UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

School of Information Resources &
Library Science

IRLS 501
Knowledge Structures I
Fall 1998

Description - Texts - Schedule - Requirements - Register - Links

Instructor: Don Fallis
Telephone: 520-621-5223
E-mail: fallis@u.arizona.edu

DESCRIPTION:

How do you go about designing an information retrieval system? In other words, when you have a bunch of documents, how do you organize them so that someone can find the particular document(s) that they are looking for? The simple answer is that you put the documents in order and/or you put the documents into categories. But of course, as usual, the devil is in the details.

Whenever you have a collection of stuff that is so large that it is not feasible to sort through the entire collection when you want to retrieve an item, you have to organize the stuff. In particular, you have to put the items in order and/or you have to put the items into categories. Consider your local supermarket or department store.

In fact, it turns out that most of the rules for organizing documents are going to be the same as the rules for organizing any other large collection of stuff. So even though we are information professionals and we want to know how to organize information, we can go a long way toward achieving that goal by learning how to organize stuff in general. That is what we will focus on in this course.

TEXTS:

(For information about ordering the textbooks and class notes, click here.)

  • Hunter, Eric J. 1988. Classification Made Simple. Aldershot: Gower.
  • Mann, Thomas. 1993. Library Research Models: A Guide to Cataloging, Classification, and Computers. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Class Notes for IRLS 501.

    • SCHEDULE:

    1. Online retrieval systems vs. card catalogs

  • Stoll, Clifford. 1995. Pp. 174-216 in Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, New York: Doubleday.

    • 2. What exactly is our goal?

  • Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores. 1987. Pp. 36-37, 164-67 in Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
  • Goldman, William. 1974. Pp. 138-42 in The Princess Bride, New York: Ballantine Books (of course, my recommendation is that you rent the movie and watch the battle of wits between Vizzini and the Dread Pirate Roberts).

    • 3. Cataloging (several lectures)

    4. How did we get here?

  • Foskett, D. J. 1968. "Some Historical Aspects of the Classification of Knowledge." The Classification Society Bulletin 1(4):2-11.

    • 5. Isn't it all just categorization?

    6. How to categorize stuff

  • Borges, Jorge L. 1981. "The Analytic Language of John Wilkins." Pp. 141-43 in Borges: A Reader, eds. Emir R. Monegal and Alastair Reid. New York: E. P. Dutton.
  • Kelley, David. 1988. Pp. 11-25 in The Art of Reasoning, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

    • 7. How to pick the categories

  • Aristotle. On The Parts Of Animals, Book I, Sections 2-4, trans. William Ogle. gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/02/39/17.
  • Lambert, Karel and Peter Simons. 1994. "Characterizing and Classifying: Explicating a Biological Distinction." The Monist 77(3):315-28 (you can skip the formal systems on pp. 319-26).

    • 8. Faceted classification vs. enumerative classification

  • Hunter, Eric J. 1988. Classification Made Simple. Aldershot: Gower.

    • 9. Some other ways to organize stuff (several lectures)

    10. How to solve a coordination problem

  • Lewis, David. 1969. Pp. 5-51, 122-30 in Convention: A Philosophical Study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (you can skip the proof on pp. 17-19).
  • Nozick, Robert. 1993. Pp. 3-12 in The Nature of Rationality, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Devlin, Keith. 1997. "Verbal Tangos." Pp. 208-39 in Goodbye, Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind, New York: John Wiley and Sons.

    • 11. How people naturally categorize stuff

  • Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. "Principles of Classification." Pp. 27-48 in Cognition and Categorization, eds. Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  • Young, Jeffrey R. 1997. "New Metaphors for Organizing Data Could Change the Nature of Computers." The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 4):A19-A20.

    • REQUIREMENTS:

    Group Presentation 30%
    Organization Project 30%
    Midterm 20%
    Short Assignments 20%

    FURTHER INFORMATION:

    This syllabus is subject to addition and modification during the course of the semester.

    This class will have a listserv: IRLS501@listserv.arizona.edu. Please subscribe (see Subscription Information for instructions). Information about your login name and password will be distributed via the listserv just prior to the first week of classes.

    LINKS:

    Home Page for IRLS 501

    Prisoner's Dilemma Simulation

    Code of Academic Integrity

    Fall Registration Information

    SIRLS Computer Requirements

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    This document was last updated on August 24, 1998.
    http://www.sir.arizona.edu/fl98/501/