Jargon
drorzel | December 29, 2010Most of what would ordinarily be blogging time this morning got used up writing a response to a question at the
Physics Stack Exchange. But having put all that effort in over there, I might as well put it to use here, too...
The question comes from a person who did a poster on terminology at the recently concluded American Geophysical Union meeting, offering the following definition of "data":
Values collected as part of a scientific investigation; may be qualified as 'science data'. This includes uncalibrated values (raw data), derived values (calibrated data), and other transformations of…
dsalo | March 18, 2010First, a small warning: I am having an extremely crowded and busy week, so blogging here (even the catchup I need to do to the many excellent comments on the Battle of the Opens post) will suffer.
Something for folks to chew on in the meantime: can anybody explain to me what this tool (if it is a tool) actually does? I clicked over thinking it might be a good thing to add to a tidbits post, but I confess myself wholly flummoxed by the jargon therein.
Any ideas, anyone? Especially anyone with a health-care background?
dsalo | March 14, 2010I'm committed to a lot of different kinds of "open." This means that I can and do engage in tremendous acts of hair-splitting and pilpul with regard to them. "Gratis" versus "libre" open access? Free-speech versus free-beer software code? I'm your librarian; let's sit down and have that discussion.
Unfortunately, out there in the wild I find a tremendous amount of misunderstanding about various flavors of open, sometimes coming from otherwise perfectly respectable communications outlets. (Pro tip: If you're not completely sure you understand, please find someone to ask. A librarian is a good…
dsalo | December 18, 2009Since the end of the year is a fairly quiet time for my particular professional niche, I've taken the opportunity to do some basic name authority control on author name-strings in the repository.
Some basic what on what, now? Welcome back to my series on library information management and jargon.
The problem is simple to understand. Consider me as an author. I took my husband's surname upon marriage; fortunately, I hadn't published anything previously, but I might have done—and if I had, how would you go about finding everything I've written, if it was published under two different names? "…
dsalo | October 26, 2009It's been a while since I did anything on my series about library ways of knowing. If you'd like to refresh your memory:
The classical librarian
The humble index
Classification
Today I'll finish my discussion of classification, and distinguish it from subject analysis, since that distinction often seems to confuse, especially in our digital age.
So if we'll recall, the goal we set for ourselves was to collocate physical books on shelves in such fashion that their arrangement would be useful to information-seekers. With most non-fiction, that means collocation by subject, by what the books…
dsalo | September 9, 2009Now that we've looked at how back-of-book indexes endeavor to organize and present the information found in a book, we can consider organizing books themselves. It's quite astonishing, how many people go to libraries and bookstores who never seem to stop to think about how books end up on particular shelves in particular areas. There is no magic Book Placement Fairy!
Let's consider the problems we're trying to solve for a moment. A library has a lot of books, on which ordinary inventory-control processes must operate. So librarians as well as patrons must be able to locate the specific book…
dsalo | August 25, 2009I'd like to start our tour of book and library information-management techniques with a glance at the humble back-of-book index. I started the USDA's excellent indexing course back in the day, and while it became clear fairly quickly that I do not have the chops to be a good indexer and so I never finished the course, I surely learned to respect those who do have indexing chops. It's not an easy job.
Go find a book with an index and flip through it. Seriously, go ahead. I'll wait. Just bask in the lovely indentedness and order of it all.
Now answer me a question: Should Google be calling that…
dsalo | August 19, 2009Five years ago (really? goodness, it hardly seems possible) I gave a preconference session at the Extreme Markup Languages conference (which is now Balisage) entitled "Classification, Cataloguing, and Categorization Systems: Past, Present, and Future."
I have learned to write better talk titles since then. However. The talk was actually a runthrough of library standards and practices for an audience of markup wonks. Like any field, librarianship has its share of jargon and history that legitimately seems impenetrable to outsiders.
I'm going to try to reprise some of that talk here in blog…
dsalo | July 23, 2009Because I've seen it quoted, misquoted, and usually not attributed at all… “Converting PDF to XML is a bit like converting hamburgers into cows." That is the quote I know of. It comes from revered XML developer Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list in July 2006.
It's possible Kay got this from somewhere else, but I've never seen an earlier attribution. (Comments are open if I'm wrong.)
I hear all sorts of chest-beating about attribution in data circles, often for good and sufficient reason. I think we can stand to get our quotes and their authors right.
dsalo | July 17, 2009That would be the question, wouldn't it. Unfortunately, such fundamental definitions are never simple to create, and even less simple to agree upon. A little history may help explain how we got into this parlous uncertain state, but it may not get us out of it.
The short version of the history (which all and sundry may feel free to correct in the comments) is that the Anglophone world had a terminology breakdown right from the start: what the English called "e-science" the Americans (with our customary tin ear) dubbed "cyberinfrastructure." Then the humanities reared back on their hind legs…