Categorizing Knowledge, Danish Style

A friend of mine spent a semester in Denmark and had an interesting experience with the library there. Instead of finding the call numbers online and going to get the books herself (which, as we all know, usually leads to the discovery of any number of other books on the same topic nestled snuggly together on the shelf), she had to submit a request for each individual book she wanted to a staff member who went to get it for her. She couldn't go find the books herself, because they weren't arranged in any way that would help her find them. They were arranged by size.

I had a somewhat similar experience when I lived in Montreal, where the movie stores were almost as difficult to navigate as Danish libraries. The movies were arranged alphabetically, but not by title. According, I suppose, to the whim of the manager, they were ordered either alphabetically according to the last name of the star, director, or producer, so that Indiana Jones, for example, could very easily be shelved under "F", "S", or even "L".

Libraries, and other versions of information repositories are, at least in theory, organized in a way that maximizes user access, and their resources are categorized into different branches of human knowledge.

But I wonder how much information is never found because it has not been categorized in quite the way we think. Today we type in "keywords" to help us find what we are looking for but there are many different ways to categorize human knowledge and many different ways to label things. What one person may find to be the most significant, another may find to be completely irrelevant.

The internet is becoming one giant communal information repository. People can edit entries on Wikipedia and tag images and texts in the way that they feel is best. There is no standard for categorizing information. Even if there was, there is no real way for it to be definitive, which is reflected in the myriad classification schemes used by libraries around the world. Still, I do love traveling through the stacks to find the book that I was looking for and realizing that somehow, the one that I really need, while it didn't come up in my search, is sitting right there.

I guess I would have trouble in Denmark.

To Keep or Not to Keep: Spam and the Culture of "Found"

We recently read Paul Graham’s 2002 article “A Plan for Spam” for our Digital History class and as a group, we came to the surprising realisation that we do not, in fact, get much spam anymore. So this got me thinking: What would an archive of spam look like? Would it tell us anything?

The idea of keeping what used to be “garbage” has been gaining currency in recent years. People are finding meaning in the things others throw away, from grocery lists to postcards. See, for example, Davy Rothbart’s Found Magazine (and the book he’s published) – there is an internet archive of the most random objects people find, and find meaning in. Today’s “find of the day” was a handwritten note asking Joey to give Grandpa more hugs because he feels left out. I had my own experience in that regard: last spring, I was walking across the Maryland Bridge in Winnipeg and I came across a manila envelope stuffed with pages of handwritten notes and drawings that had been mailed around 1991. I read the whole thing, but then decided to leave it where I found it. I couldn’t bear to throw it out, but I didn’t know what I would do with it if I kept it. Maybe someone else would find more meaning in it than I did.

Things like this are invested with meaning by the finder. But the internet opens up a whole new level of “junk” to be discarded or cherished: from spam, to old emails, to myriad inactive web pages, there is more potential garbage than ever before. But I don’t think the appeal of something like Found Magazine is in mass produced fliers or advertisements anymore than there is an appeal to an archive of old spam. The appeal is in the human element, and in the connection between the object and the finder. People send things to Rothbart because they felt a connection to them, and they think maybe someone else will too. I’ve never personally felt a connection to junk mail. In fact, I’d prefer to forget it altogether.

England, England: a study in re-presentation

I recently read Julian Barnes’ novel England, England in which a wealthy businessman recreates, or as one might put it, distils the essence of, England, on the Isle of Wight. All of the major tourist destinations and significant moments in English history are represented. Tourists begin to make a conscious choice between the real England and the Island, which is “cleaner, friendlier and more efficient” [1]. People make the choice between authenticity, which can be disappointing and far from clear cut, and a representation of England that was selected from stereotype and myth, from Robin Hood to double-decker buses, that is simple, uncomplicated, and exactly what they expected.

“Once there was only the world, directly lived. Now there is representation – let me fracture that word, re-presentation – of the world. It is not a substitute for that plain and primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment, an ironisation and summation of that world. This is where we live today. A monochrome world has become Technicolor, a single croaking speaker has become wraparound sound. Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory.” [2]

In the end, the Old England falls into economic disaster and reverts into a semi-primitive state. The allure of the Technicolor world of England, England, where you can shop at Harrod’s in the Tower of London and have Yorkshire pudding with Dr. Johnson, is too great. England, England is exactly what it is expected to be, which is easy, instead of what it really is, which is much harder.

No-one has done something in quite the same scale as Barnes imagines, but recreations of history are everywhere, from re-enactments of Civil War battles, to video games, and multimedia exhibits in museums recreating experiences like First World War trenches. Perhaps there is a certain correlation between these kinds of carefully designed experiences and Barnes’ fantasy world. In our digital history class, we have been imagining all kinds of historic appliances that can put us in touch with the past. Representations of history, whether digital or not, are all created with a specific agenda in mind, and are designed to deliver certain messages and invoke certain reactions. In the case of England, England, the “England experience” is designed to fit the visitor’s expectations. In a sense, it doesn’t seem that great of a leap from England, England as a physical space to England, England as a virtual reality experience in which the physical recreations are replaced by digital ones. And, really, what’s the difference?

It seems to me that there can be an almost religious quality to the experience of visiting an ancient historic site or seeing an artifact with your own eyes. But perhaps it makes no difference whether you are looking at the real thing or merely a replica of it, and maybe a historical agenda will be pushed on you either way. Maybe, in the end, Julian Barnes was on to something. In a sense this is exactly what museums are doing anyway. Maybe we should just throw up our hands and make everything into a sexy, multimedia experience and forget about authenticity altogether, whatever that means.

Maybe. But maybe not.

1. Julian Barnes, England, England (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998), p.184

2. Barnes, 55