i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

This blog would like to explore two different Identification / Organization approaches to explore value in their retrieval results.

I had the chance to see Peter Greenaway, a professor of cinema studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, give a master class at UC Berkeley last week. He spoke about the 'death of cinema' as a way to re-define the word "cinema" not as a story-telling narrative, but as a purely visual experience. He has therefore, spent much of his career categorizing and organizing smaller bits of film to create sequences of visual engagement. From a Solon.com article, they call Greenaway a "cataloguer" where many of his films are concerned with listing and the "reductiveness of ... stripping down, the basic form of organization." This "ephemeral" cataloging and naming approach results in live performances much like a DJ would mix music.

A current article which provides an interesting juxtaposition to Peter Greenaway, is a Google Books article. Google Books has the "ambitious plan to "digitally scan every book in the world" and make them searchable over the Web and in libraries." Both approaches from Greenaway to Google grasp at the concept of the ideal to create huge amounts of metadata for their collections ability to re-use, re-combine, or ask questions to the materials at a later date. Both media systems are being hand categorized, but the value of the identification systems of organizations are being approached differently.

The difference between Greenaway and Google is that Greenaway has a plan and framework to "name" his works, whereas Google did not (and from personally playing with Google Books still doesn't) have a plan or structure to organize their books. Google proposed using "crowdsourcing" and originally created metadata based on using a Book trade subject-matter classification system called BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications). According to the Salon.com Google Books article, "BISAC is just right for a local Barnes and Noble store, but even when it's correctly applied, it's hopeless for a larger collection." This contemporary classification system has cultural assumptions tied into the classification system. For example, BISAC has "20 subcategories for children's books about various animals" but only one category for European Poetry. We will ignore all the mis-categorization of metadata the article brings up, but it illustrates Google that the library science subtlety to organizing information is not emphasized.

The larger questions that come out of juxtaposing these two approaches is how can a collection of material be scaled up, how can the material be easily accessed for reuse, how can you find themes and connections throughout the material, and how much time do you put in the front to get payback at the end. Perhaps this video of a Tulse Luper Vj performance by Peter Greenaway can start showing the time spent upfront can is not a tradeoff, but an opportunity to recall information to produce a creation and why "when you name a thing it becomes yours, you possess it."  In comparing these two approaches, the creative organization that Peter Greenaway uses might be able to be selectively applied to Google Books to provide more gradients for retrieving. 

Works Referenced:

• Peter Greenaway talk You Tube summary.
• Peter Greenway Salon.com article
• Google Books Salon.com article.