This is my thesaurus analysis for my course titled Foundations of Bibliographic Control.
While working on our thesaurus, there were several topics of discussion about the uses and limitations of thesauri that came up repeatedly. When we created an initial list of preferred terms for Part I, we talked about the ability—or inability—of the informational professional to predict how people are going to use language to conduct searches, and what a daunting task that is, considering the subjectivity and mutability of language. Predictive analytics of the kind used by marketing firms that can track what words people use most frequently to search for different information online and how effective those search terms are in web navigation could be helpful in a professional context, but data gathered about people’s search habits is not without its own ethical baggage.
In creating a thesaurus, it seems that the indexer has to balance usability with personal values. If you’re trying to make something findable by as many people as possible, do you have an obligation as the system designer to include commonly used terms you don’t agree with? Or should you try to figure out ways of steering people’s use of language and understanding of the concepts you are indexing in a more progressive direction? Though these are larger issues than one assignment can address, we came to the general conclusion that we needed to be extremely conscious of implicit bias and value judgements that may crop up when doing this kind of work.
One example of this in this assignment was when we considered whether or not to include visual markers of gender as part of our indexing process, considering our use case of drag queen story hour could potentially warrant it. Ultimately, we decided against including anything about gender markers or gender expression because we felt it was impossible to undertake without making inadvertent value judgements about what constituted gendered imagery.
As we continued the project, we encountered issues with how to handle the potentially problematic nature of ascribing equivalencies between terms. We examined this in Part II as part of the process of editing and adapting another group’s thesaurus. One point of discussion among our group was the antonym Nudity USE Clothing. The relationship between terms seemed to imply a value judgement in relating nudity directly and exclusively to the need to cover ones body, even though several characters, such as the animals in This is Not My Hat, and the dragons in Dragon’s Love Tacos, were not wearing clothes in many works in a narratively and ethically neutral context. We believed this term could have benefited from a scope note or reevaluation.
Image from This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen.
In adapting the other group’s thesaurus to be more comprehensive and hospitable to the three new works, we spent the most time discussing how we could expand the term Emotion. As written, there were no narrower terms or scope notes to explain the specific uses of this term. We wanted to increase the usability of this term by increasing the specificity to include narrower terms like Happiness, Frustration, and Worry. We believed these narrower terms would be useful to the use case. The result however meant the broader term emotion served less as a usable term and more as a bridge to specific concepts.
Looking back at the first part of our thesaurus, there were several gaps in our understanding of the project that were clarified during Part II of the assignment. It took being able to see the holes in another group’s thesaurus to understand our own shortcomings, including usefulness of preferred terms to the use case, the fact that lead in terms cannot also be used as narrower terms, and the usefulness of hierarchies as opposed to related terms. Seeing the thesaurus through this new light allowed us to better understand the structure and shape of a thesaurus—what at first felt like a daunting or overwhelming task then became more like a puzzle, with various parts that build on and fit with each other (Aitchison et al. 49).
Overall, the thesaurus was an exercise that taught us about the challenge of taking something incredibly mutable—language—and putting it into something less mutable—the thesaurus structure. The thesaurus has to be useful, which means that it can’t be confined only to the creator’s understanding and word choice. People from different disciplines and backgrounds have to reliably find what they are looking for, as well. It emphasized how even seemingly innocuous terms could hold value judgments or reinforce harmful biases. Ultimately, while language is the most challenging aspect of the thesaurus, it is also the most engaging because it invites potential for literal structural change.
Image from Drew Daywalt’s The Day the Crayons Quit.