Taxonomies

I wonder if one of the problems humanities students have with mind mapping and essay planning is due to not knowing about taxonomy. It seems to me that in planning to cover an entire question, students often do poorly because they omit several ‘top level’ categories from the question. They are also unable to organise material – one student this summer consistently wrote ‘industry’ when they meant (or should have meant) ‘factory’

To me, a factory is very clearly not an industry. Under certain exceptional conditions, of course, a single factory might constitute an entire industry, but normally a ‘factory’ is a subset of an ‘industry’. I am surprised that any student in university could confuse these simple everyday concepts; and yet I am confronted by such errors all too frequently while grading papers.

This is a shortcoming which crosses several disciplines – it is taxonomy in the life sciences, set theory in mathematics and is central to the parent-child inheritance concept at the heart of object orientated analysis and design in software engineering. In fact, in the domain of information science generally, classification is fundemental – no library could operate with it.

In part I suspect that the nature of electronic library catalogues and goggling contributes to the death of taxonomy – who needs to understand that 941.4082 is a sub-category of 941.408 if the computer simply spits out the titles you want?

Some students understand this perfectly of course, and some understand it in some contexts but cannot transfer the knowledge out of the specific context in which they learned it. So a student who has worked part-time in the Library might fully grasp the Dewey Decimal system, but be incapable of applying the underlying principles of it to economic history.