[Sigcr-l] Reading about how culture/language affects knowledge representation

[Elin K. Jacob]

Dear Dagobert.

Zerubavel's book on "lumping and splitting" is an excellent  
introduction to the idea that different cultures represent the world  
differently:
	Zerubavel, E.   (1991).  Islands of meaning (p. 5-20).  The great  
divide (p. 21-32).  In The fine line: making distinctions in everyday  
life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The classic article by Brown discusses various aspects of "naming" :
	Brown, R. (1958). How shall a thing be called? Psychological Review  
65, 14-21.
The physicist Peat has a very intriguing chapter that talks about the  
"stories" that different cultures use to explain the same phenomenon:
	Peat, F. D.  (1993).  Science as story.  In C. Simpkinson & A.  
Simpkinson (Eds.), Sacred stories (p. 53-62). San Francisco: Harper.

The following also address this issue:
	Clark, A.  (1998).  Magic words: how language augments human  
computation. In P. Carruthers & J. Boucher (Eds.), Language and  
thought: interdisciplinary themes (pp. 162-183).  Cambridge:  
Cambridge University Press.  Retrieved August 31, 2008, from http:// 
www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/staff/clark/pubs/magic.pdf
	 Goode, E.  (2000).  How culture molds habits of thought.   
NYTimes.com, 8 August 2000.
	 Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M.  (1999).  Philosophy in the flesh: the  
embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought (p. 3-36).  New  
York: Basic Books.

There are also several foundational papers on how representation  
"works" that I have found useful in  discussions of representation are:
	Palmer, S. E. (1978) Fundamental aspects of cognitive  
representation. In E. Rosch & B. L. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and  
categorization (pp. 259-302). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
	 Barsalou, L. W. (1992). Representation. In Cognitive Psychology: an  
overview for cognitive scientists (p. 52-56 only). Cambridge:  
Cambridge University Press. (Barsalou's briefer discussion is  
actually based on Palmer's paper, which is excellent).

And there is a paper by Hjorland -- I don't remember the title  
offhand but I do remember the examples of different representations  
of forests(?) in different languages that cannot be translated.  Berger?

In my lectures on representation, I contrast the English words for  
flowing bodies of water (creek, brook, stream, river, etc.--  
distinguished by "size") with the two French words for river (fleuve  
and rivier, distinguished by destination) to illustrate that the  
conceptual planes in these two languages are different and thus  
cannot be translated.

Unfortunately, none of these resources deal explicitly with any  
bibliographic classification scheme.

elin


Elin K. Jacob, PhD
Associate Professor & Director, SLIS Doctoral Program
School of Library & Information Science
Indiana University
011 Wells Library
1320 E. 10th St.
Bloomington  IN  47405
Phone:  812.855.4671
Email:  ejacob at indiana.edu

On Sep 19, 2009, at 12:33 PM, Dagobert Soergel wrote:

> A beginning student asked me
>
> Could you recommend a reading about how culture/language affects
> knowledge representation?
>
> Does anyone know of the one or two articles that introduce this
> problem, or a bibliography?  A good treatment of cultural focus (or
> bias) in classifications, such as DDC or the Colon Classification,
> would certainly fit in here.
>
> Dagobert
>
>
> Dagobert Soergel
> College of Information Studies
> University of Maryland
> 4105 Hornbake Library
> College Park, MD 20742-4345
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