Descriptionary: A Thematic Dictionary, bills itself as “The book for when you know what it is, but not what it’s called.”
Knowing “what it is” apparently means knowing what broad category (type/class?) to browse. Organized into twenty (20) subject categories that are further sub-divided into smaller categories. For example, “Clothing” is a major category, with eight sub-categories for “Clothing of Ancient Greece” to “Clothing of the 20 Century,” with further sub-divisions under 20th Century.
A topic map would do a much better job, particularly since any subject could appear under multiple categories. And subjects could be searched for with multiple properties.
Association, occurrence, proxy, topic, topic map, etc., do not appear in a section titled “1,050 Words and Expressions You Should Know.” I will request correction of that oversight in future editions.
Not as amusing as Liam Quin’s reproduction of Nathan Bailey’s Canting Dictionary [thieving slang], but it does have entries like “crinoline [hoop skirt]:: “…The skirt itself was often hitched up to show a scarlet petticoat beneath.” Perhaps the Balisage markup conference will organize a game to guess the likely source of misinformation in various entries.
An this is exactly how parent teach their children language; they start with general terms/symbols/subjects and then as the child progresses its language the terms/symbols/subjects gradually gets a finer granularity.
Comment by Inge Henriksen — May 2, 2010 @ 6:24 am
I don’t remember teaching my daughter the concept of “clothing” before I talked about socks, shoes, tops, etc. Just my impression (haven’t looked up the research) but I would have said that children go from the particular to the general. I would think the more abstract set is a later concept.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — May 2, 2010 @ 7:17 am
Its just my personal observation; a parent instinctively(?) may first call all birds a “peep-peep”, when the child grasps the concept of this the parent may call all birds “a bird”, when the child grasps this the individual type of bird can be thought (i.e. “swallow”, “pelican”, “seagull” etc. ). I’m just a techie, dont shoot me down ;o)
Comment by Inge Henriksen — May 2, 2010 @ 7:41 am
I suspect the movement from general to specific (peep-peep to different types of birds) or specific to the general (shoe, sock, shirt to clothes) probably varies from what we (as adults) would call classes of items. Some go one way and some go the other.
Would make an interesting study to isolate cases one way or the other and then to see if those vary across cultures/languages. I suspect the interest/knowledge of the parent plays are real role as well. If the parent knows a distinction, more likely to be passed onto the child.
This is the sort of thing that we need to do in the development of interfaces generally and for topic maps in particular. Well, not necessarily you and I discuss it but to ask lots and lots of users. Not so much a question of a correct answer but the expected one (from a user perspective).
Comment by Patrick Durusau — May 2, 2010 @ 8:15 pm