Subject/Object

Here is a review of Pnina Shachaf and Sarah Horowitz’ 2006 article “Are virtual reference services color blind?“. It is an unobtrusive study of e-mail reference which purports to discover discrimination against Arabs and African-Americans based on the names appended to e-mail queries.

While I found the study very interesting, I also thought it was poorly designed, with multiple places where bias could have entered the study. Particularly, the authors did not sufficiently control for gender in measuring prejudice, something Shachaf did do in a follow-up study (see references).

Here is the PDF if you want it. The entire piece is below the cut.

Discrimination in reference services: A critical review of “Are virtual reference services color blind?”

Shachaf and Horowitz (2006) present in this study an examination of academic libraries’ virtual reference when serving culturally diversity patrons. The unobtrusive study was conducted by sending various sets of queries by e-mail to a number of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) reference services which differed only in the implicit ethnicity of the addressers’ names. From their findings the writers conclude that in all dimensions Arabs and African Americans received a poorer level of service when compared with Caucasians. While these conclusions may be valid, this examination of the authors’ methods and interpretations of the data will illustrate possible entry points for error and rival explanations. Given these possibilities we find that the authors’ stated conclusions are overly strong and ultimately unsupported.

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Some thoughts on my essay on Bliss Bibliographic Classification (BC1)

If we are building a library or bibliographic classification, then Philosophy presents a problem, particularly if we are building our classification on the lines of consensus with science and education, that is, matching our main classes to the university disciplines.

1. What is the relationship between Philosophy and the other disciplines? How is X related to the Philosophy of X? Should Aesthetics, the philosophy of the beautiful, be classed with Art? Bliss does does so, feeling this collocation is efficient. Yet, given the rule of consensus, is it more worth wild to keep these discussions with philosophy?

2. What is the nature of philosophical writing? At one hand, it aims at Truth and is written as non-fiction. Yet, at the same time, a great bulk of what philosophy does is comment on and dialogue with other philosophers; in this way it resembles literature. Should we therefore class philosophy by topic? Or should we arrange it alphabetically by author? Or, to see the dialogue, arrange it by broad historical periods?

3. What is the nature of secondary writing in Philosophy? In most disciplines, literary criticism for instance, we separate the act of creating literature and writing about literature. However, in almost all cases, writing about philosophers is itself doing philosophy. Except if we were writing the most general survey, adding one’s own commentary and interpretation is itself philosophizing. Are we to keep all secondary commentaries along with their primary texts? What about Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle, worth reading in its own write, or Heidegger’s commentaries on Hegel and Schelling? When does a commentator not deserve their own attention? What about if we are writing about multiple philosophers, even in the same micro-document (an essay in a book of essays)?