025.431: The Dewey blog

Mathematical or not?

Last year we talked about Sudoku (Great new way to waste time catches on fast), and followed that up with a blog about Kakuro (Do you do or do you don't 'doku?). There, we said that: “We at Dewey Manor don't think Sudoku really counts as a mathematical game, since it doesn't require players to carry out any mathematical operations,” and “[Kakuro] is really a test of logic, not of arithmetic.” So we assigned Sudoku and Kakuro the Dewey number 793.73 Puzzles and puzzle games, and not 793.74 Mathematical games and recreations.

However, in the comments on the first blog, Thom Hickey and Dennis McGovern disagreed with us.  Dennis (writing under the handle of “LCDennis”) said:

I disagree with the other residents of Dewey Manor in that I think Sudoku really counts as a mathematical game, even though it doesn't require players to carry out any mathematical operations. The popular version of Sudoku (i.e., the one described in the 1st 20 Google results) is played using numbers (mathematical symbols). I think of number games as mathematical recreations, and I agree with the LC subject heading (sh85082131) which has Number games as a 450 ref. to Mathematical recreations. To my way of thinking Guardian's Godoku (which doesn't have much literary warrant) is another game: a logical game using letters that should also class in 793.74.

He also pointed us to the Wikipedia article on Sudoku and to web pages on Sudoku and related puzzles by the Australian mathematicians Anne Street and Diane Donovan.

These things have way of coming back to bite you, and we have just dealt with assigning Dewey numbers to the LCSH Weekly List containing “Sudoku.”  (Weekly List 2005 no. 37 -- the list with “Kakuro” is still in our future).  And we’ve had a change of heart: we’ve decided that Sudoku is a game involving Latin squares, a topic within 511.64 Permutations and combinations, while Kakuro involves 519.77 Integer programming.  The Wikipedia even has an article on the Mathematics of Sudoku.

510 Mathematics is a large topic, and now includes a lot more than traditional topics like algebra, calculus, geometry and statistics: it includes many other formalized and axiomatised systems, such as 511.3 Mathematical logic, 511.6 Combinatorics, and 519.7 Programming (which is not the same topic as the mathematics of computer programming, but includes linear programming and nonlinear programming).  Both Sudoku and Kakuro fit within this broader concept of mathematics, and belong in 793.74 Mathematical games and recreations.

Strike Two!

About two months ago, we delighted Classification Club members with 331.892829225209712743090511, a 27-digit DDC number mapped to the Canadian Subject Heading “Buhler Versatile Inc. Strike, Winnipeg, Man., 2000-2001.”  As it turns out, strikes are fertile territory for the Classification Club.  The latest list of LCSH-DDC mappings includes the LCSH “Fire Fighters’ Dispute, Great Britain, 2002-2004” mapped to 331.89281363370941090511. This 23-digit DDC number certainly would have given the first one a run for the money if only the geographic notation had been longer (Winnipeg has more digits in Table 2 than Great Britain).  Anyway, the number is constructed from 331.89281 Strikes in industries and occupations other than extractive, manufacturing, construction + 363.37 Fire hazards (the number for fire prevention and fire fighting, the two chief activities of fire fighters) + T1—09 (Geographic treatment) + T2—41 (Great Britain) + T1—090511 (2000–2009).

Would you Adam and Eve it?

The Believer! It's "intellectual yet playful." It's "rigorous yet amiable." It featured Tintin, Mark E. Smith, and Ian McEwan on its cover in successive months. How could it be anything other than the Dewey blog's favorite magazine? And that's even before you consider that the Believer is the only popular magazine (as far as we know) to tempt readers with featurettes that consist entirely of lists of DDC numbers recently mapped to Library of Congress subject headings. Here, for example, is an extract from the list published in February 2006 (on the same page as an interview with stand-up comedian Demetri Martin) of "Dewey Decimal Classifications of various endings":

Road closures—388.312
Retraction letters—070.44
Lost articles in literature—T3C—355
Ex-football players—796.33092, 796.332092
Same-sex divorce—306.89

Thanks to Rivka Galchen and Aaron Harnly for getting the Dewey word out in this way. Needless to say, we're all believers here at the Manor.

Goodnight, Irina

And so it came to pass that the Winter Olympics stopped. Taking time out from her HBO hit Da Ali G Show, Sasha Cohen narrowly failed to win the figure-skating gold for the US; Jamaica, disappointingly, missed the bobsleigh title by a whisker once again; and the Dewey blog was left to ponder why, if he's really so speedy, "Speedy" Peterson doesn't compete in an event where speed is more directly a factor, like a race or something. Talking of figure skating, we wanted to let you know that, although the subject has been listed in the DDC since, ooh, at least 1989 (at 796.912, under 796.9 Ice and snow sports), the Library of Congress has only recently created a subject heading for it, which we mapped to the DDC just the other week. Nice!

All-New Dewey Teaser: DOA?

Okay, so the All-New Dewey Teaser went down like a mouthful of soggy spaghetti. How could all those expensive focus groups have got it so wrong? Needless to say, the minion whose idea this was has been summarily dismissed and, last we heard, is currently attempting to eke out a living hawking his sad collection of keywords to search-engine advertisers. All that remains of the whole sordid affair is our promise to tell you precisely where we ended up deciding to class works on neoliberalism, educational attainment, and phishing. Without further ado, or indeed any ado at all, let's give it up for 320.51 Liberalism (not 320.513 Modern liberalism), 306.43 Education (under 306 Culture and institutions), and both 005.8 Data security and 364.163 Fraud. Controversial? Nous? If you think so, let us know. Otherwise, what we really want to know is: Does the All-New Dewey Teaser really have all the appeal of a wet Wednesday in Luton (T2—42567)? Or could it work if we tweaked it a little? Or does anyone have any better ideas for getting weekends off to an appropriately Deweytastic start?

All-New Dewey Teaser #1

Finally, the suspense is over. It's the moment you've all been waiting for! The return of the Dewey Teaser, in its all-new, genre-busting format. Well, we say "all-new" -- but in one crucial respect, it's just like the Old Dewey Teaser: it's simple. All you need to do is tell us where in the DDC you would class the following:

1. a work on neoliberalism;

2. a work on educational attainment; and

3. a work on phishing.

All three subjects are taken from recent Weekly Lists of new subject headings issued by the Library of Congress: "Neoliberalism" appears in WL 22 of June 1, 2005; "Educational attainment" and "Phishing" are from WL 23 of June 8, 2005. The DDC editors will be mapping DDC numbers to these headings next week -- so, watch out for our answers next Friday!

That's all, folks

Dewey blog readers around the world will rejoice at the results of the high-level crisis meeting we had at the Manor yesterday -- that lazy "Ideas of the year" riff has finally been put to bed. (Until next year.) Actually, it transpires that we could all do with a bit of a rest, so this will be the final blog entry of 2005. We'll be back on January 3, Twenty-oh-six! (Mark those calendars.) Oh, and the next set of LCSH/DDC mappings will be posted on the Dewey web site on January 6. In the meantime -- from everyone at the Manor to everyone out there in Deweyland -- happy holidays!

The loom of language

As part of the continuous process of updating the DDC so that it remains consistent with the most current information available, the editors make constant use of a wide variety of authoritative reference works across the full range of subject areas that Dewey covers (i.e., everything). Over the next few months, the Dewey blog will be highlighting a few of the most useful of these reference sources -- starting today with a giant in the field of linguistics. Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 15th ed. (2005), edited by Raymond G. Gordon, Jr., and published by SIL International of Dallas, TX, is a compendium of information about 7,299 living languages that includes an index of 39,491 distinct names for those languages. The 1st edition of Ethnologue appeared in 1951; the 14th edition was published in 2000, and access is currently available, free-of-charge, to electronic versions of both the 14th and the 15th editions, on the web at http://www.ethnologue.com/. Ethnologue arranges individual languages in a hierarchy of families according to the relationships determined to exist between those languages, and the resulting tree structure is easily browsable at the web site. Dewey editors' development of the hierarchical structure of the DDC's Table 6 (Languages), and their decisions as to the location within this structure of individual languages and as to the preferred forms of language names that appear in DDC captions and indexing, have been informed by Ethnologue data since the preparation of DDC 20 (published in 1989). The recent mapping of the LC subject heading "Ngoni language (Tanzania and Mozambique)" to T6—96391 Central Bantu languages    Central eastern Bantu languages, for instance, was done after consulting Ethnologue's "linguistic lineage" for Ngoni, which places it in the Manda group in zone N of the Narrow Bantu family of Niger-Congo languages. We don't always view Ethnologue as the final word, however: sometimes consultation with authorities in particular localities leads us to conclusions that differ from Ethnologue's. A case in point is our relocation of the South African language Ndebele to T6—963989, i.e., in the Nguni group (rather than the Sotho-Tswana group) in zone S of the Narrow Bantu family.

Identity crisis

"Identity is the crisis," sang Poly Styrene. "Can't you see? Identity; identity." An incisive critique of the plastic society of '70s Britain, to be sure, but sadly of little assistance to the DDC editors when it came to resolving a little situation that we came across in the vicinity of 111.82 Unity (under 111.8 Classical properties of being in 110 Metaphysics), which is indexed by "Identity (Principle of)." This is the place for philosophical works on identity as a general property of things, whether or not those things are people; the philosophical concept of identity applied to the human self is indexed at 126 The self as "Identity (Human)--philosophy." Meanwhile, works on personal identity written from the perspective of psychology are classed at 155.2 Individual psychology, which is indexed (among other terms) simply by "Identity (Human)" with no further subdivision. We spotted at least two problems here: first, that the number for interdisciplinary works on personal identity is incorrectly specified in the Relative Index as 155.2; and second, that the occurrence of the parenthetical qualifier "(Human)" erroneously gives the impression that the "Identity" indexed at 126 and 155.2 is a completely different concept from the "Identity" indexed at 111.82. The results of our rethink are as follows: index 111.82 with "Identity--philosophy"; 126 with "Identity--philosophy--humans"; and 155.2 with "Identity--psychology." Make sense? Oh, and if you're wondering why it suddenly occurred to us to do this -- well, we've just mapped the LC subject heading "Identity (Philosophical concept) in art" to 704.949126, and had to come up with our own Relative Index term for the new built number. Which, after the dust settles, will be (drum roll, please) ... "Identity--philosophy--humans--art representation." We'll leave the last word to Poly: "Clear as crystal. How do you feel now? I want to know ..."

The Island: Untethered

It's not every day an island lands in your backyard but that's what happened to one unfortunate homeowner in Springfield, MA, a few weeks ago. Given that the event made front-page news in yesterday's New York Times, it seems a shame that the island in question doesn't even have a name, but is known only as "the island" of the pond around which it floats. (In a flight of fancy, the pond itself is called Island Pond.) With our fingers on the pulse as always, and almost simultaneously with the latest Island Pond catastrophe, we mapped the Library of Congress subject heading "Floating islands" to DDC class 551.42 Islands and reefs in earth sciences. The particular work that inspired the creation of this subject heading is Chet A. Van Duzer's Floating islands: A global bibliography (Cantor Press, 2004), which includes the author's translation of Georg Christoph Munz's eighteenth-century treatise on the subject, Exercitatio academica de insulis natantibus. From Van Duzer's preface: "Natural floating islands may be most broadly described as floating pieces of land which commonly consist of peaty soil made buoyant by gases released by the decomposition of vegetable matter, or else masses of buoyant aquatic vegetation that often, but not always, have substantial amounts of organic sediments trapped among their intertwined roots ... [A]rtificial floating islands [are] designed for various purposes, including wildlife (especially bird) habitat, human habitation, improvement of water quality, and as airports." We also mapped the related subject heading "Floating islands in literature" to —32142 Islands (under —32 Places) and to —36 Physical and natural phenomena in Table 3C—3 Arts and literature dealing with specific themes and subjects, although a work with this subject has yet to be cataloged.