The Personal Meaning Scheme as Principle of Information Ordering: Postmodernism, Transdisciplinarity, and the Ontology of Classification

The Personal Meaning Scheme as Principle of Information
Ordering: Postmodernism, Transdisciplinarity, and the Ontology of
Classification

Jeremy
J.
Shapiro
Human and Organization Development Program The
Fielding Institute
jshapiro@fielding.edu

Shelley
K.
Hughes
Academic Resources The Fielding
Institute
skhughes@fielding.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Introduction
Standard bibliographic classification schemes and scientific taxonomies are
useful devices for bringing a certain order -- at least an external and
abstract order -- into the mass of available information and knowledge. But
they have two limitations: (1) People do not necessarily or automatically
organize information and knowledge in accordance with them. Individuals --
scholars, researchers, knowledge workers, and human beings in general --
seem to organize information, at least in part, in accordance with meaning
schemes and cognitive principles of their own individual personalities and
lifeworlds, which are shaped by personal (Kelly 1963) and cultural forces
(D'Andrade 1995) as well, of course, as by the classification schemes and
taxonomies that have become embedded in them. (2) Reality itself is not
necessarily or automatically structured in accordance with these schemes.
While it is useful, even essential, to learn about them, they are often
limited and corrupted by untenable or outmoded ontological and cosmological
assumptions. In this world of increasing complexity and perpetual
information flooding and, at least in the humanities and social sciences,
increasingly decentered and interdisciplinary knowledge, innovation in
research often comes from grasping, exploring, and articulating
relationships that fall outside of or between the categories of standard
schemes and that arise from a combination of interdisciplinary
cross-fertilization and personal meaning schemes. Articulating and
representing personal meaning schemes and using them to order information
can be a valuable method of cognitive organization that can counteract
information overload and contribute to intellectual and cultural creativity.
And software tools for doing this are now becoming available.

The Present Context
Six features of the present postmodern period create the need for new
structures for organizing information:
First, the sheer volume of information available through the
combination of digital libraries and the World Wide Web means that
general classes and descriptors become increasingly less useful in
structuring information, because they are less definitive of and
make fewer valuable distinctions within the masses of information
that they subsume.
Second, the progress of the sciences has led to taxonomic
complexification, which has rendered obsolete both linear and
hierarchical models that underlie current classification systems and
led to new modes of cognitive inter-relationship and ordering. As
Nicholas Rescher has argued, the new structure, "is not that of a
hierarchy at all, but rather that of chain-mail-work interlinkage
reminiscent of medieval armor." (Rescher 1979)
Third, the increasingly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
character of research and scholarship, at least in the humanities
and social sciences, is motivated by the quest to understand the
real, internal relations of interdependence and mediation that exist
in concrete objects of research, and these relations are poorly
grasped by disjunctive categories that originate in disciplinary and
library classes and descriptors.
Fourth, postmodern awareness of the limitations of objectivistic
and rationalistic frameworks for representing and structuring
knowledge has delegitimized the philosophical systems and
assumptions that underlie modern information organization and
classification schemes. Every scheme for classifying or ordering
information is grounded in or implies some ontology or cosmology.
The majority of current schemes (e.g. the LC and Dewey Decimal
systems) are in effect operationalizations of neo-Platonic, realist
ontology and theology, the "Great Chain of Being" (Lovejoy 1936)
that asserts the priority of the universal over the particular, of
the abstract over the concrete and that see the individual or
particular as mere emanations of the abstract and the universal.
Despite its own occasionally relativistic limitations, the
postmodern critique of legitimating metanarratives and ontologies
has removed the ground from both traditional ontology and its
idealist, rationalist successors and thereby from the information
ordering based on them.
Fifth, the emergence of hypertext as a novel and
characteristically postmodern method of information ordering has
become, through the World Wide Web, a global system for organizing
information and knowledge with a simple and viable non-hierarchical
infrastructure. Through its use in personal publishing on the Web,
hypertext and the mode of cognitive and semantic relationships that
it encourages have taken on tremendous cultural and psychological
force for individuals, organizations, social groups, and information
producers and managers (Landow 1992). And hypertext highlights
personal engagement and choice as the basis for information
ordering.
Sixth, in postmodern, complex, multi-cultural society, any
semblance of a universal, background cosmology, cultural system, or
generally shared lifeworld that could serve as an accepted common
basis for structuring knowledge and information has dissolved,
leaving in its place a multiplicity of diverse lifeworlds, cultural
orientations, and individual meaning schemes (Habermas 1992). Thus
it would be futile to try to invent a new, more encompassing and
universal classification system or taxonomy.

Existing classification systems: analysis and critique
The library and academic worlds today are dominated by a small number of
primary schemes and principles for ordering information (Rowley 1992). Each
of these represents a particular ontology or cosmology, i.e. a particular
way of organizing or classifying the structure of being or reality. Each
scheme has particular philosophical and practical virtues and limitations,
that follow primarily from the ontology on which it is based. We consider
the contributions and disadvantages of major ordering systems and their
ontological or cosmological premises: enumerated classification ("official",
classical information orderings, e.g. LC, and semiotic ordering, e.g. Dewey
Decimal); faceted classification (Ranganathan and colon classification);
historical/chronological ordering (e.g. timelines); cultural symbol systems
(e.g. folk taxonomies, the I Ching); hypertext ordering ("point and click
your way across the Internet"); hybrid ordering schemes that combine
hypertext and classical features (e.g. Internet experts and mavens); and
metadata systems (e.g. the Dublin Core). It is our contention that, despite
the value of and need for such systems, creative and important research, at
least in the humanities and social sciences, often comes from relationships
most visible in or highlighted by personal meaning schemes.

Personal meaning schemes
For the contemporary knowledge worker, researcher, and citizen, the
personally (and culturally) constructed meaning scheme is a useful
alternative method for the organization of knowledge and information. By
personal meaning scheme we mean a map of the cognitive/symbolic organization
of a person's individuated world, which we take to be not only scientific
and conceptual but also to include affective, normative, aesthetic, and
existential dimensions (Mucchielli 1970). Personal meaning schemes draw on a
number of sources, including cultural context, individual psychological
development, the canonical information ordering schemes to which the
individual has been exposed, the scientific community of which she may be a
part, metaphysical systems and traditions, historical context, and
technologies (Goody 1977).
In the emphatic sense in which we are using the term, a personal meaning
scheme, while person-centered, is systematic. That is, isolating it involves
a review, analysis, and organization of an individual's entire, structured
personal world that, as embodied in a particular social, historical,
natural, and informational world, is also "objective" and systematic.
However, its objectivity and systematicity are explicitly and awarely rooted
in that particular context. The personally and socially constructed nature
of the meaning scheme is "worn on its sleeve." As contextual, the personal
meaning scheme is dynamic and revisable in accordance with changes in the
social, historical, natural, and informational worlds and with the person's
changing relation to those worlds. Focusing on the objective and systematic
character of the personal meaning scheme also favors intellectual and
ethical autonomy and personal self-reflection on the part of the individual.
That is, it requires the individual to take cognitive responsibility for her
or his organization of her or his world, in relation to other, differing but
overlapping contemporaneous personal meaning schemes or worldviews.
Psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science provide a rich collection of
theories and models for the articulation and representation of personal
meaning schemes, from Freudian through existential to personal-construct
psychology (Kelly 1963), from structuralist through symbolic to cognitive
anthropology (D'Andrade 1995, Lévi-Strauss 1966, Wagner 1986), and from
cognitive science's analyses of the structure of mental models and
representations (Johnson-Laird 1983). And, because personal meaning schemes
are frequently unarticulated or unconscious, psychological and
anthropological methods, several of which are particularly focused on
unconscious meanings, lend themselves to the identification and formulation
of such schemes. Several research methodologies that can be used to elicit
and formulate personal meaning schemes and world views: psychological
inventories, phenomenological research, ethnography, the sociology of
knowledge, and mental modeling.

Software tools for personal meaning schemes
There are a number of methods that individuals use in practice to organize
information for reasons of personal predilection and utility, ranging from
directory and file structure organization to the use of bookmarks and
personal Web pages to reflect their personal interests and personal
information framework. Software that seems to hold promise for the
representation and utilization of personal meaning schemes includes visual
mapping and diagramming software (e.g. Inspiration, Visio), which can
visually represent the elements and inter-relationships of a mental model;
qualitative research software (e.g. Atlas/Ti, NUD*IST), which can visually
display relationships among thoughts and concepts; and HTML image-mapping
software (e.g. Coffee Cup), which can hyperlink elements of a visually
mapped mental model to other information. Probably the most advanced
software for the use of a personal meaning scheme to organize information is
The Brain, which integrates both visual mapping and information-linking in a
single software product.

Conclusion and recommendations
From the Dublin Core to the Web search engine, from the digitization and
placing on-line of millions of heretofore relatively inaccessible
information objects to Amazon.com, which has recently been proposed as a
model of the digital library (Coffman 1999), professional and amateur
information scientists are devising new methods to make knowledge and
information accessible and usable. We believe that the personal meaning
scheme, while not viable as the fundamental organizing principle for
libraries or large collections of information, is valuable for individuals'
information organization and can contribute to the current discourse on the
organization of information in the contemporary, postmodern world of
information explosion and transdisciplinary intellectual work. There are
several avenues of research to be carried out in this area: (1) exploration
of the use of relevant theories and empirical research from psychology,
cognitive science, and anthropology in developing methods of capturing
individuals' personal meaning schemes and cognitive systems; (2) the use of
computer tools for the representation and easy manipulation of personal
meaning schemes; (3) the practical application of personal meaning schemes
to individuals' methods of storing and organizing information; (4) the role
of personal meaning schemes in promoting interdisciplinary research and
scholarly dialogue.

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