Posts Tagged ‘taxonomy’
“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.
“Every decently-made object… is not just a piece of ‘stuff’ but a physical embodiment of human energy, testimony to the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty”*…
Indeed, as the Materials Library of the Institute for Making at UCL brilliantly demonstrates, that’s often true of the materials themselves…
The Materials Library is a collection of some of the most wondrous materials on earth, gathered from sheds, labs, grottoes and repositories around the world. It is a resource, laboratory, studio, and playground for the curious and material-minded to conduct hands-on research through truly interdisciplinary inquiry and innovation. The collection is accessible to Institute of Making members day to day, and to the public at Materials Library Discovery sessions.
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As we celebrate stuff, we might spare a thought for Addison Emery Verrill; he died on this date in 1926. An invertebrate zoologist, museum curator, and university professor, he is best remembered as curator of zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, where he developed one of the largest, most valuable zoological collections in the U.S.
Verill trained under Louis Agassiz at Harvard; then, at age 25, became Yale University’s first professor of Zoology. His lifelong devotion to taxonomic research yielded the development of extensive collections at Yale in a wide variety of taxa. From 1871-87, while he was in charge of scientific explorations by the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Verrill found and described hundreds of new marine specimens. His expeditions took him to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America and to Hawaii and Central America. He published more than 350 papers and monographs, including descriptions of more than a thousand species of animals in virtually every major taxon. His breadth of interests included parasitology, mineralogy and botany.
“It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one’s own chaos was also brought under control.”*…
(Roughly) Daily has looked before at the history of the filing cabinet, rooted in the work of Craig Robertson (@craig2robertson). He has deepened his research and published a new book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information. An Xiao Mina offers an appreciation– and a consideration of one of the central questions it raises: can emergent knowledge coexist with an internet that privileges the kind “certainty” that’s implicit in the filing paradigm that was born with the filing cabinet and that informs our “knowledge systems” today…
… The 20th century saw an emergent information paradigm shaped by corporate capitalism, which emphasized maximizing profit and minimizing the time workers spent on tasks. Offices once kept their information in books—think Ebenezer Scrooge with his quill pen, updating his thick ledger on Christmas. The filing cabinet changed all that, encouraging what Robertson calls “granular certainty,” or “the drive to break more and more of life and its everyday routines into discrete, observable, and manageable parts.” This represented an important conceptualization: Information became a practical unit of knowledge that could be standardized, classified, and effortlessly stored and retrieved.
Take medical records, which require multiple layers of organization to support routine hospital business. “At the Bryn Mawr Hospital,” Robertson writes, “six different card files provided access to patient information: an alphabetical file of admission cards for discharged patients, an alphabetical file for the accident ward, a file to record all operations, a disease file, a diagnostic file, and a doctors’ file that recorded the number of patients each physician referred to the hospital.” The underlying logic of this system was that the storage of medical records didn’t just keep them safe; it made sure that those records could be accessed easily.
Robertson’s deep focus on the filing cabinet grounds the book in history and not historical analogy. He touches very little on Big Data and indexing and instead dives into the materiality of the filing cabinet and the principles of information management that guided its evolution. But students of technology and information studies will immediately see this history shaping our world today…
[And] if the filing cabinet, as a tool of business and capital, guides how we access digital information today, its legacy of certainty overshadows the messiness intrinsic to acquiring knowledge—the sort that requires reflection, contextualization, and good-faith debate. Ask the internet difficult questions with complex answers—questions of philosophy, political science, aesthetics, perception—and you’ll get responses using the same neat little index cards with summaries of findings. What makes for an ethical way of life? What is the best English-language translation of the poetry of Borges? What are the long-term effects of social inequalities, and how do we resolve them? Is it Yanny or Laurel?
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Information collection and distribution today tends to follow the rigidity of cabinet logic to its natural extreme, but that bias leaves unattended more complex puzzles. The human condition inherently demands a degree of comfort with uncertainty and ambiguity, as we carefully balance incomplete and conflicting data points, competing value systems, and intricate frameworks to arrive at some form of knowing. In that sense, the filing cabinet, despite its deep roots in our contemporary information architecture, is just one step in our epistemological journey, not its end…
A captivating new history helps us see a humble appliance’s sweeping influence on modern life: “The Logic of the Filing Cabinet Is Everywhere.”
* Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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As we store and retrieve, we might recall that it was on this date in 19955 that the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in a proposal for a “2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence” submitted by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories). The workshop, which took place at Dartmouth a year later, in July and August 1956, is generally recognized as the official birth date of the new field.
“What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?”*…
Crab-like body plans have evolved independently at least five times. As Jason P. Dihn explains, biologists are still trying to figure out exactly why…
In 1989, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed a thought experiment: What would the world look like if we turned back time and replayed the evolutionary tape? “I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again,” he concluded. Maybe not. But crabs might.
Evolution just can’t stop creating crabs. Believe it or not, the flat-and-wide body plan has evolved at least five different times. The process is called carcinization, and it’s inspired comics, memes and entire subreddits.
Still, biologists don’t know why crabs keep evolving. Figuring it out would satisfy the online masses, sure, but it would also be a step toward solving other important scientific mysteries. For instance, why some species share evolutionary paths while others forge unique ones (looking at you, platypus)…
Convergent evolution: “Evolution Only Thinks About One Thing, and It’s Crabs,” from @JasonPDinh in @DiscoverMag.
Will crabs need to (re-)evolve a sixth time? “Alaska’s snow crabs have disappeared. Where they went is a mystery.”
(Image above: source)
* Gregory Bateson
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As we fiddle with phylogeny, we might spare a thought for Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild; he died on this date in 1937. A British banker, politician and soldier, he is best remembered for his pursuit of his passion— zoology and his collection of species. At its largest, Rothschild’s collection included 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 birds’ eggs, 2,250,000 butterflies and 30,000 beetles, as well as thousands of specimens of mammals, reptiles, and fishes. They formed the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a private individual (and are now part of the Natural History Museum). He named dozens of animal taxa, published Novitates Zoologicae, and authored or co-authored scores of scientific papers.
Related: “How Bird Collecting Evolved Into Bird-Watching.”
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