Digital Categorization and Databases
In our daily life, we are using structures that are organized that makes our lives much easier. The creation of organization comes from categorization which is sorting and identifying similar patterns in materials. For an example, last week’s practicum, I was organizing documents from a concentration camp called Auschwitz. When organizing the data, I was looking at ages, residency, races and religions to organize the people. In the reading “Classifications and its Structures,” the author, Sperberg-Mcqueen talks about the rules of classifying materials. These 5 rules can be summed up as looking at changes and be strict with your choosing. This can help allow for less bias and more accurate categorizing. This can be useful for digital scholarship by allowing students and authors, like us, to be able to navigate and work our way around documents that have not been identified yet.
On the other hand, chaos can arise from these methods. In the reading “Databases,” Ramsay talks about the main issue while creating categories databases as “…the essential problem of organization and efficient retrieval is complicated by the need for systems which facilitate interaction with multiple end users, provide platform-independent representations of data, and allow for dynamic insertion and deletion of information.” Ramsay is portraying that the audiences interpretation and understanding for specific information can be different than another user’s opinions. Categorizing can be hard, especially with databases, where you are working with many documents and many people which ends up like the saying “too many cooks in the kitchen.”
