Exploring Contemporary Classification Practices: Organizing Information, Technological Change and Ideological Contestation

The contributions in Exploring Contemporary Classification Practices analyse various aspects of classification and their importance to contemporary debates surrounding cultural heritage and information access.

Specific focus is on systems of classification, media technologies, and cultural institutions (such as libraries, archives, and museums) and how they respond to challenges, including classificatory bias, truth, neutrality, institutional tradition, and technological innovation. Raising awareness of classification practices in modern culture serves to emphasize how sorting things into categories is both an everyday accomplishment and a highly cultural and political activity with consequences for those who are classified and for those who classify. Throughout this book, ‘classification’ is defined as the practice and activity of systematically ordering and categorizing entities to bring structure and understanding to diverse contexts. This book addresses several timely issues both in terms of theoretical advancement and empirical diversity. The scholarly discussion on the classification and organization of knowledge has developed with digital technologies from a bibliographic paradigm into something much wider, as the need for metadata and classification has become critical for usability and legitimacy. This development has also led research on classification and knowledge organization to confront a new, post-humanist reality with not only emerging varieties of information currents in society, but also the development of new theoretical and methodological strands, such as post-colonial and intersectional perspectives, and digital humanities methodologies. In doing so, this book seeks to address critical questions for the archives, library, and museum sectors concerning the organization of information.

Exploring Contemporary Classification Practices will, therefore be of interest to academics, researchers, and practitioners with interests in library and information science, archives, cultural heritage, and digital heritage.

Jack Andersen is an Associate Professor with a PhD in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on how classification practices, particularly in digital media, influence the categorization, understanding, and treatment of information, individuals, and groups in society. Andersen investigates the social, cultural, and political implications of these practices, which range from algorithms to digital archiving. His work incorporates concepts from rhetorical genre theory, classification theory, cultural techniques, communication and media theory, as well as cultural and social theory.

Joacim Hansson is Professor of Library and Information Science at the Department of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research focuses on three main areas: Library Studies, with a special focus on the institutional identities of public libraries in contemporary democratic development; Document Theory; and Knowledge Organization with a special focus on classification theory and the relationship between metadata practices and societal development, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. He is Academic Leader at the European University for Well-being (EUniWell) and Head of the Linnaeus University Critical Knowledge Organization Research Group.