LIS 4701 Information Representation
Week 6 Form, content, and intellectual attributes
Administrivia:
Papers for A1 are due right now!
Papers for A2 are due a week from Thursday ... but then we're all caught
up! :-)
What did you read for this week?
O'Connor, Brian. (1986). “Considerations of representation.” Chapter 2
in his Explorations in indexing and abstracting: Pointing, virtue, and
power. pp. 19-34. (eBook available via netLibrary)
And what is our topic for this week?
Form, content, and intellectual attributes.
Recall: surrogation (creating representations that are physically or informationally
smaller; distillations)
Recall: aggregation (creating meaningful groups of items based on one or
more aspect from the surrogate)
Recall: aggregation lab
Okay, so now this week, when we talk about considerations of representation
and form, content, and intellectual attributes, we are discussing in more
detail how to create good surrogates -- surrogates that can be used meaningfully
to create useful aggregates.
In fact, that's how the O'connor chapter starts: by reminding us that "Most
methods of retrieving documents depend on some form of representation of
the collection documents" (p. 19). When you "retrieve" information items,
you are usually looking for a set of items, or an aggregate (though sometimes
you are looking for only one item, and in that case you are just using
the one surrogate as a path to get you to the whole item). Good surrogate
representations of the items (what O'Connor calls documents) are what let
you make good aggregates.
Form: physical form of an item; can also be "intellectual" form such as
the genre
Content: the information actually contained in the item
Intellectual attributes: further attributes that were not included in the
form or the content, that you would need if you were going to identify
the item, refer to the item, or locate the item again.
But ...
O'Connor: direct extraction of information; isomorphic representation (amazon.com
does this); indexical representation (using the direction of a weather
vane to tell you the direction of the wind)
O'Connor: signs without code (p. 31): e.g., blissymbols :-)
O'Connor: (p. 32) attributes may be Diachronic—those that remain the same
across time; or Synchronic—those that may change with time and place.