Week 36: Can you die by wolf?
one person died by "frighted" in England, 1649; 29 "Fainted in a Bath"
A note for some new readers, who joined this week after I gave an impassioned lecture on why ebooks are so unnecessarily expensive for libraries on my Instagram story (I’ll come back to that eventually): I’m in the middle of a seven(?) part series about naming and placing, aka classification aka the bedrock of information organization. You join us right in the weeds, and I’d recommend reading these three issues before diving into this one. Thanks for being here.
A note for all readers: this issue discusses (mis)classification of mental illness. I’ve marked those spots in case you’d like to skip past them.
controlled vocabularies: attempting order
Last time, I left off with naming as fraught and insufficient practice because we don’t know very much about anything at all. Billy Shaks had us covered with “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” What we name something is not necessarily what it calls itself, nor does a name change the attributes of the thing. You could call a “lamp” a “pen,” but that doesn’t mean the lamp suddenly has the function of a writing utensil. Most of the misnaming that happens in knowledge organization occurs with far more complicated concepts, perhaps because of a lack of knowledge or reliance on old habits or deliberate obfuscation, but the point stands.
Cataloguers know about these insufficiencies and they resolve the uncertainty of how to name things by employing controlled vocabularies. Controlled vocabularies:
set the terms we apply to concepts, rather than require each of us to come up with our own lists,
reduce ambiguity by establishing a preferred term for synonyms (should I refer to Pepper as “family pet,” “pet,” “beloved cat”? I’ll set the term as “family cat”),
define which terms are appropriate for which fields of metadata (hence why you won’t put “Stan Lee” in the “Date” field or “Batman” in the “Author” field),
provide syntax, or how to input data (e.g. formatting dates as 2021-10-19 instead of Tuesday, October 19, 2021), and
and ensure that the same documents are being returned for the same search terms.
In practice, this means that items labeled with the same controlled term will be linked together: the subject headings I detailed in issues 34 and 34A are part of a controlled vocabulary. When I clicked on “Grief — Fiction,” I was linked to a list of all of the items classified as such; clicking on just “Grief” leads me to a disambiguation of all items labeled Grief, regardless of genre.
Controlled vocabularies combine naming and placing: By telling you which kinds of inputs you can have in which categories, controlled vocabularies arrange or place entities. These resulting arrangements, or classifications, have real-world consequences on how we understand and treat people and ideas.
Consider a thesaurus. Thesauri define relationships. We often use thesauri to find words related to one we already know. Thesauri will also nest terms, or link narrower concepts under increasingly broad concepts. In an online thesaurus, for example, you might see results ranked as more closely related than others.
In a classification scheme, these related terms will often expressed in tree hierarchies. Think of the hierarchy of biological species (I write as I swat a fly from my monitor): Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species. In a visual expression of that hierarchy, we might write Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Genus-Species. Each hyphen marks another branch from the overarching category (Kingdom) to the most distant branch (Species).
In information organization, the nesting or linking or relating (however you want to think about it) of concepts is informed by a variety of sources, such as academic consensus, professional societies, or other “authorities.” Many fields have subject-specific thesauri that are designed to help practitioners apply the same language in the same ways to the experiences they encounter. These thesauri are good places to see the influence of certain types of thought on how we arrange entities, especially when two (or more) groups place the same concept in different ways, demonstrating just how subjective these processes are.
case study: classification of mental illness
In class, we did just that: our lecturer showed us how ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) and PsycArticles alternatively classified schizophrenia. We began with the subject heading “schizophrenia” and clicked on the successive “broader term” links, climbing back up to the root category, as expressed in the map here:
In the APA classification (left), we see that schizophrenia is under psychosis, which is classified as a mental disorder under the broader term “disorders,” of which “disabilities” are one type. In the ERIC classification (right), we see schizophrenia again nested under psychosis, which is nested under both severe disabilities and mental disorders.
The material force of categories appears always and instantly. In APA, schizophrenia is not classified as a disability; in ERIC, it is. What might this mean to someone who researches schizophrenia after receiving a diagnosis? How might these classifications inform insurance companies’ decisions to cover healthcare? How might this impact the kinds of treatment or support a person with schizophrenia is recommended, seeks out, or thinks applies to them?
In class, we also discussed the ablism of qualifying a category as “severe.” How does one determine severe versus moderate versus mild disabilities? “Severe” compared to what, and in which circumstances, and for which people? Is someone “severely” disabled if their health needs are met in humane, conscientious, and just ways such that they can live a dignified life? How does one match a subjective scale of impairment into a medical, psychological, or care scheme, all of which have different priorities?1
APA and ERIC also list related terms—recall that thesauri describe both hierarchical and horizontal relationships. As we clicked up the term chain from schizophrenia to disability, we also encountered “related terms.” Similar terms to psychosis, according to ERIC, are “autism,” “dementia,” and “emotional disturbances.” What assumptions about ability does ERIC communicate by linking neurodivergence, a degenerative illness, and a mental illness as “related terms”? What assumptions do these classifications reflect about our society and the kinds of accommodations we are willing to make to ensure that people live just, humane, and dignified lives?
I read this week about a healthcare village in Denmark that is home to 225 residents, all of whom have dementia. The town has shops and services, a hairdresser and salon, a library and theatre. Residents move freely and guests are encouraged. Early results from the town demonstrate that residents are happier, healthier, and live longer than adults with dementia who live in traditional nursing homes or hospices. The oft-repeated refrain “I’m only disabled when I leave my house” highlights how the labor of access should not be placed on the individual, but an environment. Qualifying disabilities as “severe” actually reflects the severity of isolation and social rejection with which our society treats those with additional care needs. That is the material force of these categories.
producing classification: cause of death, census data, and Twilight
Classification connotes. Just as we layer references onto an item when we name it, so too do we communicate our political priorities when we arrange it. Consider this example from the county book fair I attended this weekend:
I posted that photo to my Instagram story and got a variety of messages in response: “A true crime against literature,” “truly truly,” “a crime against us all,” and so on. We all know that Twilight is not “True Crime” in the sense of the popular genre (I’m not opening that can of worms). But by classifying it as such, the book fair organizers evoked our knowledge of true crime conventions and poked fun at the book.
Twilight as “True Crime” exemplifies how classification is not inherent, but a historical process, a practical match, a set of negotiated compromises, and a negotiated order. Geoffrey Bowker & Susan Star puts it well in their first chapter of Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences:2
when we ask historical questions about the deeply and heterogeneously structured space of classification systems and standards, we are dealing with a four-dimensional archaeology. The systems move in time, space, and process. [emphasis mine]
Twelve years ago, Twilight may have sat happily undisturbed in Romance or Fantasy or Young Adult. Such conventions and cultural consensus change over time, however, which means that classification, or arrangement of information, changes as well.
In 17th-century English death records, for example, “causes of death” included the subcategory of death by animal. Nested under “death by animal” were further categories of death by dogs, rats, or wolves. Today, one could die by “venomous animals,” “nonvenomous animals,” “dogs,” or “rats,” but wolves lacks its own category, deeming “death by wolf” an impossible classification in data entry. Of course, one can still be killed by a wolf, but it won’t be recorded as such, rather under “death by nonvenomous animal.” Here, we see how the shifting arrangement of categories changes what we know and understand about cause of death by animal.
We see changes in cultural conventions play out in the census as well: tracking racial classifications in US census data becomes a journey through domestic and foreign policy, civil unrest and subjugation, and various linguistic attempts to distinguish white people and non-white people from one another according to whatever political priority at hand. There’s nothing inherent about these classifications; rather, classifications are a historical process, a practical match, a set of negotiated compromises, and a negotiated order. Recall the absurdity of bibliographic description: the standards I described are the direct results of
a historical process (the making and understanding of book production),
a practical match between the information printers left and how to express it,
a set of negotiated compromises between every bibliographer’s idea of how to express these concepts, and
a negotiated order of what is most important (the collation formula) followed by everything else.
What happens, however, when a concept or action cuts across categories? Consider care workers, who, for example, work in domestic spaces, nursing home and hospices, medical environments; they work in physical, mental, and emotional realms. Are they medical professionals? Psychologists? Health aids? Social workers? All of the above? The category of “care work” reveals how the classification of space and profession caters to what we imagine as static categories: medicine as a science-based practice that occurs in a hospital or office, for example. But the alignment of science and medicine, and the location of medicine outside the home, are two very recent developments. Pointing out where entities traverse these class boundaries reminds us just how tenuously and subjectively these ideas have been placed.
I have repeated Geoffrey Bowker and Shannon Star’s refrain throughout this issue: “the material force of categories appears always and instantly.” In the case of care workers such as home health aids, their placement outside of medicine (and healthcare coverage) results in undervaluing their labor, which leads to underpayment. So too do we see the material force of categories with the classification of kinds of illnesses and disabilities—these play out in healthcare coverage, accommodations, remuneration, legal protections, and so on.
But if classifications are subject to change, how do we actively change them? And why should we? That’s for next time.
Housekeeping and Birdseeking
house
Dominoes fall:
bird
Not a bird, but there’s a new spider friend in my bathroom who gave me quite the shock two mornings ago. We’ve since made peace.
More later.
I edited this issue this week just days after the death of Engracia Figueroa. Figueroa was a disability rights advocate whose untimely death was a direct result of injuries she sustained after United Airlines irrevocably destroyed her custom wheelchair on a flight last year. Many disability advocates note that their aid technology—mobility aids, hearing aids, and so on—are not luxuries but parts of their bodies. “Severe disabilities” suggests that the classifier observed these kinds of illness or impairment and assumed a poor quality of life. That need not be the case. The material force of categories appears always and instantly.
Edit (Dec 7, 2021): Based on a note-taking error, I previously miscited this as from Melissa Adler’s Cruising the Library.