Posts Tagged ‘classification’
“Roget’s Thesaurus is an oddball philosophy of language masquerading as a reference book”*…
Austin Kleon on Roget’s Thesaurus…
I have always assumed — and maybe you have, too — that a thesaurus is just a synonym dictionary, the words arranged alphabetically with a list of synonyms and antonyms below. Somehow, every thesaurus I’d ever come across — even ones with “Roget” in the title! — had this alphabetic arrangement.
Because of this, it was easy for me to effectively ignore the thesaurus. If I needed a synonym or antonym, I’d just open an actual dictionary, or do a quick online search…
It turns out that Roget‘s Thesaurus is not at all what I thought it was. It is weirder and much more interesting…
… if you understand the man, you understand where his book came from. Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) was a Victorian polymath: a doctor by trade, but he did all sorts of stuff: he was a consultant on pandemics, he wrote Encyclopedia Brittanica entries and a book about natural theology, he helped catalog several libraries, he invented the scale on the slide rule, and he may have written a paper that contributed to the birth of cinema. Oh, and he was also obsessed with chess problems.
The thing he is now most famous for — his thesaurus — was actually a side project he took up in retirement, in his seventies. His whole life he’d made lists as a way of soothing himself. He carried a notebook around with him and jotted down lists of related words and phrases to help him with his own writing and lecturing. He made his own personal thesaurus in his twenties, but in retirement he thought maybe it might be helpful to others, and after four years of work, he published the first edition of his Thesaurus (from the Greek word thēsauros, meaning “storehouse” or “treasure”) in 1852, overseeing new editions until he died in 1869. His son, John Lewis Roget, a lawyer, painter, and art critic, then took over the project.
Roget, like many Victorians, was obsessed with order and classification. His hero was Carl Linnaeus, known as the father of modern taxonomy. Roget wanted to classify and organize words in the English language. This is the best way to understand Roget’s Thesaurus: it’s not just a book of words, it’s like a library of words.
When you go to the library, the books are not arranged in alphabetical order — they’re organized topically. In order to find a book in my local library, you have to look up the book in the catalog, note the Dewey Decimal Number, then find it on the shelf. The beauty of this system, and a major argument for physical browsing collections, is that when you find the book on the shelf, it will be surrounded by books on the similar subject. You may go looking for one particular book and while browsing you might find a better book or the book you didn’t even know you were looking for. This is the way a thesaurus is supposed to work.
In the very beginning of his introduction to his book, Roget emphasizes that what makes his book unique and helpful is that the words are not arranged alphabetically, like a Dictionary, but “according to the ideas which they express.”…
The fascinating story of Roget’s Thesaurus: “A Library of Words,” from @austinkleon.
Browse the 1911 edition– still in the format Roget intended– at the Internet Archive.
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As we look it up, we might send tasty birthday greetings to the literary genius behind green eggs and ham, Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he was born on this date in 1904. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction– and a love of words– for generations of young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
“Am I as admirable as that ant?”*…
There are lots of ants on earth. And, as Anna Turns explains, they play a big role as ecosystem engineers– as well as providing insights on everything from the climate to aging…
To most of us, they are small, uninteresting and sometimes annoying, but 2022 revealed just how ubiquitous ants are and how indispensable they are to the planet. Scientists revealed in September that there are an estimated 20 quadrillion (or 20 million billion) ants globally – that’s 2.5 million for every person on the planet.
More than 12,000 known species of ant live in all sorts of habitats, from the Arctic to the tropics and they represent one of the most diverse, abundant and specialist groups of animals on the planet. Leafcutter ants are fungus farmers, slave-making ants capture broods to increase their work force, while wood ants herd aphids to the juiciest parts of a plant to harvest their honeydew sap…
Experts agree that ants are ecosystem engineers because they play a crucial role in decomposing organic matter, recycling nutrients, improving soil health, removing pests and dispersing seeds. But, historically, ants haven’t attracted as much attention as crop pollinators, such as bees, which perhaps have more of an obvious economic value. That bias could soon change. Ants have been used as a biological pest control on citrus crops in China for centuries, and research published in August indicates that the pest control potential of some predatory ants could work better than some agricultural chemicals.
The wonders of ant biology throw up plenty of other possibilities for real-world applications. Queen ants that live more than 30 years – yet have the same genetic material as a short-lived worker ant – could teach us something about senescence. Nobody understands how queens store sperm for decades inside their bodies without any degradation, despite colonies living in different climates. Meanwhile, Schultheiss’ [Dr Patrick Schultheiss, of the University of Würzburg] research into ant navigation – how they find food and how they behave when they get lost – could help build mathematical models that instruct a robot searching for missing people.
Looking back at how ants evolved can shed light on a huge array of other plants and animals, too. Butterflies that rely on ants to tend to their caterpillars could disappear if those ants are wiped out, says Corrie Moreau, a professor at Cornell University: “Nature is this intricate woven tapestry and if you pull one thread, you’ll never know which is the critical thread that makes the whole thing fall apart.”…
“Insects and us: a mind-blowing 20 quadrillion ants and what they mean for the planet,” from @AnnaTurns in @guardian.
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As we get antsy, we might spare a thought for Swedish botanist Carl Linné, better known as Carolus Linnaeus, “the Father of Taxonomy,” died on this date in 1778. Historians suggest that the academically-challenged among us can take heart from his story: at the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was “less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else.” Still, he made is way from Lund to Uppsala, where he began his famous system of plant and animal classification– still in use today.
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed”*…
The first patent on an animal was granted in the U.S. in 1988. But the first agricultural patents date back to 1930 and the Plant Patent Act (PPA). Since then, patent protection on seeds has been both broadened and lengthened; in the 1980’s, protection was extended beyond “utility” (a plant that uniquely did one thing or another) to the living thing itself. And the seed industry has consolidated…
For years Haribhai Devjibhai Patel has been growing cotton, peanuts and potatoes in the western Indian state of Gujarat. For years he and his family have used seedlings from one harvest to plant the next year’s crops on his four acre field.
Last year he planted a new potato variety known as FC5. It was a decision that ultimately landed him in court, because the US company PepsiCo had already claimed the rights to that very same potato variety. Patel claims he wasn’t aware of the potato’s name, much less PepsiCo’s claim…
According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Anand Yadnik, the lawsuit alleges that the FC5 potato is especially bred for PepsiCo’s subsidiary company Lays and their internationally distributed product: potato chips. PepsiCo was seeking 10 million Rupies or $140.000 (€ 126.000).
“I was completely devastated. I was afraid. Not in my lifetime would I ever have been able to pay the kind of damages that were being claimed by PepsiCo,” Patel said. The 46-year-old farmer has two children and earns around $3,500 per year.
The lawsuit was based on findings that PepsiCo gathered from Patel’s field. According to his lawyer, the company hired a private detective agency to provide the data. “They took secret video footage and collected samples from farmers fields’ sans disclosing their real intent”…
The case is another example of an ongoing global trend of companies claiming property rights for plants or genetic material of plants across the globe.
“Resources that used to be available to mankind as a community have now been confined to privatization,” Judith Düesberg from NGO Gene Ethical Network… The number of patents on plants worldwide has increased a hundredfold from just under 120 in 1990 to 12,000 today – 3500 of them are registered in Europe,according to the European initiative No-Patents-On-Seeds…
Critics argue that patents block access to genetic material for farmers and minimize biodiversity, the diversity of species and increase farmers’ dependency on seed producers.
But Bayer, Monsanto’s parent company, told DW in a written statement: “Farmers have the choice of whether and which products they buy from which supplier. [… ] Each farmer decides freely. […] Farmers will only use our products if they gain a clear advantage.”
In Europe, a case involving Monsanto and a particular breed of melon drew media attention several years ago. Monsanto had discovered that an Indian melon variety was naturally resistant to a specific virus. At the European Patent Office it then successfully applied for a patent on that trait after breeding into other melons.
From this moment on, not only did this trait belong to Monsanto, but so did every melon variety containing it, including the Indian melon from which it originated. Patent opponents call this practice biopiracy…
According to the Indian-based market research agency Mordor Intelligence, revenue in the seed sector will reach $90 billion by 2024 compared to about $60 billion in 2018. And over 50% of the worldwide market share is in the hands of Bayer-Monsanto, Du Pont and Syngenta…
The UN report “The right to food” has raised concerns about food security caused by “the oligopolistic structure of the input providers” warning that it could also cause food prices to increase and deprive the poorest of food.
A further concern is who owns the seeds and who produces the food. According to the NGO Germanwatch, most of the seed producing industry comes from the Global North, but 90% of biological resources (agricultural products, natural materials come) from the Global South.
While patenting laws remain more restrictive in the Global South, an Oxfam Study shows that big global players appear to be finding loopholes…
A few companies are angling to sew up the world’s seed supply: “Patents on plants: Is the sellout of genes a threat to farmers and global food security?“
* Genesis, 1:29 (KJV)
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As we reap what we sow, we might send well-organized birthday greetings to Antoine Laurent de Jussieu; he was born on this date in 1748. A botanist, he is best remembered as the first to publish a natural classification of flowering plants; much of his system– which was, in part, based on unpublished work by his uncle, Bernard de Jussieu— remains in use today.
“Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground”*…
In a 1995 interview with Linton Weeks of the Washington Post, the Howard University librarian, collector, and self-described “bibliomaniac” Dorothy Porter (1905–95) reflected on the focus of her 43-year career: “The only rewarding thing for me is to bring to light information that no one knows. What’s the point of rehashing the same old thing?” For Porter, this mission involved not only collecting and preserving a wide range of materials related to the global Black experience, but also addressing how these works demanded new and specific qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to collect, assess, and catalog them…
As Thomas C. Battle writes in a 1988 essay on the history of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, the breadth of the two collections showed the Howard librarians that “no American library had a suitable classification scheme for Black materials.” An “initial development of a satisfactory classification scheme,” writes Battle, was first undertaken by four women on the staff of the Howard University Library: Lula V. Allen, Edith Brown, Lula E. Conner, and Rosa C. Hershaw. The idea was to prioritize the scholarly and intellectual significance and coherence of materials that had been marginalized by Eurocentric conceptions of knowledge and knowledge production. These women paved the way for Dorothy Porter’s new system, which departed from the prevailing catalog classifications in important ways.
All of the libraries that Porter consulted for guidance relied on the Dewey Decimal Classification. “Now in [that] system, they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had one other number—325, as I recall it—that meant colonization,” she explained in her oral history. In many “white libraries,” she continued, “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.”
Consequently, instead of using the Dewey system, Porter classified works by genre and author to highlight the foundational role of Black people in all subject areas, which she identified as art, anthropology, communications, demography, economics, education, geography, history, health, international relations, linguistics, literature, medicine, music, political science, sociology, sports, and religion.
This Africana approach to cataloging was very much in line with the priorities of the Harlem Renaissance, as described by Howard University professor Alain Locke in his period-defining essay of 1925, “Enter the New Negro.” Heralding the death of the “Old Negro” as an object of study and a problem for whites to manage, Locke proclaimed, “It is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts.” Scholarship from a Black perspective, Locke argued, would combat racist stereotypes and false narratives while celebrating the advent of Black self-representation in art and politics. Porter’s classification system challenged racism where it was produced by centering work by and about Black people within scholarly conversations around the world.
How Dorothy Porter assembled and organized a premier Africana research collection– and helped change academia: “Cataloging Black Knowledge.”
See also “African American Print Culture.”
* Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
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As we contemplate cataloguing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1909 that a group including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, and Ida B. Wells formed the NAACP— The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People– an interracial organization dedicated to advancing justice for African Americans. 112 years later, its work continues.
“The farmer works the soil; the agriculturist works the farmer”*…
Like the wheat barons of the 1870s who lived on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, [Stewart] Resnick isn’t of this place. He’s never driven a tractor or opened an irrigation valve. He’s never put a dusty boot on the neck of a shovel and dug down into the soil. He wouldn’t know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. The land to him isn’t real. It’s an economy of scale on a scale no one’s ever tried here. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a bar. He came to California in the 1950s to remake himself. Welcome to the club. He remade himself into a graduate of the UCLA law school, a cleaner of Los Angeles buildings, a vendor of security alarms, a seller of flowers in a pot, a minter of Elvis plates and Princess Diana dolls, a bottler of Fiji Island water, a farmer of San Joaquin Valley dirt. He purchased his first 640-acre section in the late 1970s and kept adding more sections of almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, and citrus until he stretched the lines of agriculture like no Californian before him.
At age 81, he’s gotten so big, he doesn’t know how big. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. That’s 281 square miles. He is irrigating 121,000 of those acres. This doesn’t count the 21,000 acres of grapefruits and limes he’s growing in Texas and Mexico. He uses more water than any other person in the West. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. The city of Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes 587,000 acre-feet.
Resnick’s billions rely on his ability to master water, sun, soil, and even bees. When he first planted seedless mandarins in the valley 17 years ago, the bees from the citrus orchards around him were flying into his groves, pollinating his flowers, and putting seeds into the flesh of his fruit. He told his neighbors to alter the flight of the bees or he’d sue them for trespassing. The farmers responded that the path of a bee wasn’t something they could supervise, and they threatened to sue him back. The dispute over the “no fly zone” was finally resolved by the invention of a netting that Resnick sheathes around his mandarins each spring. The plastic unfurls across the grove like a giant roll of Saran Wrap. No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless.
The control Resnick exercises inside his $4.5 billion privately held company does relinquish to one person: his wife, Lynda, vice chairman and co-owner, the “Pomegranate Queen,” as she calls herself. She is the brander of the empire, the final word on their Super Bowl ads, the creator of product marketing. There’s “Cheat Death” for their antioxidant-rich pomegranate juice [POM] and “Get Crackin’ ” for their pistachios [Wonderful] and “Untouched by Man” for their Fiji water. A husband and wife sharing the reins is rare for corporate America, rarer still for industrial agriculture. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. “If he sticks even a toe onto her turf,” says a former business partner, “she gives him a look that sends him right back.”
Together, the Resnicks have wedded the valley’s hidebound farming culture with L.A.’s celebrity culture. They don’t do agribusiness. Rather, they say, they’re “harvesting health and happiness around the world through our iconic consumer brands.” Their crops aren’t crops but heart-healthy snacks and life-extending elixirs. Stewart refers to the occasional trek between Lost Hills and Beverly Hills — roughly 140 miles — as a “carpetbagger’s distance”…
Stewart Resnick’s domain is the densest planting of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates on earth, making him the biggest “farmer” in the U.S. and the biggest irrigated “farmer” in the world: “A Kingdom from Dust.”
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As we contemplate concentration, we might send well-organized birthday greetings to Antoine Laurent de Jussieu; he was born on this date in 1748. A botanist, he is best remembered as the first to publish a natural classification of flowering plants; much of his system– which was, in part, based on unpublished work by his uncle, Bernard de Jussieu— remains in use today.
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