Categories

Thought on categories.

I was reading about document engineering (not my favorite topic) a couple of weeks ago, while researching PhD programs, and came across some interesting ideas about how people create categories.

It got me thinking about tagging again (an old topic, bla) but then more broadly about the relationship between tagging, categorisation and language itself. As much as I love and believe a taxonomy is critical to finding things, and DPKO has worked hard to establish and implement a taxonomy, I thinks its equally critical to establish from the outset that taxonomies are evolving creatures. That, I think, is the great lesson of the tagging phenomenon; that categories are fluid, so fluid in fact that their ephemerality is apparent even in the smallest groups of people. The play/struggle to convey meaning comes down to the microlevel of each communication. In each sentence we speak, we reconcile the meaning of the word with the experience we are enmeshed within. We see the apple, it is unlike any other apple we have seen, we adjust the meaning of the word apple with this new sensation, and it hooks into all the cognitive schema embedded in the neural network. The mind is supple.

AND in fact the best taxonomies ever created are whole languages.

So it got me thinking about how language changes and evolves. Looking at an initial attempt to understand the difference between tagging, categorisation and taxonomy, I came up with the following diagram. It needs improvement, but perhaps its something.