User:BirgerH/Subject (discourse)

The concept of "subject" is important in, among other fields, Library and Information Science where books and other documents are organized by subject, where information specialists perform "subject analysis" of documents and where users perform "subject searches". Any discussion of whether a given document is adequately indexed in a database requires clarification of the meaning of the term. Different kinds of "subject access points" and different kinds of indexing often results in different sets of retrieved documents. The question thus arises: What (if anything) is the correct subject assignment? And consequently: What is the meaning of "subject"?

There are many other implications of different understandings of the term 'subject': Bradford's law of scattering is about the scattering of documents with the same subject in, for example, scientific journals. But different ways to operationalize the concept of subject result in different distributions (cf., Bradford's law). Another implication is citation studies: It is claimed that cited and citing papers are related by subject. However it is very difficult to establish exactly when this is the case. The concept of subject is really difficult in these fields of research.

Ranganathan on subject

S. R. Ranganathan provided an explicit definition of the concept of "subject":

"Subject - an organized body of ideas, whose extension and intension are likely to fall coherently within the field of interests and comfortably within the intellectual competence and the field of inevitable specialization of a normal person". (Ranganathan, 1967, p. 82).

Another (related) definition is given by on of Ranganathan's students:

"A subject is an organized and systematized body of ideas. It may consist of one idea or a combination of several..." (Gopinath, 1976, p. 51)".

Ranganathan's definition of "subject" is strongly influenced by his Colon Classification system. The colon system is based on the combination of single elements from facets to subject designation. This is the reason why the combined nature of subjects are emphasized so strongly. It also leads to strange consequences such as the claim that gold cannot be a subject (but is alternatively termed "an isolate").

Besides the emphasis on the combined, organizing and systematizing nature of subjects Ranganathan's definition of subject contains the pragmatic demand, that a subject should be determined in a way that suits a normal person's competency or specialization.

Patrick Wilson on subject

The most serious analysis of the concept of subject in Library and information science is probably given by Patrick Wilson (librarian). Wilson (1968) examines - in particular by thought experiments - the suitability of different methods of examining the subject of a document. Among the methods are

• To identify the author's purpose for writing the document

• To at weight the relative dominance and subordination of different elements in the picture, which the reading imposes on the reader.

• To group or count the documents use of concepts and references

• To construe a set of rules for selecting the elements which are necessary as opposed to unnecessary for the work as a whole.

Patrick Wilson finds that each of these methods are insufficient to determine the subject of a document and is led to conclude (p. 89): "The notion of the subject of a writing is indeterminate..."

Wilson's concept of subject was discussed by Hjørland (1992) who found that it is problematic to give up the precise understanding of such a basic term. Wilson's arguments led him to an agnostic position which Hjørland found unacceptable and unnecessary. The role of the subject analysis is to determine which documents would be fruitful for users to identify whether or not the documents use one or another term or whether a given term in a document is used in one or another meaning.

Related concepts

The subject of a document or a piece of speech or writing is sometimes regarded as synonym with its topic, its theme, its aboutness etc. Sometimes, however are attempts made to distinguish the meanings of these terms.

William John Hutchins (1975, p. 115) thus argued for not using the term "subject" in relation to documents. He wrote: " 7.7 From this account of indexing one thing should now be clear, namely, that the notion of the "subject" of a document is peculiarly vague. We may mean the "extensional aboutness" or the "intensional aboutness", as given by the author in his title or as given by the abstractor or by the indexer; we may mean the NL [natural language] phrase expressing the Topic or we may mean the DL [documentary language] expression denoting the document content. There are clearly so many variables involved that whenever we talk of he "subject" of a document we ought always to say what kind of subject we are intending.

These questions of definition are, of course, a quite separate issue from the point stressed at the beginning of this chapter, namely that we should never talk of the subject of a document. As we have seen, judgments of subject content (by authors, readers and indexers) are influenced by so many factors that any particular statement of a document's content should never be regarded as anything other than just one of many possible such statements. In other contexts and from other perspectives the same document may have other, quite different "subjects"".

Epistemological issues

The term subject as used about discourses is not the same concept as a subject understood as an observer of an object (see Subject (philosophy). A librarian indexing a document is a subject in this last meaning. His or her subjectivity may influence the way documents are assigned subject terms.

From an epistemological point of view the important question is: Is the subject of a document something subjective or objective? Is it something inherent in the documents or something that the indexer produces from an interpretation of the document? (What is the ontological nature of subjects?). In both cases we need an understanding of how subjects should be determined in order to produce fruitful subject analyses and document representations. A deeper understanding of this issue is extremely important for all theories and practives of knowledge organization as well as for information retrieval. The so-called "question-oriented view" of subject analysis emphasizes that subject analysis is supposed to help identifying documents, which can answer certain important questions.

Hjørland (1992) demonstrated that different kinds of indexing and classification (manual as well as automatic) implicite are based on quite different understandings of the nature of subjects. Systems such as facet analysis, bibliometric coupling, vector space models, user based indexing and so on are based on different implicit notions of “the subject of a document”. Such systems can only be compared if the concept of subject has been properly defined.

Litterature

Drake, C. L. (1960). What is a subject? Australian Library Journal, 9, 34-41.

Frohmann, B. (1994). The Social Construction of Knowledge Organization: The Case of Melvin Dewey. Advances in Knowledge Organization, 4, 109-117.

Furner, J. (2006). The ontology of subjects of works. ASIS&T conference. http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/jfurner/papers/furner-06asist-b-ppt.pdf

Gopinath, M. A.: Colon Classification. IN: Classification in the 1970's. A second look. Revised edition. Ed. by Arthur Maltby. London, Clive Bingly, 1976, 51-80).

Hjørland, B. & Nicolaisen, J. (2005). Bradford’s Law of Scattering: Ambiguities in the Concept of "Subject". IN: Crestani, F. & Ruthven, I. (Eds.): CoLIS 2005, LNCS 3507, pp. 96 – 106. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. http://www.db.dk/binaries/bradford_colis5.pdf

Hjørland, B. (1992). The concept of "subject" in Information Science. Journal of Documentation, v 48, n 2, 172-200.

Hjørland, B. (2001). Towards a theory of aboutness, subject, topicality, theme, domain, field, content. . . and relevance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 52(9):774–778.

Hjørland, Birger (1997). Information seeking and subject representation. An activity-theoretical approach to information science. Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press.

Hutchins, W. J. (1975). Languages of Indexing and Classification: A Linguistic Study of Structures and Functions. London, UK: Peter Peregrinus.

Metcalfe, J. (1973). When is a Subject not a Subject? IN: Towards a theory of Librarianship. Ed. by Conrad H. Rawski. New York: Scarecrow Press.

Miksa, F. (1983): The Subject in the Dictionary Catalog from Cutter to the Present. Chicago: American Library Association.

Ranganatan, S. R. (1967). Prolegomena to Library Classification. London: Asia Publishing House.

Wilson, P. (1968). Two Kinds of Power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

See also

• Bradford's law (About the distribution of subjects in information sources such as journals).
• Subject heading