So brassratgirl scooped the NYT (at least for me)!
Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’.
Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion†in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.
Taxonomy tends to be invisible until something like this happens. Taxonomy is how people make sense of the world, in the sense that categorization (which is what taxonomy is at its core) is a sense-making response. Taxonomy is powerful in that it can make entire categories of information totally invisible, either unintentionally, or intentionally. The best taxonomies are largely invisible — that’s a sign of success (for some definition of success). When you notice the taxonomy, it’s because there’s a problem. Something is missing, something is categorized in the wrong place. Missing things & things in wrong places doesn’t on the surface seem like necessarily an awful thing, but because taxonomy — whether implicit or explicit — reflects world views, if that world view doesn’t recognize, say, abortion, or if it misses an important step in an escalation process in human services (child abuse, domestic violence, education, human resources, whatever), people and other assorted things people tend to think are important start falling through cracks (or, in more benign cases, door knobs get classified as toilet seats — sweartagod I saw it once!). I have some immediate experience with folks falling through the cracks because of taxonomy issues too, but NDA & all that stuff… At least I can usually sleep at night knowing what I do isn’t likely to affect someone’s health or kill someone (although there was that case about a decade ago where someone messed up a contentious administrative region issue & someone died at the hands of a pissed off regional, but not due to “my” taxonomy, but a critical error in someone’s interpretation of the geopolitical standard taxonomy).
My former indexing/abstracting & taxonomy professor makes a good point when he points out that Dewey & LC have unexpurged biases. He says:
Classifications are political instruments… all classifications make epistemological, ethical, and political statements; there is nothing new to this. The library blogshere seems to argue that POPLINE’s move is unprecedented and unacceptable… get a grip; what is the ethical assumption behind Dewey’s religion section? I don’t see any ethical justification in the introduction to LCSH…
He’s right, classifications are political instruments — they reflect the perspective/world view of the people who contribute to them. Yes, of course we knew that. POPLINE’s move, while not unprecedented perhaps, is entirely unacceptable. There is no ethical assumption behind Dewey’s religion section, there is no ethical justification for LCSH — but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who actively work to fix that shit & suggest better options (even if they are viewed as cranks & PC gadflies). Having had him critique my papers, I’m going to offer this in turn: He should have put the paragraph I just quoted, his final paragraph, penultimately. The thought I *want* to be left with upon reading his take is the current penultimate paragraph ending with, “POPLINE will, apparently, make a statement re this in a few days – it is going to be interesting to see if they actually are going to say something of substance and make ethical commitments.” I think drawing attention to the need for ethical commitment within taxonomy development, I think, is the core of what he wants to say more so than pointing out the obvious (LCSH & Dewey have some sucky things in them) & less obvious (taxonomy/categorization can have major political implications).
In reading the grey lady, I see Dr. Klag [dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health] said the school was “dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, and not its restriction.†As noted in the NYT quoted paragraph, he restored ‘abortion’ as a search term & will launch an inquiry as to why the change happened. It’s a step in the right direction. I would be interested in seeing the results of the inquiry as well.
So there’s a lot of this story I know I’m not addressing because I’m digging around in my taxonomy bucket right now, fer instance, while it’s maintained by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs, it’s funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — the same group responsible for the gag rule wrt international family planning agencies being prevented from receiving assistance if they perform or counsel their clients about abortion (which ties into the next issue too, but the issue in this case is political ideology being inappropriately reflected in what is supposed to be a neutral research resource). There’s also the women’s health issue presented by not having reasonable access to information surrounding contraceptives & reproductive health. I’m sure there are others.
OOH! SHINY! (The POPLINE Thesaurus!. I do wish it displayed in tree format, or some other graphical interface showing semantic/hierarchical relationships because alpha by keyword is kind of a drag for me. Of course, my interests are perhaps not exactly according to their standard audience…). And with that, it’s late, I have a not so little girl with a tummy ache, and I’ve probably said plenty about taxonomy.
