A Thought, Part 2

As I said in the last post, a classification system (library or otherwise) can be thought of as a sort of map or guide to a certain field of knowledge or a certain group of items. It helps map out the territory, which then helps guide you to the specific item or place or bit of knowledge that you seek. So, if a library classificationist is the one who writes the guidebook to all human knowledge, this assumes that he knows where various fields are in relation to each other, which further assumes that he knows at least something about all of these fields of knowledge. But how can anyone really know how every subject relates to every other subject, if there even is an objective answer to such a question? I said last time that all classification systems are guesses. It might be more appropriate to say that all classification systems reflect the preferences (intellectual or aesthetic) and the practical needs of whoever designs the system. For example, the old edition of Roget's Thesaurus of Words and Phrases that I've been using divides all words (which is to say, ideas and/or things) into six classes:

I. Abstract Relations

II. Space

III. Matter

IV. Intellect

V. Volition

VI. Affections

The whole system descends in a hierarchy, from these six main classes to sub-classes and sub-sub-classes and so on, till you get down to the most specific ideas. This is all fine and dandy, and it gives the whole realm of knowledge a comforting sense of order and structure. However, in a more recent edition, called Roget's International Thesaurus, the categories are not nearly as hierarchical. It is divided into 15 main classes, but within each class, the order of sub-classes is what librarians call "enumerative" (i.e., a listing), rather than hierarchical (which can be thought of as a family tree). Is this an indication that Roget's (and, by extension, the rest of us) have given up on the idea of structuring human knowledge into some kind of logical order? The enumerative list is just that... a list. It doesn't attempt to understand or explain how ideas are related to each other, except in the simplest sense of grouping similar concepts together and putting similar groups under a general category. Worst of all, however, is the alphabetical style of thesaurus, which simply lists words by how they happen to be spelled. This can be very useful, of course, but that's the whole point... it is merely practical, without making any attempt whatsoever to classify our ideas and therefore to provide a sort of road map to all knowledge. Whereas an old-style thesaurus can be used in a similar way to a library classification system (except that it is a guide to words instead of books), the modern dictionary-style thesaurus serves no such purpose, leaving one just as lost amid the sea of words and ideas and things as without it.

One reason the classification project has held such allure for me is that, at some level, I have seen it as a way of locating things in the world. I mean "locating" both in the sense of "finding" and in the sense of "placing", as in "let's locate it here". And, although I mean "finding" in the sense of discovering something new or recovering something lost, I mean "finding" even more in the sense of discovering where something is in relation to everything else. Instead of something being lost in the flood of ideas, images, and experiences that we encounter each day in our 21st century lives, or floating adrift in the vast sea of knowledge, a classification system is a way of "locating" or "finding" its place in the world. Perhaps, ultimately, it's a way of making the world more like home, by organizing the random, chaotic clutter of our experiences and knowledge into a meaningful and beautiful order.

In my previous post I mentioned an uncertainty principle (specialization vs. generalization). What I have been talking about here leads me to what I might call an incompleteness theorem of classification. It goes something like this: In order to know how to organize knowledge and experience, one must already remember everything that needs to be organized. If you forget something, then that thing gets left out of the system, and the system is therefore incomplete. But in order to find everything that needs to be included in the system, we first need a system; without a system, we are left to the whims of memory, which is always incomplete and leaves things out. We can never be sure that we have included everything that needs to be included. In other words, we can't make a complete system without already having a complete system. Therefore, all classification systems are incomplete, and in fact it is impossible to create a complete classification system.

A Thought, Part 1

Today it occurred to me that one of the primary purposes of classification is to help us find things. This might seem obvious, but it bears some thought. If you have a library where every book has its place in a logical scheme, it's much easier to find something than if you have a room full of books in no order whatsoever. So classifying things is not only a way of mapping out the structure of reality, but, like any other map, it is also a guide to help you get to a certain article of knowledge.

This brings up some interesting questions. Librarians, like philosophers, don't make it their business to know everything. They focus instead on the big picture, and on attempting to understand the interrelationships among different things and to make out the grand structure of reality. So librarians classify books on the basis of some kind of general understanding of how different topics are related. But the problem is that having this general understanding requires at least some degree of knowledge about the subjects themselves. Think about it. If you know nothing about a given field of knowledge, how can you possibly know how to map out its contents? For that matter, if you know nothing about a given topic, how can you be qualified to say how it relates to other topics?

The upshot of all this is that there seems to be a sort of uncertainty principle at work here. The more you know about a certain field of knowledge, the better you are able to classify its contents. But the more you know about the field, the less you can know about all other fields (since time and mind are finite). Therefore, the more specific a system gets, the less general it can be, and the more general (or universal) the system gets, the less specific it can be. Which brings us back to the old conundrum of having to choose between specialization and generalization. You can't have it both ways.

So how is an ideal (by which I don't mean perfect, but simply the best possible) classification system to be constructed? No single person can know everything, so a single person can't know how all subjects relate to each other. Conclusion: it is impossible for a single person (or two, or any small number) to create an adequate classification of all knowledge. No wonder I was feeling overwhelmed. No wonder I think Mr. Phillips is crazy. Forget about perfect. Adequate isn't even possible... at least not with a small number of people.

But what about a large team of experts? The problem here is that if everyone is an expert (and, for the sake of argument, let's just say that everyone is, since no single person can possibly master all of human knowledge), then no one is qualified to say definitively and authoritatively how all the various fields of knowledge relate to each other. This would be an almost God-like perspective.

The heart of the matter is that the overarching structure, the grand scheme, of reality must in some way forever remain hidden from us. All classification systems are guesses.

Taking a Break

I guess one thing I've realized about classification systems is that they can be of two basic types: philosophical and practical. It's not that they are mutually exclusive--philosophy can have an effect on practice, and practice can reflect philosophy--but they represent different emphases and purposes. What I call a philosophical classification is the kind I have been striving for--an attempt to chart the grand structure of reality, with practical application in an actual library being of secondary importance. The other type of system, the practical kind, is what most library classification systems are, I think (librarians being, on the whole, a supremely practical lot). It exists for the primary purpose of putting the books in order on the shelves so that they may be found as easily and quickly as possible, with the aid, of course, of a library catalog. Perhaps because I am of a more philosophical bent (I majored in a field of the humanities, after all, which isn't very practical), I am more intrigued by the philosophical sort of classification. And that's why Mr. Phillips' scheme appealed to me at first, with its aim of "perfection". But after spending weeks obsessively thinking about it and working on it only to run into seemingly insurmountable difficulties, I have to admit I'm a little burned out on the whole thing. Lib Con 08 (the library conference) is only two weeks away and I've lost all enthusiasm for the GPS. I'm thinking that maybe library classifications should just be practical after all, that there is no such thing as a perfect classification system, and that when you're creating a system to classify things, the nature of the system will depend on the nature of whatever it is you're classifying, as well as on your own practical needs. Or perhaps on your own aesthetic preferences. Which is what Mr. Phillips is doing, I suppose, in attempting to create a work of art. But that's his work of art. Sure, I'm just the lowly apprentice, like an apprentice painter, but somehow I'm not content in this role. Am I too sure of myself, thinking that I no longer need a master to teach me, eager to strike out on my own? No, I don't think that's it, because I don't feel sure of myself at all. If anything, I feel disoriented, disillusioned, completely unsure how to approach the problem or even if there is any point to approaching it. I feel that I've come face to face with the limits of human knowledge, and it's enough to make me wonder why we seek knowledge.

You can tell by my posts this week that I've been more interested in the "literature" of Ivan Large than in Mr. Phillips' (or my own) classification project. I guess my mind needed a break. And there's nothing better for sending your brain on vacation than reading a little Harmless Banter.

Perfection

Today I was sitting at a desk working on the classification project, with thesauri, dictionaries, and encyclopedias spread out before me, drawing diagrams with a pencil and notepad and doing a lot of erasing. Vivian was shelving some books nearby, and at one point, having long since lost my ability to concentrate on the work at hand, I started watching her. Not overtly staring, mind you, just sort of surreptitiously, casually glancing every now and then while I pretended to look busy. I found myself captivated by the way she shelved the books, so... I don't know how else to put it... elegantly. Just like when she stamped the due date cards. Every motion seemed perfect. I don't mean in a mechanical way, but in a graceful way. It was almost like watching some kind of ballet. And--well, I know this is going to sound funny, since Vivian is probably 15 or 20 years older than me--she seemed, in that moment, strangely beautiful. I don't mean to say that I like her, not in that way anyway. I just mean that she appeared to me to possess the kind of beauty that a ballerina does. It's not so much sexual as it is aesthetic.

Anyway, this got me to thinking about culture and civilization, and how they are by definition a human addition to nature. In case you don't see the connection, I'll explain. Vivian's elegance, it occurred to me, isn't so much her "natural" way of moving as it is a cultivated sophistication, just as a ballerina's movements are. Like music, poetry, architecture, or for that matter any kind of technology, her movements are human constructions, "improvements" upon nature if you will. But aren't human beings themselves part of nature? If so, how can anything we do or make be un-natural? To distinguish the artificial from the natural seems to suggest that human beings can somehow transcend nature. And if we can transcend nature, isn't that an amazing thing? Perhaps it is human nature to transcend nature, if "nature" means that which is given to us, and to add something of our own creation.

I see that Mr. Phillips takes this approach to classification. He doesn't care so much about his system being a mirror of nature as he is interested in creating a great work of art... beautiful yet arbitrary. Well, there's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But my approach has been to try to figure out nature itself... the way things are. I can assure you this is easier said than done. Science and philosophy attempt to do this, and they are famous for being intellectually challenging disciplines. Scientists at least have physical stuff to work with, things they can observe and verify. Philosophers deal in abstract ideas, logical relationships, metaphysical entities. Perhaps it is too much for me, or perhaps for anyone, to attempt to construct a library classification system by simultaneously constructing a philosophical system, rather than basing it on already existing philosophical principles.

At any rate, I don't see why Mr. Phillips thinks of his system as a work of art and yet strives for it to be "perfect". I don't know why I never noticed this apparent discrepancy before. How can one say that a work of art is perfect? Does he just mean in an aesthetic sense, as we would say that a certain song or painting is perfect, by which we would mean that it is flawless and perfectly executed? Up till now I have thought of a "perfect" classification system as one that perfectly expresses the structure of reality. By now I'm starting to become disillusioned with the possibility of attaining such a thing. I do believe that reality has a structure, but I've come to realize that it's a lot more complex and intricate than we can ever hope to understand. Is Mr. Phillips right? Should classificationists (if that's what we're called) consider what we do an art more than a science?

Of Squirrels and Philosophers

I've been especially busy the last few days since I've started preparing for Class War. Oh yeah, that's what they call the classification contest at the library conference. Cute, huh? This year's contest is actually Class War III. Mr. Phillips has competed in all of them so far. In the first Class War, his system came in third place. In Class War II, an improved (but still Lesser Perfect) system came in second. This year Mr. Phillips is determined to win first prize, armed with the GPS and a little help from you know who. Of course, I still think the man's totally out of his mind, thinking that I'm going to help him win this thing. I try to humor him, though. Even though I don't have any idea at all what I'm doing.

Today on my lunch break I was sitting in the park watching the squirrels. It occurred to me as I watched them that even animals must classify things, although their systems are much simpler than ours. I was thinking that those squirrels might have only two categories, "nut" and "not a nut". Must make life really simple. But then again, it might also make it really boring, at least for a human being. Maybe for a squirrel it's all right.

I suppose the complexity of life, or perhaps the ability to perceive complexity, is one of the things that makes life interesting. When you start to think about the whole of reality and the kaleidoscopic variety of things that compose it, it makes the world seem far richer than it might have seemed before. It also begins to seem a little overwhelming. It's like when you're the kid in the candy store, with enough money to buy one kind of candy, and you're suddenly confronted by more kinds of candy than you ever knew existed. It's thrilling and paralyzing at the same time. What do you choose? Or let's say you decide to try a different kind each week. Which one do you choose first? How do you know which one is your favorite until you've tried them all? Can you ever try them all? What if there are still other flavors that your local candy store doesn't carry? Maybe one of those is really your favorite? What if you never discover it?

I guess my point is that the sheer richness of the world is both a blessing and a curse. It's exciting to find oneself in such a teeming universe of multitudinous things, but it can also make one feel overwhelmed by options for potential experience and knowledge, and make one's actual experiences and knowledge seem a bit random. What you can do and see is always inadequate, a vanishingly small fraction of what there is. I'm beginning to think that philosophers and librarians are a bit alike in that they both seek somehow to comprehend the whole of reality, knowing that they can never actually know all there is to know (despite what children might believe about the librarian's omniscience), yet not content to limit themselves to one specialized subcategory of a subcategory of knowledge, the way today's university professors do. Philosophers (at least those who still seek to contemplate the whole of reality, rather than a sub-subcategory of it) and librarians (at least those who attempt to develop classification systems) would rather attempt to comprehend the whole thing, to try to figure out its dimensions and its structure, the relations among its various parts. Not that anyone--at least not anyone in his right mind--believes we can actually attain such knowledge completely. Omniscience is a divine quality, not a humanly possible one. Centuries ago, people used to think it was possible to master at least all human knowledge. Now we despair at even this task. But the philosopher and the librarian seek to comprehend the big picture, if not all the details, and perhaps metaphysics and classification are the closest we can ever approach to being real know-it-alls.

Complications

Classifying everything that exists is a lot more complicated than it seems. The branches of the tree get really intertwined. The thing I've come to realize is that things aren't always, or even very often, connected to other things by single, simple lines. They are often connected by many lines to many different things, in many different types of relationships. So it seems you can't really have a simple family tree. Take human relationships, for instance. I am descended from my mother and father, and their parents before them, and so on. But I am also connected to many other people, both through genetics and through social association, and I am connected to all these people in many different kinds of relationships, from friend to brother to coworker to random stranger passed on the street. Reality seems more like a big net than a tree, with the lines crossing every which way. This makes the whole project of classifying things infinitely more complex than it might seem at first glance. In a typical library classification system, each book has a definite place in the scheme, which corresponds to its physical location on the shelves. In a network (essentially, like the way the Internet is ordered), there are multiple links to and from any given entity, so its location in the scheme is relative rather than absolute. It's challenging enough, in this light, to trace all the relationships of just one thing, let alone everything that exists. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I've gotten in over my head.

Degrees of Separation

When trying to determine the relationship between any two entities in the GPS, one often runs into undecidable propositions. For example, try to figure out the relationship between the Holocaust and the Japanese monster movie Rodan. They can both be classed as things that happened on Earth in the 20th century, but is that all? How do you know if that's the only way their genealogies interconnect? For a classification system can also be looked at as a sort of genealogy of things, not necessarily in the literal sense of which things gave rise to others, but in a metaphysical sense, i.e. what categories and sub-categories of things exist, and how the different categories descend from each other in a giant tree. Just like in a family tree, you can determine how you're related to someone by tracing your respective lineages back far enough until you find a common ancestor. I read once that it's mathematically impossible for any two people on earth to be more distantly related than 50th cousin. Or it's sort of like how everyone in Hollywood can be located within six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. I haven't yet figured out how many degrees of separation are possible between any two entities, but it has to be a finite number, right? At any rate, even if the number is incomprehensibly large, it still boggles the mind to contemplate the fact that two disparate things like the mass murder of millions of people and a crazy Japanese monster movie coexist in the same universe. What is their common ancestor? How far is each of them from Kevin Bacon?

A Grand Scheme

If you're reading this, you must be a very faithful reader indeed, seeing that I haven't posted in just over two months. This is what happens when you become obsessed with inventing the perfect classification system. I didn't mean to abandon the blog. I neglected it for a few days once I became engrossed in my project, then pretty much forgot about it. Well, here we are again. There really isn't that much to fill you in on, except that I have developed some ideas of my own, and these ideas now seem a more interesting subject than my apprenticeship to Mr. Phillips per se. At least they are interesting to me, but I don't know how much of that is due to my obsession. But hey, it's my blog, so I can write about whatever I want, and nobody's making you read it, right?

For now I will just record this thought: Classifying things, I've come to realize, is more than just a way to attach labels to them. It's a way of understanding, or at least attempting to understand, what things are, and how different things relate to each other. In other words, it's sort of like a philosophical system, or at any rate it's an expression of a philosophical system. A classification system attempts to determine not only what a thing is, but also its place in the scheme of things. Although it may seem an arcane art, I think the reason classification has become so fascinating to me is that it makes everything in the universe, from the biggest to the smallest, to seem interconnected, all things part of one grand design. The classification system is merely a human attempt to interpret and describe that grand design, to embody it as faithfully as possible. And I've realized, too, that's why I fundamentally disagree with Mr. Phillips. I believe there is some grand structure, a scheme of things, whereas he seems to think either that there isn't, or that we can't know it, and that a classification scheme is just an artistic creation, like a symphony or a cathedral. I see it as more like a science, or at least a philosophy... in either case, it's a sincere attempt to arrive at the truth, which is to say the way things are. And the wondrous thing to me is that reality, in some mysterious way, seems to be something like a symphony or cathedral itself. Maybe it is quixotic to attempt to find out the outlines of this grand design, but to me that is the challenge and the allure of this project. Not that I believe that every little thing can be assigned a specific place in the scheme, by myself or any other mortal... but the belief that it does have a place in the overall structure, whether we can understand it or not--that it can be located somewhere in the grand scheme of things--this is what animates and underlies my quest.

The System Builder

Sorry I haven't posted in a few days. I've been busy. On Friday, Mr. Phillips let me in on his grand classification scheme. It seems he had been working on a classification system for some years, which he had referred to as the Perfect System. Well, after much development and hard work, he had come to feel that it was inadequate, not so perfect after all, so he shelved it (so to speak) and is now starting over on a new one. This one he calls (are you ready?) the Greater Perfect System. The old one he now refers to as (I know you're not ready for this one) the Lesser Perfect System.

Anyway, it seems that Mr. Phillips wants me, for reasons known and probably comprehensible only to himself, to assist him in the construction of the GPS. He gave me a copy of Roget's Thesaurus of Words and Phrases to help me get started. Unlike most current thesauri that list words in alphabetical order, dictionary-style, this is an older edition that lists words by category--in other words, a sort of classification system. But the old Roget's is a classification of words, not of books, so it can't be adapted as it is for use in a library. However, as Mr. Phillips points out, words are essentially ideas, and Roget's categorization of words is essentially a categorization of ideas, which can provide the basis, or at least some kind of rough guide or helpful aid, for a library classification system.

At any rate, ever since I got home from work on Friday, I've been working on the GPS, with Roget's and a notebook and pen (Mr. Phillips would like it that way, sans computer). I have to admit I've become rather fascinated and obsessed with the project. Geeky, I know. I guess I've caught a little bit of Mr. Phillips' classification mania.

The Eye Test

Today was weird. Which, of course, is normal when you're the apprentice to Walter J. Phillips, the great librarian.

Today Mr. Phillips sat me in a comfortable chair in a dark room and showed me slides of birds. He would show three birds in succession, a, b, and c, then a and b side by side, followed by a and c, then b and c. Then he would ask me which pair seemed to resemble each other the most. If I seemed uncertain (which was more often the case than not), he would run through them again, saying, "A and B... A and C... B and C. OK, one more time..." I felt like I was at the optometrist.

By the way, if you're wondering what any of this has to do with librarianship... you're in good company. Mr. Phillips' pedagogical methods get stranger and stranger every day.

"All right, here we have Corvus corax... followed by C. brachyrhynchos... and lastly C. frugilegus. Now here is C. corax with C. brachyrhynchos... next is C. corax with C. frugilegus... and finally we have C. brachyrhynchos with C. frugilegus. Which pair is the best match? Here they are again..."

And so on, for about three or four hours.

Don't ask me. I just work here.

The IQ Test

Ok, so I had to "classify" a box of bones. Easy, right?

Well, considering that I know almost nothing about anatomy, not so easy. I wasn't sure what type of animal these bones were from, or even if they were all from the same type of animal. How was I supposed to find out? I suppose I could find some books on animal bones...

And how should I classify them, anyway? By size? Shape? Body part? Species? Who could say? Mr. Phillips was out of the library all day, so I could not ask him for clarification. I only had a one-word command: CLASSIFY.

Was this some kind of intelligence test? A lesson in the difficulty of classification? If it was the latter, then I can say that I learned my lesson well. When you know next to nothing about bones, classifying bones is a near impossible task.

Well, I started out the best I could, organizing them by general size and shape, what looked like leg bones here, what appeared to be vertebrae there...

But this approach soon became complicated. At some point it becomes hard to know how to group things, what to put together and what to keep apart. Which is more important, the similarity or the difference? At one extreme, you just have to lump them all together as "bones"; at the other extreme, each bone is a unique individual specimen. Is every object a prime number, divisible only by itself and one? Are there really "kinds" of things, or are all classifications arbitrary? It seems there would have to be real kinds... all of these objects are obviously bones. But what about different kinds of bones? Are the divisions between different types of bones as definite and clear as what divides bones from non-bones? And of what greater thing are bones just one kind? Is there only a single group to which they belong? Can't we say that bones are a kind of this thing, but also a kind of that thing? And wouldn't everything that exists ultimately have to be a "kind" of one ultimate thing? A kind of what? Thing? What is a thing, anyway?

While my head swirled with such vertigo-inducing philosophical questions, the bone classification exercise became increasingly difficult and frustrating. Just when I thought I had a good system down, the next bone specimen would throw a wrench in the works and I had to rethink all of my assumptions.

Where did Mr. Phillips get all these stupid bones, anyway? Why does he have them? Just to torment me?

Mr. Phillips finally stopped by right before 5 o'clock to look at my work. "Interesting," he said.

"Well?" I asked. "Did I get it right?"

He gave me a funny look. "Right? Why, young man, you miss the whole point. As I told you, classification is an art." He shrugged nonchalantly. "There's no right answer." He chuckled and turned to leave. Needless to say, I was smoldering.

I almost didn't want to believe him. I didn't want to believe that I had just wasted eight hours of my life trying to find something that didn't exist. I wasn't sure if I should be more angry with Mr. Phillips or with myself. So last night I sulked.

Today, I started to think that maybe, just maybe, Mr. Phillips was wrong.

Only Classify

Where do I begin.

I came in today, Monday morning, and Vivian told me that there was an "assignment" from Mr. Phillips waiting for me in the workroom.

So I went in the workroom, where I saw a large cardboard box sitting on a table. A handwritten sign on the box said simply:

CLASSIFY

I opened the box.

It was full of bones.

I kid you not.

...sigh...

I'll tell you the rest tomorrow. Right now I just need a beer.

Dewey Decimation System

On Friday Mr. Phillips called me into his office. "Allow me to let you in on a secret," he said.

I waited. Then Mr. Phillips leaned forward, looked at me seriously, and said:

"Dewey was wrong."

I had to think for a moment. "As in the Dewey Decimal system?"

"The very one! Well, I'm here to tell you that Melvil Dewey, creator of the much-vaunted Dewey Decimal Classification system, didn't know what the hell he was talking about!"

"He didn't?"

"No! To think that you can classify everything that exists into ten and exactly ten groups? How convenient! And that each of those ten groups is further divisible into ten subgroups, and so on? Such a neat and tidy cosmology! As though the universe does everything in tens!"

"I never thought of it that way."

"Well, let me tell you this: The Dewey Decimal Classification system is something to be surpassed! Mankind can do far better!"

"What about the Library of Congress system?" I ventured, remembering my work in a university library.

"Library of Congress?! You've got to be kidding! Leave it to the United States government to devise the single worst classification system known to man! Why, it's hardly even worthy of the name! The word 'system' at least implies that there is some sense to it! The problem with Dewey is that it has too much sense; with Library of Congress, that it has--as one would expect of anything associated with Congress--too little sense!"

"So what is the answer, sir?"

"I'm so glad you asked, young man. Because that brings us to the very crux of librarianship and indeed of your apprenticeship. Classification. It is the heart of the matter. It is what we librarians do. We take the vast multitude of books that exist and we sort them out into some kind of comprehensible system. Otherwise, people would never be able to find what it is they're looking for. But it is more than that. That is just the practical, day-to-day outcome. Ease of finding is all they teach you in library school, but that is merely the natural result of classification. Classification, my boy, is an art, the finest art in the fine art of librarianship! A classification system is like architecture, like poetry, like music! Unfortunately for the world, however, Dewey's system is utterly dull and prosaic, while Congress's is pure noise! What we need is a classification system that will rise up like a symphony of human knowledge, in perfect harmony!"

I have to admit that at this point I thought Mr. Phillips was starting to sound a little crazy. Idealistic, yes, brilliant even, but just a little bit nuts. That is, until the next thing he said...

"And you, young man, are going to help me compose the perfect classification system!"

Then I thought he was totally out of his mind.