An Evolutionary Approach to Bibliographic Classification
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2018 AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION David Linn Sims University of Tennessee Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Sims, David Linn, "AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2018. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5006 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by David Linn Sims entitled "AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Communication and Information. Suzanne L. Allard, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: David G. Anderson, Bradley Wade Bishop, Stuart N. Brotman Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville David Linn Sims August 2018 Copyright © 2018 by David L. Sims All rights reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS If it had not been for my dissertation chair, Suzie Allard, I may not have completed this degree. She had the understanding of those of us who pursue a PhD while working full time and having a family. She also had incredible patience as I would constantly under estimate the time it would take to do all that was needed to complete a dissertation. But I am also grateful to so many others: my dissertation committee members David Anderson, Wade Bishop, and Stuart Brotman for their patience through comprehensive finals, and valuable advice in both the dissertation proposal and final dissertation; Robert Patton at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for advice related to text-mining and assistance with term extraction for the dissertation research project; Jim Malone, Priyanki Sinha, and Todd Suomela, my closest cohort colleagues at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for interactions that provided early encouragement for pursuing this degree; Jenni Sinclaire with John Wiley & Sons publishing company for help with source material for the dissertation research project; Mike Paulus, Jennifer Caldwell, and Cynthia Manley at ORNL for ongoing encouragement and support; Kay Hedly, my mother-in-law for her support in the final three months of the dissertation project; Lonnie Crosby, Tabitha Samuel, and Gary Rogers, The University of Tennessee staff for help with the acquisition of the source material for the dissertation project; and UT-Battelle, LLC (M&O contractor for the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory) for educational assistance. And of course, I am very grateful for having a mother, father, and sister who always supported and encouraged my education goals and impressed upon me the importance of education, each in their own way. iii But I am most grateful for the support, understanding, and tolerance of my spouse, Beka Hedly, and my children, Ava Grace and Sean. For nearly as long as I have been married, and for the entire lives of my young children, I have been working on this degree. Countless times, Beka has taken care of the children while I studied and worked towards this end goal. Countless times my children have asked me to play only to hear my standard response: “I need to do my school work today,” even though it was the weekend or a vacation day I was using. Most major holidays a laptop accompanied me on trips. This was not the life Beka had envisioned when we were married nor was I the husband and father she had envisioned. Needless to say, much time and attention is owed to my family—and this is one debt I am looking forward to repaying! iv ABSTRACT This dissertation is research in the domain of information science and specifically, the organization and representation of information. The research has implications for classification of scientific books, especially as dissemination of information becomes more rapid and science becomes more diverse due to increases in multi-, inter-, trans-disciplinary research, which focus on phenomena, in contrast to traditional library classification schemes based on disciplines. The literature review indicates 1) human socio-cultural groups have many of the same properties as biological species, 2) output from human socio-cultural groups can be and has been the subject of evolutionary relationship analyses (i.e., phylogenetics), 3) library and information science theorists believe the most favorable and scientific classification for information packages is one based on common origin, but 4) library and information science classification researchers have not demonstrated a book classification based on evolutionary relationships of common origin. The research project supports the assertion that a sensible book classification method can be developed using a contemporary biological classification approach based on common origin, which has not been applied to a collection of books until now. Using a sample from a collection of earth-science digitized books, the method developed includes a text-mining step to extract important terms, which were converted into a dataset for input into the second step—the phylogenetic analysis. Three classification trees were produced and are discussed. Parsimony analysis, in contrast to distance and likelihood analyses, produced a sensible book classification tree. Also included is a comparison with a classification tree based on a well- known contemporary library classification scheme (the Library of Congress Classification). v Final discussions connect this research with knowledge organization and information retrieval, information needs beyond science, and this type of research in context of a unified science of cultural evolution. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION & GENERAL INFORMATION ...........................................................1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................1 BACKGROUND OF THE SUBJECT ...............................................................................................2 BACKGROUND OF THE PROBLEM .............................................................................................6 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM ..............................................................................................20 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY ........................................................................................................20 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ..........................................................................................................21 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY ................................................................................................21 DEFINITIONS ..........................................................................................................................23 ASSUMPTIONS, LIMITATIONS, DELIMITATIONS ......................................................................25 CONCLUSION .........................................................................................................................28 CHAPTER 2 – LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................30 INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................30 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK ...................................................................................................31 REVIEW OF RESEARCH ...........................................................................................................33 DETAILED SEARCH DESCRIPTION ............................................................................................99 CHAPTER 3 – MATERIALS & METHODS .................................................................................... 106 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 106 vii RESEARCH DESIGN ............................................................................................................... 107 POPULATION AND SAMPLE .................................................................................................. 108 DATA COLLECTION ............................................................................................................... 111 DATA ANALYSIS ................................................................................................................... 115 CHAPTER 4 – RESEARCH FINDINGS .......................................................................................... 120 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 120 FINDINGS FROM DATASET