INLS 150 Spring 2005 Organization of Information

Lecture Thursday 21 April 2005

2005-04-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

architecture and information architecture
architects intermediate between users and engineers
design

What are the crucial components of information architecture? Think about this from the IA professionals' and the clients' points of view.

What are the similarities, differences and/or relationships between IA and
- organization of information
- systems analysis and design
- interface design

Is IA a trend or a lasting profession? Be prepared to defend your position.

goals experience content (labeling & functional req'ts and structure

browing and searching-> navigation
organization
labeling

browsing aids

search aids

controlled vocabulary
label tuning
techniques to uncover latent structure
evaluation techniques

Lecture Tuesday 19 April 2005

2005-04-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

It's worth the cost of creating a controlled vocab; saves in the long run (D Batty)

Land's end: quilt & comforter & coverlet
controlled vocab in place
but ample cross-referencing necessary

word
cancer

term
breast cancer

name
invasive ductal carcinoma

label

word: minimal element of speech having meaning as expressing some idea, as in a thing, attribute or relation space unit
term: shortest set (non-minimal) of words for an idea, to a complex whole
name: may bemore than one word; proper noun or noun phrase that refers to a particular instaqnce of a general kind
label: some vague ostensive quality, functional sense

how many names? - has to have thing-status
how many labels? -

anaphora and ambiguity - computational systems: how do they provide context?

naming schemes are interesting

vaguely english
or environmental
or golf-related

subdivisions & marketing

lots of things are being loaded into names

"The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else
of the same name." - Aldous Huxley

JULIET: 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

LINK ANCHORS

what do I link? common words? whole phrases?

IA: naming, labeling, linking, signaling, means for doing

Lecture Tuesday 12 April 2005

2005-04-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

Left column: words to decribe ontologies
----------------------------------------
exhaustivity
specificity--- |---granularity
generality----/
flexibility
hospitality - welcomes new words & concepts
compactness
efficiency

right column: terms to describe controlled vocabularity
--------------------------------------------------------
expressiveness
precision
recall
currency -- standards vs. change thesaurus maint.

pre/post-coordination
multiword terms - when are two words treated together

what about completeness???
generativity???

10 lessons form thesaurus construction

warrant

LoS
pharma errors
elimination of redundancy
oral vs. IV
detection of errors (ADE)
disciplinary warrant

talk about marcia bates' article

Lecture Tuesday 05 April 2005

2005-04-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

Formal characteristics of formal ontologies

Think ER diagrams!

Information systems need some sort of data dictionary

Extensibility (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/People/clamen/OODBMS/Manifesto/htManifesto/node10.html)

Ontologies
Definition with a flexibile set of attributes makes it better able to link up with other representation (more available for crosswalks)

Two ontologies may be the same but the purpose of their implementations may be different, thus foiling efforts to establish crosswalks

"In short, a commitment to a common ontology is a guarantee of consistency, but not completeness, with respect to queries and assertions using the vocabulary defined in the ontology." (*)

WordNet - how do I do word-sense disambiguation

Difference between an ontology and a thesaurus
thesaurus: nodes are words
ontology: starting with concepts & track the concepts

Lecture Thursday 31 March 2005

2005-03-31T12:20:00.000-08:00

Handbook of ontologies (Springer)

Ontology: defines the basic stuff of the world
not just terms but objects/concepts and their relations

relationships:
classification
part/whole
material/made of
tool/function
domain-specific relations

Lecture Thursday 24 March 2005

2005-03-24T12:15:00.000-08:00

Thursday, 3/24/05: Classification, cont.

* Parsons, J. & Wand, Y. (1997). Choosing classes in conceptual modeling. Communications of the ACM 40(6), 63-69.
* Priss, U. & Jacob, E. (1999). Utilizing faceted structures for information systems design. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, 203-212.

Concern with coding hierarchy: notation, a remnant of pre-computing and early computing systems where memory was a concern

facet: fabric

notation
order in an array--in which order would you like a set of facets (how to order types of fabrics)?
schedule order--in what order are the facets themselves (e.g., chief complaint facets, such as body system, then type of pain, etc.)
citation order
cotton green shirt sounds funny
but green cotton shirt sounds normal

version of ICD-9

how do you order nominal data?

Lecture Tuesday 22 March 2005

2005-03-22T08:08:00.000-08:00

Classification made simple

things to take out of your house in a fire
Do we have a word for this?
No.
But we have a word for "cat" representing things that are cat.

This is an ad hoc category: highly situational, improvised as necessary

What is an essential difference between an ad hoc category and a named one?

What I would remove:
family & pets
fire box
computer
old tax records
pieces of art
photo albums

we also have:
- scientific/expert classes
- folk/everyday classes
- class by definition (arbitrary)

coherence/convergence - ad hoc classes are difficult to converge

defining a class
----------------
extensional - listing all members
intensional - listing essential properties/conditions that members must meet (the rules)
subjective
intensional -

mutually exclusive classes are wonderful but really don't happen very much in reality or if they do they're quite unwieldly

exhaustive classes are all-inclusive; the category "other" contitutes a failure

hierarchical classifications are too rigid; often classifications depend upon multiple layers of characteristics

Lecture Thursday 10 March 2005

2005-03-10T12:15:00.000-08:00

rules logic proof and trust

trust seems a rather insidious requirement

can you actualy make trust an IT implementation.

Washington site shows value of metadata

rules
logic framework
trusted systems

the gettier proposition is true by justification of something in the present text
but it's not the right justification
and so the truth is accidental and therefore there's no knowedge

but these systems could have the social function of insisting propositions qualify for knowledge

computer game world: everything is there
social function

completeness of a game, a premise of fiction
when the premise is lost is where the danger ensues
but the web makes no such assumption

re: banking industry and computer reality

what the representations are
can we manipulate them
yes, but we need to maintain the premise of fiction

services: going beyond the resource discovery....

agency/confidence in the service

we do operate without the certitude that truth has
but we do have notions of reliability based on experience

when it comes to business you either never find out or its too late

qualification: the semantic web needs qualification

greater data reuse for purposes not originally conceived

existential question: when computers are defining a foul reality
similar to a deity defining a foul reality for a protagonist

language is somehow anarchic
notions of centralization of these language
functions is centralizing the power
and power is dangerous

starts with writing
dictionaries
semantic web

Lecture Tuesday 08 March 2005

2005-03-08T12:15:00.000-08:00

For Thursday's class

1. Reflection paper due
2. What components of the semantic web do we have now? Which ones are on the way? Which are out of reach?

Lecture Thursday 03 March 2005

2005-03-03T12:15:00.000-08:00

Dublin Core!
http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/

What do you need to add to a description to distinguish items?

Dublin core: here are tools you have to point out similarities & differences
dimensions of description
value fields are dimensions

delivery mechanism?
header & file

html: will it stick around for longer than ever imagined?

semantic web

Lecture Thursday 24 February 2005

2005-02-24T12:15:00.000-08:00

Reflection paper due 3/10/05 15%

Identify a theme/thesis/queston
Choose your own form

metaphors of text mining/knowledge discovery/hypothesis generation and the know;ledge maanagement paradigm

comes doewn to defining the role of information scientists working as professionals always cognizant of the work context instead of as computer scientists

Metadata describes the attributes of an information bearing object (IBO) - document, data set, database, image, artifact, collection, etc.; metadata acts as a surrogate representation of the IBO. A metadata record can include representations of the content, context, structure, quality, provenance, condition, and other characteristics of an IBO for the purposes of representing the IBO to a potential user - for discovery, evaluation for fitness for use, access, transfer, and citation. See also, Meta-information. Examples of metadata format are the MARC format used by the library community Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata developed by the Federal Geographic Data Committee Directory Interchange Format (DIF) used by NASA's Global Change Master Directory Government Information Locator Service (GILS), and Dublin Core set of attributes for electronic resources developed with the lead of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). [LH] (fat-albert.alexandria.ucsb.edu:8827/glossary.html)

like a map index

data upon data, layers of description

metadata also used to describe data about "information bearing objects"

metaphor of assigning a card catalog to animals in a zoo

reasonable approach to information

interplay of information technology and people

representation of a thing
isn't that what data is?

metadata can describe itself?

"An alternative solution that promises to mediate these extremes involves the creation of a record that is more informative than an index entry but is less complete than a formal cataloging record. If only a small amount of human effort were required to create such records, more objects could be described, especially if the author of the resource could be encouraged to create the description. And if the description followed an established standard, only the creation of the record would require human intervention; automated tools could discover these descriptions and collect them." (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/July95/07weibel.html#intro)

CAPTURE & REPRESENT
intrinsicness

worth is in part due to collecitons rather than individual items

problem of retrospective conversion: given the things that have beencreated without metadata, who is going to update it?

Intrinsicality

The Dublin Core concentrates on describing intrinsic properties of the object. Intrinsic data refer to the properties of the work that could be discovered by having the work in hand, such as its intellectual content and physical form. This is distinguished from extrinsic data, which describe the context in which the work is used. For example, the "Subject" element is intrinsic data, while transaction information such as cost and access considerations are extrinsic data. The focus on intrinsic data in no way demeans the importance of other varieties of data, but simply reflects the need to keep the scope of deliberations narrowly focussed.
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/July95/07weibel.html#intro)

retrospective metadata

problem is you have to have those attributes in place that are adequate for describing them
knowledge is justified true belief
the means by which you arrive at the knowledge must be the right means

data is not very good at suggesting its inadequacy, and neither are researchers attempting to use it in order to publish

sometimes it's the attributes that have never been identified that bear the most information

Lecture Thursday 17 February 2005

2005-02-17T12:15:00.000-08:00

Soc. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

from the Phaedrus
(http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.htm)

A list of names--an attribute--each representing an individual.

Identifier
Label...access
differentiation
individualization
unitize/quantize
rules of the game/frames what it is in part that's going on here: individuals--social contract--open discussion
familial relations
associative triggers

they don't carry information but they do enter a realm where associations are swirling; sometimes those intersectings are informative, sometimes not

genre
------
representations: western/mystery/sci fi
plot and conflict

genesis/classic/revision/parodic

how the labels are being used: what's our context?

WHAT's IN A NAME?
re: kripke...

what does a representation inherently do?
there's nothing "in" it...but it interacts with a system in certain ways

course listings on web site
names
course department abbreviation/number
number indicative of level
course title
description
prerequisites
equivalents
free-text description
credit hours

perusing/browsing a curriculum

doesn't tell whether it will fit into a semester's schedule
class size
who's teaching it
quality of course

what do we not know:
required course

Lecture Tuesday 15 February 2005

2005-02-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

Comments on articles for today's readings?

We've been talking about the knowledge management paradigm

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/the_knowledgemodel_driven_enterprise.php

Structure is latent & generated, derived, secondary
Arbitrariness

My criticisms of metadata: turtles all the way up
Careful design takes time, and time consumption encourages corporate stasis

If it's a company with a mission, then they ought to be able to divide up tasks, producs, etc.

What about campus course numbering system?
Seems that no one wants to change the numbers assigned...why? Historical reasons...

an accurate class system has non-exclusive classes
model with non-exclusive classes is highly complex & difficult to visualize

Wanting a rational structure is a problem...
1. assumes we can describe things in a rigid structure
2. assumes we can fit these things into a rigid structure, functionally
3. may induce stasis where flexibility is necessary, considering the time-consuming nature of the organization task
4. assumses an organization of people can well-described in terms of a static structure

there's no time dimension...
units are never clear. is a unit a Person? a role?

Hahn, J. & Subramani, M. (2000). A framework of knowledge management systems: Issues and challenges for theory and practice. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Information Systems. 302-312. [e-journal, ACM DL]

artifact person
------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
classify
structured ez roles/
skills
-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
target of
unstrucured text KM: make it
person indep.
-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+

Personal
information
management
to
enterprise
knowledge
management?

Change management...

Thursday 10 February 2005 Lecture

2005-02-10T12:15:00.000-08:00

Not being able to tell the difference betweeen things and words is a sign of schizophrenia, according to Freud.

Homework due Thursday 24th

Review of a software tool:
First decide which option
Then, work out what the goals and criteria are
Work independently or in pairs

-------------------------------------------------

Location-based vs. logical search

paradigmatic examples
location-based: browsing subject headings
logical search: text-entry search window

depth vs. breadth

logical search: search branches can be quickly pruned

use both

automatically creating hierarchy may serve as a sort of intermediary: search tool that does both: enhance logical searching and location searching

but, how do we know that generated hierarchy is good? for myself much less multiple people?
how do we know the names are good?

convention
preference
some people prefer visual-associational approaches to finding
some prefer keyword-associational approaches to finding

what if the previous headings were bad?
then the new headings, if based on the behavior of use of the old headings, will share in that badness.

Cyrus: Kolodner - how do we know what happens? what are the scripts?

organization shared between people naturally evolve if they have goal-motivated behaviors that align or compliment...e.g., trade between two groups that don't share a common language...pidgin & creole evolves
but such organizagtion schemes can devolve, break down, or never arise at all

keeping found things found?

Are we trying to find a location or a piece of meaningful info?

parallel structures fall along the wayside
more and more of our materials are mediated
computer data is essentially a means of mediation
mediated and flexibly represented/representable for different purposes

Tuesday 08 February 2005 Lecture

2005-02-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

Previous lecture's terms:
Project/task/topic
Function
Proximity
visibility
form
situation
document
disposition - what is it you have to do with x and why....
order/scheme
value
time
cognitive state

We should probably reflect and/or discuss the next assignment in the above terms

Barreau & Nardi

Personal Informaton mgmt

Ephemeral/Working/Archived

what's ephemeral: SPAM
ephemeral defined in part by "I might need it some day"
what are the possibilities someone else might have it? what are the risks of not being able to re-find?
other email
voicemail
pens & stationary
knowledge from conversations

ephemeral in form/[in function]/in content
function/role
no action
action -> pass on
save-remove from ephemerality

what goes out of date
emails in reference to a prject
what stays
references

Diane Kelly on workshop for personal information (PIM)
foundational questions to be answered before a field is established
- what is personal information?
information of exclusive relevance to a person
address book
social security
email

information about yourself or information relative to you

information I have that I'm unwilling to share or make public (private)
personalized information
organizing structures - my start page

"personal" information management
"personal information" management

collecting information on an individual

what is the goal of personal information management?
to make it easier to do what I want to do
act efficiently/augment & enhance work
to help me surprise people
to find valid, novel & interesting information

why sort it when you can search it?
characterize what's important to the user
that organization is a sort of annotation itself that should be valuable to a search tool
future/resorting use

do different types of sorts

Thursday 03 February 2005 Lecture

2005-02-03T12:15:00.000-08:00

Knowledge management?

TD Wilson's "The nonsense of 'knowledge management'" Info Res 8(1) Oct 2002
TW Malone "How do people organize their desks?" ACM Transact Office Info Sys 1 (1) Jan 1983 99-112

Differences in handling information for individuals and for groups

Neat vs. messy desks reflect the sort of tasks the person is engaged in, which may in turn reflect the personality of the person, which in turn reflects the task and so on....

Exercise
How would organize these things?

tasks
journal

office supplies & tools - not visible
floppy disks
pens
stapler remover

bookmarks & cup in regular use, on desktop, memory stick - visible

reference not visible
campus directory
department directory

decorations - you suggest - visible

post it on the monitor edge - visible

to-read pile for the unopened mag
currently being read pile
classes
fun
research projects a-(n)

archive - visible
cds

active school files - visible

unopened journal
opened and not read
opened and read
currently in reading

bag can go somewhere else

proceedings storage out of sight/shelf

terms for organizing a desk
---------------------------
accessibility & visibility - proximity & visibility
currently using
have used & no longer actively using
will use but haven't used
shape
security
functional or decorative
topic?
project...

height

efficiency? creativity? insight? what do

for group: mission/goals/elevator pitch/project deadlines/meetings

why do you want to organize?
who do you want to organize for?
why do you want to work?
what do you like doing?

27 January 2005 Lecture

2005-01-27T12:15:00.000-08:00

Buckland, M. (1991). Information and Information Systems. New York: Praeger. Chapter 1, Information, 3-13.
Buckland, M. (1991). Information and Information Systems. New York: Praeger. Chapter 5, Information-as-Thing., 43-54.
Buckland, M. (1997). What is a document? Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(9), 804-809.
Meadow, C. (1992). Text Information Retrieval Systems. San Diego: Academic Press, Inc. Chapter 2, Data, Information, Knowledge.

So what? It matters only so far as role & use

Old-fashioned philosophical approach to creating something: creating the text to set limits, to set a law seems antiquated, when chaos, or, more importantly, a symbiosis & feedback between user tool task concepts & context seems to be of utmost relevance.

One can show the following: given any rule, however fundamental or necessary for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite. (Paul Feyerabend)

We need to be careful with the distinction between prescription and description: are we defining "information" by prescribing limits, or defining "information" by describing the limits?

David Bohm's active information: all the world is made of matter, energy, and information

information:
what it is
what it is relative to a person
what it is relative to one person being observed by another person doing the observing
(what it is relative to a zoologist being observed by an information scientist
verus
what it is relative to a zoologist being observed be the zoologist's neighbor who isn't an information scientist)

use and the user
and the hall of mirrors

terms are in fact highly dynamic defined by user which is in turn defined by use which is modified by need

creating structure

distilling information to highlight it

What are planned & unplanned collections?
Collection implied decision as to what's in and what's out
Web isn't a collection
Solitary chooser

Can you have a collection without ruleS?

Colletions that succeed: it isn't that you shouldn't have rules, it's that the rules don't cover it
the platypus

categorizations/representation scheme

getting stuff
information is stuff: information is intangible

ask users what they want, what do they want to do
what sorts of things do you want to accomplish

manual/intellectual

motivation: task...goal oriented or not, exploratory,

task: tasker does something with something in/at something to something

example: pool maintenance: wants to know chlorine levels, because wants to keep at safe levels
the solution is necessarily an information system

25 January 2005 Lecture

2005-01-25T12:15:00.000-08:00

Previous discussion on scaffolding; example of cooking recipes

Cooking is a more obvious example

Less obvious: How do we group/classify computers?
UPC codes? Robert's Rules of Order?

Consider social infrastructure, constraints, opportunities, etc.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Is an anteloope a document?

Document....

Term relative to user/task: action of perception "realizes" document status
perceptions versus uses

information:
what it is
what it is relative to a person
what it is relative to one person being observed by another person doing the observing
(what it is relative to a zoologist being observed by an information scientist
verus
what it is relative to a zoologist being observed be the zoologist's neighbor who isn't an information scientists)

use and the user
and the hall of mirrors

terms are in fact highly dynamic defined by user which is in turn defined by use which is modified by need

Tuesday: "What does it matter for us what 'document' and 'information' are?"

type
toke
type (2)
representation

20 jan 2005 lecture notes

2005-01-20T13:15:00.000-08:00

Cognitive scaffolding & stigmergic organization:
"Welcome to the insects"

symbol manipulation model - classical/cartesian model
there is an internal world
vs.
structuralist externalist scaffolded world
(both are of course based on unverifiable and equally unrealistic metaphors)

cartesian/cognitivist model
sensory input to short term memory to long-term meory
do something out of short term memory
store knowledge into long term memory

wittgenstein on man-made classes?
coming up with necessary and sufficient conditions for defining a class
critiquing his own logical positivist agenda for describing language(? is that right?) - language is a tool

unlike artificial categories, things in the real world have degrees of belonging to natural categories
birds fly
birds have feathers
but flightless birds are still birds

Wittgenstein: games are hard to define

cognitive frames: facts are subservient to frames (Lakoff)

there is a world and it is experience, and the difference between internal and external is somewhat, uh, for a lack of a better word, artifical, no, contrived, no, derivative

scaffolding - "broad class of physical, cognitive, and social augmentations - augmentations that allow us to achieve some goal that would otherwise be beyond us" - Jacob from Clark

some links to help with Jacob's terminology

2005-01-19T23:33:00.000-08:00

The nonsense of 'knowledge management'
T.D. Wilson

central to Wilson's argument is a definition of tacit knowledge he takes from the influential 20th c. scientist & philosopher Michael Polanyi:
'tacit knowing achieves comprehension by indwelling, and... all knowledge consists of or is rooted in such acts of comprehension' (Polanyi, 1958)
Wilson believes that the idea he considers to be the classicist/cartesian, the notion that tacit knowledge can be "captured" perhaps through analysis, surveys, etc., is essentially manifestly repugnant. If it's rooted internally, you can't get to it by definition. In other words, the expression of tacit knowledge, say, through the drawing of a model, is not tacit knowledge. Heck, it;s not even a representation of that tacit knowledge. Instead of trying to manage knowledge, Wilson argues, we should manage tasks & work environments where such tasks inhere.

Structured observation:
http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/INISS/Chap1.html

Stigmergic systems:
http://www.stigmergicsystems.com/stig_v1/index.html?
http://www.stigmergicsystems.com/primer.html?

Embodied Cognition:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/embodcog.htm

Reminds me of the overused literary cliche that we are our environment (for a play on this idea, particularly in the, ahem, context of a web site and the absent person, see http://www.proximate.org/url1.htm)

Oh and here in Jacob is a little Lakoff...just read his "Dont Think of an Elephant", on Chrismas Day, in fact. Good layman's explanation of cognitive frames.

scaffolding=strategies, procedures, & tools

jacob's paper, sections:
embedded agents & embedded minds
function of constraints
language: the ultimate cognitive artefact
classification as scaffolding - classification scheme is a scaffolding; it constrains both associated knowledge domain & its participants; classification scheme sets the basis for reality in a given context
classification as infrastructure

2005-01-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

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

--------------------------------------------
Homework 1 dues Tuesday in two weeks (2/1)
---------------------------------------------

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.

-----------------------------------

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)