Joseph T. Tennis: Categoriography lecture at Knowescape

Associate Professor Joseph T. Tennis gave a lecture at the Knowescape TD1210 workshop in Amsterdam, March 5, 2015. The workshop, "Evolution and variation of classification systems – how stable is the organization of knowledge and how diverse is its representations? Toward a Metadata Observatory,” brought together knowledge organization system (KOS) experts to explore ways to define an attribute space in which KOS can be compared among each other and across time. Inspired by the study of planets and stars in the heavens, the long-term goal is to build a metadata observatory.

Tennis’ lecture was part of the "New trends in eHumanties" research meeting series. A description of the lecture is given below: 

Categoriography: Thick Description of Semantics in Long-lived Complex Information Systems

While it is possible to look at how schemes change over time and examine how a subject changes in that context, we are not seeing the entire picture. There are other things we need to know about subjects historically and how they are contextualized in extant systems. We can do this by attempting to describe the nature and characteristics of the system, the variety of ways subjects are seen to interact with each other in the scheme and when applied in the system. We can also dig deep into the relationship between subjects and the texts they represent. In this talk I share the current data I have and ask after the ways in which we can begin this kind of thick description.