In the margins: Reflections on scribbles, knowledge organization, and access

Authors

  • June Abbas Buffalo, New York

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7152/nasko.v1i1.12840

Abstract

A favored text, dog-eared and yellowed from use, yet still useful, brings back insights that we try to impart to our students when we teach knowledge organization, organization and control of recorded information courses, whichever words we have chosen to label them. Scribbled in the margins 1 are notes to self, keywords, subject headings? “tags”? to remind us of why this particular passage was relevant to us. These scribbles include notes about the thoughts, subjects, eloquent linguistics that we wish to remember, and to access at a later time, maybe even our thoughts that occurred as we read the words. Should someone pick up this same text and read the passages and also the notes, would one necessarily draw the same conclusions, or would one have yet other insights into the author’s meanings, the scribbles, the words? 2 Wilson (1968) reminds us that “What a text says is not necessarily what it reveals or what it allows us to conclude. . . . but what is not said may interest us more than what is said” (p. 18). How then do we access the facts, truths, assertions, that the text conveys, or doesn’t convey, or the different truths, assertions, that occur to another when they read the text? Our knowledge organization structures provide access points to follow. Classification schemes, controlled vocabularies, ontologies, taxonomies, and the like, have been used to access various levels of subject content within the texts. 3 How then, do we access the “meaning”, the conclusions, insights others’ make while reading the words, the scribbles in the margins?

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Published

2011-11-04