Mapping Beyond Dewey's Boundaries: Constructing Classificatory Space for Marginalized Knowledge Domains - Dewey Decimal Classification excludes some groups

5. "[P]oiesis, a way of representing experience, reality, that remakes and alters it in the process." Poiesis is a creative and creating production. In poiesis, we understand that the representation of reality is the construction of reality. The representation of information, through classification, is part of the construction of information. Classification remakes and alters information by constructing a particular context for it--gathering, scattering, and juxtaposing topics in relation to each other. How broadly or narrowly topics are represented will enhance or mask their visibility. In these ways, classification produces information in a creative process. This process of poiesis is a locational one. Feminist sociologist Elspeth Probyn (1990) proposes that:

   Through location knowledges are ordered into sequences which are congruent
   with previously established categories of knowledge. Location, then,
   delineates what we may hold as knowable and, following Foucault, renders
   certain experiences "true" and "scientific" while excluding others. (p.
   178)

She continues on to point out that this act of creation or construction determines not only what is knowable, but whose voices are heard. So the creation of classification creates the space in which some knowledges are central and others are peripheral.

6. This creation of reality is "a communal process, dependent for its continuance on receptive conditions, on engaged responses both favourable and critical." That is, both the context and the process affect the construction of reality. It could be called reflexive or holistic. It is akin to the death of the author and the ascendancy of the reader in literary criticism. The author does not create the text. It is created in the process of reading and depends upon the "receptive" and "engaged" reader for its meaning and existence. It involves interpretation, in the case of classification, by classifiers and users. In this sense it places responsibility for the construction of information not just on classificationists who write classifications but also on the individuals and institutions who use classifications.

OPERATIONALIZING THE THEORY

To operationalize the concept of rhetorical space, our research project examines the DDC context of individual concepts from A Women's Thesaurus by looking at:

1. What other topics share the number?

2. How is the number described?

3. What is the hierarchical context?

4. What topics sit on either side?

Two examples from our pilot study illustrate how the variable of rhetorical space works to reveal whether or not feminist topics can be taken seriously in DDC.

The first topic is colonialism. The following entry from A Women Thesaurus implies the scope of this term:

Entry from A Women's Thesaurus:

   colonialism

   UF   imperialism
   NT   neocolonialism
   RT   apartheid
   cultural imperialism
   decolonization
   developing nations
   ...

Colonialism appears in the index to DDC and points unequivocally to the number 325.3. This concept is not excluded from DDC. However, its rhetorical space is not as neutral as it at first appears. The following entry from DDC shows how 325.3 is defined and what it includes: