I was recently one of a handful of keynote speakers at ISKO Brazil, meeting in Rio de Janeiro, May 27-29. It was my first trip to Brazil, and I was just a little shocked to find myself sitting at a bar at Ipanema listening to Bossa Nova. I texted my sister, because our mother (who passed away about a year ago) used to dream of such a thing. Well, be that as it might, I won’t write here about culture shock, I’ll come back to that.

I spent some time musing about dimensions and how epistemology could be a dimension of knowledge organization. In the end my presentation became rather pedantic, but that is because I think there is too much wiggle room in ISKO about just what knowledge organization is. And I think that is problematic for a domain that thinks of itself as a science.

I’ll try to write more about this soon.

Here are some photos from my trip.

And here is a pdf of my presentation, which I think also is available on ISKO Brazil’s website, but caveat emptor, this is not a formal research presentation. Smiraglia_Epistemological Dimension of KO

More later.

My editorial based on the conference proceedings from Mysore was just published in Knowledge Organization, v. 40, no. 1 (2013): 1-10. I gave it the subtitle “evolving intension,” because from what I could see in the statistical evidence, the theoretical core of knowledge organization is stable and is represented in these papers, but there was less granualarity than in recent biennial ISKO conferences, suggesting differences peculiar to this specific mixture of scholars which appear to be sort of pushing and pulling the boundaries inside the domain, thus evolution is taking place in the intension. Of course, it is hard to take one moment in time represented by a single conference by itself; so it will be interesting to see how this dataset fits into the domain analysis of knowledge organization over time.

We have been having some success with extending online access to Knowledge Organization (which now is available to library subcribers through Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (EBSCO) full text. But for some reason we have not seen Web of Science catch up with the indexing of our conference proceedings. So I will upload the basic Excel spreadsheet of papers and citations that I used to analyze this conference, here: ISKO 2012 citations

As I commented about earlier, there was quite a different mix of scholars at this conference, probably because of the exotic location. It did seem as though many of the usual suspects were not present, but the conference was well-attended anyway, by new people, which was good. The effect of this shows up in my analysis in the prevalence of papers from Brazil and India, which had the largest presence together with the US. I expect there is therefore some influence of the emerging economic powerhouses of Brazil and India on the thematic emphases of the conference, with digital solutions at the top of the list, relationships and domains rising up the thematic distribution, and categories and general classifications falling to the bottom. I was not able to demonstrate this statistically, however, as there were too few cases in the cells of a cross-tabulation.

The tug-and-pull between empirical scientific methods and humanistic methods, or epistemologies, was evident in the heavy reliance on monographic citations; only about half of the citations were to journal articles.

Of course, it was no surprise that S.R. Ranganathan had clear influence on the conference participants; but it also is true that facets are increasingly being found useful in knowledge organization systems.

In my experience of ISKO, which now is a bit more than a decade, it was the first time I had seen “official ISKO vehicles.” I thought that was delightful!