Reading for Thurs 1/20
read Jacob first
consider relationships in Jacob:
-between cognition and task
-between tools and scaffolding
Today's considerations:
Good vs. bad organizational structures
What are the raw materials?
concept of similarity/difference(?)
thing - unstruct data, objects, ideas
audience (more on Thurs)
constraints
display of (?)
task/role relationship (+ spatial location?)
neighboring info schemes
customs, existing patterns & structures
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Homework 1 dues Tuesday in two weeks (2/1)
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organization is innately satisfying; beauty etc. is nice
utility is nice too
new uses can be discovered from things that are discovered without knowledge of use
structure inevitably yields utility(?)
structuralism, OED:
1. Psychol. A method, connected esp. with the American psychologist E. B. Titchener (1867-1927), of investigating the structure of consciousness through the introspective analysis of simple forms of sensation, thought, images, etc.
1907 J. R. ANGELL in Psychol. Rev. XIV. 64 If you adopt as your material for psychological analysis the isolated ‘moment of consciousness’, it is very easy to become so absorbed in determining its constitution as to be rendered..oblivious to its artificial character. The most essential quarrel which the functionalist has with structuralism..arises from this fact. 1927 M. BENTLEY in C. Murchison Psychologies of 1925 390 However important or trivial we shall find the accomplishments of structuralism to be, we must recognize the gain in clear thinking which accrued to Titchener's sharply drawn distinction between the analytical psychology of structure and the descriptive psychology of mental operation and functional performance. 1930 Times Lit. Suppl. 19 Jan. 508/3 Modern schools of psychology, Structuralism, and Functionalism. 1968 Internat. Encycl. Social Sci. XV. 610 The movement called ‘structuralism’ which was founded in Germany by Wilhelm Wundt and transplanted to the United States by Edward B. Titchener of Cornell University.
2. Any theory or method in which a discipline or field of study is envisaged as comprising elements interrelated in systems and structures at various levels, the structures and the interrelations of their elements being regarded as more significant than the elements considered in isolation; also, more recently, theories concerned with analysing the surface structures of a system in terms of its underlying structure. a. gen.
1951 Mind L. 270 Braithwaite evidently believes that the whole philosophy of structuralism breaks down over the question of a combining relation. 1968 Sunday Times 10 Mar. 52 Structuralism is a technique for analysing any kind of symbolic system. Its break with the past consists in refusing to take note of the appropriateness of symbols for the things they symbolise. 1969 P. ANDERSON in Cockburn & Blackburn Student Power 246 Namier's legacy to English historiography was thus inevitably equivocal. His structuralism was rapidly suppressed from memory. 1970 M. LANE Structuralism 31 Structuralism, then, is a method whose primary intention is to permit the investigator to go beyond a pure description of what he perceives or experiences..in the direction of the quality of rationality which underlies the social phenomena in which he is concerned. 1971 C. MASCHLER tr. Piaget's Structuralism i. 4 We come upon at least two aspects that are common to all varieties of structuralism: first, an ideal..of intrinsic intelligibility supported by the postulate that structures are self-sufficient. 1972 Sci. Amer. Sept. 50/3 Structuralism recognizes that information about the world enters the mind not as raw data but as highly abstract structures that are the result of a preconscious set of step-by-step transformations of the sensory input. 1973 Film Comment May/June 52/1 In recent years, structuralism and semiology have received much attention as methods for analyzing and interpreting film... Structuralism..attempts to analyze comparatively the deep structures, thus locating those distinctive features common to all of man's cultural and social expressions. 1975 New Rev. II. XIV. 55/1 (title) Is your structuralism really necessary? Ibid. 57/2 Is not the case for temporalism overwhelmingly stronger than the case for structuralism? 1978 History Workshop Autumn 3 British Marxist structuralism exalts theoretical practice to the point where it seems to become an end in itself. 1980 London Rev. Bks. 15 May 3/2 Structuralism is the philosophy of those in the universities and thereabouts who are not philosophers.
b. Linguistics. Applied to theories in which language is considered as a system or structure comprising elements at various phonological, grammatical, and semantic levels, esp. after the work of F. de Saussure (1857-1913).
1945 E. A. CASSIRER in Word I. 99 (title) Structuralism in modern linguistics. Ibid. 104 If the adherents and defenders of the program of linguistic structuralism are right, then we must say that in the realm of language there is no opposition between what is ‘formal’ and what is merely ‘factual’. 1953 A. MARTINET in A. L. Kroeber Anthropol. Today 577/1 It would seem that the teaching of Ferdinand de Saussure has, directly or indirectly, influenced most of linguistic structuralism. 1964 English Studies XLV (Suppl.). 33 They intend..to stress the importance of semantic studies..(as a necessary counterpart to formal structuralism). 1968 J. LYONS Introd. Theoret. Linguistics x. 443 It is one of the cardinal principles of ‘structuralism’, as developed by de Saussure and his followers, that every linguistic item has its ‘place’ in a system and its function, or value, derives from the relations which it contracts with other units in the system. 1972 Language XLVIII. 419 Structuralism proper in linguistics began with phonology. 1976 Archivum Linguisticum VII. 152 With the rise of structuralism, linguistics turned back upon itself, so to say, and tended to abstract away from the social matrix of language.
c. Anthrop. and Sociol. The theories or methods of analysis concerned with the structure or form of human society or social life; also, following the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908), theories concerned with the deeper structures of communication from which the surface structures or ‘models’ evolve.
1955 R. FIRTH in Jrnl. R. Anthropol. Inst. LXXXV. 1 All British social anthropologists are structuralists in their use of the analytical principles developed by this method. But the rigidity and limitations of a simple structuralism alone have come to be more widely perceived. 1969 A. G. FRANK Latin Amer. (1970) ii. 68 The pioneering service..of those latter students of economic development and cultural change is precisely that they drop all pretense and practice of social scientific structuralism. 1973 J. REX Discovering Sociol. ix. 118 French structuralism has to be sharply distinguished from the structuralism of Radcliffe-Brown with which it compares itself, and the structuralism of Simmel and Weber, of which it remains largely ignorant. 1978 J. Z. YOUNG Programs of Brain 299/1 Structuralism, a movement in social science originated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, which supposes that social structures depend upon certain basic characteristics of human brain programs.
Post-structuralism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Post-structuralism is a body of work that followed in the wake of structuralism, and sought to understand the Western world as a network of sructures, as in structuralism, but in which such structures are ordered primarily by local, shifting differences (as in deconstruction) rather than grand binary oppositions and hierarchies (as in structuralism).
Post-structuralism is most clearly distinct from structuralism in its rejection of structuralism's tendency to seek simple, universal, and hierarchical structures. They challenge the structuralist claim to be a critical metalanguage by which all text can be translated, arguing that a neutral omniscient view outside the realm of text is impossible. Instead, they pursue an infinite play of signifiers and do not attempt to impose, or privilege, one reading of them over another. Appropriately, within the discipline of post-structuralism there are few theories in agreement, but all take as their starting point a critique of structuralism. Post-structuralist investigations tend to be politically oriented, as many of them believe the world we think we inhabit is merely a social construct with different ideologies pushing for hegemony.
Key post-structuralists are the historian Michel Foucault and the philosphers Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. The works of Roland Barthes straddle the divide between structuralism and post-structuralism. Also important to the movement are Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Frederic Jameson.
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how do we evaluate performance of a search?
we need a basis for comparison
absence & presence/control&experimental
speed
satisfaction
success/failure
we want precision and recall measures
boots and fish -
precision: how many are fish out of all the things we pull out
recall: how many of the fish we want do we get
how do we organize buildings?
exterior characteristics
relative position (e.g., manning is next to hamilton)
objective position (gps)
