Texts, categorizations and their borderlands: looking for a virtual library

Ellen Kotanen, MA in New Media, Cultural Usability seminar, UIAH Media Lab 2001

Note! This article is a draft, do not quote or cite. Updated version is due on May 5, 2001.

Abstract

My article outlines the relations between texts and classifications of literature in the context of digital reading environments. Texts become hypertexts; hypertexts get connected, forming what Manuel Castells calls the "supertext": a textual environment where all texts from different times and places are converged into one textual totality. How do the readers orient themselves and find what they need within this textual environment? The library, with its categorizing and organizing technologies, can be thought of as an interface between texts and their users. I will take a closer look at how classifications and categorizations are constructed, and how they are disrupted by new conceptual categories. In the borderlands between the crystallized language of classifications and the new language-creating practices of reading and writing, it perhaps is possible to find meaningful ways to mediate between readers and texts. Looking  for approaches to design virtual libraries and reading environments, I will emphasize the need of open social spaces within classification practices and, on the other hand, the importance of examining how categorizations operate within reading practices. 

Library as an obstacle to reading

One of the most invisible revolutions of our time is the revolution of readers. It has remained unnoticed even for many readers.
(Jan Blomstedt)

When discussing the possibilities for a theory of reading - or rather the need for this kind of theory - Roland Barthes (Barthes 1993) mentions two ways to foreclose reading. The first one is connected to all those social sanctions which make reading into a duty. The other phenomenon that functions like an obstacle to reading is the artificiality of the library.

By the artificiality of the public or collective library Barthes means that the library is always unfitted to the desire for reading. Either the library is too small or too large for the reader's jouissance, pleasure. The library is always giving a substitute for the book the reader really wants.

Barthes wishes to make a distinction between the "home-book" which intimately belongs to the reader, almost like a fetish, and the "library-book" which belongs to the public, institutional space and therefore leaves the reader in debt. The home-book can not express totally the reader's desire, because it is connected to the field of publishing, marketing and selling literature. The home book is for Barthes, at all events, free of those social, cultural and institutional values and demands that are the burdens of the library-book.

It is interesting how Barthes considers the public and institutional ways of mediating literature as being so destructive to the reading. It is as if the organizing of literature into collections and systems of public categorizations would somehow change the content of literature and guarantee the reader's dissatisfaction, in a way that is even worse than using literature as a commodity.

To continue on the basis of Barthes' provocative thoughts, the artificiality of the library can be seen as the artificiality of One, in the sense that Jacques Derrida is comprehending the archive institution (Derrida 1996).

A library as a public collection of texts aims to impartially cover the fields of literature and knowledge. Targeting its institutional nature this way the library is representing the One. When the One exists, the Other is always missing. The reader with her desire reminds an Other. The order of literature within the library collections becomes a system and law of its own, collecting items suitable for its structure. By choosing its information structures the library also chooses its users.

Does there exist a possibility for an intimate relation between the texts and their readers within the library institution? Or is the public sphere so polluting of the personal desire and pleasure to read as Barthes states? Does there also exist the discourse of desire and pleasure, not only the discourse of the law and duty, within the library as a reading environment? And what is, after all, 'the library' of today?

These questions are of no less importance in the context of digital publishing and virtual libraries than they have been in traditional reading practices and traditional libraries.

In my article I examine questions arising from the relationship of textual practices and categorizations. My intention is to look at the classifications as a form of information technology and examine the cultural context and consequences of this particular type of information technology in the environment of reading. I present some views of those dimensions of categorizing present in the act of reading; this is a topic I intend to study further in my thesis. I also introduce briefly fiction classification practicies in the libraries, and two models for a virtual library, which I find both interesting because of their ways to place the categorizations of readers in connection with the library classification practices.

My main argument is that the concept of 'a library'  in its broadest meaning should be seen as an open social space for the meanings and interpretations of readers, and it is needed as a part of the digital reading environments, whatever form they may take.

When texts become supertext: interfaces to the docuverse needed

At the time of writing this article, librarians and civil liberties activists in the USA are challenging the Congress' Children's Internet Protection Act, which requires that public libraries and schools receiving federal financial aid for technology, use computer filters to block access to Web sites that could be deemed obscene or harmful to young people. If the law takes effect as planned on April 20, the government could cut off funding to institutions that don't comply. Although many of the public libraries in USA are already using filter programs, the American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union will file suit, arguing that the law is unconstitutional because it mandates that the government force local libraries to restrict what people might want to access. They also contend that adults, not just children, will be affected by the technological blocks. (O'Harrow 2001.) This is one of  today's questions in the close relationship between literature, readers and categorizations. This example also demonstrates how close we come to the questions of power, institutions, democracy and the user's rights, when talking about the categorization of information.

Categorizations and classifications of literature are connected closely to the new technologies of information retrieval. Ongoing global metalanguage projects,  such as xml , rdf, or semantic web  are all examples of the ubiquity of classifications in the information and culture publishing and using practices.They all approach the idea of universal metalanguage describing other languages. They also bring up the importance of the skills of making categorizations since the design of own markups is made possible. Capability to categorize may soon be seen as an extension of the writing.

New ways and practices of reading are appearing as information and culture move to the network environment. Today the virtual library means the library services which are available in the internet (for instance the possibility of browsing and making inquiries in the library catalogues or "ask the librarian" type of services). It also means organizing the information published on the web to the metalanguages of library classifications and content descriptions, as well as creating and organizing the tools for information search in the internet.

There exist many joint questions in the organizing of the use of virtual services and the use of new media in the physical library space.  In the USA the term hybrid library is used to describe the combining and organizing of the traditional and digital library and the co-existence of different kinds of media (Rusbridge 1998).

Virtuality in the library services can of course also mean the virtual reality library, but for the present, at least when it comes to the public services and their resources, the problematics of creating illusions and immersions of virtual reality can not be at the top of the most important matters.

One form of the present changes in the reading practices is that information retrieval, in its traditional or new meanings, is taking its place as a part of the digital reading practices. Hypertext reading largely consists of navigating between texts, not only within them. The difference between fiction and facts, as included in the means of expression within the new media texts, is also getting fuzzier so that we can talk about faction, as a combination of fiction and facts.

Lev Manovich (Manovich 2000) notes that multimedia with "cultural" content appear to particularly favor the encyclopedia-like database form. Manovich even thinks of the database as  a new symbolic form of a computer age, and adds that it would also be appropriate to develop the poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of the database.

Manuel Castells   (Castells 1996) is elaborating the idea of a supertext as an textual environment where all the texts from different time periods are converged into one mode of expression, into one document, in fact. All written and audiovisual communication is emerging into the same textual totality. The idea of a supertext is related to Ted Nelson's ideas of Xanadu and hypertext as a net of computers combining all the documents of the world (Nelson 1990). Supertext is, according to Castells, a new symbolic environment, which is made possible by the multimedia technology. In the supertext environment symbols are replacing reality and the virtual becomes reality. The 'real virtuality' means a symbolic environment capable of capturing the reality of people's material and symbolic existence, immersion into a virtual image setting, where the appearances are not just a way to communicate, but they become the experience.

Castells emphasizes that the price to pay for inclusion in the new communication system is adaption to its logic and language. The critical point for the social effects of supertext is the development of a multinodal, horizontal network of communication instead of centralized multimedia system.

Where in Castells' images of real virtuality of texts, or symbols come alive, are we able to see the idea of a library? The answer, of course, is that the idea of a library is concretized in the categorizing principle. However, the understanding of categorization and classification practices needs to become more flexible, multifaceted and multisubjected in order to be really working practice in the hypertextual, or supertextual if we wish, environment. Our understanding of the communication and power aspects included in the categorizations may also be an object of reconstruction.

It is obvious that an idea of a 'library' does not necessarily need to be connected to the traditionary library world at all in this context. The idea of a library can be concretized also in the commercial or community-based services aiming at organizing the contents of web, for instance in information portals or information services which use agent technology, or in the metalanguage practices of web technology. The role of the public library services depends on the libraries' capability to take their place as an interface between the users and the documents.

A suspicious reader might think that in the shaping of Castells' supertext the highest degree of the 'artificiality of library' mentioned by Barthes, would be present: the entire world of literature and documents within easy reach instead of the document a user really would like to find, but is not able to, although it constantly is available... [1]

Give it a name! Making classifications

In "The Order of Things", Michel Foucault connects classifying practices and the practices of Classical science together, and  presents some very concrete and clarifying aspects of the nature of giving order to things and constructing categorizations and classification systems (Foucault 1994).

Foucault discusses the scientific thinking and the epistemological space of the Classical age and natural history. In the practices of categorizing plants and animals, natural history is in its essence the nomination of the visible world. The research methods and the classifications of scientists changed the idea of language at the end of the eighteenth century; also language could after that be seen as an object.

Seeing language as an object among other objects is part of the desire to bring the language as near as possible to the observation process of the researcher, and also part of the desire to bring the subjects of observation as close to the language as possible. Foucault points out that researchers and creators of scientific classifications like Linnaeus did not just give names to objects which previously silently existed, but constituted a new field of visibility.

In the natural sciences the practices of systematic observing, eyesight, i.e. the microscope, have a central role. Defining the structure of plants makes it possible to describe the objects observed. Foucault refers to the eighteenth century work, by Tournefort, "Éleménts de botanique", which describes the structure of a plant as the composition and arrangement of the pieces that make up its body. In addition to the measurable qualities, e.g., numbers or dimensions that can be expressed in quantitative terms, there also exist qualities like forms and arrangements that are to be described either by identification with geometrical figures or with other analogies as clear as possible. The analogy to the human body, for instance, makes it possible to describe fairly complex forms in an understandable manner. The forms of the human body then function as a "sort of reservoir for models of visibility (Foucault 1994) ".

Limiting and filtering the visible structure allows the visible to be transcribed into language, according to Foucault. The elements chosen to describe the structure of plants can be thought of as forming some kind of a grid over the vegetable kingdom and with the help which it becomes easier to "copy" the attributes of the plants to verbalization. This way it becomes possible to establish the system of identities and the order of differences. The botanical names show the place of the plant in the system of plants. The process of naming, however, is then no longer based upon what one sees, but "upon elements that have already been introduced into discourse by structure". (Foucault 1994)

The humanities have aspired to the distinctness of the natural sciences in many ways. The history of literature, in its tradition of dividing literature into a system of genres, could be seen as nomination of the language-based world, according to the pattern of the natural science. For instance, Alastair Fowler criticizes the common assumption among modern genre theorists, "to take it for granted that genres are definable and mutually exclusive (Fowler, 1997)".

Fowler summarizes some examples of considering of genre as a class: Bennison Gray's attempt, as cited by Fowler, is "to classify a phenomenon, namely literature, in terms of genus and species". Francis Cairns states, quoted by Fowler: "Every genre can be thought of as having a set of primary or logically necessary elements which in combination distinguish that genre from every other genre", and Fowler claims that the expectation of 'necessary elements' or defining characteristics is an almost universal idea among genre theorists. (Fowler, 1997.)

The system of genre appears to be connected very strongly to the Aristotelian tradition of information classification [2] which is based on binaries: things are categorized according to certain characteristics they either do or do not have. The genre understood as a class belongs to the canon-building process of literary history. The canon is making up the structure, the institution, of literature. The structure renders possible the evaluation of literature, the recognition of the differences and similarities, to establish "the system of identities" and "the order of differences" as Foucault formulates it.

Classification tables of literature describe the literal texts with the hierarchical relations between their character and content concepts. The table and indexing practices thus present the literature as it is going to be presented for the future, as cultural legacy. The structures of literature classifications are mostly constructed to be as value neutral as possible and this is thought to made possible by using 'concrete facts' [3] as a table concepts: mostly literature is divided into the literature of different languages or countries, which all have subcategories of the main genres, most commonly divided into fiction (novels and short stories), poetry and drama as main classes.

The obvious problem with even this sort of 'concrete' classification is that the objects of literature are not so easily categorized: this concerns the matter of genre, but also the matter of homelands and native tongues of literature. Literature of formerly colonized countries and language minorities, for example, fit inadequately into this kind of interpretation of literature, and the consequences of these classifying practices are the strengthening of some aspects of power and the diminishing of others.

Evaluating classifications and their influences has become so complex medium that Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (Bowker & Leigh Star 2000) discuss the need of a new branch of science to explore this field. They think this new science should combine traditional social science with computer and information science in mapping the dynamics of linking the different kinds of classifying systems. The equipment needed for this is a mixture of scientific, poetic and artistic talents, in the way they are represented in the hypertextual world, the writers assume. The information structures formed by systematic classifications should be connected to the classifying practices made by people in their everyday life, in a meaningful way. [4]

Frozen language, a key to the future and past

The search for a universal language capable of describing the world adequately, together with the quest for transforming and translating the world into a problem of coding, are the central features Donna Haraway (Haraway 1991) uses when discussing the western thinking model which started from the Aristotelian system of sciences. Haraway presents the view of information sciences as a model taken from military operations, consisting of command, control, communication and intelligence. Information includes a lot of instrumental power. The biggest imaginable threat to this power is the possibility of information breaks.

Classifications can be seen as a frozen or fossilized language, formations of crystallized categories and relations between them. The breaks and gaps in the information structures of classifications, e.g. the missing or inconsistently presented things in the information logic, suggest at the elements absent from the classification systems and which thus represent a threat - or perhaps also a possibility - towards the system.

The purpose and aims of classification systems are connected to the future in a way that comes close to the future-oriented thinking Derrida is describing in connection with the idea of archive (Derrida 1996). For Derrida the archive exists not only in relation to the memory, as a memory device, but also in relation to the future, as a promise of mastering the structure of the future. Our understanding of the future is based on the idea of archive-valid events. The conceptual structure of an archive is giving form to our comprehension of the future. The institutional power of classifications is centered in its ability to determine the future.

Bowker and Leigh Star, for their part, point out that all our ways of discussing the past are based on present classifications. There are no other ways to the past than through the classifications of the present time (Bowker & Leigh Star).

Monsters, the inhabitants of the borderlands of classifications

The thread towards the instrumentalist categorization of information, mentioned by Donna Haraway, manifests itself in the breaks, the gaps, within the dichotomies of classifications. The gaps are breaking points which question the naturalized dichotomies of information structures and categories.

The organizing principle can not protect itself from the reorganizations of the concepts belonging its structure: the juxtapositions of the concepts of different categories makes the structure split, and out of the conceptual breaks spring up new meanings.

From the feminist point of view, Haraway is shaping a theory about feminine subjectivity based upon the suppressive dichotomies of the public discourse. This theory Haraway calls informatics of domination (Haraway 1991). The practice of informatics of domination is deriving new networked concepts out of the old, naturalized categorizations. The new concepts do not form oppositions with the previous concepts, but instead they decompose the dominance of the other concept. As examples of such conceptual couples Haraway presents:
Representation / Simulation
Realism / Postmodernism

Haraway's informatics of domination illustrates the positions of categorizing practices: who is speaking in the classifications? Whose point of view are we supposed to take as users of  the classifications?

Michel Foucault talks, in the context of natural sciences and natural history (Foucault 1994), about the metamorphoses of the prototype, monsters, preparing the way for the new combinations coming after them. The monsters are a sort of background noise of the system, the biological taxonomy, 'murmur of the nature'. The history of nature consists of an endless chain of variations; some of the variations are surviving, some others are not. The monsters manifest the origin of differences.

Fossils are preserved and found forms of the past which make it possible to follow the history of nature. The monsters and the fossils are the backward projection of those differences and those identities that provide taxonomy, the former in connection with the structure and the latter in connection with the character. From the point of view of the continuum the monster concretizes and ensures the emergence of difference and the fossil expresses the origin of the identity.

Metaphors can be seen as ways of surpassing the conceptual gaps of information structures and keys to the understanding of the many ways classifications as information structures are piercing our society. The importance of making metaphoric combinations that juxtapose together elements that are structurally incompatible, lie in the capacity of making visible the information structures and their deficiency. The nature of conceptual discontinuities in the information structures and categorizations is, while surpassed, also crystallized with the metaphor-like fusion and co-ordinations of the elements belonging to different categories.

Foucault (Foucault 1994) calls the juxtapositions of conceptual inconsistencies heterotopies. Heterotopies are formed of discontinuities: structurally unfitted, excluding elements are connected and linked together within the language. In heterotopies the relations between the words, the syntax, both on the level of the sentences and the meanings of the words, is destroyed.

The act of writing can be seen as breaking down the existing categories of language and searching for new, metaphoric, combinations. Roland Barthes (Barthes 1997) describes the state of writing as a continuous, although illusory, effort to create a new language by breaking up the rules of the existing language. Barthes places also the act of reading in the state of writing.

According to Barthes the text is produced in the state of productivity, a writing, which exists in relation between the reader and what has been written. Writing is a social space, because nobody involved with it can consider it from the point of view of an outsider. Every reader interprets the text she is reading, she rewrites it. In the process of writing, the writer's new language production is facing the personal and general conjunctions of the language. Being able to produce verbally something new is always somehow an illusory act: the writer is always moving within the borders set by her language and her personal history. The writing is a compromise between liberty and the memory, it is liberty that remembers.

Writing as a borderland

"Is everything significant, and, if not, what is, and for  whom, and in accordance with what rules? What relation is there between language and being, and is it really to being language is always addressed - at least, language that speaks truly? What, then, is the language that says nothing, is never silent, and is called 'literature'? " (Foucault, The order of things, s. 306)

Haraway pays attention to the important role of writing in the western logic of domination. Writing is a distinctive feature between primitive and civilized characteristics, and also in the postmodern critique toward the worship of the authority of one singular work.

Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle, says Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto, and describes a cyborg writing technology which is a struggle against perfect communication and one code that translates all meaning perfectly. Seizing the tools that are making it possible for the writer to mark the world that has marked her as other, is making cyborg writing a matter of survival. The tools for marking the world are stories, writings that are displacing the naturalized hierarchical dualism and identities. These writings are retelling the western culture origin stories.

To my thinking, the practices of marking are very important in the context of reading practices in general. In those re-writings of texts the reader is putting into effect within the reading practices, there exists also a very concrete need to mark some kind of a territory of the reader. A reader wants to mark the text she is reading with her comments or by emphasizing the most important parts of the text. The ability to 'write in the margin' of the texts is also included in the digital devices for reading, e.g. e-books or reader programs of different kinds. The markings of the readers are re-writing the text, but also taking charge of the text and confirming that this occupation is possible even later.

This concrete marking practice condenses also the difference made by Barthes, between the  library-book belonging to the public collection and the intimately owned home-book. The marking of the library-book expresses the possession of  public space in a similar way as, for instance, graffiti marks the collective space.

Electronic literature, if we now exclude the digitalization of traditional literature and the possibility of writing in the margin, has been using this concrete act of writing surprisingly seldom as a part of the reader's activity. However, thinking about the design of reading environments, it is also possible to think that a reader of digital text, too, may find a more intimate relation to the text after the text has in a concrete manner made her a writer, not only a consumer of the given alternatives of the text. [5]

Raine Koskimaa (Koskimaa 2000) describes the concrete ways the users might rewrite and reshape the hypertext (for instance by saving the continuously changing texts in files, printing them out and reading them like traditional literature, or changing the linkings of the hypertext document) as a resistant reading or hackering practices. By doing this the reader in a concrete way takes the author's position and reconstructs the text according to her own wish.

Taking Gillez Deleuze's and F. Guattari's metaphor, a rhizomatous text (Deleuze & Guattari 1992), is often connected with the hypertext (Moulthrop 1994; Järvinen 1999) and its continuously reshaping significance. The rootbook for Deleuze and Guattari, is a classic, mimetic and complete work which is based on the binary logic of tree shaped hierarchies, a logic that always collects itself together, into one, and is incapable of disintegration. The concept of a rhizome, however, describes the abundance, scattering of meanings, a compassion escaping the idea of a closed, meaningful totality (a work), by dissolving itself into smaller parts.

What is common to the thinking of Barthes, Haraway and Deleuze and Guattari is that each of them are sketching a fluid concept of text and the comprehending of reading and writing as a state of transformations of significance, each of them with their own emphasizing. Writing appears as a process which includes the documents and their writers and readers. What is interesting here is how the reader-writers orient themselves in this continuous state of writing, in other words, how do they end up finding meaningful things?

Reading as a borderland between texts and categorizations

Describing the content of texts in a systematic way is needed for the organization and retrieval of texts. In my view, the relation between the text and the content-describing practices of texts, can be examined from two points of view. We can study the act of reading and the procedures and practices coming close to categorizations within it, or we can study classifying and classifications as interpretations of texts.

The interpretation process of reading includes the outlining, completion and organizing of the text and its meanings. The reader is outlining the text both on the internal level of the text (the structures of the text) and on the intertextual level (the relations between texts) of the text, as well as outlining the ways the text is presenting reality.

Some examples of the categorizations I see included in the reading process:

    1. observing the structures of text:

            - the narrative structure

            - the symbolic structure

            - the system of themes and motifs

            - the gaps and discontinuities of the text structure, and their completion

            - the navigating structure of hypertext

    2. combining the reading experience with the context of literature: recognizing a genre

    3. observing the potential use for what has been read

    4. comparing what has been read to the reader's own intellectual system, knowledge of reality

    5. observing the discourse / cultural context of literature

These practices are forming aesthetic, pragmatic, cultural, intellectual and social functions for reading. Through these close-to-classifying processes the reader is forming a overall view of the text. To simplify the outcome of these observing processes, I suggest that this broad idea of the qualities of the text in reader's mind could be called a mental signum. Signum in the library context is an annotation expressing the placement of certain information. This mental signum created in the reading process expresses those characteristics of the text that the reader finds significant. The signum also makes it possible to memorize for later use those things expressed in the reading experience. Classifications' nature as assisting mental techniques and technologies is functioning through this kinds of procedures. The research of texts and categorizations still knows very little about the forming and use of these kind of mental signums created by readers.

The process of reading appears different in different kinds of text theories. Text can be understood as forming a closed entity of its own, the reader concretizing and interpreting it in the reading process; this is the view of traditional literary criticism. Text can also be seen as an open work with many possible interpretations depending on the readers and readings. Post-structuralism literary criticism sees the text opening from its own world into the communication and interaction with other texts.

The concept of intertextuality, formed by Julia Kristeva (Kristeva 1993), is shaping the interaction between texts. Kristeva determines the participants of textual interaction: the writing subject, the recipient and the external texts. The word, the unit of text, belongs together to the writing subject and to the reader. The word in the text is also directed towards the tradition of writing: the existing texts are in dialogue with each other.

In hypertext theory, text can be seen as a machine generating itself and also including the process of reading, like Espen Aarseth's (Aarseth 1997) definition of cybertext. A text Aarseth calls cybertext is a machine, producing and consuming verbal signs. The parts of the textual machine are verbal signs, human participants, and media which is the technological part of text. Text can not be defined without these parts and no one of the parts without the other two.

Reading is always an activity of a psychophysical subject, influenced by the reader's own experiences, memories and interpretations of previously read texts. The reader's interests, needs and aims are guiding the processes of outlining the characteristics of text.

In the hypertext environment navigation, the moving through and between texts, is an example of the orienting practices of reading. Navigation is part of the reading and rewriting process, merged into its interest orientation practices, many times in a unconscious manner. Navigation does not only mean the reader's orientation through the text but also the reader's information searching activities. Better than the traditional term 'information retrieval' or 'fiction retrieval' on the other hand, the term navigation suits to be used with the fiction and the reading processes. As a part of reading the information search activities are constituted more variable than the mere information or text gathering: what is searched for is not a package of text for transfer, but meaningful routes through texts. The structure of pre-refined navigation routes is an important part of the information architecture of hypertext and the classifying practices of hypertext environment writing.

The main difference between reading and categorization processes, if we wish to draw a line between them, as I comprehend it, is to be found in their different positions of interpreting text. The classification practices are forming a structure or a system of texts. Classifying places individual texts into the system of texts and the system of culture, that are represented for instance by the national library and the national bibliography with its classifications. Categories are the qualities of texts transformed to the institutionalized cultural legacy and thus representing the future. Fiction classifications are the literary canon materialized to a visible system: the canonized hierarchies of literature.

The classifying practice seen as this kind of an activity are forming a frozen metalanguage, as compared to the open, unfinished creating of significance and play with the meanings in the reading process. In spite of the social and cultural consequences of classifications, classification is only one reading process, on the practical level. Categorization is a sort of commentary on the text, but this comment makes the individual reading visible and transforms the meanings and structures of the text into the metalanguage of classification and indexing systems.

The following table represents a summary of the dimensions of classifications in relation to text and reading:

Table: The relations between text, reading and classifying

The table describes those dimensions of text that are activated in the reading and classifying processes. Classifying practices develop the interpretative practices of reading to the systematic tools for organizing the reading.

Describing fiction in the libraries

The organizing of the fiction published in the internet is very similar to the ways that literature has been organized in libraries. Not even do the description and retrieval practices of the electronic literature differ from the library practices. This makes libraries an authority within the field of fiction organizing, and it deserves studying how these practices are realized in the libraries.

With fiction content description in the libraries the categorization through indexing, describing the content of the document with index terms, is more important than using the classification tables. In the classification schemes for fiction the tendency for 'objective' categorizations is noticeable, and it is realized by categorizing fiction by, for instance, its language, country or time period.

Indexing practices that allow nuanced description of the text, form a more vivid part of the content description. Classifying and indexing are practices that are made to complement each other. The classifying practices of fiction are most often based on the traditional author and work oriented view of literature. The system of indexing, with its capacity for multidimensional linking, which actually forms some sort of prototype of hypertext, makes it rather easy to describe the varied nature of the interpretations and textual relationships. With the classifications, however, there always is the expectation of implied hierarchy, even though it would be the indexing practices that are used to describe the content. The concepts of indexing systems are formed to be working together with the classification tables. On the side of mere subject lists, indexing can also take form of a thesaurus, which presents the subject terms in hierarchic relations with each other.

Content description of fiction has not a been very rapidly progressing part of library work, due to the obvious complexity of fiction. Finnish public libraries have been able to use a centralized indexing service for fiction for some years, and the Finnish Thesaurus for Fiction, Kaunokki, has also been in use only for a short time.

Kaunokki is a thesaurus based on six main facets that consist of terms describing
    1. fictional genres and their explanations
    2. events, motives and themes
    3. actors
    4. settings
    5. times
    6. other, mostly typographical and technical aspects
(Kaunokki 2000; Saarti 2000)

The choice of aspects is a very problematic issue. Some existing classification systems for fiction are based on the classification schemes for general classifications while some of them aim at unique description practices for fiction. In the existing systems fiction can be described by abstracts, elements of its structure, motifs or themes.

The theory, design and research of the content description systems and methods have centered very much on the users ability to accommodate themselves to the systems and categories already existing.

In his research, dealing with content description of fictional (prose) literature Jarmo Saarti (Saarti 1999) notes that to include many kinds of description materials, such as the reader's experiences, into the information system of fiction, may constitute a system which is too unfocused. A logical structure and the needs of the users are the most essential qualities of classifying systems of the fiction, too, as of any system.

According to Saarti, genre is an element, that makes it possible to design a logical system for the complexity of the reading experience. Genre is used as an descriptive element which defines the position of a literary work within the literary canon. It also defines the aspects of the content and the means of narration. Through the concept of genre both the authors and readers perform their tasks of creation and interpretation: genre in setting the limits for the means and conventions used by the author and also the conventions of interpretation (Saarti 1999; Ridell 1994.).

Saarti considers that the description system of fiction should be based on explaining genre and those essential aspects of genre that should be mediated to the reader. According to the description environment it is then also possible to mediate information concerning the authors and the concrete interpretations of the literary works. Genre, then, forms a basis for the logic of content description and a key to the codes of the work. Genre is also a practical tool capable of taking into consideration the facets and qualities of different kinds of text. On the other hand, Espen Aarseth (Aarseth 1997) has described in his text typology, based on correspondence analysis, 576 different kind of positions of textual media, that could also be understood as genre. This means that a genre based content description of new media texts would become a rather extensive totality...

Saarti refers genre as a context of reading with the concept of competent reception: "genre is telling the reader how to receive the work so that it could be called a competent reception. (--) In order to avoid the discretion of the reader's or the author's interpretations of the work, the interpretation should always be based on genre and the generic tools used in the work (Saarti 1999)".

The difficulties of the descriptions of fiction all culminate in this question of competent interpretation: whose voice should be heard in the system of fiction description? The need for a logical system and the need to pay attention to the complexity of fiction are in conflict here, and it is getting very clear how impossible a task it is to make value neutral classifications. On the other hand, building the system on certain cultural codes does not prevent resistant reading, in fact it sometimes even calls for that.

With the question of genre the distinction made before, between the open space of reading and the closed system logic's of classifications, are illustrated. In the reading process and its categorizations the texts are placed in connection with other texts. These interpretations as forms of discourses of literature take their place in the open social space between the subjects, whereas the reading included in the classifying practices is forming a sort of prototype, a class within the classification hierarchy, of the text and its reception.

The interpretative nature of classifications and descriptions easily becomes obscure because of the frozen character of classification and indexing languages. When the reader positions that have been displaced in the classifications - the borderlands and waste lands of classification systems: despised subcategory of 'others' of all the categories, in a metaphoric meaning -  speak up, the classification as a closed interpretation system is being challenged.

I see the concept of genre as it appears, introduced by Saarti, in existing content description systems of fiction, coming close to the concept of fossil described by Foucault. In the classifications of natural history a fossil represents in the frozen form the origin of historical differences. Another view of genre, as a social signifying process, is offered by Alastair Fowler (Fowler 1997) when he talks of genre as a collective or group creative process. Should the collective conceptual creative processes also be included in the description of fiction? 

The library as a collective of readers, writers and texts

It is also worth asking how the readers would express their relation to the texts they read, and how would they organize them for the later use? These questions also share the starting points of hypertext, with close relation to the personal memory of the user. Vannevar Bush elaborated memex to "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory (Bush 1945). "

Of course we know that every user organizes her text documents at least according their file forms (but not of her own desire) and further to the files, and it would be interesting to know more about those practices. The link listings on home pages are another example of organizing the users relations to the documents. It is characteristic of the need for the personal organization possibilities how many of the home pages in the web aim at organizing the massive amount of information in the internet. Corresponding forms of personal organizing of information are the organization of bookmarks and, of course, electronic mail, which Derrida characterize as "transforming the public and private space of humanity (Derrida 1996)".

Considering of virtual libraries and their ways of bringing texts and readers together, one obvious problem with the design of the description systems for literature is that reading is usually observed and thought in terms of information retrieval, which of course can reach only a small part of the reading process. Should there, for instance, be hypertext research examining the nature of navigation from the combined point of view of informatics and research on reading?

One possible design model for a virtual library and description of fiction, is presented by Jarmo Saarti, who describes an ideal model of an information system for fiction (Saarti 1999) which would also include the documents with their descriptions.

The system consists of five databases representing the different actors in the fictional communication system:
    1. texts (digitized fiction)
    2.subject indexing and abstracts of texts
    3. history of the reception by the readers (research and literature criticism, discussions of readers)
    4. history of the writer
    5. cultural history (the cultural context of literature)

The system forms a networked hypertext, where texts, authors, readers and the context of literature are modeled and described for the purposes of information retrieval. Interpretative and intertextual aspects can be included in this system, but they should be expressed as a separate systems or facets named for their specific functions. The system could be designed, for instance, for a publisher, library or reader oriented system; these systems could be separate, but linked to each others. A reader oriented system Saarti sees functioning as a stimulus for the reader's interpretation and as a platform for discussions between the readers.

It is difficult to understand why this model restricts the concept of fiction to the digitized texts and takes not at all into consideration the hypertexts and new media texts originally created to electronic reading environment. However, the aspect that makes Saarti's model important and interesting to me is its aim to place the social space for the readers within the structure of content description system. The problems with the model involve the writings of the readers and the social space and time of reading practices.

An interesting feature of the model is that the context of fiction appears in it in the form of history, frozen time, "history of the reception by the readers" although the content of  readers' receptions would most probably be, at least partially, discussions in the present time. It seems, at least for those who have walked with Foucault through the taxonomy of biological beings, as if the language and practices of classifications had their own modes of representation, their own poetics, and it works by creating distance. The same problem - which might be called the aesthetics of distance, from the point of view of literature - occurs in describing the texts; the texts tend to be frozen and crystallized in to their historical meaningfulness, or lack of it, when they are observed through the classifications. But what if the texts refuse to stay still?

At all events, the readers' possibility of putting their own texts into the virtual library is an important part of the idea of the virtual library. The idea of a reader-oriented system can be approached from the point of view of building a personal library for readers. An interesting example of this sort of thinking is the digital library design model, based on agent technology, of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science's (SICS) Intelligent Systems Laboratory. The aim of this model is to build a virtual community library, and linked to it, a personal information environment for the user, a personal library.

Belonging to the community library means that the user can benefit from all the materials and categorizations of the other members of the community. It is possible to search for material through information retrieval and user rankings based on social filtering. It is also possible to get help in organizing the personal library. The model for the digital library is a decentralized recommender system, consisting of agents communicating with each other and mediating the interests of their users to the information gathering agents, and, further, mediating the information received with the interpretations available from the categorizations of the other personal libraries, to their users (Rasmusson & Olsson & Hansen).

The user is represented at the system level by the agent of the personal library, which is the fundamental building block in the system architecture (Olsson & Rasmusson & Janson). A personal library agent can be used by individual persons or institutions. No libraries in the system have the authority concerning the information or its categorizations.

When organizing the personal library it is possible to

- attach personal annotations to the documents

- attach personal tags to the documents (from a predefined hierarchic structure)

- change tags attached to the documents

- visualize the information content (Swedish Institute of Computer Science,  project description)

The advantage of this technical model is that it comprehends the library as a community: a library is a community formed by its users in order to share information.

In the project problems were noticed that arise from the classification of information by non-professional end-users: it is harder to develop use-conventions in classifications, especially in indexing. The need for librarians in the classifying of larger collections was observed in order to create functioning use-conventions. Professionally maintained collections as personal libraries in the virtual community library were assumed to be used more frequently by others than the libraries representing only one individual.

Both the user-empowering models of information description and retrieval, like the SICS-model, and the standardized and professionally maintained categorizations have their advantages and disadvantages and the evaluating of them has to be done on the criterion of the desired targets. The creation of different sorts of hybrid systems and customized information environments for the users would be possible also in connection with the public system of classifications, without the neglect of compatible system logic. There is, in fact, no need nowadays for the user environment to follow exactly the same logic as the system.

Together, Saarti's model for the fictional communication system and the SICS-model for virtual community library, are already shaping some possible ways to realize the ideas of social spaces of reading in the hypertext environment, and simultaneously keep the traditional effective information retrieval system functioning.

A model emphasizing the aspects of community would be well suited, for instance, to the use of writer communities: a library would then mean a shared space where the members of the community are publishing texts and where they share information categorizations as well as their other experiences in relation to texts. A public library, too, could be part of this kind of community, by offering its collections and categorizations for the use of the community, and by getting valuable information for the user categorizations.

It seems essential for the constituting of new reading environments to create hybrid practices which connect different kinds of participants within the field of literature. By using the term library in this article I have, in fact, been referring to the ideal of a library, which for me is: the distribution, organizing and describing of textual material in a social space open to everyone for their cultural and intellectual needs.

As an experiment, in the context of new media texts, I suggest that we think of the library as forming one part of the textual machine described by Aarseth. The library with its systematic organizing techniques is a technology. As such, these organizing technologies could be seen as a medium, among other organizing and performative mediums within the textual machine, while the texts and reader-writers would be the other parts of the machine. When the relations between the agents and actants of the system of text are described like this, the system of textual machine is, in fact, beginning to describe the system of a textual galaxy, instead of individual texts. This placement for 'a library' comes close to the agents and navigation technologies designed for travels in textual galaxies, but also for personal reading devices and the changing concepts for writing. Classifying within this context would be the practice of all the participants of the textual device, and a classifying person and technology would together form a cyborg character.

To my mind, thinking of classifications through the metaphor of text machine will show more clearly some of the borderlands of human and technical agents and actants. Some dimensions in the cultural structure of classifications may appear more visible than before. A 'docuverse machine' emerged to the text machine is, for instance, capable of creating distance, recognizing differences and similarities, freezing meanings into categories and generating repetition.

Is there still, and on what conditions, within this 'classifying machine', possible to find the space of writing, which is the pleasure in reading, which is a never ending play with changing positions, and never standing still?
 

Notes:

[1]  Clare Beghtol examines some points of these aspects in her article 'Facets' as interdisciplinary undiscovered public knowledge: Sr. Ranganathan in India and L.Guttman in Israel. Journal of Documentation, 51 (3): 194-224. She refers with the term 'undiscovered public knowledge' to the phenomenon of fragments of independently created knowledge that are public and logically belonging together, but will never be found because of the missing information search logic. Timo Kuronen brings this question into the context of  the difficulties in transferring the concepts and results of an certain branch of science to another, and points out the need for multidisciplinary approaches. Timo Kuronen: Ranganathanin lait ja virtuaalikirjasto. Finnish Information Studies 4. Oulun yliopisto 1996.

[2]  Aristotle's systematic of the sciences is the categorization that has been most influential in library classifications during their thousands of years old history. Aristotelian systematic was used in ancient Greek libraries. However, Aristotle in his genre theory of literature did not use genre as a class.

[3] Foucault's epistemology of the sciences in The order of things is focuses a great deal on the dialogue between the "domain of pure forms of knowledge" and subjectivity.

[4] More about the ubiquity of classifications of every day life and especially in the health services in Bowker & Leigh Star, 2000.
[5] In his article "From Work to Hypertext: Authors and Authority in a Reader-Directed Medium". (1997) Glenn A.Kurtz discusses the writing and choosing processes in the act of reading in relation to the much celebrated and cursed concept of interactivity. He remarks that theorists who are considering the choosing between the offered links as an expression of the reader's liberty to reshape the text, are often basing their views on the theory of Barthes. This is to be regarded as a misunderstanding of Barthes. What has been typical for the reader's experience in Barthes' theory has become a characteristic of a hypetext programs, not the user practices.
http://www.cel.sfsu.edu/MSP/Instructors/Kurtz/Work.html
 

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