colon: concerning classification

This is from an old bunch of notes from two years ago, born digital. If they were handwritten I’d remember better where I was going with the ideas in the notes. I'd even remember whether it was windy that day or not. But now I have trouble telling apart my views from the quotes. Is it a quote, did I think that? Which is me which is my reading? Where was it going? It is so long ago that I made them… —did I get there. Obviously not.

It is inspired by the way libraries divide up the world as finding aids: ways to find the books. Wayfinding for readers, now and in the future. As an index the finding aids inform the libraries work, and so also help preserve the library, and thus the library’s work in maintaining our errors and their learnings. A library or museum is primarily motivated by empathy for the future.

Of the world libraries divide

The urge ‘to world’ soon arises or intensifies in activity once risk is noticed or re-assessed. It becomes “world-building” and pauses us to reflect on living, so we step out of the moment into the momentous. The crisis is not only born it becomes continual, a structure of classes, categories ontological. We create the known among us, as if we know what we are doing.

And this is as it should be, to step forth to err, to learn, to re-appraise, to pass on, to nurture, pay it forward.

A big part of this is the emphasis we place on classifying ‘things’ in order to get a handle on it all. We over-extend these groupings into structures thinking them natural, especially once the power of our notice discerns their success.

The first categories arose as stages of life made as virtues, the child, the mother, the relatives. The jesus, the madonna, the heavenly host. When there were enough relatives to form a band, and bands of bands into tribes, we ‘thinged’ gender out of our bones, and put the life cycle to one side.

Sometimes we skinned our groups, sometimes we animated non-animal life, gendering pronouns such that language may contains nuts and this is not always avoided. Any difference can be discerned, all discernment can be cast into classes, and caste-hardened into layered cakes that only some of you can have.

We world badly when we attempt to negotiate that our preferences are the most natural, when we have made it all up, it is natural and thus cannot be negotiated. How lazy we are in our intensifications… Dogma prevents mistakes, prevents learning, without learning there is no wisdom, no reason, no love.

libraries and their many divisionings: poetry precedes poetics

Colon classification (CC) is a library catalogue system developed by Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan. It was an early faceted (or analytico-synthetic) classification system. The first edition of colon classification was published in 1933,[1] followed by six more editions. It is especially used in libraries in India. [wikipedia]

Prior to Ranganathan, classification design was considered as an intuitive field, the domain of a few inspired geniuses. This is quite obvious from the work of Melvil Dewey (1851-1931), C.A. Cutter (1837-1903), and J.D. Brown (1862-1914). H.E. Bliss (1870-1955), who was singularly dedicated to classification studies, did base his Bibliographic Classification (1944-1953) on some concretely formulated principles which Ranganathan viewed as static theory. The first edition of CC was mostly based on intuition and unstated principles. Later he justified this approach by his belief that in the real world a practice precedes its theory: poetry emerged much earlier than poetics (Satija 1992, 87-88). To elaborate in his own words:
"Design work of any kind has to draw largely from intuition unmediated as far as possible by the intellect or by rules framed by intellect. In its general makeup, a scheme of library classification will have to come out whole as an egg from the intuition of a classificationist of the creative variety. The intellectual classificationist can only polish it with the aid of a theory germane to it (Ranganathan 1961, 79-80)."
[From isko.org]

I guess this is a type of grounded theory.

Anyways, the call numbers, the code put on a book's spine to label its place on a shelf relative to other books, in Colon Classification look like this:

L,45;421:6;253:f.44'N5

It's call 'colon' because it divides up the facets of the world with punctuation according to their personality, as you can see. Decoded the example is:

Medicine,Lungs;Tuberculosis:Treatment;X-ray:Research.India'1950

To get a better understanding of this intellectual process check out the relevant links (above and via [wikipedia) and then do some homework and try and divide the world up into your own system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_classification for other examples besides the best known: Dewey and Library of Congress.

It's way complex because your endeavours will interfere with the goal, even without any meta workings. You know the world but do you know you knowings? I.E. "poetry precedes poetics".

In Dewey decimal systems the example would be something like:

616.246 [plus some other bits for the remaining Treatment;X-ray:Research.India'1950]

Libraries divide up the world in order to find that book again once it is put on a shelf. This is why despite it's many failings Dewey systems survive a culturally litigious age. It is familiar and comforting.

These systems are necessary because all the world's books no longer fit into a large trunk that you can move on a donkey-pulled cart and you remember every title and where you bought it, and what the weather was like that day. Your granddaughter is less likely to know that, even if you told them. Your granddaughter's son-in-law's fifth cousin twice removed even less so.

"It was windy?" they say, bewildered.

"Yeah, remember that or the bogeyman will getcha," you reply.

Remember for libraries these divisions are finding aids, not commandments. Still scary I guess.

But all divisions of the world are about structuring experience as information from a point-of-view and so conflict with each other (get meshed up). Dogmatic types love this because they can get on their high horses. Any excuse to rile and rule.

Recently we tend to call these divisions of experience ontologies rather than (social) categories or classifications, the focus is on their hard construction, not their blinkering confoundational influence. I find this really annoying but I am showing my age, dear granddaughter's son-in-law's fifth cousin twice removed.

Finale

Whether a social division or construction or deconstruction of the world as knowledge is useful or valid, based in grammar or more familial relations, it all used to be meshed by inter-group survival, which is what it is all about. It's variety of expression, and even any truth or knowledge, were secondary and contingent outcomes: happy accidents we romantically call ancient wisdoms or laws, but were often interfered with by the process of politics in which our worldly divisions are negotiated. You can call this history but often it is just one damn unpoliced narcissist after another.

What's important to my argument is that we recover from these episodes and continue to urge ourselves to world, despite the chaos of dogmatic worldbuilding which often arises in the same breath which the narcissist calls honour or devotion or loyalty.

Crossposted at substack.com