Jefferson’s library on LibraryThing

Douglas Galbi has a great post on Jefferson’s library on his purple motes blog. Jefferson’s library is in LibraryThing. Cool.

Sexuality is a principle upon which all aspects of society are organized

Is it really possible to say this? The more I look into it, the more I believe it’s true. Looking to Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Linnaeus, and LC/Dewey, I have to say that yes, sex and power (which are inextricable) are deeply embedded in our classification systems. I’m reading LCSH to find explicit and implicit representations [...]

The Woman Category

Palmer and Malone examine representations of women in classification structures, which are “artifacts of a society’s intellectual history” that “reveal commonly held beliefs and assumptions” (179). They show how subject headings can be temporary in nature and can depend upon and influence relationships between published knowledge and organization and retrieval of that knowledge. They trace [...]

Literacy in prisons

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy reveals striking stats regarding levels of literacy among prison inmates and people living in households. Most of the findings aren’t surprising to me. The study does show a slightly higher literacy rate among inmates over 10 years, but there are still significant numbers, in prisons and out, that [...]

Dead City Base Ball

baseballbrandon1Originally uploaded by madlerbrarian.

Go Dead City!

Speaking

Last week I quit drinking coffee, so I was nearly incapacitated and definitely unable to read Foucault. I’m much better now…my withdrawal symptoms seem to be gone, so I’m back in action! 
 
This chapter makes me think of LoC Subject Headings, particularly authority headings, in a variety of new ways:
 
“What civilizations and peoples leave us as the [...]

More on Las Meninas

“…the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never residesin what we say…And the [...]

Las Meninas

“In the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation—of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject—which is the [...]

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