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Wilson stated that the work of providing bibliographic services is political in nature because catalogers have to adjudicate amongst the demands made for various forms of control by different commu...

The “author” is a concept central to many publication and documentation practices, often carrying legal, professional, social, and personal importance. Typically viewed as the solitary owner of their creations, a person is held responsible for their work and positioned to receive the praise and criticism that may emerge in its wake. Although the role of the individual within creative production is undeniable, literary (Foucault 1977; Bloom 1997) and knowledge organization (Moulaison et. al. 2014) theorists have challenged the view that the work of one person can-or should-be fully detached from their professional and personal networks. As these relationships often provide important context and reveal the role of community in the creation of new things, their absence from catalog records presents a falsely simplified view of the creative process. Here, we address the consequences of what we call the “author-as-owner” concept and suggest that an “author-as-node” approach, which situates an author within their networks of influence, may allow for more relational representation within knowledge organization systems, a framing that emphasizes rather than erases the messy complexities that affect the production of new objects and ideas.

Politics is about the distribution of goods and risks. We can describe the distribution of goods, and we can also characterize those distributions as a kind of inequality. As a baseline definition of “politics of information” we mean the distribution of information goods across different populations. Despite a strong tradition of disciplinary focus in information science, much of the literature is still given over to fairly simple notions of social form and structure. A nascent knowledge organization practice dedicated to social difference is explicitly motivated by justice and nomenclature. Not only is knowledge organization a tool of cultural hegemony, but also it can be read as a product of cultural ordering and bias. Identifying unjust and politically oppressive practice must be part of the path to justice. Understanding the political construction of knowledge organization is essential for the theory of information service in order to build a more just professional practice.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present two models of human cognition. The first narrow model concentrates on the mind as an information-processing apparatus, and interactions with information as altering thought structures and filling gaps in knowledge. A second model incorporates elements of unconsciousness, embodiment and affect. The selection of one model over the other, often done tacitly, has consequences for subsequent models of information seeking and use. Design/methodology/approach A close reading of embodied engagements with pornography guided by existential phenomenology. Findings The paper develops a phenomenology of information seeking, centered primarily around the work of Merleau-Ponty, to justify a more expansive concept of cognition. The authors demonstrate the roles of affect and embodiment in document assessment and use, with a prolonged example in the realm of browsing pornography. Originality/value Models of information seeking and use need to account for diverse kinds of human-document interaction, to include documents such as music, film and comics that engage the emotions or are perceived through a broader band of sensory experience to include visual and auditory components. The authors consider how those human-document engagements form virtual communities based on the similarity of their members’ affective and embodied responses, which in turn inform the arrangements, through algorithms, of the relations of documents to each other. Less instrumental forms of information seeking and use – ones that incorporate elements of embodiment and affect – are characterized as esthetic experiences, following the definition of the esthetic provided by Dewey. Ultimately the authors consider, given the ubiquity of information seeking and its rhythm in everyday life, whether we can meaningfully characterize information seeking as a distinct human process.

Classification schemes are powerful constructions in our information environments. They represent the intentional and unintended biases of those who construct them and are structurally bound by the technical systems in which they are built. As the study of what concepts exist in the world and how expressions of these concepts interconnect , classifications are fundamental to how we come to imagine and subsequently position ourselves embedded within a system of entities. On a more practical level, classification systems become the means by which we materially structure information within knowledge delivery systems, especially in the digital realm. Given the expressive qualities of classifications, they are also unavoidably political entities: they include and exclude, express and repress, facilitate and restrict. Actively identifying and addressing the political aspects of KO systems is a necessary activity within the KO community. This workshop will articulate possible courses of action to address the political aspects of classification in all subdomains of KO, inclusive of both research, pedagogy, and future disciplinary emphases. This workshop will address the political aspects of classifications through the following short paper presentations, which will help guide structured discussions. Abstracts of these presentations are available and, if this proposal is accepted, they will be included in the final workshop description: • Meaning through many hands: the neglected craft of classification implementation • name / change: Towards a politics of classification • Mechanisms of Cultural Bias in Classificatory Activity • The politics of biodiversity classification: Reconciliation and Interoperability • Expressing and obscuring throughout: Politics, values, and semantics derived from a conceptual analysis of classification terms

Patrick Wilson’s writings have proven to be the foundation for much of our thinking about the organization of documents and their subtle connection to power structures that govern their construction and use. His examinations of public versus private knowledge, for example, expand how we understand individual and social epistemology within the field. In his writings, however, Wilson speaks as an idealist, generally glossing over the problem of how technologies mediate and impact the relationship between people, on the one hand, and the circulation and constitution of knowledge, on the other. He did not analyze how knowledge organization structures (KO) could be effective for some people or some forms of knowledge, and ineffective for others, nor did he analyze similarly the constitutive components of KO as they relate to the differential effects on the use of knowledge. We posit that pluralistic modes of understanding KO are a fruitful way forward for the discipline. This paper conceptualizes how we can build on Wilson’s critical conversations about epistemology in the domain of KO from three specific angles: KO as pluralized space, a political economy of KO, and KO and political pragmatics.