Processing Post: Ordering Media’s “Innmerable Species”

One of the themes that came up in many of the readings for this week is the effect that grouping things together have on the way they are read and understood. Perec, in Think/Classify subverts the power in creating classes both in the text itself and in the way it is organized. With every cluster of words or division of ideas that he makes (quite brilliantly, I would say), he positions the reader in a different place along with a different perspective. Roy Boyne calls this strategy “Fantasies of alternative ordering of things”. We see how the class defines the object. It is funny to think about only some (alternative) orderings as fantasy, as if any single system of ordering can truly represent reality on its own. We see the problems with this assumption over and over in the Dewey “Dui” decimal system, as well as other traditional ways of organizing information. In any case Perec demonstrates the way in which classes produce knowledge, as theorized before by Levi-Strauss. Perec is more fun to read though.

Boyne, as part of his genealogy of classification, reminds us that Plato said that discovering what something is could be a function of its connections to other things, not necessarily its internal qualities. The records we create as well as the way we define ourselves are connected to many communities today both offline and online. Every classification offers a narrow idea of what a thing really is. David Weinberger, in the moments between talking about Paris Hilton, starts his talk by saying that physical objects can only be in one place at one time, while digital records are not limited in the same way. He then continues and makes his argument about crowd sourcing the organization of information and having multiple ways of doing so simultaneously. He forgets to mention that Wikipedia is authored and edited by many bots, that using tags doesn’t come naturally to many people, and the issues with always including and never deleting data (servers and their maintenance required a lot of power). Despite al of this he makes some very good points. His talk also made me think about the contemporary library and what it could be.

Libraries have multiple copies of the same manifestation of a work (to use FRBR terms). Can’t different copies be placed on different shelves? Despite the limitations, tags, or Ranganathan’s facets can still be possible in the physical world to a certain degree. I realize, however, that this effort might be futile. I still think that the librarian, as a person who can guide and give advice for research, is unique and valuable to the library as a physical location and the people who visit it. Human presence and interaction is something that will be very hard to replace. I just found out from friends about projects that take this idea even further. Human Library is model that uses the library as a framework for dialogue and exchange of knowledge between people instead of one person interacting with printed books. Fanny de Chaillé’s The Library is a very similar project.