sitemap |
bibliography |
mnemosyne home |
|
|
>>
|
||
|
>>
|
||
There is, however, a less complex way but far more effective means by which MOMA imposes a partisan view of the objects in its possession. This is the rigid division of modern art practices into separate departments within the institution. By distributing the work of the avant-garde to various departments -- Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books, Architecture and Design, Photography, and Film -- that is, by stringently enforcing what appears to a natural parceling of objects according to medium, MOMA automatically constructs a formalist history of modernism. Because of this simple and seemingly neutral fact, the museum goer can have no sense of the significance of, to give just one example, Rodchenko's abandonment of painting in favor of photography...this history cannot be articulated because of the consignment of Rodchenko's various works to different fiefdoms within the museum.
p. 265, Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins
We are all familiar with 'categories' -- they are one of the most often used methods for organising information -- be it a series of objects or a field of knowledge. Department stores are eponymously named, dividing their contents into what seems natural and logical categories or 'departments'. Categorical classification seems reliable and simple. The basis of the grouping is similarity or difference. `The only problem is that these divisions are subjective; individual and/or cultural rather than universal. We are educated (whether it be formally or 'on the fly') to believe that certain categorical groupings make sense and that others don't, that certain attributes are crucial and others unimportant.
This problem is dramatised in Jorge Luis Borge's 'The Analytical Language of John Wilkins' in which he describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the 'Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge', in which it is written that animals are divided into:
- those that belong to the Emperor,
- embalmed ones,
- those that are trained,
- suckling pigs,
- mermaids,
- fabulous ones,
- stray dogs,
- those included in the present classification,
- those that tremble as if they were mad,
- innumerable ones,
- those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
- others,
- those that have just broken a flower vase,
- those that from a long way off look like flies.
It is obvious that the process of defining the specific categories is crucial. It may require specialist knowledge of the subject matter and the intended audience.
 The
presence or absence of categories and the definition of what is and
is not to be included in each category can also have powerful consequences.
Bowker and Star explore the "underlying architecture of apartheid,"
noting that "over 100,000 people made formal appeals concerning their
race classification; most were denied." They also explain that while
"child abuse" surely existed before the 20th century, you couldn't
tell from the literature because "that category per se did not exist."
The very creation of the category made it more socially and legally
visible. Bowker and Star also discuss the problems that occur when
things don't fit into an existing category ("monsters") and when they
fit multiple categories ("cyborgs"). They include a quote (Ritvo 1997)
referencing the proliferation of monsters in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, noting "monsters were united not so much by physical deformity
or eccentricity as by their common inability to fit or be fitted into
the category of the ordinary." As we design classification schemes,
are we responsible for our own Frankensteins? Peter Morville, 'The Ethics of Information Architecture' 2000 |
The increasing awareness of the importance of defining categories has given rise to a companies and software which specialises in defining and applying ontologies.
|
Most
large organisations have a serious problem of poor communication.
That problem means that people in the organisation cannot find and
act on critical information at the right time. When that happens,
mistakes are made, and the organisation loses business and money.
A major cause of this communication problem is that organisations
have no consistent way of naming and describing things. As a result,
nobody knows what anything is called or where it should be stored.
The organisation is a landscape without a map. Enterprise portals
don't work, and intranets and web sites are unnavigable. |
For more information, see:
Peter Morville, 'Software for Information Architects' for discussion of software-assisted taxonomy generation
Lars Marius Garshol, 'What Are Topic Maps?'
Natalya Fridman Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness. 'Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology'
|
|
organise by hierarchy