Grocery Stores and the Dewey Decimal System

Ah, crossover. This represents one of the many times thus far that I have had a reading assigned for one of my MA programs that I have already read for the other.

This one was assigned for LI804, but I read it (many times) during my linguistic undergrad studies:

LAKOFF, GEORGE (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things. University Of Chicago Press.

What does this matter to grocery stores and DDS?--It demonstrates the principle that one's cultural or individual background can have a large influence on the way classification systems are created and perceived. As talked about before in my post on Linguistic Relativity, people divide up the world in many interesting ways.

Grocery stores are masters in the art of classification and seeking behaviors, which is the reason they know that when you find your target quickly you spend less time in the store. And the more time you spend in the store, the more you are apt to buy. But no one will shop a "disorganized" grocery store, so they have to keep things organized while at the same time keeping people in the store longer.

This is the reason things like milk and eggs, which people always run in to get when they notice they're out, are at the back of the store. It's so a customer has to pass through aisles of food before they get to the target and then back, hoping they pick up another item or two on the way.

Melvil Dewey. What an interesting guy--one of many to attempt reform of the English language with regards to spelling, among other OCD organizational tasks. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page on Melvil Dewey. (And for the record, there are no spelling rules in English. Absolutely none. Zero sound to letter combination correspondance. It's amazing anyone ever learns to read and write in English given that the history of the language means there are no phonological-spelling rules. Check out my favorite poem demonstrating this here.)

Now, the DDS. I've never been a DDS fan. It's not user centered, and by and large, library subjects and media (I feel) have outgrown it. I never learned DDS until I started my MA in Library and Information Management Science; without the headers on the end of the aisles that listed subject matter I would have been lost in a library. For me, it's bookstore model all the way. In my dream world the computer system will also help a person find things on the shelve by providing exact directions (maybe a map) to the location of the book.