).  For Foucault, global theories, global knowledges or taxonomies are “totalitarian theories” or systems. (.p.81).  In the Order of things, he brings the example of the list of the emperor’s animals. (p.) This fictional taxonomy of the animals of the Emperor, which appears in Borges’s 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”, is appropriated by a chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Its a list where the animals are classified as  “mermaids”, “suckling pigs”, “fabulous ones” “others”, etc. Foucault re appropriates it to highlight Borges’ point: such a taxonomy only reveals the limitation of our own. He attempts to comment particularly on the wester notions of order. This taxonomy is not possible for western logic, and its relation to truth and power of taxonomic discourses.  This brings then the list as a emblematic model of the production of the subject through the scheme of power/knowledge, universal taxonomies and the alphabetical literacy.
The  list operates as a technology of the self. First of all it gives identity. Identities (in theoretical or in the practical sense) have been always been about categorized metadata describing the individuals. The list structure of the official state identity survives and gets reproduced in the social networking context, for example in online user profiles. The list gives identity through classifying, under state standards, which follow the universal model. The list, as explained previously, gives listed items a significance as a whole. This reminds the concept of imagined coherence that Isabel Llorey (2013) writes about in her essay Governmentally and self- precarisation. In this article she explores the normalization of cultural producers through Foucault's biopolitical govermentality."The normalizing self-governing is based on an imagined coherence,uniformity and wholeness that can be traced back in the construction of the white male.." (p.59). Therefore the list not only assigns identity through the adaption of classification systems,  it assigns also to the person out of nowhere an "imagined" coherence, which is a great example of normalization. The list gives identity and normalizes.
As Eco claims, we make lists in order to defend the unknown and death, therefore we can see how practices of making and reading lists can become these operations that according to Foucault bring us in a certain state. The list attempts to transform us in a state of wisdom and immortality. It not only embeds us in the  notion of the  global knowledge. It can achieve for us immortality through its capacity as a written storing device for information.
TakinG the notions of the template choice, universality, standardization and literacy into account, we can see how the alphabetical list constitutes  the normalized, determinate and archived subject. And, these seem very fixed conditions to become, to get formed as subjects and understand the world. As Foucault states, they are "fixed and determinate processes" of self constitution and of "knowing a determinate, objective set of things". [quoted in Kelly, p.79]. These are the conditions of being a determinate, objective set of things, could be added to this.


==''THE LIST AND THE WEB ''==


'''the problematics of classification'''


The list doesn't exist just within the front end, in the interfaces we use online.It is a structural element of the web, because it is embedded within programming languages.
Back in 1989, Tim Berners Lee presented the first proposal for  html, the language in which all websites are written.


It   is not possible to understand the concept of the list   without referring to the concept of classification. Classification professor Dr Maria Kazazi(1994) in her book  Classification  principles writes about the classification and its  goals. According to  her, classification is a form of hierarchy between   human environment and human mind. It is a key to knowledge. It is all   about dividing a total in classes. It is a system of classes and their   relationships.
She also explains that classification is abstract. It gives a general view of the world.


[[File:1212121.png]]


The goals of classification could be summarized as following: to   defeat chaos, to require from the user the minimum effort to search the collections of the library and to support memory. We can see then the list as a sort of material outcome of classification and as a structure that supports its purposes.  
The image, part of documentation of HTML from the organisation that stardardises it, the World Wide Web Constortium,  documents that the element of the list(LI) and its particular expression as ordered (OL)  is part of the syntax of html.  This is important as it shows not only the significance of  the list as a design form of the web through an archeological perspective but also reveals its syntactical nature, which is classificatory.
Alison Adam explains that for computer science, a list means  “a data structure that is an ordered group of entities” (p.176) . She distinguishes lists from arrays and explains that lists are “one dimensional arrays”(p.176). She also refers to two special types of lists, queues and stacks. The fist use the logic of processing first the first items listed, while the latter do the opposite, begin processing with the last listed item. It is interesting that she observes that a stack approach is not so common in our culture by bringing the example of people waiting in line for a bus: the first listed has to go first, or at least thats how we do in in our culture.(p.176)
What Adam emphasizes here is that within our culture the notion of hierarchic classification is strong. And of course this is something we can also observe in the list s of results from a query in a search engine.  Who is really visiting the last listed item? We start from the first listed, and this cant be avoided within the culture of the list: first listed is the higher in hierarchy, the most important and most relevant.
If we live in a world of information, then the internet is the part of the world where all information is ORDERED.
So all the problematics of classification are embedded within our every day lives, in a very active way, particularly when we are online. Moreover the web’s information is classified under standards that nowadays are not simply defined  by visionary individuals or knowledge institutions, but globalized corporations, particularly the online giants. And on top of this, these corporations affect the process of information collecting by adding their algorithmic filters, which personalise the content based on history, geographic position, identity.
The fact the companies like Google are the classifiers  together with the classificatory nature ot the web, suggests that the internet is dependent to bureaucracy and standardization and that its a normalising medium through its standardized classifications. By classifying the world and the self its normalizing them . Its not only the state anymore as in the world of Foucault that is involved in the construction of a certain individual, biopolitically constructed. The online corporation stands an extra normalizer of the individual. As a provider of content while also a provider of the structures through which we access and see it.  Online companies do not only provide us with what we see but also with the way to look at what is.
We collect within already classified collections.  We can understand this by looking at the act of collecting in online libraries and archives or other repositories. Moreover, the systematic use of web indexers, companies which index the content of the web and offer it allready classified to the users, implies also that we search and collect within an indexed content and classification structures that reflect for example Google’s decisions on information organization.  As Hall explained, the classification systems we use in a society are learned . In our current mode we don’t learn only ethical, social or educational classification systems that come from the great systems of belief, religion, politics and culture, the community, or the knowledge institutions, but from the corporate world which is bound with the ideas of productive, easy, effective and fast use of information. Its important to keep in mind that the lists we operate in while collecting information online are there precisely to transform the search experience into a fast, productive and not ambiguous one.  So one the one hand we collect within corporate classification systems and algorithms that provide narrower and narrower possibilities while the adjust information to individuals.  By insisting in the list as a form which is same all the time, different platforms collectively get the advantages of this structure which ensure a simple , abstracted and fast process.


On   the one hand, it is impossible to imagine the world without lists and   without classification. How can we keep track of our possessions if we   cant list them? How can we describe a person without putting out an  even  imaginary list of his personality elements?  How can a   university communicate an educational curriculum without listing its   courses?
==''THE COLLECTOR AND THE SEARCH INTERFACE''==
There   are great reasons for creating lists and there is a great  functionality  within the list which makes life easier. There are also  philosophical  origins in the construction of the list. Umberto Eco(2009)  in his Infinity of the list essay, claims that we do  lists in order to comprehend the unknown, to defeat  death and so on.


On   the other hand, the list, as bound with the concept of classification ,  carries the later's problematics and challenges. Dr Kazazi explains   also some crucial problems of classification: First of all, knowledge   gets outdated. Additionally,  classification systems reflect older   values. For example classification systems still use the aristotelian   concept of categorization, that lists things from general to specific.   We can add to this that a list can never be complete. So it can be seen   as  a limited structure for things to be in. Furthermore, we do not   classify the objects themselves, but the concepts. And not even the   concepts themselves can be listed, but their material existence, their   name, the word. Another issue of classification is the idea of classes   of similarity and not of difference lets say.The abstraction of  grouping  things. And the normalization of this grouping. Additionally,   classification affects the relationship between concepts / objects and   its form, which can be hierarchical, syntactic or semantic.
(collecting online is mediated by search interfaces which are constituted by lists and lately started hiding them)


Classification is so useful and so required, to an extend that we cant imagine surviving without it. It though seems  that its problematics which talk about normalization, representation, abstraction, values and knowledge have a very political and ideological dimension which will be further explored in the following chapter. As the concept of classification is so relevant to the online world, a world which is precisely classified information, it is interesting to see how the problematics of classification are embedded in the database criticism of Mark Poster(1990) or Evgeny Morozov(2012), who talk about databases and normalization the first and about abstraction and individual profiles in databases the later.  
The study of the history of some search engines, possible through the Wayback machine can reveal interesting findings that highlight transformations of their interfaces. The screenshots that follow document the emergence of Yahoo and Altavista search engines in 1996, followed by Google two years later.  


(IMAGE)


'''who is is the classifier (ideology)'''


To begin with, there is a critical issue with classification related to   power and control: who is exercising classification. This issue is actually not one sided: who is doing the classification is the second part of the question. Who created the classification system is the initial point to question.
As we can observe the pre-google search interfaces of Yahoo and Atavista do not follow the dominant model of today’ s Google’s simple (basic) search. Even Google itself has been providing lists together with the search box. In some cases they even became too literal on classifying the web thematically:


In the world of libraries and archives, at least in western culture, two main systems of library classification have been used and adopted by the majority of libraries or similar institutions. The most popular classification system is DDC, Dewey Decimal Classification. It was invented by the american librarian, educator, entrepreneur and founding member of American Library Association, Melvin Dewey  in 1876. Next would come the UDC, Universal Decimal Classification of belgian information scientist and documentation expert, activist and entrepreneur  Paul Otlet, published around 1907.
(IMAGE)
A third widely used system in American Libraries mainly is the system of Library of Congress. It was developed my  american librarian Herbert Putnam around 1897, and holder influenced from Dewey's system and Charles Ammi Cutter cataloguing work.


We already can see that the three main library classification systems of the western world have been developed very closed the one to another , at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century.  Here Kazazi's observation that classification systems reflect older
Until the Google approach brought the most simple and abstract search interface, web indexers have been heavily relying on the model of a library classification system as UDC or DDC.The concept of a search bar is accompanied by the basic categories . The are also additional lists with categories like news or specific collections and the search interface is constituted by many lists in the front page.
values becomes easy to realize. The fact that they all rely on the Aristotelian views on classification, the idea of categories as classes itself, or the approach of general to narrow, adds another layer of significance in this.  
The basic categories are analyzed further in sub categories. The approach from general to narrow is present, and one has to navigate with the list system clicking every time to go narrower. As a model of information retrieval it has been closer to Dewey’s DDC rather than Otlet’s UDC. As explained before , Dewey created a basis of 10 categories and items are assigned numbers that represent the specification. Items belong to one category. What Otlet was proposing, the semantic interconnections between items which he managed using algebraic symbols like the +, is not present in web indexers.
These systems, particularly the LOC and DDC which are the most popular in use, have been further developed and attempts are systematically made to update them. OCLC, a research center for libraries, maintains for example a web-dewey version. Moreover, updates in knowledge fields are being also adopted. As some dictionaries oftentimes publish new terms , words or concepts, so do classification systems used by libraries get updated. But of course this process is institutionalized and takes time. And every new entity has to get standardized before put in use.
Of course, there is already the option to conduct an advanced search through boolean operations  which can be seen as a way to approach semantically the content in the first level of the search. Why Otlet’s vision is not there was because items themselves are not connected , one has to navigate lineary from the general to the narrow all the time, and things belong in one category.  Therefore, the lists of search interfaces continue to operate under the model of fixed spatial arrangement. Like the alphabet, they place thinks in places that cannot be changed. Overall, we can observe that from their emergence to the current mode of Google as a dominant search engine the interface has been simplified, the lists from the first page gradually dissapear and what mainly remains is a page with just one search bar. The reason of this simplification seems to me that is not only the attraction of more and more users.  It seems to me that users were allready there. I understand it more as the outcome of the approach that looks at the web as the place where information is to be commodified.  It is interesting to observe how the abtraction of the interface brings the abstraction of the form, but also of the language.
Early search interfaces of web indexers  even included the options of natural language, the possibility to ask a full question.
Here, the classification and search interface is closer to the model of the librarian, that co-exists with the collection’s catalogue.  
Gradually, we moved towards a model , where natural language is  is replaced by a tag based search. The online guide of Google documents this perfectly when it contains the so called “tip” number 3: “Choose words carefully: When you're deciding what words to put in the search box, try to choose words that are likely to appear on the site you're looking for. For example, instead of saying my head hurts, say headache, because that’s the word a medical site would use.”
But what does this element say about the use of language and its universal connotations? If the alphabet became the most abstract version of textual based cultures, while arranged things in space in a fixed position, so their relationships,  then this process of thinking more tag based and writing in such a way, seems that brings even greater abstraction. This is not only explainable if we think that we need to communicate with machines, and machines have to communicate to eachother in the processes of online communication. It follows a tradition of abstraction that constitutes  the history of writing. The alphabet as an extension of the list becomes now more a sort of controlled vocabulary thesaurus with keywords that represent concepts the simplest way possible. So on the one hand as stated above, folskonomy in the web seem to bring subjectivity in the foreground, however, the tag abstracts back subjectivity which is also constructed through the list we accessed information at the first place.
The major contribution of Google in this universal abstraction was that it simplified the search engine as more as possible.  “Search the web using Google! “ is the motto that has been  present under the search bar.  This is maybe what caused the popular misconception about the content found in Google as “web”, while this has been the part of the web that Google indexes.  So web indexers classify the content, and users search for it. The page of the search results is the listing of the classified content .
Furthermore what was groundbreaking was the development of the simplest, easiest and most abstract search interface .
I am looking at the basic search interfaces because I think that these are what the average user is using, including  myself. Through it I see how the classifiers  became the corporations . Standardization and institutionalization have been the main factors that led to the classificatory normalization of the subject within knowledge economies. Knowledge hierarchies are beeing constructed and provided by huge global corporations.
Returning to the idea of (social) hierarchy of Adam and expanding it in the lists we use to access information online ,we can see how hierarchical based information retrieval is the main characteristic of search engines of online corporations, while for example within Internet archive, which is a non profit knowledge institution , the search results do not appear hierarchically in the sense of ranking. However, still ,the mode of ORDER cannot by bypassed. It is embedded within the culture of the list, a culture which makes order out of hierarchy, semantics or even randomness.  
Thinking about the list and the interface I realize that the list is an interface. A prototypical interface to collections, a catalogue to access the classified content, an online catalogue of a library. On the other hand it also consists the interface, which is build with a multiplicity of lists in all the levels from the back to the front.  I explored above the lists’ presence in the front end of popular search engines.  And the finding was that the most abstract and contemporary search interface, Google’s, keeps only one list in the frond end. After the search, this is the list of search results.
If the list is an interface but also constitutes it its important to understand what interfaces are.
I want to bring Soren Pold’s and Christian Ulrik Andersen’s interface criticism discussion. The authors have been working on a cultural and aesthetic criticism of interfaces.  In their  Manifesto for a Post-Digital Interface Criticism,(2014) they point out up some of the core qualities they find in interfaces.
“ The interface is an ideological construct.”  As they note “...[it] reflects a balance of submission and control. This balance is often conditioned by ideology. On some occasions the user is seduced to interact without negotiating this relation” (§3.). As the authors present, interfaces reflect power and control, which in the case of this research is the power of the ones who create classifications, and the ideologies behind their views. If we agree with this ideological dimensions of interfaces then particularly search interfaces of Google to Internet Archive could carry different ideologies within them, aligning with the nature of each institution/ information provider.  We use lists within search interfaces , so ideological constructs within other ideological constructs. And mainly, as the authors point out, often times we are “seduced” to use them without even considering this. This comes close to the very definition of ideology as an underlying dictation  that functions in a level we do not really understand  , feel or consider, somehow automatically as a script. We perform web searches without acknowledging the notions of power and control that are hidden within the vast amount of information offered and the structures which hold it. We should acknowledge that despite the difference between information providers, and all tough we cant really compare the role of an online giant web indexer to an online free access archive, there is a shared condition expressed in all of these interfaces: they are there to provide effective and fast information retrieval. They are inherently connected and refer to the values of universal knowledge and a productive and cost efficient access to information. This standpoint , to see “the web” as a place for fast and accurate information appears highly problematic if we dis attach it from the notion of productivity within a knowledge based society.  The web could be a playground of information and an online amgibuous space with unexpected possibilities.
“The mechanisms of the interface constitute the sensible...The interface is a multimedia that integrates sound, images, text and interaction in feedback-loops” ($6).  The form of the list as an interface not only can hold within it all forms of media. This is particularly visible in the online lists of search results. Moreover, the notion of the feedback loop and its relation to writing, particularly to search interfaces its significant. The whole notion of a search interface as a feedback mechanism , highlights the cybernetic nature of the whole computer culture, a culture of information organisation.  We seen before that Otlet had an even -pre cybernetic vision. But for the information science of cybernetics the manipulation of information has to do with notions of controlling society, again a social engineering approach related to communication.  This is something that is carried in our online experience with (search) interfaces. As Pold and  Andersen write ; “The cybernetic feedback-loop is a central part of the interaction between human and computer[...]. However, this coinciding registering and representation takes place at all levels of the interface. The multimedia as a cybernetic mechanisms constitute the sensible (even beyond the human) – i.e. the way we sense, what we sense, and how we act upon this “ (§6) . Then the sensible experience that we have is constituted by interfaces largely. The construct what is arround us, what we perceive as our realities. What the list then brings in this experience? The qualities engaged with the alphabetical list are embedded within this experience. The notions of a globalized, standardised looping reality  are expressed in the visual characteristics of the list of search results. The sensible is becoming globalised and unified.


==''THE EFFECT OF THE LIST: THE FLATNESS''==


Furthermore these systems have been mainly designed through personal efforts and views of these individuals and supported by the main knowledge institutions of that age. To explore the ideologies behind their construction we should trace back a mix of historical, economic, social ,political and scientific elements that constituted the life at that period. This would go out of the scope of this research. It it interesting though to look at who these people were and in which context they have operated. The fact that both Dewey and Otlet have been  visionaries that were very early interested in the world of complex information,  and have been dealing with information science even before its formation as a science related with cybernetics, control and communication. They were both  also involved in business, in fact they have been both selling their catalogue cards and systems.  It seems that we cant disconnect  the work of those people from their business approach and their standardization and globalization visions. Particularly Paul Otlet was talking about a "collective book"  a "universal book of knowledge", and Dewey was dreaming of a "library for every soul". It seems that they  both, had an interest in a more networked information world which would really foresee our online world of today. This leads us think that there are more reasons to look at what classification is, particularly in the online context.
Moreover, a certain (perception of) space is created , which is constituted through the way we navigate within the list but also it formal charakteristics.
Looking at the model of the list in online space and particularly lists of search results, like in online archives and libraries or web indexes, I see it as an expression of a flat online experience.. These lists are visually same, and look bureaucratic, therefore they reduce a possible interesting online experience to a very flat one. Flat here should be understood as boring but also as an experience with no sense of space.  
The navigation in the list of search results  is simple: going up and down, next and previous page, and picking items.
The results are rendered in the form of the fundamental, most basic and simple list. A box shaped form filled of words. Constructed out of thin, possibly black or grey lines that by managing free space they constitute boxes that hold words inside. They keep things in the place they  “should be”. These lines create a grid which is a very visual form that a list can take. These lines can be even absent. But they are still there as imaginaery lines. Furthermore, the results are  static, nothing moves except our eyes and hand with the mouse, while going from top to down or back to top and from page to page, from left to right or the opposite. The background doesn't move as the boxes don’t move, everything stays in place. The words of course don't move, they are what should remain mainly still. To end up with this formal analysis of the sensible chakteristics of the online list of search result, it has no depth. The background and the surface are both two very two dimensional modules , the one on top of the other. On the one hand, to me, this flatness of the background and of the items, together with the quiet and non movable structure, constitutes an flat online experience. Our senses are somehow excluded. And additionally, this flatness destroys the feeling of space, we navigate lineary and hierarchically in a one surface. The list of search results manages to maintain a non-space experience for the person. Search result pages are information spaces that are treated in this tradition of standardization and bureaucracy with all its political implications and positions.
Of course search engines are simpler and effective the way they are . Howerever it is precisely this  lens of (over)simplicity and (over) productivity that should be looked. The list as a dominant material form of rendering search results reflects standardisation and universal , unified language.
It also forces as to look at any content the same way.
Is the world of information a space where we only want to be productive , effective, go , hit, find, use? Or could we have seen the internet as a real space build on and for information? On the other hand, as a printed list due to the materiality of its technology cannot provide the sense of depth , the online list is designed within an environment that makes possible the manifestation of a space, with characteristics that would consist a spatial and sensual experience. Why this doesn't happen to online search results should be looked also through the history of 3d electronic space to  3d online space and the reasons why they never became  a dominant spatial design model , allthougth they emerged in the early 90s. 
The work of M. Cooper and the Visible Language workshop of MIT in 1994 “Information Landscapes”


On the other end, within library worlds, the cataloguers are the librarians. Each essential part of the cataloguers job to work then with the adopted classification system of the library, so to say with the list of categories of this system and the subcategories that emerge. Additionally one works also with the so called controlled vocabularies, a thesaurus of terms.  As critical librarian Emily Drabinsky(2012)writes: "Every object in a library will be placed in a subject division and assigned  controlled terms, nothing lies outside of the system".  
[[File:Muriel_cooper1.jpg|250px|unframed|center|]]


It seams that there is a collaboration of two factors then, important for the cataloguing practice. What kind of classification system the library is using, and what is the cultural capital of the cataloguer, which possibly makes him or her do specific choices in where a book should be classified and what keywords are going to be assigned to it. An interesting tension can emerge from this question: is there a certain degree of "freedom of choice" for the cataloguer? According to Drabinsky, as stated above, no. Nothing lies outside of the system as she says. Categories and controlled vocabularies represent fixed values. Therefore, seems more relevant than to examine each cataloguers ideology or culture , to understand that he is operating under a template choice standard, which does not allow an important amount of his subjectivity to thrive in the process. To explore what  the cataloguer is carrying in terms of ideology , is to give an emphasis on understanding the idea of standardization as ideology.
was a significant contribution for thinking the possibilities of electronic media, information and space. Cooper was a co-founder of the MIT Media lab and was teaching interactive design. The work, a demo of a data visualisation proposals, presented a three dimensional textual space of typography, while investing on the possibilities of interactivity and animation. While bringing the elements  of infinite zoom, transarency and live data, one would navigate in a full three dimensional space, changing his position within the information space. I am not brining this work as utopic, allthough of course efficiency and productivity do not allign with playfull, rich and deep information spaces, but mainly as a point of criticism on the flat online experience that is constituted by the normal way we navigate in information online. The space was purely textual but the navigation possibilities transformed the list notion of space to something much more interesting. As David Reinfurt writes, (2007)  the design was focusing on “creating connections and making meaning“(p.3). The flat online experience doesnt enforce connections, because the fixed spatial arrangement of the list assign things with their fixed relationships. Therefore, such flatness reduces even the possibilities of learning or thinking something new. As Nicolas Negreponte notes, Cooper managed to “break the flatland” (quoted in Reinfurt, p.3). 
It seems to me that approaches like Cooper’s did not become popular due to efficiency reasons. One the one hand, 3d approaches in the web would be really difficult to handle from the old dial up connections. The tools where also not so easily accesible by a wider audience, that possibly didnt even have a computer at home.  They would be really time consuming. Additionally, online information is highly corporate. The structures they hold them support the goals of the Classifiers. The simple form of the list materialises and guarantees the commodification of information and its vast accessing with an emphasis in producing something out of it quickly and feed the system back.
After all these decades of flat online experiences,  it seems that the tools for a new approach in information organisation are accessible, the content is allready there, and we still insist in the normalised list to see or order information. The practise of many artists or developers that use programming language to create online works , and the literacy that can be acquired online in such a field are a good example.  Moreover, the web is full of content, not only through web indexers but in online archives , libraries and other repositories. All the elements are then there to create new information landscapes.


Furthermore it is   interesting to notice, that the cataloguer or the cataloguing activity is sort of low in the professional hierarchy within a library. It s role is considered fundamental but more in the sense of the worker who runs behind new content that needs to be classified. Even library directors though do not   have the power to change a classification system within their library.  It has to be compatible with the other libraries of their network or  consortium. And of course any choice like replacing the established  system would be opposing to a long tradition and causing a series of events of miscommunication and  problematic access.
==''conclusion''==






'''social and political dimensions of classification'''
Asking in the beginning what is the effect of the list on the online information collector, I found the flatness as an concentrated expression of an experience build upon standardisation, unified language, normalisation, productivity.Order as ideological construct is reflekted upon the whole process of information collecting online. The list is a technology which constructs subjectivity and objectivity. Realising that the online experience is consisted of such a flatness, I also realise the the modernist dreams of a general archive and a unified language are still present in our culture, within the systems of web indexers or online libraries and archives. There is an urgent  need for hyper subjectivity, ambiguoys taxonomies and alternative interfaces on online information.
Why the internet has been kept so normalising through the materiality of the list? Focused on efficiency and clarity? It has become a tool against serendipity and  ambiguity.




STANDARISATION


"All classifications, including those in libraries, function according to a set of three  ideals described by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star in their critical study of  classification: [first of all ] they apply a system of classificatory principles  to a given set of objects…" (quoted in Drabinsky,)
==''sources''==


Classifications are systems. They become standards. Models of how to work, to communicate and to think.
Marshall McLuhan. The gutenberg galaxy. 1962


When   standardized, classification systems can also can become global, as happened with DDC for example.
Michel Foucault. The order of things. 1966
Here   another issue emerges, the possible conflicts between standardized and  local classification systems, as brought up by Bowker and L.Star(1991).


The notion of standardization brings the dialogue around local and international, globalized cultures. Cultural imperialism is also unavoidable to think. If we extend this standardization concept to the online context and the way google search for example operates, we can observe that in our contemporary society standardization is bound with corporate choices . And the classification task assigned to business companies rather than traditional knowledge institutions.
Michel Foucault. Des espaces autres. 1967


BOUNDARIES
Jack Goody. What is a list?. 1977


In a legal and social context particularly,  classification also enforces  the idea of categorical devisions and boundaries , as Terence McKenna argues in his Importance of psychedelics lecture.  To him it is the "western game" which is about the creation and maintenance of boundaries. To strengthen his point he refers to the categorical devision of legal/illegal substances. On the one hand there are substances that are illegal, like the psychedelics, and on the other hand substances like caffeine are even embedded within working contracts, he says, putting in focus the drugs that promote productivity in a capitalistic society.
Colin Gordon [ed]. Michel Foucault: power/knowledge. selected interviews. 1980


There is an ethical dimension  in  this. The things that are allowed or promoted, and the things that are not, according to different systems like   religion, politics, cultures.  This model goes back to the list of the ten commands and its tremendous ethical implications as a model of a desirable person within religious society.
Michel Foucault. History of sexuality: vol3, the care of the self. 1984


There is also a mental level in this boundaries within classification. It brings order and boundaries between things. Therefore defines their relationship and keeps it fixed. This can affect the ways we perceive things, the world, believing that everything can be explained in such terms as a classified and analyzed (sub)entity.  
Gutman, Hutton, Martin (ed.). Technologies of the self: a seminar with M. Foucault. 1988


BUREAUCRACY
Tim Berlers Lee. Information Management: a proposal. 1989. [ accesible at http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html]


Alison   Adam(2008) in her essay "Lists" quotes Bruno Latour: "the main job of the   bureaucrat is to construct lists that can then be shuffled around and   compared" . And as she writes, Foucault sees the practices of listing as an essential part
Mark Poster. The mode of information. 1990
of the development of modern science.


The connection of listing and bureaucracy is of course obvious. One has in mind an employe in a public service. His desk is full of paper. Lists and lists of lists. He is always trying to navigate within the state (of) classifications. Citizens as users of bureaucratic systems do also always have to fill forms and compile lists of various kinds of information.
W. Boyd Rayward. The case of Paul Otlet: pioneer in information science, internationalist, visionary: reflections on a biography. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. V. 23, 1991


Bureaucracy acquired a new dimension in information, service based societies. Databases and catalogues of goods, services, people, are organized in an attempt to offer a great productive result. Moreover, in the online context, people have become data indexers as Manovich(1999) states.  Users not only search and access but they classify and archive in a variety of media and this consists in a great amount their online experience.  
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting things out:Classification and its consequences.1991


LITERACY
Maria Kazazi. Arhes taxinomisis [in greek]. 1994


Classification systems and lists can be used by alphabetically literate people. The alphabet as a storage system survives through them. We looked previously at who are the classifiers. But it is equally important to see who are the classifiers addressing: people that have reading and writing skills. So the list becomes a device for the literate. 
Stuart Hall. Representation and the media. 1997.[ accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sbYyw1mPdQ]


The concept of literacy can be connected with all previous concepts of the chapter. It is  related to bureaucracy, which its endless lists and  form filling, and the fact that only the alphabetically literate can be a part of its system. It is creating boundaries like in the written thesaurus of controlled vocabularies, the written contracts of people or the written laws of a state. We can also think of the technology of writing as a medium of the distribution and realization of standardization. It is the materiality of the medium that makes this ideology  circulate and  get applied. It can be revisited, even  revised, it can be translated and of course stored, therefore reproduced.
Lev Manovich. Database as symbolic form. 1999


                         
Nader Vossoughian. The language of the world museum: Otto Neurath, Pault Otlet, Le Corbusier.2003


'''classification systems as means of training. The list as technology of the self'''
David Reinfurt .“This stands as a sketch for the future. Muriel Cooper and the Visible Language Workshop”. 2007


Florian Cramer. Animals that Belong to the Emperor:  Failing universal classification schemes from Aristotle to the Semantic  Web. 2007


Starting from the point of standardization in the previous chapter, it seems that not only libraries, but also we as individuals  mainly adopt classification systems than create. Media theorist Stuart Hall(1997), in his media and representation lectures, explained that: "the capacity to classify is a genetic feature of all human beings." On the other hand , "the particular classification system used  in a society is learnt". To Hall, without any classification notion we cannot comprehend the shared conceptual maps of our culture. To him, "to become a human subject is precisely to learn or internalize the shared maps of meaning with other people in your culture" and this is not necessary something we learn within formal knowledge processes. Moreover he specifies that it is about becoming a "cultural subject" rather than a biological one.
Nader Vossoughian. Otto Neurath: The language of the global polis .2008


As he highlights then, lists and classifications are constructions of culture which if we do not appropriate and reproduce we cannot at least culturally become. But if they are learnt within a cultural or social context, then we can approach them as means of training.
Alison Adams. Lists. in Software studies: a lexicon. 2008
Hall's  approach in what is to become a human subject is maybe indicating that we need to understand the shared meanings of our culture in order to be productive and creative, in other words socially useful. This notion comes close to the ideas of Michel Foucault about biopolitical govermentality. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault explains that western man was "gradually learning what is to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence". Classification systems  can be seen as this means of training through which an individual, part of a wider culture, can learn what is to be under particular existential conditions of categorical devisions.


The idea of a state which produces a normalized subject has been related by Foucault with the first bourgeois societies.He thinks that the notion of a state caring about the individuals formation was not keen in sovereign societies. In the bourgeois societies and on, the concept of govermentality he introduced becomes biopolitical. In that sense the art of governing is directed towards governing also the individual in order to produce him or her in a suitable manner suitable to the exercise of power and control and their reproduction.
Frank Hartmann, Visualizing Social Facts: Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE Project, in European Modernism and the Information Society edited by W. Boyd Rayward, Ashgate, 2008


Govermentalities are based in sets of practices.  
Michel Senellart(ed.). Michel Foucault: The birth of biopolitics : lectures at the College de France, 1978-79. 2008
The technologies of production, sign systems, power and control and technologies of the self are to Foucault "each a matrix of practical reason". These technologies hardly work independently. I am mainly focusing here, related to classification systems and lists, in the technologies of the self . It is interesting to note though that the technologies of power are, always according to the author, working towards an "objectivation of the subject", while the technologies of the self "permit individuals to effect … a certain number of operations on their own bodies… and to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality." Both technologies compile the concept of govermentality.
As he explains in his lectures The culture of the self, each technology brings certain modes of training of individuals, and are not just about gaining specific skills but also certain attitudes as he calls them. Moreover, as he describes, these technologies have been filtered and transformed by mass media, to illustrate that the culture of the self is not an independent culture.  


How then can the list operate as a technology of the self?
Umberto Eco. The infinity of lists. 2009


First of all it gives identity. Identities (in theoretical or in the practical sense) have been always been about categorized metadata
Mark G. E. Kelly.The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault. 2009
describing the individuals. The list structure of the official state identity survives and gets reproduced in the social networking context, for example in online user profiles. The list gives identity through classifying.  
The list, as explained previously, gives listed items a significance as a whole. This reminds the concept of imagined coherence that Isabel Llorey(2013) writes about."The normalizing self-governing is based on an imagined coherence,uniformity and wholeness that can be traced back in the construction of the white male..". Therefore the list not only assigns identity through classification, it assigns also to the person out of nowhere an "imagined" coherence, which is a great example of normalization.
The list gives identity and normalizes.


As Eco claims,we do lists in oder to defend the unknown and death, therefore we can see how practices of doing and reading lists can become these operations that according to Foucault bring us in a certain state. The list attempts to transform us in a state of wisdom and immortality.
James Gleick. The information: a history, a theory, a flood. 2011


We are indeed taught of classification systems, they are part of our fundamental education and appear interdisciplinary.
Evgeney Morozov. Net delusion. 2012
We are learning  classification systems of biology, of language, of mathematics and so on. However we are able to respond to all this new learning experiences only after we develop certain reading and writing skills, the focus on which comes always in the very beginning of our school years. Not only reading through lists but also keeping notes that reproduce them, supports the memory of the literate. On the other hand, getting assessed through lists and the multiple choice model for example, seams to be a clear expression of the template choice culture within our formal training.
 
Overall, by exploring the political dimensions of classifications and the effect of  lists, we can observe that they are ideological constructs, interconnected with the concepts of standardization, boundaries, bureaucracy and literacy. Moreover classification systems are means of training and normalizing, while the list materializes the problem of the template choice.
All these seem very fixed conditions to become, to get formed as subjects and understand the world. As Foucault writes in the Order of things, they are "fixed and determinate processes" of self constitution and of "knowing a determinate, objective set of things".
 
 
sources ch1:
 
 
Charles Ammi Cutter. Rules   for a Printed dictionary catalogue. 1876
 
Michel Foucault. The order of things. 1966
 
Michel Foucault. History of sexuality: vol3, the care of the self. 1984
 
Terence McKenna. The importance of psychedelics, lecture. (circa1985)
 
Maria Kazazi. Arhes taxinomisis. 1994
 
Stuart Hall. Representation and the media. 1997
 
Lev Manovich. Database as symbolic form. 1999
 
Mark Poster. The mode of information. 1990
 
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting things out:Classification and its consequences.1991
 
Alison Adams. Lists. in Software studies: a lexicon. 2008


Umberto Eco. The infinity of lists. 2009
Emily Drabinsky. Teaching the radical catalogue. In Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front, 198-205. 2012


James Gleick. The information: a history, a theory, a flood. 2011
Isabell Llorey. Govermentality and self precarization: on the normalisation of cultural producers. Translated by Lisa Rosenblatt and Dagmar Fink. in To the reader/BAK.2013


Evgeney Morozov. Net delusion. 2012
Soren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen. Manifesto for a post-digital interface criticism. 2014


Emildy Drabinsky. Teaching the radical catalogue. 2012
How one library pioneer profoundly influenced modern librarianship. OCLC, [accesible at https://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/biography.en.html]


Isabell Llorey. Govermentality and self precarization: on the normalisation of cultural producers. 2013
Gerd Arntz webarchive. [accesible at http://www.gerdarntz.org/]


==''chapter2''==
Donald Jackson. Alphabet: the history of writing.  [ accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IUBglyvt8o]

Latest revision as of 16:19, 3 June 2015

last update 15/5

abstract

The web is the world of classified information. Individuals as information collectors operate within databases and their lists in order to access information and gain understanding and meaning of the world. The research explores the effect of the list on the online information collector by looking at its political and ideological dimensions. Later on focuses on online lists of search results and and why I believe they enforce a flat online experience.

INTRODUCTION: THE LIST

Internet users are online information collectors. Looking for information inside the web, they operate in fixed structures, databases and their lists. Lists nowadays function as, or are part of, search interfaces to online information and the online information collector is constantly confronted with them. I am interested in the list as a construction of culture that affects the act of (information) collecting through the enforcement of order. This order could be numerical, chronological, alphabetical, even random. Still I see order as an ideological construct, an outcome of ideologies of effectiveness and productivity within a certain economical system based on knowledge, which demands order in the vast ammounts of information that surround us. To me the use of the list brings somehow something wrong in the way it makes us see and construct our selves and the world because it enforces a very particulary navigation within information. There is a political dimension in the list. While the online environment offers many possibilities to create dynamic and interesting information spaces, the lists through which databases are accessed , so the way our search results are presented to us , doesn't seem to invest in these potentials. The popular search interfaces used online and their lists of results are extremely predetermined, they destroy the sense of play and of the hunting of information, they even destroy the sense of (online) space. The results of a search could be displayed in a much more playful way that would emphasize collecting of information online not as picking items from a list but more as exploring a world of possibilities. List of results in different providers could also be different and diverse, but they don’t. So different providers, from a corporate web indexer to a free acess and open online archive lets say, share a very similar design of their lists which reveals similar desicions that have been made on their structures that provide information. In my personal practice I have been dealing with lists either in libraries I have been working in or as an artist working in the online environment. Cataloguing in libraries is based in a list of ten categories, together with the use of controlled vocabulary terms. Working with online databases and recontextualising classified objects towards the design of a subjective online space consists as a reaction to the template choice of the cataloguer. Through my practice I exercise an extreme example of an online user that deals with how information online is organised and responds in extreme ways. In this context I realize that I am confronted with the apparatus of the list almost in every aspect of the online experience. Either working within online platforms of user generated content such as Sketchup’s Warehouse Library, or social networks and user profiles, the list appears as a form that is constantly present. Moreover, during my working experience as an information literacy instructor I have been instructing kids on the Dewey Decimal Classification and how to use the library’s online catalogue to satisfy their research question. I realised that subjectivities and identities are not only shaped by information in terms of content but also in terms of structure, through which information is accessed. I want to explore what is the effect of the list on the online information collector. With this term I mean the general user of the internet who is constantly seeking for information online, constructing offline and online collections. It seems useful to approach the politics and ideologies behind lists and global classification systems, and the aesthetics of the list that reflect them to explore such an issue. Alltough lists and classification systems are widespread everywhere in the whole of our lives, at least in library science, the political dimensions of classification are somehow overlooked, while its aesthetics are totally ignored. They are both taken for granted . Exploring the list effect on the user of the internet is important to extract insights that would be taken into account in the design of different search interfaces, and their possibilities of providing a different online experience as a response to the established one. To do so, I will first introduce the list as an information technology. Then I will look at how it relates to global classification systems and how the list as their material form constitutes a technology that shapes subjectivity. Later on I will explore the explosion of the list as a form in the web, and will explain how I think it affects online experience.

THE COLLECTOR AND THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Humans have been always bound with the act of collecting. James Gleick (2011) who wrote the book Information : a theory, a history, a flood, a study on humans understanding on information, quotes Marshall McLuhan: ”the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer” (p.9). This is an important observation that highlights that the act of collecting is present in human society from the level of collecting food for survival in the prehistoric period but exists still in our societies in another mode. It also emphasizes information as a vital element of our survival. The act of collecting food transformed throughout societies into collecting goods, tools, artifacts. Its contemporary mode is this of collecting online information, activity significant for living, in a world where knowledge and information are interconnected with power. If humans are naturally collectors, the technology of the list seems a meaningful and very useful tool. On the one hand supports memory, provides easy and time wise effective access to information. As library scientist Maria Kazazi(1994) explains , in her book Classification principles, of the main goals of classification is anyway to support memory and to require the minimun effort by the user.(p.24) . The list seems then as the material form of classification and as a structure that supports its purposes. But on the other hand we should look at it as all technologies and media. It shapes us and constructs us in a certain way. The list is an information technology and one of the first constructs that emerge following the technology of writing. In fact, some of the first writtings of humanity where lists. As Jack Goody(1997) writes, in his Domesticatiof of a savage mind, the first writtings seem to be the clay tablets of Summerians that were lists for administration.(p). The image shows an administrative list in table from 2370 B.C. in southern Mesopotamia. (credit: Max Planck Institute). (image) Throughout the book Gleick emphasizes also on how information technologies transform the way human perceive information. He sees the alphabet as the major information technology that dominates our culture. But the alphabet, the way we know it is a really new construction. Alltought writing is an ancient technology, it was not for everyone for a really long time in history. It was only the second half of the seventeenth century when the alphabet became an “arbitrary” system, according to Michel Foucault(1966). As he writes in the Order of things, the technology of the alphabet “reconstitute[d] the very order of the universe by the way in which words are linked together and arranged in space”.(p.42) By becoming a system used by all and one that everyone must use, the decisions made on the alphabet design, affected and reconstructed the order of things, in a very list format. If the very function of the list is to stand as a structure that holds information in fixed positions in space, the technology of the alphabet becomes a model of understanding and expressing which falls under the problematics of listing because it becomes a classification system. Further, Gleick brings interesting insights on the list and the alphabet by saying that “..alphabetical lists were mechanical, effective, and automatic”, while he compares them to what he calls “topical lists”, that different cultures created before the alphabet and were local classifications which he characterized “creative” and “imperfect” (p.63). The author draws on Al. Romanovich Luria ‘s research on illiterate people in remote Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, that do not recognize the categories of the written cultures, and understand for example categorisation through geometrical shapes. The major finding of his research was that oral culture people did not “accept our logical correlations” (p.40). It seems then that the different operations of alphabetical or topical list reflect wider issues of logic. And allthough all people are (information) collectors, following global, mechanical standards is obviously a different approach than creating own, topical lists.

PROBLEMATICS OF CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS: FROM THE LIBRARIAN TO THE DATA INDEXER

I see classification as the act of arranging things in space. According to Kazazi, classification is a key to knowledge (p.17). It is a system of classes and their relationships. However, she also believes that classification is abstract. It gives a general view of the world (p.20). On the one hand, it is impossible to imagine the world without lists and classification. There are great reasons for creating lists and there is a great functionality within them which makes life easier. There are also philosophical origins in the construction of the list. Umberto Eco (2009) in his Infinity of the list essay, (p.) claims that people do lists in order to comprehend the unknown and to defeat death .We list in order to create meaning of ourselves and the world around us, which can be both seen as Eco’s “unknown”. By listing things are broken down in pieces, arrange them in a certain manner that brings meaning and logic to the chaotic word of possibilities that surround us. “We like lists because we don't want to die” he writes in an extreme statement(p.). Defeating death brings us back to the idea of survival and collecting that was stated previously. Moreover, if one considers that even for ancient cultures to defeat death was to achieve immortality through memory, also highlights the value of memory, which is being supported through information technologies. On the other hand, the list, as bound with the concept of classification , carries the later's problematics and challenges. Kazazi explains also some crucial problems of classification: First of all, knowledge gets outdated. Additionally, classification systems reflect older values. Furthermore, we do not classify the objects themselves, but the concepts (p.27). And not even the concepts themselves can be listed, but their material existence, their name, the word. Another issue of classification is the idea of classes of similarity and not of difference lets say. The exclusion of difference and the abstraction of grouping things. And the normalization of this grouping. Classification affects the relationship between concepts / objects, which can be hierarchical, syntactic or semantic. I see library cultures as pre database cultures. However, both cultures do not deal with organisation of information in the same way.While in library classifications the structures that hold information are adopted by libraries and cataloguers are using them, together with controlled vocabulary thesauri, the digital / online database classification brings a greater variety of classification systems. The cataloguer gives his position to the general internet user,who operates now on as a data indexer as Manovich observed in his “Database and symbolic form” essay. (p.9). Moreover, since folksonomy, tha practise of tagging by users, emerges, huge ammounts of subjectivity enter the wider cataloguing practise of online information , often times outside controlled vocabularies. The web brings the notion of the topical list much closer to the information organising practise. User can affect with their opinions the online content, and they can create their own collections classified in various personal ways. But what is in the core of my question is why this persisent form of the list as we know it appears dominant as an aesthetic expression of classification? Online information is accessed within structures that are ruled by global classification principles which are standardised. For example, users can create their own topical systems of classifiying their desktop collections, but they have mainly accessed this information through the same kind of lists either from search engines or in online libraries. In other words, users as online data indexers can arrange things in space in many differnet ways than librarians, but one the one hand they collect their information in lists with very fixed spatial arrangement, and on the other hand most of times they reprocude this normalised sparial arrangment because they are familiar with such an organisation form. As the concept of classification is so relevant to the online world, a world which is precisely classified information, it is interesting to see how it problematics are embedded in the database criticism of Mark Poster (1990) in his work The mode of information, and Evgeny Morozov (2012) with Net Delusion. Poster extends Foucault’s ideas of the panopticon and surveillance to the database which enforces participatory surveillance and normalization. He believes that surveillance is exercised in a peer to peer manner, for example through social networks the exercise of control is not bound to a Panopticon model where people are watched through one eye. In the superpanopticon database mode all eyes are open and working for the common surveillance of peers. Morozov sees the database profiling of people as creating an abstract and normalized representation of them. He refers to the movie the Life of the Others to illustrate how police can get only a very abstract and generalized image of individuals through databases. What is common in the library and database world then is the problematics of classification systems. How they become standardised and normalising.

POLITICS OF CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS: WHO IS THE CLASSIFIER IN THE GENERAL ARCHIVE

There is a critical issue with classification related to power and control: who is exercising classification. This question can be divided in two parts. who is doing the classification as a cataloguer and who created the classification system at the first place. In this chapter I will look at the sigfinicance of the work of Melvil Dewey, Paul Otlet and Otto Neurath, all modernist visonaires of information organisation. In the world of libraries and archives, at least in western culture, two main systems of library classification have been used and adopted by the majority of libraries or similar institutions. The most popular classification system is DDC, Dewey Decimal Classification. It was invented by the american librarian, educator, entrepreneur, Melvin Dewey in 1876. Next would come the UDC, Universal Decimal Classification of belgian information scientist and documentation scientist, and entrepreneur Paul Otlet, published around 1907. The two systems rely on a fixed structure of the first basic categories, which are divided in more subcategories each. Within this structure items should be classified and described through numerical systems which indicate their category and their specific place within it. The images how the basic design of UDC and DDC.


Universal-decimale-classifaction-system-1.png
Deweydecimal1.jpg

The main library classification systems of the western world have been developed very closed the one to another , at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century. Here Kazazi's observation that classification systems reflect older values becomes easy to recognize. First of all, these systems are very old. Moreover, they, and particularly DDC, rely on Aristotelian views on classification. the idea of categories as classes, the approach of general to narrow and grouping based on similarity. So not only these systems are based in ancient values, they invest on the idea of grouping “similar things” within established entities. Categories are classes, distinct, huge, stable entities. And every (new) concept fits into them as a narrower term, therefore adopting new knowledge means always to go even narrower within existing categories and rarely creating new categories. UDC expresses a different model though: semantic links are present in the design of this system. UDC emphasizes on semantic interconnections of objects, through a different numerical system that uses symbols like + from algebra to indicate two different fields that they item can be assigned in.Its important here to notice that DDC is much more widely used than UDC. UDC and DDC have been designed through personal efforts and views of these individuals that were envisioning organizational systems. Both Otlet and Dewey have been very passionate and visionary in their field. But on what kind of background did they operate? They both have been very early interested in the world of complex information, and its organization, and have been dealing with information science even before its formation as a science related with cybernetics, control and communication. They were both also involved in business, in fact they have been both selling their catalogue cards and systems. They shared standardization and globalization visions. However, they had mainly social visions, that would be imagining organizational systems of information that would promote communication, knowledge and peace.They seem to have believed that the world would become a complexity of information territory and the power will come together with knowledge. Particularly Paul Otlet was talking about a "collective book" a "universal book of knowledge". He created the Office International de Bibliography in 1895 together with Henri La Fontaine, an office with a goal to create a universal library, the Mundaneum ,where the classification system of Paul Otlet , UDC, would be applied. The Palais Mondial, which later on became Mundaneum, opens in 1920. Its collection was accessed through a system of thematic index cards . In the following photograph we can see some of the drawers of Mundaneum that contained the index cards. The institution was in the beginning hosted in the city of Brussels.


800px-Mundaneum Tiräng Karteikaarten.jpg


Otlet became an important figure in Unesco. He was convinced that the global spreading of knowledge and the exchange of it would promote world peace. as R.Boyd Rayward(1991) writes about in this reflective biography of Otlet. He was dreaming of a world where the transmission of information would overcome geographic boundaries. Dewey was dreaming of a "free library for every soul". He particularly talked about free schools and free libraries and the significance of what we would call today free access to information. As described in his biography in the website of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) , he helped to establish the American Library association. In 1877 , while working as the librarian of Columbia College he founded there the first library scool of the world. He also initiated programs for traveling libraries. Dewey emphasized mainly the idea of open and free access and he was very influential in the american library world. The work of both influenced the wider world of library cultures but particularly their views on connected and free information can reflect todays world and possibly are more relevant to our experience than they were to the societies the lived in. Their point of view contained the understanding of the power of information and data together with the understanding of their social significance. Another important figure of the same period, philosopher, sociologist and political economist Otto Neurath, seems to understand the importancy of pictorial language, in a similar manner. Where Otlet and Dewey created a vision of a proto-database, a srtucture that would hold together universally big amount of information, Neurath proposed methods of information visualization. Together with illustrator Gernt Arnzt and his future wife Marie (Neurath) Reidemester they designed the project Isotype. The International System Of TYpografic Picture Education contained 4000 symbols designed by Arntz, that represented key concepts of the fields of industry, politics, demographics and economy, as explained in Arnzt web archive. Otto Neurath focuses on “uneducated persons and to facilitate their understanding of complex data” as Frank Hartmann writes. (2008, p.279) . In other words Neurath and his colleagues were dreaming of a universal system of information exchange, like Otlet and Dewey, only that Neurath was taking a distance from alphabetical norms, recognizing that illiterate people were by default excluded by powerful knowledge. All these ideas should be taken into account when we attempt to describe the ideology behind classification systems of our times because they were visions of a proto- web society. The need of a universal language is always present as it seems within the ideas of organization visionaries. And universal language (is it a classification system, or a museum signing system, or a method of illustrating books), can be constructed only through standardization and institutionalization. They even seem to realize that getting involved in an institutional context was the only way to go. They all were influential within institutions like American Library Association( Dewey) United Nations (Otlet), Museum of War Economy and the socialist party (Neurath). They attempted to change society, Otlet towards peace, Neurath towards knowledge for the low class, Dewey towards free access in information. It is important to realize that they operated in the modernist context, which has given space to the ideas of transparency, universal collection and storage of information, reform and globalization. Its exemplary that Otlet collaborated with the pioneer of architectural modernism, swiss Le Corbusier, for his Mundaneum.This join of forces highlights the modernist perspectives in towards a universally accessible and unified reality. The World City, was Otlet’s and Le Corbusier’s extension of the Mundaneum proposal, designed in the city of Geneva. Although again not realized, the project seems at the ultimate modernistic vision, the realization of a global, world archive. According to Michel Foucault(1986) in his Des Espaces Autres, the concept of the “general archive” and the “idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside time and protected from its erosion” both belong “to our modernity” (p.182). From a point of view the modern fathers of information organisation can be seen as reformers, from another point as social engineers that operated within burreocratic institutionalised practises in order to engineer a new society . Moreover, in our society, their views and dreams are translated through the lens of corporate knowledge capitalism, and effective production. Corporations are the knowledge institutions of our days. Google’s web indexing extends the concept of the Mundaneum or the Global Polis and embeds them clearly in the knowledge capitalism. Otlet’s ideas about semantically connected gathered information and universal books of knowledge leading to a world peace are challenged by the corporate and state power on information.The ideas of freedom of access of Dewey are quite challenged within corporate practices when online content is still bound on corporate servers. The visions of the fathers of information organisation during modernism become extremely utopic in the advanced information societies we are in, as information became so commodified that what matters mainly is to find it easy.


POLITICS OF CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS: STANDARDISATION AND BURREAUCRACY

It seems that there is a collaboration of two factors then, important for the cataloguing practice. What kind of classification system the library is using, and what is the cultural capital of the cataloguer, which possibly makes him or her do specific choices in where a book should be classified and what keywords are going to be assigned to it. An interesting tension can emerge from this question: is there a certain degree of "freedom of choice" for the cataloguer? According to critical librarian Emily Drabinsky (2012) in her work Teaching the radical catalogue, no. Nothing lies outside of the system as she says (p.) . Categories and controlled vocabularies represent fixed values. Therefore, seems more relevant than to examine each cataloguers ideology or culture , to understand that he is operating under a template choice standard. To explore what the cataloguer is carrying in terms of ideology , is to explore what template choice means. And this is not only relevant to the cataloguers in the libraries. In the online context, people have become cataloguers. Users access, classify, store online information constantly and operate within content which is classified under the standards of online giants. So the problematics and politics of classification systems are not anymore relevant only to library cultures, but through the web culture they become crucial for all . The idea of the template choice is transformed within the networked paradigm, particularly because controlled vocalubaries seem to fall apart oftentimes. However, the list as a form seems to express still a standardized view on things. A significant research that explores the political, ethical, social implications of classification is the one of Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1991) in their critical study Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. In this book they explain that "all classifications, including those in libraries, ... ..apply a system of classificatory principles to a given set of objects…",( p.). The authors understand classifications as systems that demand certain principles to be applied. They state that they are different than standards, but they are to be standardized, while “a standard [..] is a way to classify the world”. (p.12). To me the template choice is precisely this form of choice upon a given set of principles. As classifications become standardized, choices become also. Models of how to work, to communicate and to think. And these standards are applied to a truly variably and heterogenous mix of objects. Classification systems are meant to be able to conceptually fix any given set of objects in a certain manner and the list serves this function. When standardized, classification systems can also can become global, as happened with DDC and UDC for example. Here another issue emerges, the possible conflicts between standardized and local classification systems, as brought up by Bowker and L.Star (p. 326) and explored above thourgh Drabinsky’s example. The two authors think that local classifications are pushed away by the standardized ones, notion that aligns again with Gleick’s idea on “topical lists” and their replacement by “alphabetical lists”. Furthermore, for Bowker and L. Star, classification systems are part of modern Western bureaucracy. “Assigning things, people, or their actions to categories” is a ubiquitous part of work in the bureaucratic state”. (p. 285). Alison Adam’s (2008) view aligns with this notion, when in her essay "Lists" quotes Bruno Latour: "the main job of the bureaucrat is to construct lists that can then be shuffled around and compared" (p.175). Bureaucracy acquired a new dimension in information, service based societies. We live in the society of not only a state bureaucracy but also a big companies bureaucracy. Databases and catalogues of goods, services, people, are organized in an attempt to offer a great productive result. As Manovich explained, users not only search and access but they classify and archive in a variety of media and this consists in a great amount their online experience. They do it for themselves, by organizing personal material and found information, they do it for the companies, by listing metadata and experiences in order to construct online profiles in a bureaucratic and standardized way that operates in favor of the company and the advertisers. As explained before, this online data indexing and listing practises take quite a distance from the librarian/ cataloguer practise. The ways approaching content to be listed can be much more diverse and manytimes reacting on the main unified model.For example many facebook users do not use their real names or other pragmatic data , so to say they challenge the obligation of listing a specific type of content and challenge the universality of classification systems. However, what does remain same is the formal aesthetic expression of the list, which seems still to “serve” the globalised burreocratic ideologies. Bureaucracy is a system that relies in writing and information technologies of storing and classifying information, relies on citizens that acquire certain literacy skills. With its endless lists and form filling, needs alphabetically literate people that are able to be a part of its system. Therefore,the practise of template choice is widespreadwithin writeen cultures and webcultures particularly. While the globalised list becomes a device for the literate, standard options are stored in its materiality which enforce predetermined possibilities. Overall it seems to me that the aspekts of the universal language, the general archive , standardisation, all concentrate in an utopic view of an information world that suffers from the lack of serendipity.

THE LIST AS TECHNOLOGY OF THE SELF

Not only libraries, but also individuals mainly adopt classification systems rather than create. Media theorist Stuart Hall (1997), in his “Media and representation” lectures, explained that: "the capacity to classify is a genetic feature of all human beings." Humans not only share collecting nature but also classificatory nature. Collecting is bound with being able to classify what you collect, to access it again, to remember what it is and where. Additionally, as a collection expands, classificatory needs start show up. On the other hand, following Halls argument, "the particular classification system used in a society is learnt". To Hall, without any notion of classification we cannot comprehend the shared conceptual maps of our culture. “To become a human subject is precisely to learn or internalize the shared maps of meaning with other people in your culture" he states in his talk and this is not necessary something we learn within formal knowledge processes. Moreover he specifies that it is about becoming a "cultural subject" rather than a biological one. As he highlights then, lists are constructions of culture which if we do not appropriate and reproduce we cannot at least culturally become. But if they are learnt within a cultural or social context, then we can approach them as means of training. Hall's approach in what is to become a human subject is maybe indicating that we need to understand the shared meanings of our culture in order to be productive and creative, in other words socially useful. This notion comes close to the ideas of Michel Foucault about biopolitical govermentality as presented in the publication edited by Michel Senellart “Michel Foucault: the birth of biopolitics”(2008). The notion of biopolitics for Foucault “deals with population(p.)". Through it he explores how life is governed through power and processes of what he calls subjectivation. (p.) He connects biopolitics with liberalism, as a form of governance of the social and the individual body and which has made the idea of power and control an extended version of itself. Power becomes biopower when it manages to control the bios, the life. Meanwhile, subjectivation, as a process of constructing the individual , works together with objectivation, they together constitute not what things are but the rules and forms through which we become human subjects. (p.) The idea of a state which produces a normalized subject has been related by Foucault with the first bourgeois societies. He thinks that the notion of a state caring about the individuals formation was not keen in sovereign societies. In the bourgeois societies and on, the concept of govermentality he introduced becomes biopolitical. In that sense the art of governing is directed towards governing also the individual in order to produce him or her in a suitable manner suitable to the exercise of power and control and their reproduction. Govermentalities are based in sets of practices. The technologies of production, sign systems, power and control and technologies of the self are each a “matrix of practical reason”. (Gutman et, p.18) These technologies that hardly work independently.I am mainly focusing here, related to classification systems and lists, in the technologies of the self . Maybe global classification systems could be seen the technologies of power and their lists as the technologies of the self. It is interesting to note that the technologies of power are, always according to the author, working towards an "objectivation of the subject” , while the technologies of the self "permit individuals to effect … a certain number of operations on their own bodies… and to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality" (p.18) . Both technologies compile the concept of govermentality. As he explains in his lectures The culture of the self, each technology brings certain modes of training of individuals, and are not just about gaining specific skills but also certain attitudes as he calls them. Moreover, as he describes, these technologies have been filtered and transformed by mass media, to illustrate that the culture of the self is not an independent culture. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault explains that western man was "gradually learning what is to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence".(p.142). Global Classification systems can be seen as this means of training through which an individual, part of a wider culture, can learn what is to be under particular existential conditions, categorical devisions of a fixed logic. If the modernist visionaries were seeing knowledge as a tool for power in order to promote peace or a tool for power in the hands of the low class, for Foucault power and knowledge are interconnected and totally dependent in a different manner. His power/knowledge scheme (1980), rejects global language / and the global taxonomy. He brings the idea of the “insurrection of the “subjugated” knowledges, which are “naive-popular knowledges” (p. 82) disqualified within the knowledge hierarchy. It seems that Foucault's views on the disqualified, abandoned, topical knowledge allign with Gleick's view on topical lists but also with Bowker and Star’s on standardisation and conflicts of the universal with the local. What motivates Foucault to talk about the resistance of subjugated knowledges is the fact that he believes that they reveal “struggles”.(p) They are not only about the hidden, historical content but mainly knowledges that are pushed behind by “a functionalist coherence or formal systemization” (p.83). For Foucault, global theories, global knowledges or taxonomies are “totalitarian theories” or systems. (.p.81). In the Order of things, he brings the example of the list of the emperor’s animals. (p.) This fictional taxonomy of the animals of the Emperor, which appears in Borges’s 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”, is appropriated by a chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Its a list where the animals are classified as “mermaids”, “suckling pigs”, “fabulous ones” “others”, etc. Foucault re appropriates it to highlight Borges’ point: such a taxonomy only reveals the limitation of our own. He attempts to comment particularly on the wester notions of order. This taxonomy is not possible for western logic, and its relation to truth and power of taxonomic discourses. This brings then the list as a emblematic model of the production of the subject through the scheme of power/knowledge, universal taxonomies and the alphabetical literacy. The list operates as a technology of the self. First of all it gives identity. Identities (in theoretical or in the practical sense) have been always been about categorized metadata describing the individuals. The list structure of the official state identity survives and gets reproduced in the social networking context, for example in online user profiles. The list gives identity through classifying, under state standards, which follow the universal model. The list, as explained previously, gives listed items a significance as a whole. This reminds the concept of imagined coherence that Isabel Llorey (2013) writes about in her essay Governmentally and self- precarisation. In this article she explores the normalization of cultural producers through Foucault's biopolitical govermentality."The normalizing self-governing is based on an imagined coherence,uniformity and wholeness that can be traced back in the construction of the white male.." (p.59). Therefore the list not only assigns identity through the adaption of classification systems, it assigns also to the person out of nowhere an "imagined" coherence, which is a great example of normalization. The list gives identity and normalizes. As Eco claims, we make lists in order to defend the unknown and death, therefore we can see how practices of making and reading lists can become these operations that according to Foucault bring us in a certain state. The list attempts to transform us in a state of wisdom and immortality. It not only embeds us in the notion of the global knowledge. It can achieve for us immortality through its capacity as a written storing device for information. TakinG the notions of the template choice, universality, standardization and literacy into account, we can see how the alphabetical list constitutes the normalized, determinate and archived subject. And, these seem very fixed conditions to become, to get formed as subjects and understand the world. As Foucault states, they are "fixed and determinate processes" of self constitution and of "knowing a determinate, objective set of things". [quoted in Kelly, p.79]. These are the conditions of being a determinate, objective set of things, could be added to this.

THE LIST AND THE WEB

The list doesn't exist just within the front end, in the interfaces we use online.It is a structural element of the web, because it is embedded within programming languages. Back in 1989, Tim Berners Lee presented the first proposal for html, the language in which all websites are written.


1212121.png

The image, part of documentation of HTML from the organisation that stardardises it, the World Wide Web Constortium, documents that the element of the list(LI) and its particular expression as ordered (OL) is part of the syntax of html. This is important as it shows not only the significance of the list as a design form of the web through an archeological perspective but also reveals its syntactical nature, which is classificatory. Alison Adam explains that for computer science, a list means “a data structure that is an ordered group of entities” (p.176) . She distinguishes lists from arrays and explains that lists are “one dimensional arrays”(p.176). She also refers to two special types of lists, queues and stacks. The fist use the logic of processing first the first items listed, while the latter do the opposite, begin processing with the last listed item. It is interesting that she observes that a stack approach is not so common in our culture by bringing the example of people waiting in line for a bus: the first listed has to go first, or at least thats how we do in in our culture.(p.176) What Adam emphasizes here is that within our culture the notion of hierarchic classification is strong. And of course this is something we can also observe in the list s of results from a query in a search engine. Who is really visiting the last listed item? We start from the first listed, and this cant be avoided within the culture of the list: first listed is the higher in hierarchy, the most important and most relevant. If we live in a world of information, then the internet is the part of the world where all information is ORDERED. So all the problematics of classification are embedded within our every day lives, in a very active way, particularly when we are online. Moreover the web’s information is classified under standards that nowadays are not simply defined by visionary individuals or knowledge institutions, but globalized corporations, particularly the online giants. And on top of this, these corporations affect the process of information collecting by adding their algorithmic filters, which personalise the content based on history, geographic position, identity. The fact the companies like Google are the classifiers together with the classificatory nature ot the web, suggests that the internet is dependent to bureaucracy and standardization and that its a normalising medium through its standardized classifications. By classifying the world and the self its normalizing them . Its not only the state anymore as in the world of Foucault that is involved in the construction of a certain individual, biopolitically constructed. The online corporation stands an extra normalizer of the individual. As a provider of content while also a provider of the structures through which we access and see it. Online companies do not only provide us with what we see but also with the way to look at what is. We collect within already classified collections. We can understand this by looking at the act of collecting in online libraries and archives or other repositories. Moreover, the systematic use of web indexers, companies which index the content of the web and offer it allready classified to the users, implies also that we search and collect within an indexed content and classification structures that reflect for example Google’s decisions on information organization. As Hall explained, the classification systems we use in a society are learned . In our current mode we don’t learn only ethical, social or educational classification systems that come from the great systems of belief, religion, politics and culture, the community, or the knowledge institutions, but from the corporate world which is bound with the ideas of productive, easy, effective and fast use of information. Its important to keep in mind that the lists we operate in while collecting information online are there precisely to transform the search experience into a fast, productive and not ambiguous one. So one the one hand we collect within corporate classification systems and algorithms that provide narrower and narrower possibilities while the adjust information to individuals. By insisting in the list as a form which is same all the time, different platforms collectively get the advantages of this structure which ensure a simple , abstracted and fast process.

THE COLLECTOR AND THE SEARCH INTERFACE

(collecting online is mediated by search interfaces which are constituted by lists and lately started hiding them)

The study of the history of some search engines, possible through the Wayback machine can reveal interesting findings that highlight transformations of their interfaces. The screenshots that follow document the emergence of Yahoo and Altavista search engines in 1996, followed by Google two years later.

(IMAGE)


As we can observe the pre-google search interfaces of Yahoo and Atavista do not follow the dominant model of today’ s Google’s simple (basic) search. Even Google itself has been providing lists together with the search box. In some cases they even became too literal on classifying the web thematically:

(IMAGE)

Until the Google approach brought the most simple and abstract search interface, web indexers have been heavily relying on the model of a library classification system as UDC or DDC.The concept of a search bar is accompanied by the basic categories . The are also additional lists with categories like news or specific collections and the search interface is constituted by many lists in the front page. The basic categories are analyzed further in sub categories. The approach from general to narrow is present, and one has to navigate with the list system clicking every time to go narrower. As a model of information retrieval it has been closer to Dewey’s DDC rather than Otlet’s UDC. As explained before , Dewey created a basis of 10 categories and items are assigned numbers that represent the specification. Items belong to one category. What Otlet was proposing, the semantic interconnections between items which he managed using algebraic symbols like the +, is not present in web indexers. Of course, there is already the option to conduct an advanced search through boolean operations which can be seen as a way to approach semantically the content in the first level of the search. Why Otlet’s vision is not there was because items themselves are not connected , one has to navigate lineary from the general to the narrow all the time, and things belong in one category. Therefore, the lists of search interfaces continue to operate under the model of fixed spatial arrangement. Like the alphabet, they place thinks in places that cannot be changed. Overall, we can observe that from their emergence to the current mode of Google as a dominant search engine the interface has been simplified, the lists from the first page gradually dissapear and what mainly remains is a page with just one search bar. The reason of this simplification seems to me that is not only the attraction of more and more users. It seems to me that users were allready there. I understand it more as the outcome of the approach that looks at the web as the place where information is to be commodified. It is interesting to observe how the abtraction of the interface brings the abstraction of the form, but also of the language. Early search interfaces of web indexers even included the options of natural language, the possibility to ask a full question. Here, the classification and search interface is closer to the model of the librarian, that co-exists with the collection’s catalogue. Gradually, we moved towards a model , where natural language is is replaced by a tag based search. The online guide of Google documents this perfectly when it contains the so called “tip” number 3: “Choose words carefully: When you're deciding what words to put in the search box, try to choose words that are likely to appear on the site you're looking for. For example, instead of saying my head hurts, say headache, because that’s the word a medical site would use.” But what does this element say about the use of language and its universal connotations? If the alphabet became the most abstract version of textual based cultures, while arranged things in space in a fixed position, so their relationships, then this process of thinking more tag based and writing in such a way, seems that brings even greater abstraction. This is not only explainable if we think that we need to communicate with machines, and machines have to communicate to eachother in the processes of online communication. It follows a tradition of abstraction that constitutes the history of writing. The alphabet as an extension of the list becomes now more a sort of controlled vocabulary thesaurus with keywords that represent concepts the simplest way possible. So on the one hand as stated above, folskonomy in the web seem to bring subjectivity in the foreground, however, the tag abstracts back subjectivity which is also constructed through the list we accessed information at the first place. The major contribution of Google in this universal abstraction was that it simplified the search engine as more as possible. “Search the web using Google! “ is the motto that has been present under the search bar. This is maybe what caused the popular misconception about the content found in Google as “web”, while this has been the part of the web that Google indexes. So web indexers classify the content, and users search for it. The page of the search results is the listing of the classified content . Furthermore what was groundbreaking was the development of the simplest, easiest and most abstract search interface . I am looking at the basic search interfaces because I think that these are what the average user is using, including myself. Through it I see how the classifiers became the corporations . Standardization and institutionalization have been the main factors that led to the classificatory normalization of the subject within knowledge economies. Knowledge hierarchies are beeing constructed and provided by huge global corporations. Returning to the idea of (social) hierarchy of Adam and expanding it in the lists we use to access information online ,we can see how hierarchical based information retrieval is the main characteristic of search engines of online corporations, while for example within Internet archive, which is a non profit knowledge institution , the search results do not appear hierarchically in the sense of ranking. However, still ,the mode of ORDER cannot by bypassed. It is embedded within the culture of the list, a culture which makes order out of hierarchy, semantics or even randomness. Thinking about the list and the interface I realize that the list is an interface. A prototypical interface to collections, a catalogue to access the classified content, an online catalogue of a library. On the other hand it also consists the interface, which is build with a multiplicity of lists in all the levels from the back to the front. I explored above the lists’ presence in the front end of popular search engines. And the finding was that the most abstract and contemporary search interface, Google’s, keeps only one list in the frond end. After the search, this is the list of search results. If the list is an interface but also constitutes it its important to understand what interfaces are. I want to bring Soren Pold’s and Christian Ulrik Andersen’s interface criticism discussion. The authors have been working on a cultural and aesthetic criticism of interfaces. In their Manifesto for a Post-Digital Interface Criticism,(2014) they point out up some of the core qualities they find in interfaces. “ The interface is an ideological construct.” As they note “...[it] reflects a balance of submission and control. This balance is often conditioned by ideology. On some occasions the user is seduced to interact without negotiating this relation” (§3.). As the authors present, interfaces reflect power and control, which in the case of this research is the power of the ones who create classifications, and the ideologies behind their views. If we agree with this ideological dimensions of interfaces then particularly search interfaces of Google to Internet Archive could carry different ideologies within them, aligning with the nature of each institution/ information provider. We use lists within search interfaces , so ideological constructs within other ideological constructs. And mainly, as the authors point out, often times we are “seduced” to use them without even considering this. This comes close to the very definition of ideology as an underlying dictation that functions in a level we do not really understand , feel or consider, somehow automatically as a script. We perform web searches without acknowledging the notions of power and control that are hidden within the vast amount of information offered and the structures which hold it. We should acknowledge that despite the difference between information providers, and all tough we cant really compare the role of an online giant web indexer to an online free access archive, there is a shared condition expressed in all of these interfaces: they are there to provide effective and fast information retrieval. They are inherently connected and refer to the values of universal knowledge and a productive and cost efficient access to information. This standpoint , to see “the web” as a place for fast and accurate information appears highly problematic if we dis attach it from the notion of productivity within a knowledge based society. The web could be a playground of information and an online amgibuous space with unexpected possibilities. “The mechanisms of the interface constitute the sensible...The interface is a multimedia that integrates sound, images, text and interaction in feedback-loops” ($6). The form of the list as an interface not only can hold within it all forms of media. This is particularly visible in the online lists of search results. Moreover, the notion of the feedback loop and its relation to writing, particularly to search interfaces its significant. The whole notion of a search interface as a feedback mechanism , highlights the cybernetic nature of the whole computer culture, a culture of information organisation. We seen before that Otlet had an even -pre cybernetic vision. But for the information science of cybernetics the manipulation of information has to do with notions of controlling society, again a social engineering approach related to communication. This is something that is carried in our online experience with (search) interfaces. As Pold and Andersen write ; “The cybernetic feedback-loop is a central part of the interaction between human and computer[...]. However, this coinciding registering and representation takes place at all levels of the interface. The multimedia as a cybernetic mechanisms constitute the sensible (even beyond the human) – i.e. the way we sense, what we sense, and how we act upon this “ (§6) . Then the sensible experience that we have is constituted by interfaces largely. The construct what is arround us, what we perceive as our realities. What the list then brings in this experience? The qualities engaged with the alphabetical list are embedded within this experience. The notions of a globalized, standardised looping reality are expressed in the visual characteristics of the list of search results. The sensible is becoming globalised and unified.

THE EFFECT OF THE LIST: THE FLATNESS

Moreover, a certain (perception of) space is created , which is constituted through the way we navigate within the list but also it formal charakteristics. Looking at the model of the list in online space and particularly lists of search results, like in online archives and libraries or web indexes, I see it as an expression of a flat online experience.. These lists are visually same, and look bureaucratic, therefore they reduce a possible interesting online experience to a very flat one. Flat here should be understood as boring but also as an experience with no sense of space. The navigation in the list of search results is simple: going up and down, next and previous page, and picking items. The results are rendered in the form of the fundamental, most basic and simple list. A box shaped form filled of words. Constructed out of thin, possibly black or grey lines that by managing free space they constitute boxes that hold words inside. They keep things in the place they “should be”. These lines create a grid which is a very visual form that a list can take. These lines can be even absent. But they are still there as imaginaery lines. Furthermore, the results are static, nothing moves except our eyes and hand with the mouse, while going from top to down or back to top and from page to page, from left to right or the opposite. The background doesn't move as the boxes don’t move, everything stays in place. The words of course don't move, they are what should remain mainly still. To end up with this formal analysis of the sensible chakteristics of the online list of search result, it has no depth. The background and the surface are both two very two dimensional modules , the one on top of the other. On the one hand, to me, this flatness of the background and of the items, together with the quiet and non movable structure, constitutes an flat online experience. Our senses are somehow excluded. And additionally, this flatness destroys the feeling of space, we navigate lineary and hierarchically in a one surface. The list of search results manages to maintain a non-space experience for the person. Search result pages are information spaces that are treated in this tradition of standardization and bureaucracy with all its political implications and positions. Of course search engines are simpler and effective the way they are . Howerever it is precisely this lens of (over)simplicity and (over) productivity that should be looked. The list as a dominant material form of rendering search results reflects standardisation and universal , unified language. It also forces as to look at any content the same way. Is the world of information a space where we only want to be productive , effective, go , hit, find, use? Or could we have seen the internet as a real space build on and for information? On the other hand, as a printed list due to the materiality of its technology cannot provide the sense of depth , the online list is designed within an environment that makes possible the manifestation of a space, with characteristics that would consist a spatial and sensual experience. Why this doesn't happen to online search results should be looked also through the history of 3d electronic space to 3d online space and the reasons why they never became a dominant spatial design model , allthougth they emerged in the early 90s. The work of M. Cooper and the Visible Language workshop of MIT in 1994 “Information Landscapes”

Muriel cooper1.jpg

was a significant contribution for thinking the possibilities of electronic media, information and space. Cooper was a co-founder of the MIT Media lab and was teaching interactive design. The work, a demo of a data visualisation proposals, presented a three dimensional textual space of typography, while investing on the possibilities of interactivity and animation. While bringing the elements of infinite zoom, transarency and live data, one would navigate in a full three dimensional space, changing his position within the information space. I am not brining this work as utopic, allthough of course efficiency and productivity do not allign with playfull, rich and deep information spaces, but mainly as a point of criticism on the flat online experience that is constituted by the normal way we navigate in information online. The space was purely textual but the navigation possibilities transformed the list notion of space to something much more interesting. As David Reinfurt writes, (2007) the design was focusing on “creating connections and making meaning“(p.3). The flat online experience doesnt enforce connections, because the fixed spatial arrangement of the list assign things with their fixed relationships. Therefore, such flatness reduces even the possibilities of learning or thinking something new. As Nicolas Negreponte notes, Cooper managed to “break the flatland” (quoted in Reinfurt, p.3). It seems to me that approaches like Cooper’s did not become popular due to efficiency reasons. One the one hand, 3d approaches in the web would be really difficult to handle from the old dial up connections. The tools where also not so easily accesible by a wider audience, that possibly didnt even have a computer at home. They would be really time consuming. Additionally, online information is highly corporate. The structures they hold them support the goals of the Classifiers. The simple form of the list materialises and guarantees the commodification of information and its vast accessing with an emphasis in producing something out of it quickly and feed the system back. After all these decades of flat online experiences, it seems that the tools for a new approach in information organisation are accessible, the content is allready there, and we still insist in the normalised list to see or order information. The practise of many artists or developers that use programming language to create online works , and the literacy that can be acquired online in such a field are a good example. Moreover, the web is full of content, not only through web indexers but in online archives , libraries and other repositories. All the elements are then there to create new information landscapes.

conclusion

Asking in the beginning what is the effect of the list on the online information collector, I found the flatness as an concentrated expression of an experience build upon standardisation, unified language, normalisation, productivity.Order as ideological construct is reflekted upon the whole process of information collecting online. The list is a technology which constructs subjectivity and objectivity. Realising that the online experience is consisted of such a flatness, I also realise the the modernist dreams of a general archive and a unified language are still present in our culture, within the systems of web indexers or online libraries and archives. There is an urgent need for hyper subjectivity, ambiguoys taxonomies and alternative interfaces on online information. Why the internet has been kept so normalising through the materiality of the list? Focused on efficiency and clarity? It has become a tool against serendipity and ambiguity.


sources

Marshall McLuhan. The gutenberg galaxy. 1962

Michel Foucault. The order of things. 1966

Michel Foucault. Des espaces autres. 1967

Jack Goody. What is a list?. 1977

Colin Gordon [ed]. Michel Foucault: power/knowledge. selected interviews. 1980

Michel Foucault. History of sexuality: vol3, the care of the self. 1984

Gutman, Hutton, Martin (ed.). Technologies of the self: a seminar with M. Foucault. 1988

Tim Berlers Lee. Information Management: a proposal. 1989. [ accesible at http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html]

Mark Poster. The mode of information. 1990

W. Boyd Rayward. The case of Paul Otlet: pioneer in information science, internationalist, visionary: reflections on a biography. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. V. 23, 1991

Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting things out:Classification and its consequences.1991

Maria Kazazi. Arhes taxinomisis [in greek]. 1994

Stuart Hall. Representation and the media. 1997.[ accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sbYyw1mPdQ]

Lev Manovich. Database as symbolic form. 1999

Nader Vossoughian. The language of the world museum: Otto Neurath, Pault Otlet, Le Corbusier.2003

David Reinfurt .“This stands as a sketch for the future. Muriel Cooper and the Visible Language Workshop”. 2007

Florian Cramer. Animals that Belong to the Emperor: Failing universal classification schemes from Aristotle to the Semantic Web. 2007

Nader Vossoughian. Otto Neurath: The language of the global polis .2008

Alison Adams. Lists. in Software studies: a lexicon. 2008

Frank Hartmann, Visualizing Social Facts: Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE Project, in European Modernism and the Information Society edited by W. Boyd Rayward, Ashgate, 2008

Michel Senellart(ed.). Michel Foucault: The birth of biopolitics : lectures at the College de France, 1978-79. 2008

Umberto Eco. The infinity of lists. 2009

Mark G. E. Kelly.The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault. 2009

James Gleick. The information: a history, a theory, a flood. 2011

Evgeney Morozov. Net delusion. 2012

Emily Drabinsky. Teaching the radical catalogue. In Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front, 198-205. 2012

Isabell Llorey. Govermentality and self precarization: on the normalisation of cultural producers. Translated by Lisa Rosenblatt and Dagmar Fink. in To the reader/BAK.2013

Soren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen. Manifesto for a post-digital interface criticism. 2014

How one library pioneer profoundly influenced modern librarianship. OCLC, [accesible at https://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/biography.en.html]

Gerd Arntz webarchive. [accesible at http://www.gerdarntz.org/]

Donald Jackson. Alphabet: the history of writing. [ accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IUBglyvt8o]

Retrieved from "https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/index.php?title=User:Δεριζαματζορπρομπλεμιναυστραλια/thesis1&oldid=81609"