When teaching and writing about the classification of documents ('bibliographic classification'), I try to remember to make the point that document classifications very often draw from, and less often contribute to, more general classifications and taxonomies of knowledge, and of entities in the physical world. So it is worth keeping an eye on classification in… Continue reading Changing classifications
Category: information behaviour, literacy, organisation
Google’s Global Media Literacy Summit
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to attend Google's Global Media Literacy Summit for 2019, in the shiny new surroundings the of Google's London headquarters at King's Cross. Introducing the day, Ramya Raghavan, head of civics and news outreach at Google, made a point that I often try to emphasise: that our… Continue reading Google’s Global Media Literacy Summit
Supporting truth and promoting understanding: knowledge organization and the curation of the infosphere
This is an updated text of a keynote address given at the Fifteenth International ISKO Conference, Porto, 9th July 2018. A brief account of the conference is given in an earlier blog post. Supporting truth and promoting understanding: knowledge organization and the curation of the infosphere David Bawden and Lyn Robinson Abstract This paper considers… Continue reading Supporting truth and promoting understanding: knowledge organization and the curation of the infosphere
Knowledge Organization at Porto; ISKO 2018
The 15th International Conference of the International Society for Knowledge Organization took place in in the beautiful Portuguese city of Porto in July 2018. ISKO is the main academic association for those interested in classification, taxonomy, ontology and related topics, and as always attracted a good audience from around the world, though with an understandable… Continue reading Knowledge Organization at Porto; ISKO 2018
Into the infosphere: theory, literacy and education for new forms of document
This is a slightly revised version of a chapter contributed by myself and Lyn Robinson to a Festschrift in honour of our colleague Professor Tatjana Aparac-Jelušić, of the University of Zadar in Croatia. We came to know Tatjana particularly through the LIDA conferences, of which she has been the inspiration and main organiser, through her… Continue reading Into the infosphere: theory, literacy and education for new forms of document
“A point along a line”: the future of knowledge organization
This is a slightly amended copy of a letter published in a special issue of 'Knowledge Organization' (issue 3 of volume 43, 2016), devoted to developments in thesauri and other formal vocabularies. The editors of the issue kindly invited me to speculate on how research in knowledge organisation should develop, and it also gave me… Continue reading “A point along a line”: the future of knowledge organization
CoLIS 9 Uppsala
The latest in the series of CoLIS (Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conferences was held at the University of Uppsala at the end of June, following on from CoLIS 7 in London in 2010, and CoLIS 8 in Copenhagen in 2013. This is, I think, my favourite conference from the viewpoint of getting new… Continue reading CoLIS 9 Uppsala
i3 in the Grey City
i3 – Information: interactions and impact – is a conference held at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen every two years. This year’s conference was held in late June, the fifth in the series, and the first I’d had a chance to go to. Located in the Aberdeen Business School, the conference venue gave a chance… Continue reading i3 in the Grey City
ECIL 2014
In late October, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL2014) in Dubrovnik, Croatia, to give a keynote talk. Those who have visited Dubrovnik (or watched Game of Thrones) will know how beautiful it is; others can find out here. This is the second ECIL conference, the… Continue reading ECIL 2014
Applying logic, organising information
Regular readers, if such there be, of this blog will know that one the recurring themes is my interest in theories and formalisms for the information sciences, particularly those derived from other disciplines. Formal logic, stemming from philosophy is one of these, and a recent book by Martin Frické gives a new slant on the… Continue reading Applying logic, organising information
The Occasional Informationist 