Tag Archives: of-ness

Collection aboutness in OLAC

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Defining aboutness of a collection is a challenge. From a philosophical point of view, this is even harder for collections in anthropological linguistics. These kinds of collections are not assembled for the sake of their "about-ness" but rather for the sake of their "is-ness". A collection in a museum might be about 19th century trains but such collections rarely contain the trains themselves. So, does this mean that linguistic collections are really about the people groups the speech is representing? and then the of-ness is the speech? Then linguists come along and write about the grammar of the language, and that is about the language? Often original stories will have an aboutness meaning which is never recorded in metadata. This needs to change.

This thought needs to be explored with MARC 655 $x and $v sub-fields. see: https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd655.html
https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd650.html

see email: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#sent/FMfcgzGsmrDLzSSBqXVPfKphwmdGhcZC

Of-ness in audio recordings

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Subject analysis is very interesting. In a recent investigation into a theory of subject analysis, I was introduced to the concepts of: "about-ness", "is-ness", "of-ness".

Sometimes I wonder if linguists defy standard practices in subject representation, of if they define what a general population holds as a challenge with subject analysis in cataloging.

I harken to the OLAC application profile, which is based on Dublin Core. Dublin Core does not scope the subject element to "about-ness" analysis. UNT curriculum, informed and based (in structure) on Steven J. Miller', Metadata for Digital Collections: A How-To-Do-It Manual. The issue at hand is that for linguists, about-ness is only relevant for Information resources representing analysis. For other kinds of resources such as primary oral texts, or narratives captured via video which are often the object analyzed and discussed in information resources representing analysis, the primary view on subjecthood is through of-ness. As far as I know no-one has discussed audio and of-ness descriptions of audio.

It also makes me wonder if genre is mostly about utility and not about a binding style. To this end then a scholar looking for a phonology corpus, is looking for what—a combination of things—a MIMEType, with a relationship to another MIMEType, with an of-ness of a kind and a subject of "phonology".

By splitting up the concepts of: "about-ness", "is-ness", and "of-ness" it provides analytical space for more articulate descriptions in the dc:description field. But when it comes to language materials, the question is: is language a subject by virtue of "of-ness" or by virtue of "about-ness"? There are several implications here:

  1. The description field ought to be re-thought.
  2. The subject field ought to be re-thought.
  3. Some searches by linguists are likely the concatenation of two or three factors: A relationship between two records, and a subject of a kind and a subject of a different kind.