L9. Categories
What is meaning? Where is meaning? We impose meaning on the world by
"carving it up" into concepts and categories. We interact daily with a
bewildering variety of objects and information types, and we constantly
make choices about how to understand and organize them. The conceptual
and category boundaries we impose treat some things or instances as
equivalent and others as different. Sometimes we do this implicitly and
sometimes we do it explicitly. We do this as members of a culture and
language community, as individuals, and as members of organizations or
institutions. The mechanisms and outcomes of our categorization efforts
differ across these contexts. In most cases the resulting categories
are messier than our information systems and applications would like,
and understanding why and what to do about it are essential skills for
information professionals.