I inserted a screenshot of both the bibliography and the ten Zotero links because they did not paste in the correct format on my site but I have included them anyways. The categorization of materials is useful to digital scholarship because it helps researchers access, store, and share data easily with others in a reliable manner. I have found it particularly helpful in storing different types of medias in an organized manner that is easy to access later on. The three authors text we read this week provided insight into the positives and negatives of digital humanities and the different applications and rules that go into making it successful and the simple ways to avoid things from going wrong.

Categorization of materials is useful to digital scholarship because it helps sort data to make it easier to search, save and find for users. The reading Classification and Its Structures addresses the many different ways things can be classified: One-dimensional, N-dimensional, classification schemes, Priori Systems and several rules of classification to follow.  The closer the purpose of the classification to the central problem of the research, the more likely is a custom-made classification scheme to be necessary.This reading also highlights a growing emphasis on image-based computing for humanities and how this database is growing. However, there are difficulties with categories for humanities research. This reading discusses the difficulties of agreeing on and maintaining consistency in keyword-based classifications or descriptions of images due to similarities among graphic images.

In the second reading, Databases, addresses how databases can be problematic for some humanities research and how to minimize these errors. Humanists had realized that the use of databases could create intellectual opportunities such as the mapping of relationships among entities, visualization of information patterns and methodologies worthy of studying further. This chapter focuses on the implementation and design of relational databases to remove technical and conceptual details that are problematic. The most common issues involved redundancy, which can be resolved with creating a primary key record and normal forms. Transaction management and Collaborative Database Collections can often lead to fragmented data that does not give consistent results. However, if implemented successfully, it could expand the possibilities of knowledge representation considerably. 

Finally, in The Order of Things, the author seems to question what constitutes how things are classified and what establishes the justification behind their categorization. This seems to be the overarching issue he is addressing and how that related to our thinking of categorization in humanities. This author brought up several examples that served as good tools in how we think about categories and groupings of items.

Citations:

Foucault, M. (2005). The order of things. doi:10.4324/9780203996645