DailyDirt: Categorizing Everything
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
People just keep creating stuff -- books, movies, music, you name it... so it's (more than) a full-time job to keep up with all the cool new stuff. How do we classify music into hip-hop, heavy metal or Krautrock? What can we learn from mapping all these seemingly separate media genres? People and machines are working together to cobble together categorization systems that try to keep up with the flood of new content. Here are just a few examples.- Netflix hired a bunch of people to try to categorize every movie, and it has 76,897 separate sub-genres for films like "romantic comedies" and "Violent Action Thrillers Starring Bruce Willis". You'd probably never guess which actor crosses into the most movie sub-genres (it's not Kevin Bacon).... It's Raymond Burr. [url]
- A brief history of music genre origins tells us that categories of music are often named after popular bands or lyrics. For example, bluegrass music is named after "the Blue Grass Boys"... and guess what lyrics inspired "Doo-wop" music? [url]
- Melvil Dewey came up with the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system in 1873. The DDC system is now published by OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. which owns all the copyright rights and manages the licensing of this method of organizing general knowledge. [url]
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Filed Under: archives, books, categorization, ddc, dewey decimal, films, genres, libraries, movies, music, oclc, recommendation systems, sky is rising
Companies: netflix
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1873 wtf
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140 years and still under copyright, where Libraries of all things are being charged licencing fees.
and the maximalists wonder why NO ONE respects copyright.
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The OLCL has been pretty litigious about its trademarks and copyrights in the past. A few years ago, they sent a C&D to the Library Hotel in NYC, whose floors and rooms are based on the Dewey Decimal system (and whose rooms contain books on particular subjects). After what would now be called the Streisand effect, they backed down, let the hotel give a small amount of money to a charity, and officially licensed the hotel to as a DDCS user.
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Dewey is being updated regularly, including such things as the 30 or so years they spent trying to figure out where books about computers should go, and there's talk of changing the 200s (religion) so that 80% of the numbers do not solely belong to Christianity.
That said, most librarians would much prefer if OCLC issued the DDC updates under a more open license (and charged less to access the information).
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