[teampractices] Good article on why we don’t like what we struggle to categorize

Tue Jun 14 18:05:37 UTC 2016

This is really an interesting topic to me personally because I spent a year
at deviantART working on a faceted ontology to classify art works by facets
such as Form, Medium, Technique and Genre. It was a really hard technical
problem to solve and we never really finished that work before deviantART
burned through their budget and the project got put on the back burner.

I really enjoyed the article.

A key insight that we were keenly aware of, and struggled with at
deviantART is called out in the article:

"Even though a computer might struggle to see a strong difference between
two forms of music, humans seem intent on finding one. As an example of two
genres where the music sounds quite alike but isn’t, Mr. McDonald cites
“vegan straight edge” versus “hatecore.” If you didn’t know the categories,
you might have trouble telling them apart — but meet the two groups of fans
and the difference would be pretty apparent.

This also tells us that, very often, these distinctions are for social
purposes: People label music, music labels people. As with the rainbow, a
country song and a rock song might be musically closer than two songs
*within* either genre, but in our minds, the genre threshold takes
precedence."

We weren't classifying music as that is the one and only art form which is
excluded from deviantART. Nonetheless, we had to deal with the social and
emotional meanings of genre and that's where it got very difficult to build
a system and structure that captures the subjective aspects which are very
personal, subtle but incredibly important to the people who identify with a
given genre.

I think it's still a largely unsolved problem in computer science. There
are a lot of unstructured tag-based classification systems that achieve
acceptable levels of usability but I don't know of any that do a good job
of capturing the essence of a genre in a meaningful way.  Art, and
especially genre, defies classification and it's difficult to come up with
a good solution using a scientific approach.

By now I suspect that the folks working on Wikidata probably have better
ideas and solutions than anything I came up with when I was working on it.

Thanks to Grace for sharing the article and Kevin for sharing your thoughts
on it.

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 12:17 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Back in 1990, things were almost always put in hierarchical taxonomies.
> The idea of "tags" and non-hierarchical categories wasn't really a thing,
> partly due to limitations of technology. The Dewey Decimal System (for
> books) and biological taxonomies ruled the day. And it was really
> frustrating, because so many things really can't fit into a single bucket.
> Even today, it seems like rigid taxonomies remain overused.
>
> I'm not sure where I'm going with that, but it seemed relevant somehow,
> and I needed to rant.
>
>
>
> Kevin Smith
> Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 1:48 PM, Grace Gellerman <ggellerman at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/the-psychology-of-genre.html?mabReward=CTM&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=2
>>
>> Favorite quotes from the article:
>>
>> "This “categorical perception,” as it’s called, is not an innocent
>> process: What we think we’re looking at can alter what we actually see.
>> More broadly, when we put things into a category, research has found, they
>> actually become more alike in our minds."
>>
>> “Similarity serves as a basis for the classification of objects,” wrote
>> the noted psychologist Amos Tversky, “but it is also influenced by the
>> adopted classification.” The flip side holds: Things we might have viewed
>> as more similar become, when placed into two distinct categories, more
>> different."
>>
>> "Categorization affects not just how we perceive things, but how we feel
>> about them. When we like something, we seem to want to break it down into
>> further categories, away from the so-called basic level"
>>
>> "When we struggle to categorize something, we like it less."
>>
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>
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