INLS 520

Organization of Information

In this course my focus is to provide a philosophical foundation that will carry students throughout their careers. Instead of focusing on particular implementations and contexts of information organization systems, I introduce students to fundamental concepts of organization and representation. Readings and discussion in this class is broad and encompassing, because the act of organizing information is itself broad and all-encompassing.

The fundamental belief underlying this course is that organizing is what makes us human. We all do it all the time. Language is a form of information organization. But because we all do this all the time, we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that the act of organizing is intuitive, objective, and easy. The purpose of this class is to take apart this idea of “objectivity” in organizing, and examine the idea of putting neat boxes around the unruly, messy and ambiguous world we inhabit.

Assessment in this class is based on three projects: students develop a descriptive schema on any set of things they are interested in, they then develop an organizational taxonomy, and finally they describe and compare two or more organizing systems in the wild. The final comparison project can take the form of anything other than a formal paper. Examples can be found in the Extras! page.

Credits

All of the readings, many of the in-class activities, and all of the lecture notes are based on Melanie Feinberg’s version of INLS 520 (although I think she has changed it since). I just think this is the perfect class, and changing it so it doesn’t look so much like Feinberg’s version would be superfluous and unproductive. I could not create a better course.