A Dewey Decimal
October 25th, 2007 by Steve Bowbrick
The best bit of this half hour feature on the Dewey Decimal library classification system (MP3, Real) is the quite jaw dropping revelation (from Michèle Roberts, who’s generally anti-Dewey) that the system’s sociology category groups together ‘women, gypsies and lunatics’ (the worst bit is the really cheesy Mastermind skit at the beginning - the presenter is a former winner, you see. You might want to fast forward through that bit).
Folksonomy, tags, freeform categorisation, emergent taxonomies and all the other interesting knowledge finding stuff that’s going on on the Internet at the moment make Dewey especially relevant and interesting (or possibly irrelevant and boring).
Anyway, in addition to Michèle Roberts (interesting article by Roberts on her time as a librarian here) there’s an academic who’s been trying to fit the Internet into Dewey for ten years (tip: give it up, mate). And while I think of it, here’s Clay Shirky’s famous ‘Ontology is Overrated‘ in which he demolishes Dewey.
Pic by Helder da Rocha.
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