Since Gilligan (1982) established the theory of moral development, feminist psychologists have provided some interesting analysis to show, not whether morality is essentially gendered, but rather, how morality can be invoked to warrant gendered complaints (Muntigl and Turnbull, 1998). For example Stokoe (2003) demonstrated, from interview transcripts of neighbour’s disputes, how female categories such as ‘mothers, ‘single women’ and ‘sluts’ were made relevant (both explicitly and implicitly) in order to judge each other’s moral behaviour (Stokoe, 2003:320). In the following extract from The Sunday Mail’s exclusive interview with the dismissed Yeoman, I will suggest that much of the Yeoman’s warrant for unfair dismissal rests on invoking his former female colleagues status as a ‘single woman’. Consider the following extract in which the Beefeater describes the appointment of the first female Yeoman.

‘What concerned me most, and what caused apprehension and shock among the wives of the Beefeaters, was that she was single.…I have seen a lot of very good friends’ marriages go down the pan in the Army, not because they have done anything, but because other people perceive they have done something…It is not difficult to see the potential for trouble in employing a single woman. Naturally there was some ribald speculation as to what she might look like and whether she would wear high heels with her scarlet tunic’.

In this extract the Beefeater constructs an interpretative frame within which to interpret her appointment. Notice that he deploys the category ‘single woman’. Such a categorisation carries with it a host of inferences that can be traded on, and made available, as a stock of common-sense knowledge about ‘single women’ e.g. being sexually available. However, this alone is not sufficient to provide an immoral account of her. One way in which this can be achieved is by implying that certain types of ‘single women’ are immoral based on their activities (Wowk, 1984). Since gender relations are managed by the norms of monogamy, women (but not men) who are perceived to be a threat to this rule can be held morally accountable. Although the Beefeater does not explicitly state that she was ‘sexually overt’, she is positioned as such through speculation of ‘whether she would wear high heels with her scarlet tunic’ and as a potential cause marital problems for male colleagues. In this way then, the female Yeoman’s ‘single woman’ status is linked to immorality.

Beefeater sacked for harassing first female Yeoman tells how her arrival caused ructions at the Tower… and cost him his job

Social Psychology and Discourse

Mothers, Single Women and Sluts: Gender, Morality and Membership Categorization in Neighbour Disputes

Tim over at helloluxx recently linked to the coolest little app I have seen for a while! It is aptly named Wordle and is just exquisite in its simplicity! All you do is type in any link, and Wordle will generate an awesome (and customisable) word cloud for you. For example, I put in The Fight Sequence, and this is what it came up with:

Pretty cool right??I like how ‘really’ is the biggest word.. I’ll be checking that I don’t overuse that word in the future!

Anyway, hit Wordle up at wordle.net and have some fun!!

‘Gun crime rockets in the region‘ screams the East Anglian Daily Times. And in Lancashire and Nottingham. And all points in between. Home Office data ‘released to the Conservative Party through Parliamentary answers’ appears to show increases in gun crime in many police forces from 1998/9 to 2007/8. And more than a few media outlets regurgitated the data and their sub-editors (subbies) thought up suitably melodramatic headlines. But wait a minute…

The eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that several of those stories (there are many more) also report that the Home Office attempted to remind anyone who would listen (some of the hacks but clearly not the subbies) that the data they had provided to the Conservatives had one major caveat: the categorisation method changed between 2001/2 and 2002/3. So you can’t compare 1998/9 with 2007/8 at all. How inconvenient.

“It’s deliberate” you rant.

You might think that, we couldn’t possibly comment. But nonetheless the comparison cannot be made. And if you use the data from 2002/3 -> 2007/8 then the overall numbers come down (with regional variations of course) as you can see for yourselves in the table on the last page. The table on the penultimate page gives the breakdown by type of firearm (including air weapons). Oh what a lovely mess.

And even if the comparison could be made, the ‘rocketing’ rates for East Anglia were:

• Cambridge: 35 (1998/9) to 30 (2007/8) – 14% DOWN
• Norfolk: 34 to 43 – an increase of 26% (some rocket that)
• Suffolk: 15  to 38  – 153% (hardly a big rocket)
• Essex: 47 to 260 – 453% (OK, now that’s more like it!)

With these numbers in mind let us remind you, dear readers of something you already knew. When you quadruple a very small number you still only have a very small number.

Let us imagine you have 100 apples on your tree. You pick 1 bad apple. You pick another 3. You have quadrupled the number of bad apples you have found. But you still only have 4 bad apples. 4% of all the apples on your tree. And yet your bad apple stock has ‘rocketed’ by a whopping 300%.

‘Bad apples rocket‘ say fungicide manufacturers

‘96% of our apples are perfect‘ say supermarket

You can take your choice, but beware people who report % change for small numbers, always read more than the headline and always make sure you are comparing apples with apples.

The principle of arbitrariness in language assumes that there is no intrinsic relationship between linguistic signs and their referents. However, a growing body of sound-symbolism research suggests the existence of some naturally-biased mappings between phonological properties of labels and perceptual properties of their referents (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006). We present new behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for the psychological reality of sound-symbolism. In a categorisation task that captures the processes involved in natural language interpretation, participants were faster to identify novel objects when label–object mappings were sound-symbolic than when they were not. Moreover, early negative EEG-waveforms indicated a sensitivity to sound-symbolic label–object associations (within 200 ms of object presentation), highlighting the non-arbitrary relation between the objects and the labels used to name them. This sensitivity to sound-symbolic label–object associations may reflect a more general process of auditory–visual feature integration where properties of auditory stimuli facilitate a mapping to specific visual features.

from

First tasting of the course.

Each lesson we are tasting six wines. Having done lesson two I think the tastings will tie in with the grapes and regions covered. Lesson one we got a grab bag of diverse weights and characteristics to illustrate some of criteria of the Systematic Approach. http://wsetglobal.com/documents/ic_sat_22.06.09.pdf

We were asked to put down what we thought. As our first tasting we had little to gauge our findings against. I shall be writing my results in italics where they differ from the rest of the group, or are simply way off the mark. I’m going to put the ‘real’ results in Roman. Alun, our tutor, gently coaxed us back to reviewing what we had written initially once we had a few tastings done. ‘Have another sniff of the first one.’ Light – Medium – Pronounced means little without experience of each.  A group vote showed what most of us had arrived at, then a comparison with the textbook answer. This hands on, eyes, nose and mouth on, part of the course is really, really good fun.

I’ll put the results from each tasting into the same format as our class notes. Without repeating parrot fashion from the course book, I’m going to run through how we get to the results.

Read the bottle. Seems obvious, but until lesson two I’d no idea how to really understand German wine categorization. Each tasted wine I’ll roll off what I’ve discovered about what the words on the label mean. There are initials and terminology to de-code, numbers and dates to consider. It’s all beautifully paraphrased here http://www.wine-searcher.com/wine-label-eu.htm

This will tell you what to expect, or at worst hope, to find in the bottle. Also another number to consider, in lesson one this was done after tasting, the price tag. Not knowing this first time round we were not far off the mark going in blind. Once we’re all more experienced the pricing point will be key. The expectation from this will determine whether it gets poor-acceptable-good-very-good-outstanding at Conclusion stage.

50ml into the ISO.

Look into the glass. That white background important here. Clear or dull, also if any little bubbles, spritz. Look from above to measure the Intensity.

See all the way through = Pale

See to the stem = Medium

Can’t see to the bottom of the bowl = Deep

Tilt the glass to 45° to assess the colour.

Swirl! Glass on the table, round and round, get the wine moving, air through it, aeration.

If it’s stale smelling then it’s off. Many ways it can go wrong here.

Intensity, we’ll learn to measure this with experience.

Aroma Characteristics is where Jilly Goolden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jilly_Goolden got us all laughing some years back. Now we’re learning this actually fairly standardised vocabulary to express our findings.

Into the mouth. Keep it at the tip of the tongue to test for Sweetness, I’m really struggling with this. Then spit, an inebriated palate is a clouded palate.

The second sip is held in the mouth, air drawn in over it. An exhale through the nose then more air drawn in. This slurping sounds fairly ridiculous done anywhere other than a tasting.

Acidity, felt along the sides of the tongue and the amount of saliva stimulated.

Tannin, like in strong tea, coats the teeth and gets a unique tingle.

Body, this is all about the wine’s sensation, rather than a sensory reaction.

Flavour Characteristics, we’re going poetic again like the Aroma Characteristics.

Spit

Length, what lingers on.

We are all were repeating this to try and pick up all these fine points of tasting.

Conclusions, sum it up very succinctly.

So this is the how, next few posts are the wines we tasted.

This Youtube clip explores one of the emerging technologies allowing for one to maintain their own personal digital archive. This modern software illustrates how much easier the classification and management of digital objects has become as one can arrange their files into seperate folders with annotations, while also offering technology to restore and enhance objects for future years. This clip epitomises how usability plays a central role in the design process of emerging ICTs, reinforcing discussion by Kling, Rosenbaum and Sawyer that people are now expecting for this software to be both flexible and usable (2005, p.37). It seems that this usability has made the collection and categorisation of material a much more widespread practice, even if the individuals are not intending to maintain an “archive of memories”, their use of modern ICTs is allowing them to do so.

It is well known that languages differ in how they encode motion. Languages such as English use verbs that communicate the manner of motion (e.g., slide, skip), while languages such as Greek regularly encode motion paths in verbs (e.g., enter, ascend). Here we ask how such cross-linguistic encoding patterns interface with event cognition by comparing labelling and categorisation preferences for motion events by English- and Greek-speaking adults and 5-year-olds. Our studies show that, despite cross-linguistic encoding differences, the categorisation of dynamically unfolding motion events proceeds in identical ways in members of these two linguistic communities. Nevertheless, language-congruent categorisation preferences emerge in tasks that implicitly encourage the use of linguistic stimuli during event apprehension. These data have implications for the relationship between language and event categorisation.

from Language and Cognitive Processes

Mr. Stupid Developer never ceases to constantly wow me with his intelligence.

“How do you display 11 thousand search results??”

FUCKKKK. “Paginationnnn?!”

“That’s like hundreds of pages even with a hundred results on 1 page..”

This is donkey stupid beyond anything I’ve met before – is this for real??? “Have you used Google before – have you seen how they do pagination – next 10, next 20, etc???”

“That is still so many….”

???? FUCK??? “Well yeah, if you search a generic term you will get lots of search results….”

“That doesn’t address the issue if the user is searching for a laptop starting with ‘A’ and it brings back 11 thousand matching results.”

FUCKKKKKK I don’t know how an idiot’s brain works, obviously he does.. because I’m not sure the majority of the people looking for laptops search so generically ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, etc. Unless the majority are fucking idiots. But still… pagination…… fuck.

I give up. I expect more from a 25 years old man; who apparently, has completed a degree as well.

I later found the issue behind the question. This client has a wide range of products, and his products have brand names under big umbrella brand names.. and his site wasn’t built with proper categorisation for the brands, sub brands, etc. Mr. Stupid Developer gave a quote and solution to move the site to a dedicated server (because 11 thousand search results is very memory consuming(!!!)) and also quoted extra costs to rebuild the categorisation.

FUCK. It made me feel sick. I would raise hell if I were the client. First of all, what fucking SQL queries are you writing which breaks the site when bringing back only 11 thousand search results – so what’s this about moving to a dedicated server for that?! Fuck. Secondly, why am I going to pay a few thousand extra for you to sort out your fucking shit because you were the system architect and you should have built it properly in the first place.

Stupidity overload. I’m out.

Piers Morgan’s recent article (and other media commentary) regarding ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ phenomenon Susan Boyle tells us something about the use of categories and the terms and their deployment. The reaction from the panel and the audience to her dream of becoming a professional singer like Elaine Page was ‘hilarity’, ‘eye-rolling’ and ‘loud guffaws’. Why was that? The answer Piers gives is that she was ‘middle-aged’, ‘feisty’ and a ‘funny lady’.

Categories carry huge amounts of culturally rich common-sense knowledge. If a category is applied to, or if a person applies it to himself or herself, that person is presumed to embody the social knowledge about that category and have the appropriate category-bounded attributes. If not, that person is seen to be an exception, different, or even a phoney. Presumably then, the category predicates that Piers provides ‘middle-aged’, ‘feisty’ and a ‘funny lady’ did not match the category-bounded attributes associated with the famous singer for which she dreamed of being. Consequently the panel and the audience surmised she was likely to be a phoney member. As Piers eloquently puts it, ‘We’d committed the oldest sin in the talent- show book  – judging a book by its cover’.

Read the article in the Mail on Sunday

Read more about categorisation

Today was a lovely day for categorising, and a number of trays of artefacts were sorted.

A tray featuring a few of the now-clean finds.

It was also, as it happens, a lovely day for theorising. While participating in the fieldwork and the lab work, the Saint Mary’s students are also working on their own independent research topics on the site, and the library collection at the Parks Canada labs in Halifax is a great resource for those embarking on an academic journey in material culture…

Once you know what you want to write about, that is.

Aaron looks perplexed as he gazes over the library collection, trying to find a promising research topic.

These short research papers are excellent contributions to our knowledge about Grand-Pré, since the students have a chance to investigate a small topic thoroughly, through the artefact collections held by Parks, which have grown considerably over the past nine excavation seasons.

Some of the topics the students are investigating include:

- Why are so many of the wine bottles found at Grand-Pré English-style wine bottles? What does that tell us about trade at Acadie?

- If we create a map of the site which indicates the various find locations of building material from over the years of excavation, can we learn more about where the buildings at Grand-Pré were located?

- What can the provenience and analysis of the relatively intact wine bottle found at the cellar tell us about the house? About the site, in general?

- This season we found three pipes with the makers’ mark visible on them. How do these help establish a context for other artefacts? What can we find out about these pipes?

Cranton cleans a piece of pipe bearing a maker's mark.

- From the features and artefacts found at Grand-Pré, what can we say about religious life in Acadie? What can comparison with other sites tell us about the orientation and/or location of the church?

Other topics are focusing on other types of artefacts including buttons, apothecary jars, and the numismatic (coin) evidence from previous years.

Aaron and Kyle mine past excavation records and catalogue resources.

Really, archaeology is about 10% digging in dirt, 90% digging through paper.

Digging for the truth (assuming Josh Bernstein doesn’t have a trademark on that phrase by now),

Christina

Questions? Comments? Want to know more? Grace us with a comment!

Mary Macken-Horarik uses the Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the infamous “Children overboard” scandal to argue that the “multi modal metalanguage” (p251 of reader) of news items needs new analytical strategies in order to understand the composite nature of visual and lexical texts in relation to public discourse. Rather than seeing both as separate entities on the same page, Macken-Horarik explores ways in which applied linguists can interpret the “socially constitutive” (ibid) nature surrounding the discourses that are used to “re-present” (p252) current affairs and alter our perception of them.
Macken-Horarik first establishes the symbiotic relationship between visual texts and verbal texts. Newspapers use these elements in tandem to “re-present” (ibid) and create the news. Drawing inspiration from linguist Michael Halliday and his development of systemic functional linguistics, Macken-Horarik uses one of the three major “metafunctions” (ibid) from the SFL grammar to explore the depiction and representation of asylum seekers. “Ideational meaning” (ibid), concerns representing the people involved in a text and their actions.
Macken-Horarick furthermore mentions the work of Van Leeuwen (2000) alongside with his essential tools/dimensions of representation (genericisation-specification, categorisation and role allocation). These paradigms are described in detail to aid the reader in the understanding of the choices news reporters and photographers make to create a certain discourse.
Firstly, by referring to the “social actors” (p253) individually or collectively, one can appreciate how distantly describing participants (e.g: boat people) has the potential to be dehumanising. This can also generate a stark contrast of care compared to those who are referred to by exact titles and names (e.g: Immigration Minister, Phillip Ruddock). Images, Macken-Horarik additionally notes, can achieve this same vague/specific referencing effect through photographic techniques and out of focus frames.
However, this cannot be achieved by itself. The second dimension of representation, categorisation, can be identified upon examining how the functions of social actors are described. Functionalism, achieved through nominalisation and the use of compound nouns, seeks to legitamise the antagonism towards asylum seekers by listing official occupations (“naval rescuers etc.) By slotting all boat people into the same category and implying they are all the sort to throw their children overboard, the newsmakers are embedding functionalism inside categorisation. Consider the following example of classifying the participants (the boat people) by their actions (or functions) – “people (categorisation) who treat children in this way (function)…”. (p256)
Newsmakers can additionally use images to reinforce the lexical aspects of texts by the same means – functionalising their favoured social actors by showing them in action rescuing the categorised ‘boat people’, thus creating the socially constitutive nature of discourse created in their texts.
The third aspect of representation, role allocating, is used to depict the activeness of participants to attach “social value” (p256) to these roles. This is achieved by reconfiguring the roles and relations between the participants through the syntactic choices of describing what is done to whom, and by whom. Visual depictions of a sailor rescuing the “children overboard”, are furthermore backed up by descriptive captions, reinforcing the positive versus negative role allocation achieved in the verbiage. Describing the actions of the asylum seekers through terms such as “heading for Australian territory” and “throwing their children into the sea”, contrasts and legitamises public moral outrage as the navy are forced to “rescue”, “save” and “cloth and feed” those whose boat they have “intercepted”. The “people smugglers” are thus assigned the role of “malevolent patients” (p257) who are subject to the “benevolent actions” of the Australia’s emergency services.
Macken-Horarick concludes her argument for the adaptation of textual interpretive strategies by stressing the need to interpret how racial discourse is generated. In a way, the media is using these tools of “genericisation-specification”, “categorisation”, “functionalism” and “negative/positive role allocation” to brainwash the public from a seemingly passive stance. The reporters begin to tell their own version of events by taking actions out of context to serve the editorial stance of a particular news organisation and/or stake-holders. This ensures a certain viewpoint is expressed, however subtly that may be.

Macken-Horarick, M. “The children overboard affair” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 26.2 (2003) 1-16.

In this week reading, Mary Macken Horaik discusses the discourse surrounding the children overboard affair. She addresses the media discourses surrounding asylum seekers and the negative connotations and racial anxiety which are propagated as a result of the media.

Macken-Horaik stresses the media’s role in the creation of such discourses and the multimodal form , specifically the “mutual dependence between stories and photographs”, within the mass media of print which play a detrimental role in determining and fuelling “social attitudes” and attaching “ideological meaning” to particular groups of people, often minorities within society, and certain events.  In this case the Macken-Horaik describes the children overboard affair as the “lightning rod for widespread geopolitical angst about refugees breaching Australia’s vast seaboard…” which created discourses such as ‘illegal refugees’, ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘illegals’ around asylum seekers.

This week Louise Ravelli discussed discourses in relation to meaning, signifier and sign, denoting the relationship between semiotics and discourses. As it was stated in last week’s reading, “the production of meaning is always, first and foremost, a sign of power’’, this is evident in the fact that the liberal party was behind the fictitious claims that children were being thrown overboard as a means of gaining ‘unlawful access’ to Australia. This correlates with the notion that discourses have a social distribution, the power and hierarchical structures which exists within society are evident in discourses such as this.

Furthermore, as stated by Ravelli, discourses “have a history”. It is worthy to take into account the events which surrounded the children overboard affair. The September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in the US sparked an international War on Terror & Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War only helped fuel the discourses around asylum seekers.

Whilst an analysis of the children overboard affair, in terms of generic/specific dimension, categorisation dimension and role allocation dimension, provided me with a more sound understanding around the construction of such media discourses, i felt a loss in faith in the media and an even stronger need to question what is being feed to us as the truth.

Defined as “socially constructed knowledges of some aspect of reality”, when it comes to discourses it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the ‘constructed’ and the ‘real’.

Bibliography

Macken-horaik, M. “the children overboard affair” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 26.2 (2003), 1-16

]]> http://iskouk.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/where-classification-can-make-or-break/ Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:52:36 +0000 bbater http://iskouk.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/where-classification-can-make-or-break/

Ekranoplan

Seemingly simple acts of classification can have enormous consequences.

Last year, James May – a co-presenter with Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear – took a spin in an unusual vehicle developed by the Russians called an Ekranoplan (see the BBC video).

What’s unusual about the Ekranoplan is that it’s a hybrid between a boat and an aircraft, a class of vehicle known as a Ground Effect Vehicle or GEV.

GEVs rely on aerodynamics in combination with the ground effect. ‘Ground’ has to be defined loosely here, because GEVs are mainly confined to water surfaces, these being more consistently flat than most terra firma. That poses a problem for KO: is a GEV to be classified as an aircraft or a boat? Does it matter?

Well, in the scheme of things, it appears that classification can make or break a technology. A previous GEV – the hovercraft – was classified as essentially an aircraft, making it subject to the same stringent regulations applicable to true aircraft. That proved to consign the hovercraft as a public transportation vehicle to the scrap heap (although I made a very comfortable crossing to France on one in the 1980s). Hovercraft are now mainly confined to the domain of hobbyists. But, I suppose we ought to be grateful at least that we don’t need a pilot’s licence to use a hover mower on our lawns.

The Ekranoplan and its ilk on the other hand, have been classified by the International Marine Organization as a ship, and are therefore subject to far less stringent regulations. So hovercraft technology is detained indefinitely whilst other GEVs are released without charge – all through an act of classification.

Thanks to Max Boisot on the Cognitive Edge blog as the source and inspiration for this post.

HubLog: Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation

So the semantic web. It’s been hiding in the corners all along. Integrating itself in so nicely with my everyday websites that I missed it.  I knew there was a post brewing about my realisation that I was utterly wrong in my post about the 2009 Horizon Report saying naively “oh, yeah, I haven’t seen much of this yet” when I got a weird feeling about tagging over the weekend. Was I serious!?!! All I had to do was think of my favourite all time website, eBay to be proven wrong.

I guess I taking the title a bit literally and thinking of closed systems, and not looking around online, hence my use of the term “the semantic web”.

The semantic web is described as “presenting connections between apparently unrelated concepts, individuals, events, or things” in the Horizon Report (p23). Well. Now that it’s clicked, here are just a few places off the top of my head that I’ve seen the semantic web in just the past few days.

eBay: My obsession with mid century furniture (a strange hobby for a someone not yet 30, I admit) started with design books and inevitably spilled onto eBay. Search by key words, both eBay’s suggested search terms and seller’s titles listing what they thought were key words has served a very large part in my education about what and who I do and do not like.

Facebook: It’s always annoyingly suggesting people I may be friends with.  Apparently my other friends know them, and maybe I’d like to as well.

Amazon: suggests things you may like based on previous purchases

Delicious: the tag search function will give you a list of everyone’s related tags

an enterprise wiki being used as an intranet: lo and behold, there is was in big black and white letters on my computer screen today. Yes, search the wiki using tags and it will suggest other terms that may be useful as well.

I have been blind to the semantic web all along, and make good use of it often. So an adoption period of four to five years? I don’t think so. I think it’s already here, and only a matter of time until it goes mainstream in organisations because it means that something can be stored anywhere and not just in one place and still be easily searchable. Melville Dewey would roll over in his grave.

I attended “Semantic Analysis Technology: in Search of Categories, Concepts & Context“, the fourth ISKO UK KOnnecting KOmmunities event on 3 November 2008 at University College London.

First up were presentations from two vendors, Luca Scagliarini and Jeremy Bentley.

Scagliarini argued that information discovery suffers from information overload and information underload due to a lack of meaning-based text processing. Free text search and shallow automatic linguistic analysis did not do the job, but a ‘deep semantic analysis’ based on the analysis of relationships and ‘understanding’ the meaning that is encoded in the relationships between verbs, prepositions and nouns demonstrates potential.

Bentley reviewed key information organisation issues – unstructured information, the doubling of number of resources every 19 months, ‘findability’ problems and and the how black box solutions may not do the job. He discussed the relevance of metadata and taxonomies built specifically to reflect the way an organisation workss.

Later, practitioners presented – Rob Lee and Helen Lippell, Karen Loasby and Silver Oliver.

Lee talked about Muddy Boots, a BBC project to support the BBC’s remit to link to more external sources. Lee illustrated how structured datasets in the public domain could be used to contextualise and index BBC resources and exploit the semantic richness to link to find meaningful external links.

Lippell, Loasby and Oliver discussed three different implementations of auto-categorisation systems, demonstrating advantages and issues with each approach. The approaches were:

• using Verity Intelligent Classifier (VIC) and a taxonomy with a set of rules that could be finely tuned
• applying a rule-based automatic classification system combined with the author’s review and corrections to produce BBC content that could be described in detail. The approach
• a “statistical-based auto-categorisation” project designed to connect and cross-reference distributed BBC content and resources horizontally

Amazon has launched the Amazon Windowshop. Looks quite nice, but a bit like Piclens/Cooliris.

It relies solely on keyboard navigation & dragging the mouse, which I think they should have supplemented with subtle one page navigation.

What is very nice though is the categorisation of the different items, e.g. ‘Best selling games in October’ or ‘New Music today’ which is being highlighted as that column becomes the centre of the page.

What surprises me is that, so far, there is no link back to the main Amazon site, other then the ‘buy now’ button on each individual item, which takes you to the respective page within Amazon, as it should. Should definitely be there.

I’m guessing they’ll include promotions for Amazon Windowsshop on the Amazon home page at a later stage.

All in all it’s a really nice emotionally focused way of browsing for items to buy. You could however say, like my fellow colleague John did, ‘What’s the point?’. Though, personally I quite like it and can see myself using it.

In recent blogs, Gerry McGovern makes arguments close to my way of thinking.

• Choosing the right classification words
  argues for the need to ensure content creators use the words that your audience use rather than corporate/PR/government language. Of course, in many cases the “official” language has to be used, but it’s important to optimise content for the non-official terms that your audience actually uses.
• Obsessed by technology reminds us that technology isn’t the total solution to content management. However good the tools, there needs to be editorial/business input.

“Card sorting finds common patterns in the way different people group information, while affinity diagramming obtains a consensus result.”

From UsabiltyNet

So, I switched off twitterfox and immediately started to feel better/free, then I read a quick Q&A with Helmut Lang in The Sunday Times Style magazine. The following comments resonated:

• I never settled on minimalism – that was attributed to me. I’m completely against categorisation. It doesn’t allow anyone to see or feel what they might be able to experience. It takes away the emotions.
• I don’t separate work and life, which is a blessing. I don’t have to divide my time into something I like more and something I like less.
• I need time to be alone. For me, a waste of time is the most productive time.

Categorisation/compartmentalising

It has been said to me on many an occasion, ‘I am very good at compartmentalising‘ and I tend to reply: ‘Yeah, me too, I’m great at that’. LIE… I am rubbish at that. Everything I experience has an effect on everything else. I am hedonistic in that way. I like to indulge in experience, that sounds potentially rude/disastrous, but I don’t mean it like that. I mean that I love meeting interesting people, talking to them and indulging myself in discovering new things through them – be that worky stuff or social.

It does mean that I can be a complete bore at dinner parties (talking about work) and sometimes at work I go off on a complete tangent – because it interests me and the person I am talking to has an enthusiasm that piques something in me.

I have often felt guilty about this, seen it as a lack of discipline that I respect in others. It has not helped in my attempt to define my online ‘brand’, how I present a professional front whilst retaining the Emma bit that people invest in. But I take comfort from Helmut’s observation that by categorising everything, you take away the emotion – emotion can be good, well lack of it is very definitely bad. So, I am going to stop feeling so guilty and see what happens.

Separating work and life

This is a forever problem for me. I love my work, really love my work. I also happen to love my life – most of the time! I struggle to find the dividing line between the two. I do run my own business and my business is me – as in, I have my own consulting business (but that sounds a bit too wanky).

I happened upon my line of work by doing what I loved, explaining stuff to people in a way that they would ‘get it’ and would feel good about ‘getting it’, not stupid, but informed.

I don’t do this at home, but what I do do at home is what comes naturally to me, being a Mother of two girls aged 11 and 6. This I love, as much as I love my day job. (I know, lucky me).

So, I don’t want to stop one to be the the other and how can I? I can’t stop being Mum and it seems unnatural to me to stop being ‘work me’ when I am home being Mum.

This leads to the scary blurring of lines as explained in my latest post about twitter. And this I need to work on.

Being alone and wasting time

I have always valued being alone. As long as I can remember I have been the ‘geek girl’ the one who sits absorbed in books, ‘living in my own world’ or just alone. I love that time in my own head. Recently I have found my way back to it through running. Living life as a working Mother brings little solitude, at least little solitude without guilt! The perambulatory needs of my dog has created a wonderful opportunity for me to get at least half an hour a day to myself.

Wasting time: now this I do online. It does often seem as if I am wasting time when on here; but I never am. I am either learning or communicating – often both. And this is also important! Again there is the guilt thing. If I am on my computer, I am not doing something else that needs doing, therefore is it a waste of time?

I don’t know, I really don’t and as I write this I begin to feel the edges of guilt creeping in.

So, twitter et al

In this post I have been brutally honest. And I feel as if I am wasting your reading time because I do not yet know the answer to balancing work and life. But I do know that there are no defining lines and I am trying to find my own balance.

I do know that my use of twitter has had a detrimental effect on my own life: for example I started to text my friends and acquaintances as if they were on twitter. Passing on titbits of information that I found fascinating about my life and wanted to share – twitter stylee – regardless of their wish or need to know this information. Wrong! Sorry gang, you know who you are, and actually most of you don’t read my blog.

Somehow a line needs to be drawn, I think it is a very wobbly line, that frees up my ability to keep learning and sharing, but protects my friends from my tendency to over-communicate the stuff I am not sharing at work.

You see, it is not my professional life that I need to protect – that is enhanced by my overt nature and mind that loves to learn and thrives on other people. It is my personal life and my friends who suffer. I need to work on this.

Former and current colleagues speaking at Semantic Analysis Technology: in search of categories, concepts & context, an ISKO UK event at UCL on 3 November 08.

Tales from the trenches of auto-categorisation: three case studies in the implementation of auto-categorisation systems

This session will look at three different implementations of auto-categorisation systems in large media organisations. We will look at common themes that have recurred time and time again. The focus will be on ‘do you really need it?’, managing expectations and tips based on the combined experience of the last 5 years. Helen Lippell, Karen Loasby and Silver Oliver are all Information Architects who have been involved in the management of controlled vocabularies and the systems that are used to automatically apply them..This session will look at three different implementations of auto-categorisation systems in large media organisations. We will look at common themes that have recurred time and time again. The focus will be on ‘do you really need it?’, managing expectations and tips based on the combined experience of the last 5 years. Helen Lippell, Karen Loasby and Silver Oliver are all Information Architects who have been involved in the management of controlled vocabularies and the systems that are used to automatically apply them..

Internet is considered to be the best source of information for people. Still then, people find it difficult to search through the various sites for information on different areas, topics and products. It is here that a single site with all categories will help internet users.

When different authors or writers are researching on varied topics and blog on those topics, users can find complete information they require under a single roof. Categorisation and links will help their browsing much easier and thereby they can reduce time and at the same time, get relevant and quality information they are looking for.

I’ve been blogging for just about a month now.  One of the things I’ve been conscious of recently is the choice I’m faced with (using WordPress) at the end of each post, before I publish; the choice of adding Tags and/or choosing Categories.

So far I have not used Tags at all, but I’ve built up a list of 17 categories I think (and I’ll probably create a new one for this post).  I haven’t introduced any ’structure’ into the categories yet, like broader categories having narrower ‘children’ categories, and I’m not even sure I can do that here.  So I’ve been wondering whether I should be using Tags rather than Categories or using both.

Then I noticed in the July Wrap-Up post on the WordPress Blog that they reported on Tags and Categories created in the month:

You added more tags and categories than ever before: more than 8 thousand tags and 19 thousand categories.

Should I read anything into the fact that there were more than twice as many new Categories as Tags?  Are lots of other people using only Categories and no Tags like me?  Or is there more overlap in Tags than Categories (are those even unique numbers they’re reporting) – I doubt that.  There is a posting on the difference between Tags and Categories in the WordPress FAQ, but I think it boils down to the fact that you can use them as you like.

I’m aware of the distinction between Taxonomy and Folksonomy of course, and I would tend to think of Tags as relating to Folksonomy and Categories as relating to Taxonomy, but in the case of WordPress, it seems that this distinction is not there.  My blog Categories are free-form words and phrases assigned by me and they are an independent list with no particular structure.

So it’s all about how I use them I guess.  I’m going to stick with my Categories rather than Tags and see how it goes.  I’ve added a Category list widget in the right side-bar (the Category cloud seemed cluttered but I may try it again later); maybe that will be useful?  And I’m going to create a new ‘Categorisation’ Category – I think it’s something I’m going to come back to…