User:Δεριζαματζορπρομπλεμιναυστραλια/thesis1
intro-abstract
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.
We are information collectors. We operate in fixed structures, databases and their lists, seeking to collect information. 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.
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? 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.
And to extract insights that would be important to take into account in the design of a different online navigation as a response to the established experience with the list.
chapter1
what is a list?
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.
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. To refer to some of the first writings of humanity that were catalogues, lists have a structural relationship with written language, text.
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.
Oftentimes they fall in incompleteness. Some other times they can be complete, at least permanently.
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.)
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.
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.
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 .
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. 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.
the problematics of classification
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.
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.
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? 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.
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.
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.
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. 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 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. 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
social and political dimensions of classification
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,)
Classifications are systems. They become standards. Models of how to work, to communicate and to think.
When standardized, classification systems can also can become global, as happened with DDC for example. 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.
BOUNDARIES
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.
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.
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.
BUREAUCRACY
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 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.
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.
LITERACY
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.
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.
classification systems as means of training. The list as technology of the self
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.
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. 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.
Govermentalities are based in sets of practices. 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?
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. 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.
We are indeed taught of classification systems, they are part of our fundamental education and appear interdisciplinary. 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
James Gleick. The information: a history, a theory, a flood. 2011
Evgeney Morozov. Net delusion. 2012
Emildy Drabinsky. Teaching the radical catalogue. 2012
Isabell Llorey. Govermentality and self precarization: on the normalisation of cultural producers. 2013