If you managed to persist through the entire previous issue, hats off to you. I drafted that about six different times and still don’t feel like I succeeded with what I wanted to get across, but it’s done now and we can move further into the absurdity of the bibliographic universe. One final time: “the reason that this has been able to go on for 100 years is because no one cares.” No one cares! All of those italics and brackets and superscripts have no bearing on your daily life. If pure math describes the fundamentals of the universe, bibliographic description describes the exact opposite: the output of a process of producing a volume of a book that contains the thoughts of someone who, a lot of the time, was not even talking about math. And, shocker!, that whole production process will change when we hit the machine-press period, at which point bibliographers kind of gave up for a bit because they just could not be bothered. More on that to come.
This time, I want to translate some of those utterly intangible ideas into the broader concepts of representation and organization. For our purposes, we are going to think about representation and organization as naming and placing.
It’s really, really difficult to pull these two ideas apart. So much so that I’ve already drafted the next four newsletters to try to plot out the big ideas. Right now, this issue and the next issue are about naming. The one after that is about placing. I will probably tweak things. Thanks for your patience. Anyways, here’s the opening line from the midterm I just wrote about how representation and organization are inextricable:
Representation and organization are mutually constitutive. On a practical level, to represent entities with a designated vocabulary but fail to organize them renders them unfindable; likewise, to arrange entities according to a logic but fail to index them renders them unsearchable.
Of course, I’m writing about these concepts in a library context, so I’m presuming some querying actions here: findability and searchability. But naming and placing occur everywhere and all of the time, and naming is especially influenced by how we structure knowledge.
Consider the items on your desk, or your coffee table, or your nightstand. I’m staring at my monitor, a water bottle, a mason jar painted with yellow roses, a photo of me and my Grandma Phyllis. All of these items have labels (their names), or indexes with etymologies. In nearly all of these cases, serious engineering and technological advancement took place to make the thing, advancement that developed alongside a changing language that could assign a label to the item. A lot of the time, we cannot articulate the technological and linguistic etymology of our daily clutter, because we simply do not know enough to say anything at all. I just googled the etymology for “bottle”—it derives from the Latin “buttis” for cask or wineskin.
These naming criteria come into clearer view with languages that have actual rules, unlike English, which is a clusterfuck of Latin, German, French, rolling our vowels in molasses, and making farting noises out of our nostrils. For example, the Icelandic Language Institute, now part of Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, maintains the Icelandic language and language glossaries for introducing new terms to Icelandic, which has remained relatively unchanged since the settling of Iceland in the mid-800s. New Icelandic vocabulary are often portmanteaus or manipulations of existing vocabulary: a favorite example of mine is that the Icelandic for “computer” is a fusion of “tala” (number) and “völva” (prophetess) to create “tölva” (prophetess of numbers).
There is profound work in naming, and this is just for discrete objects. Now, imagine naming concepts. Or theories. Or anthologies. That is the work of representation. If the core of descriptive bibliography is collation, then the core of representation is subject assignment.
When cataloguers encounter an item—in a library, an archive, documentary system—they have to assign it a name. This name is not the same as the title of the item. (Remember this—a name is not necessarily what something calls itself.) A title does not necessarily convey what the item is about, and that is the essence of naming: determining what something is about.
There’s a whole lot written about aboutness, and it’s not really worth getting into. Aboutness theory makes my head spin in the same way it spun when I was nine and my father explained the fourth dimension to me and I thought my brain was deflating between my ears from the enormity of it all. Aboutness is so essential and yet so inarticulable that the theory of it is not worth summarizing for a newsletter meant for a general audience. We’d be here for days.
In practice, subject assignment is determining aboutness and labeling an item as such. You see the results of subject assignment in catalog records, like the one I’ve included here for Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The subject headings are highlighted in blue: “Historical fiction, American—History and criticism,” “African American women in literature,” “Infanticide in literature,” “Slavery in literature,” and “Ohio—In literature.” This is what the cataloguer(s) of Beloved decided were the primary concepts of the text—and the ones that someone would possibly browse through—to find Beloved or a work like Beloved.
But I’ve skipped over a big process here: How do cataloguers come to these decisions? If they have the time, subject assignment looks a bit like this:
Cataloguers read (parts of, all of) the book and ask: What is the purpose or concept? Who and what are the grounding figures of this text? What holds the work together? In Beloved, there are the fictional figures—Sethe, Paul D., Halle, Beloved—as well as the conceptual and historical figures—grief, trauma, desperation, the Middle Passage.
Cataloguers consult other resources, such as critical essays, reviews, publisher’s material, author interviews. For anthologies, this may become unwieldy, as there are a lot of authors. For old books, first-hand reflections may be hard to come by. For Beloved, cataloguers might consult one or more of Morrison’s commentaries on her work.
Then, cataloguers make a list of content characteristics: what’s in the story? What’s the tone? What’s the form (short stories, essays, poetry, novel, etc.)?
They turn those characteristics into sentences: “Beloved is a story about a haunting.” “Beloved is a story about family.” “Beloved is a novel, set in Ohio, that began as an exploration of a mother’s grief over killing her child to spare her from enslavement.”
Finally, cataloguers distill those concepts into subject phrases as defined by a controlled vocabulary (ah, there’s the kicker): and this is where we find “African American women in literature,” and so on.
Interestingly, the Beloved catalog record from the Monroe County Public Library is slightly different, possibly because they use a different classification scheme than the IU Libraries, which abides by Library of Congress. Note here that the subject heading is “Women slaves” instead of “Slavery in literature.” Both cataloguers chose to highlight Ohio, however.
We return to Beloved. What jumps out to me from all of those subject headings is no mention of “grief,” or really any descriptor of the emotional scope of the narrative, which feels like a glaring omission. The subject assignments here are all accurate to the scope of the novel, and they still feel lacking as to what the novel is about.
This is the endless nightmare for a cataloguer: having to decide at what level they analyze the material and for what purpose: At what point does subject assignment transform from literary analysis to conceptual scaffolding? Subject assignment is not a lit paper, as much as I’d like it to be. The point of subject assignment is to identify, well, the point of the object. And delineating that is further constrained by the intended audience, their presumed knowledge base, and the naming criteria set forth by whatever system the cataloguer is working in. People get paid (not a lot) to do this!
But place yourself in the shoes of a user. In what circumstances are you using these subject headings to find materials, and is Beloved what you’re looking for when you plug in “Ohio—in literature”?
I’ll pause there. Next time: what happens when you want to change your name?
Housekeeping and birdseeking
house
On stealing books (and other stuff): More on Hobby Lobby’s Robby Hobby. The author of this article notes that The Museum of the Bible sought to use material history to confirm their founding argument: the word of God is immutable from Abraham to now. Though not a new idea, the museum sought material that affirmed this concept and excluded materials that detracted from it. To reach that end, they stole thousands of artifacts. At best, this is confirmation bias. But then they falsified hundreds more, committing material obstructionism that amounts to theft three-fold: theft of countries’ heritage, theft of honesty and integrity, and theft of humility, the key ingredient for working with material history.
On the opposite end of that spectrum: Jesus College Cambridge is returning a Benin bronze of a cockerel to Nigeria. Dominoes fall, etc.
bird
I have begun my painting series “birds as their flock” (working title), where I depict birds doing the thing that describes a group of those birds (e.g. crows committing a murder, a commotion of coots, a bluejay scolding its chicks). Roll with me here.
More later.