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.

Linguistic Relativity

At our last class meeting for 802, I had some people approach me after class to further discuss the at times controversial subject of linguistic relativity. The theory of linguistic relativity, which is tied to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, is the idea that an individual's linguistic, cultural, and life experience background can hold some bearing on his/her way of thinking. In a determinist approach, a theorist might say that the majority of an individual's thought patterns and eventual decisions are based on this linguistic and cultural background. In the more common theory of linguistic relativity takes a weaker stance that while these things may have some influence on some situations, they by far will not determine an individual's general cognition.

For example, a lot of papers on this topic deal with issues of tangible senses across languages. Did you know that is some languages, there are only two colors--dark and light. There are no words for red, green, purple, blue, etc. Would that affect the way a person views the world?

Some papers deal with the way languages describe space and a person's location in it. In English, we have the small-scale ideas of items being relativistically located to one's right or left, but the big scale ideas of buildings being located to the north, south, east or west. However, some languages lack one or the other--everything is described in either relative terms (i.e., right, left, in front of, behind, etc.) or definite terms (i.e. north of, south of, east of, west of). Would that affect the way a person constructs a mental model or metaphor of the world?

In English, the typical metaphor for time is that we move forward through it, boldly going where no man has gone before. So when we look ahead, we are looking into the future. In some Native American languages, the metaphor could go something like this: a person is standing in a river facing downstream. The future is upstream--this makes sense when you consider that the future is unknown until it comes to pass. In these languages, the metaphors make reference to the future being behind a person, where it cannot be seen, whereas the past is in front and seen, and ever moving away. How would that affect those mental models?

Before you say how weird those languages must be, please know that English is actually the weird one out in terms of world languages. Most languages don't have as many words for color as English does. And most languages describe things in definite terms. So please remember to take a step outside the belief that English is "normal" or "easy" before reading any of these papers--English is really pretty exotic on several fronts as languages go.

For further reading, I highly recommend starting with the overview of linguistic relativity presented on wikipedia: Linguistic Relativity.

For further reading, these are the articles that most of my teachers taught in class during my undergraduate career. A lot of them are very popular, and there is a lot on the topic posted on the web, so I suggest anyone that's interested pokes around some:

BERLIN, BRENT & PAUL KAY (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

GUMPERZ, JOHN, & STEPHEN LEVINSON EDS. (1996). Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

KAY, PAUL & CHAD K. MCDANIEL (1978). "The Linguistic Significance of Meanings of Basic Color Terms.". Language 54: 610-646.

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

LEVINSON, STEPHEN C. (1996). "Language and Space". Annual review of Anthropology 25: 353-82.

LUCY, JOHN A. (1992a). Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LUCY, JOHN A. (1992b). Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MALOTKI, EKKEHART (1983). Werner Winter. ed. "Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language". Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers) 20.

PULLUM, GEOFFREY (1991). The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language. Chicaco University Press. http://users.utu.fi/freder/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf.

WHORF, BENJAMIN (1956). John B. Carroll (ed.). ed. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press.

More Sites, terms, and Texts

From today's class:


New Text:

Krug, S. (2005). Don't make me think: a common sense approach to web usability. 2nd edition. New Riders Press.

isbn: 0321344758


New Tech Sites:

camptasia: screen recording software.

google docs: online document sharing.

microsoft surface: the desk computer with touch screen usability.

gliffy: a free diagramming (wire framming) online tool.

zoho: free online web applications (i.e. word processor, presentation tools, document management, etc.)

duvaga: media management system.


New terms:

mashup: the combination of new technologies into new services.

web service: info that's created elsewhere and brought into a web application (like a site that displays local weather via a widget they don't manage in house).

waterfall (project management): the "one step to the next" approach; leaves the majority of testing until the end.

agile (project management): the "all at once" approach; testing and communication are contsant and back and forth

cowboy (project management): the "my way, or the highway" approach; one person dominates, thinks they know everything, and demands things happen their way

streaming (video & audio): streaming media is being constantly received by the user, as opposed to a download that must be completely downloaded to the user before viewing.

metadata: quite literally data about data. For example, consider a collection of books as data; the metadata would be the things in the catalog (like titles, authors, isbns, number of words, etc.). For a group of people, metadata could be names, ages, heights, etc. For a collection of online sites, metadata could be number of visits per day, number of links, average frequency of update, etc.

It occurs to me that these lists of texts, sites, and terms should probably be compiled into single pages; I'm going to try to establish some static pages to display this information. (Or, if you happen to be currently enrolled in my class, find the online glossary of terms on Blackboard.)

Another Great Book

Morville, P. (2005). Ambient findability: what we find changes who we become. O'Reilly Media, Inc.

isbn 0-596-00765-5
(it has a lemur on the front)

Welcome, All!

Welcome, all! This is my blog for school this semester.

Please enjoy my graduation countdown featured on the right, and the Impossible Quiz, which has been set at the bottom of this page. Kudos to Pyzam and Widgetbox for these excellent features and the layout.

On the first day of class we covered the syllabus, and the professor passed around a fantastic programming text:

Segaran, T. (2007). Programming collective intelligence: building smart web 2.0 applications. O'Reilly Media, Inc.

isbn-13:978-0-596-52932-1
(it has penguins on the front)

The book covers several algorithms and programming strategies used on modern sites to compute probabilities of the "Find It" factor.