GLBT ALMS Conference 2008: Coming to Terms
Day One of the GLBT ALMS conference at the CUNY Grad Center. Coming to Terms: LGBTIQ Thesauri, Folksonomies, and Taxononomies with KR Roberto, Ellen Greenblatt, Michael Waldman, and Analisa Ornelas. And the same bad mannered know-it-all from the previous session.
I'm reporting things as I interpreted them at the session five days ago, and then as I interpret them from my notes. So do not hold the speakers responsible for what I ascribe to them, and know that I don't always agree with what I represent them having said. I've just noted things that I thought were interesting, well-said, or that I might want to remember for future use or research.
Michael Waldman
- Subject headings are arbitrary, imperfect, and values-based
- If there is no appropriate subject heading for a topic or a group of people, and you can't easily find relevant materials, it's like topic or group is erased, like they don't exist.
- "Aggressives" is a term for butch lesbians in POC communities.
Ellen Greenblatt
- Content evolves more slowly than technology
- LCSH conflates gender and sex
- comparison of international thesauri
- UNESCO
- HASSET, Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus
- UKAT, UK Archival Thesaurus
- International Homo/Lesbian Informationcenter and Archives (IHLIA), which is really good, but more terms in Dutch than in English
- AIM25, Archives in London and the M25 Area. This one also seemed to be superior.
- LGBT Life thesaurus created by Greenblatt, requires subscription to Ebsco product, which we have at Barnard/Columbia, from http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/cul/resolve?clio6006116
Analisa Ornelas
- First of all, props to Analisa for telling the rude guy his question had to wait until the end. He made it sound as if she had withheld valuable and essential information, and he would be unable to understand the rest of the presentation if she didn't take his question right then. But Analisa held her ground. Later on we discovered that he claimed not to understand what folksonomies were, which I find hard to believe.
- She talked about how Clay Shirky says that we don't need to gather all the materials under one synonym, that in fact the synonyms aren't as synonymous as we think, that the [cinema] people really don't need to talk to the [movies] people. She then used some terms relevant to our discussion to better illustrate the point; I think it was [queer theory] vs. [homosexual agenda.]
- Folksonomies may be able to get to aboutness better than controlled vocabulary.
- Then again some tagging isn't aboutthe thing at all, e.g. "selfish" tags like [unread.]
- They don't privilege one hierarchy over another
- She compared search results for [transgender] vs. [transsexual] on del.icio.us and Flickr, and found the former term used significantly more often.
- Homosexuals don't use the term [homosexuals] to describe themselves. Most people using that tag are religious homophobes.
- She compared LGBT and GLBT
- Technorati queer tags mostly link to porn sites
This talk got me to thinking about the double work that I do with the zine collection, maintaining my local Access database where I describe the zines to my heart's content and take down contact and other info and also cataloging the zines in our OPAC. But I think it's worth it. The cataloger's time shouldn't be wasted, of course, but the whole point is to make things easier for the researcher.
KR Roberto
- looked up [radical drag] as a SH in AIM25
- there are lots of transgender subject headings, but are they any good?
- did research on xtube (porn, à la YouTube), examining the tagging
- noted that different audiences use different terms
- folksonomy terms are selfish first, helpful as a by-product
Somehow by the end of this I was thinking about how I need to see about exporting the Barnard zines into a LibraryThing account.
Sorry all that was pretty reporterly and not that helpful or even complete. If you made it through the whole post, you must be partisan. Here's hoping the rest will be better. I've still got Duke's GLB Archives, Susan Stryker, the zines panel, and archiving from the ground up to discuss.