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

An everyday example of paradoxical space is the concept of separate spheres, public and private, associated with men's roles and women's roles. The private sphere represented by the white bourgeois concept of "home" and the public sphere represented by the paid workplace have been sites of paradoxical space in a variety of ways (Rose, 1993, pp. 52-56; Haraway, 1991, p. 170). Female-intensive professions like nursing, home economics, teaching and, of course, librarianship brought the ethic of care from the private women's sphere to the public male sphere in the nineteenth century. Later in this century, the necessary revisions of white middle-class feminism came to recognize that the private sphere, the home, is a workplace not only for the women who live there, but also for the women who leave their own homes to work in the homes of others. These women are mostly women of color who bring a very different perspective to the idea of the private sphere as a place for women's work. Recognition of the widespread existence of wife abuse also upsets the idea of the private sphere as the place where women are in control. Technology is now reviving the old cottage model of exploitation in the home. The electronic cottage and telecommuting bring the public sphere and its values into the private sphere (see, for example, Fulton, 1997). These examples of the fuzzy boundaries between public and private make both into paradoxical space. It is no longer possible to define the limits between public and private. "Home" is not a simple concept--it never was except in our naive constructions of it. However, we can still understand concepts like "home" because paradoxical spaces can exist.

QUALITY OF CONSTRUCTED SPACE

We can also purposely create paradoxical spaces. In this project, I have worked with research assistants to link the concepts from A Women's Thesaurus to DDC, creating paradoxical space. As we began, the idea worked reasonably well and seemed to have potential but, as we progressed, it became apparent that some concepts mapped to positions qualitatively better than others. In seeking some way to analyze the qualities of the links, what was first considered was their coextensiveness. Coextensiveness is considered here in spatial terms: the "shape" of the topic and the "shape" of the representation are the same, or, as Jessica Milstead (1984) puts it, coextensiveness is "the extent to which the index term reflects the precise content of the item of information ..." (p. 143). Milstead suggests the limitations of coextensiveness for classification when she opposes the predetermined pigeonholes of classification to the potential coextensiveness of thesauri. Most classification constructs pigeonholes, which are preformed without reference to the subjects of particular documents. Therefore, documents are put into the pigeonhole "closest in size to the subject" (p. 144). Coextensiveness is based on the subjects of individual documents while pigeonholing is based on the structure of the system.