Operation Airplane Find the best textual means to not going crazy on a long flight Patrick Wilson defines two types of “bibliographic control,” or power over the universe of documents. The first power is exploitative control, or finding “the best textual means to an end.” The second power is descriptive control, or finding documents that match a description that I generate. With exploitative power, I magically receive documents that I might not even know that I need: I think I’m looking for a chocolate mousse recipe, but really I want the most impressive dessert I can most easily prepare for a dinner party with the new neighbors, and that’s actually lemon sorbet. (One of the neighbors is allergic to chocolate, and I don’t know it. Plus, it’s citrus-sation time at the Central Market!) With descriptive power, I get the documents that I ask for: a chocolate mousse recipe, which will turn the party into a disaster. Descriptive power is not easy to achieve, but it is straightforward to imagine. Exploitative power is complex, and it requires judgment to be rendered on the items being described. Is it possible to achieve some level of exploitative power through structured description, or systems of attributes and values? A difficulty with such attempts lies in that element of appraisal. Appraisal isn’t limited to assessments of quality; as Lee and colleagues note, determining characteristics such as genre, mood, theme, and visual style of video games is similarly a matter of interpretive appraisal. While such attributes can be highly valued and useful, they are also the most difficult to describe precisely and consistently. When attributes are applied inconsistently, the information being organized becomes incoherent and hard to understand. This only gets worse if we have many people creating many records at different times, in different institutions. That’s the whole point of Dublin Core: a simple set of attributes that works across many situations. Or does it? This is what we shall investigate. I don’t know about you, but finding the right book for a long flight is a difficult task for me. I hate flying: it’s uncomfortable in that tiny seat, plus I fear death up there. And so I want a book that’s engrossing but yet not so intense that I can’t get into it. And it has to be long enough to last 5-10 hours, but short enough so that I can contemplate getting to the end by the time we land. Perhaps this is a scenario that could benefit from some exploitative control... This mission has three parts: Define two sets of attributes for two potential audience groups for a specific information-seeking task. Compare these brief schemas with a subset of Dublin Core, using some specific examples. Discuss the relative advantages of each schema. Can one be considered “best”? Define two schemas to facilitate exploitative control over the bibliographic universe for two different audience groups Lee and colleagues suggest that particular audience groups may have specific goals that align with certain attributes and associated values. They ultimately designed one schema for all uses, but they found the their audience conceptualizations to be useful nonetheless. Here, we will develop two sets of approximately five attributes each for the task of finding something to read for a long flight (over 5 hours), for two audience groups: one, yourself; and two, Francesca. Details about Francesca appear below. For each brief schema, label and define each attribute and provide some parameters for the value space (a numerical scale? A date? A name? An image?). You can describe an envisioned controlled vocabulary if you want (we’ll talk about that more next week). A tip: when developing attributes, it is usually best to define a wide value space, with a range of expressivity, as opposed to a narrow one. A dichotomous yes/no value space is typically not very flexible. So if we wanted to express aspects of a complicated plot, we might consider attributes like the number of concurrent storylines, the number of characters, the span of time in the narrative, the density of events, and so on, and not something like “Complicated: yes/no.” Brief schema 1: attributes to help you select something to read for a long airline flight (10 minutes) Brief schema 2: attributes to help Francesca select something to read for a long airline flight (10 minutes) Some information about Francesca She is a 32-year-old woman with a BS in computer science from UT; she is a software architect for a game company in Austin. She’s going on a business trip to Copenhagen. (Her company recently purchased a Danish game-design studio, known for their mobile game Death by Design, where the player must complete a bicycle route through Copenhagen streets while avoiding airborne objects of mid-century modern furniture.) She doesn’t need to read anything work-related on the plane. Francesca enjoys international politics and most regularly reads The Economist. In fiction, she likes plotdriven adventures, often science fiction and sometimes mysteries. She likes settings where she learns things that she didn’t know before: it could be about other cultures or times, or just knowledge and expertise, like sailing or farming. She is especially averse to paranormal romance. Vampires, bleh. She just reread the first two of Larry Niven’s Ringworld books and enjoyed their inventiveness. But she hates when authors keep revisiting their old series and beating them to death. Help Francesca find the best textual means to her ends! Compare these two schemas to a subset of Dublin Core Five Dublin Core elements are: Title Creator Date Subject Description There are a bunch of books on the table. See how you would describe 1-2 of these books with each schema: Dublin Core subset, the Schema for You, the Schema for Francesca. (10 minutes) Dublin Core Book 1 Book 2 Schema for You Book 1 Book 2 Schema for Francesca Book 1 Book 2 Assessment: which schema for who and why? Which of the three schemas seems to best facilitate the goal of identifying a good book for a long plane flight...for you, for Francesca, and for “anyone”? On what basis can you make such a determination? After considering this for a moment, we’ll discuss in small groups, where each person will describe their schemas and their assessments of them, in comparison to Dublin Core.