Hornbostel-Sachs Classification of Musical Instruments

This paper discusses the Hornbostel-Sachs Classification of Musical Instruments. This classification system was originally designed for musical instruments and books about instruments, and was first published in German in 1914. Hornbostel-Sachs has dominated organological discourse and practice since its creation, and this article analyses the scheme’s context, background, versions and impact. The position of Hornbostel-Sachs in the history and development of instrument classification is explored. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the mechanics of the scheme, including its decimal notation, the influential broad categories of the scheme, its warrant, and its typographical layout. The version history of the scheme is outlined and the relationships between versions is visualised, including its translations, the introduction of the electrophones category, and the Musical Instruments Museums Online (MIMO) version designed for a digital environment. The reception of Hornbostel-Sachs is analysed, and its usage, criticism and impact are all considered. As well as dominating organological research and practice for over a century, it is shown that Hornbostel-Sachs also had a significant influence on the bibliographic classification of music

Still minding the gap? Reflecting on transitions between concepts of information in varied domains

This conceptual paper, a contribution to the tenth anniversary special issue of information, gives a cross-disciplinary review of general and unified theories of information. A selective literature review is used to update a 2013 article on bridging the gaps between conceptions of information in different domains, including material from the physical and biological sciences, from the humanities and social sciences including library and information science, and from philosophy. A variety of approaches and theories are reviewed, including those of Brenner, Brier, Burgin and Wu, Capurro, Cárdenas-García and Ireland, Hidalgo, Hofkirchner, Kolchinsky and Wolpert, Floridi, Mingers and Standing, Popper, and Stonier. The gaps between disciplinary views of information remain, although there has been progress, and increasing interest, in bridging them. The solution is likely to be either a general theory of sufficient flexibility to cope with multiple meanings of information, or multiple and distinct theories for different domains, but with a complementary nature, and ideally boundary spanning concepts

On the Question of Authorship in Large Language Models (LLMs)

The adoption of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, across an increasingly diverse range of tasks and domains poses significant challenges for authorial attribution and other basic knowledge organization practices. This paper examines the theoretical and practical issues introduced by LLMs and describes how their use erodes the supposedly firm boundaries separating specific works and creators. Building upon the author-as-node framework proposed by Soos and Leazer (2020), we compare works created with and without the use of LLMs; ultimately, we argue that the issues associated with these novel tools are indicative of preexisting limitations within standard entity-relationship models. As the growing popularity of generative AI raises concerns about plagiarism, academic integrity, and intellectual property, we encourage a reevaluation of reductive work/creator associations and advocate for the adoption of a more expansive approach to authorship

Il terzo mondo di Popper e i mentefatti

POPPER’S THIRD WORLD AND MENTEFACTS The philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) theorized the existence, alongside the physical world of matter and the psychological world of thought, of a ‘third world’ reserved for the ‘objective knowledge’ contained in theories, narratives, technologies, works of art and other creations (especially, but not exclusively, the abstract ones) of human beings, not entirely reducible - in his opinion - to the corresponding psychic phenomena that occur in the minds of certain people. This theory, rather fortunate in the field of information sciences, however, involves many inconsistencies and implausibility, largely due to the excessively disparate types of content that Popper, in his numerous writings on the subject, places within his third world. Among the various attempts to resize, rationalize and make Popper’s third world more coherent and usable, it is particularly promising (although not entirely problem-free) the one linked to the concept (chronologically prior to Popper's theory) of ‘mentefact’, outlined by the sociologist Earle Edward Eubank (1887-1945), introduced in information sciences by Barbara Kyle (1913-1966) and recently revived by Claudio Gnoli in two articles published in 2018 and 2019. Mentefacts, for Eubank, Kyle and Gnoli, are all abstract (or immaterial) entities created by human beings, which are opposed to concrete (or material) objects built by humans themselves, called ‘artefacts’, and which should not be confused with the corresponding psychological phenomena, which are merely subjective. A typical relationship between artefacts and mentefacts of particular interest for information sciences is the one which identifies intentional human documents in the union of an artefact (physical carrier) with a mentefact (information content)

Information and Design: Book Symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of Information

Purpose – To review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions. Findings – Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects. Research implications – Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS. Originality/value – The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas

FUNDAMENTOS DA ORGANIZAÇÃO DO CONHECIMENTO

The evolution of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) has been guided by the problems that Information Science/Knowledge Organization (IS/KO) proposes to solve. When IC emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, the problem was the “information explosion”, the disorderly proliferation of scientific literature, addressed by the first Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) and thesaurus aimed at controlling the vocabularies used to consult these systems. The current, broader problem affecting today's society as a whole has been called Big Data. Question: Does IS/KO have theories, fundamentals, methodologies and technologies to develop KOS that are up to the challenges posed by society with the emergence of the Semantic Web and Big Data? What changes, theoretical and practical impacts will the emergence of these issues bring? The OC is currently being called upon to build models from different domains, the semantic vocabularies. What things exist in a domain, how to represent them? These are questions from Ontology and Semiotics. Objectives: This work suggests that comprehensive theories of Information and Knowledge, objects of IS/KO, cannot be obtained by IS/KO with their own theoretical bases developed so far. Methodology: foundational authors of IS/KO are reviewed in relation to the foundations, theories and objects of IS/KO. His statements are collated with high-level general theories such as Semiotics and Ontology. Conclusions: It is suggested that Peirce's Semiotics, with its categories of perception and consequent Epistemology, and Metaphysics, especially Ontology as a theory of the types of things that exist, including the social reality created by human culture, may be these theories.A evolução dos Sistemas de Organização do Conhecimento (SOC) tem sido balizada pelos problemas que a Ciência da Informação/Organização do Conhecimento (CI/OC) se propõe a resolver. Quando a CI surge nos anos 1950-60 o problema era a “explosão da informação”, a proliferação desordenada da literatura científica, endereçado pelos primeiros Sistemas de Recuperação de Informações (SRI) e tesauros voltados para controlar os vocabulários usados para consultar estes sistemas. O problema atual, mais abrangente afetando a sociedade atual como um todo, vem sendo chamado de Big Data. Questão: a CI/OC dispõe de teorias, fundamentos, metodologias e tecnologias para desenvolver SOC a altura dos desafios colocados pela sociedade com a emergência do Big Data e da Web Semântica? Que mudanças, impactos teóricos e práticos a emergência destas questões trará? A OC hoje vem sendo chamada a construir modelos de diferentes domínios, os vocabulários semânticos. Que coisas existem em um domínio, como representá-las? Estas são perguntas da Ontologia e da Semiótica. Objetivos: Este trabalho sugere que teorias abrangentes do que sejam Informação e Conhecimento, objetos das CI/OC, não podem ser obtidos pelas CI/OC com suas próprias bases teóricas desenvolvidas até agora. Metodologia: autores fundacionais de CI/OC são revistos em relação aos fundamentos, teorias e objetos das CI/OC. Suas colocações são cotejadas com teorias gerais de alto nível como a Semiótica e a Ontologia. Conclusões: é sugerido que a Semiótica de Peirce, com suas categorias de percepção e consequente Epistemologia, e a Metafísica, em especial a Ontologia enquanto teoria dos tipos de coisas que existem, incluindo aí a realidade social criada pela cultura humana, podem ser estas teorias

Ontologia informazionale: una visione del mondo come livelli di sistemi informati

This is an evolving short text drafting the main ideas of the author's ontology, before producing special articles on its various aspects. It suggests that the major ontical levels that can be identified in the world -- forms, matter, life, cognition and culture -- all can be described in terms of informational systems that follow combinatorial rules. The emergence of a major level from previous ones is triggered by the appearance of a new kind of memory (genomes, neural systems, symbolic languages). Indeed, each major levels consists of a class of informed systems, which includes a memory subsystem that informs the core subsystem shaped as a model of its environment, in turn interacting with it through the pragmatic subsystems of sensors and effectors. The main classes of phenomena in the world are shortly described and discussed in such terms

Integrative Levels of Knowing

Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit einer systematischen Organisation der epistemologischen Dimension des menschlichen Wissens in Bezug auf Perspektiven und Methoden. Insbesondere wird untersucht inwieweit das bekannte Organisationsprinzip der integrativen Ebenen, das eine Hierarchie zunehmender Komplexität und Integration beschreibt, geeignet ist für eine grundlegende Klassifikation von Perspektiven bzw. epistemischen Bezugsrahmen. Die zentrale These dieser Dissertation geht davon aus, dass eine angemessene Analyse solcher epistemischen Kontexte in der Lage sein sollte, unterschiedliche oder gar konfligierende Bezugsrahmen anhand von kontextübergreifenden Standards und Kriterien vergleichen und bewerten zu können. Diese Aufgabe erfordert theoretische und methodologische Grundlagen, welche die Beschränkungen eines radikalen Kontextualismus vermeiden, insbesondere die ihm innewohnende Gefahr einer Fragmentierung des Wissens aufgrund der angeblichen Inkommensurabilität epistemischer Kontexte. Basierend auf Jürgen Habermas‘ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns und seiner Methodologie des hermeneutischen Rekonstruktionismus, wird argumentiert, dass epistemischer Pluralismus nicht zwangsläufig zu epistemischem Relativismus führen muss und dass eine systematische Organisation der Perspektivenvielfalt von bereits existierenden Modellen zur kognitiven Entwicklung profitieren kann, wie sie etwa in der Psychologie oder den Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften rekonstruiert werden. Der vorgestellte Ansatz versteht sich als ein Beitrag zur multi-perspektivischen Wissensorganisation, der sowohl neue analytische Werkzeuge für kulturvergleichende Betrachtungen von Wissensorganisationssystemen bereitstellt als auch neue Organisationsprinzipien vorstellt für eine Kontexterschließung, die dazu beitragen kann die Ausdrucksstärke bereits vorhandener Dokumentationssprachen zu erhöhen. Zudem enthält der Anhang eine umfangreiche Zusammenstellung von Modellen integrativer Wissensebenen.This dissertation is concerned with a systematic organization of the epistemological dimension of human knowledge in terms of viewpoints and methods. In particular, it will be explored to what extent the well-known organizing principle of integrative levels that presents a developmental hierarchy of complexity and integration can be applied for a basic classification of viewpoints or epistemic outlooks. The central thesis pursued in this investigation is that an adequate analysis of such epistemic contexts requires tools that allow to compare and evaluate divergent or even conflicting frames of reference according to context-transcending standards and criteria. This task demands a theoretical and methodological foundation that avoids the limitation of radical contextualism and its inherent threat of a fragmentation of knowledge due to the alleged incommensurability of the underlying frames of reference. Based on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and his methodology of hermeneutic reconstructionism, it will be argued that epistemic pluralism does not necessarily imply epistemic relativism and that a systematic organization of the multiplicity of perspectives can benefit from already existing models of cognitive development as reconstructed in research fields like psychology, social sciences, and humanities. The proposed cognitive-developmental approach to knowledge organization aims to contribute to a multi-perspective knowledge organization by offering both analytical tools for cross-cultural comparisons of knowledge organization systems (e.g., Seven Epitomes and Dewey Decimal Classification) and organizing principles for context representation that help to improve the expressiveness of existing documentary languages (e.g., Integrative Levels Classification). Additionally, the appendix includes an extensive compilation of conceptions and models of Integrative Levels of Knowing from a broad multidisciplinary field