> David, I was intrigued by your description of the orthogonal time lines.
> This has been a central concern of mine in trying to model how
> organizations, individual biographies, and scientific problems (or
> medical/clinical problems) interact. Discrete/continuous is an important
> distinction. The discreteness may also be textured in various ways, or
> have its own ryhthm (or not). From the point of view of the individual,
> the horizon of expectation (Ricoeur) or trajectory projection (Strauss)
> also matters a great deal. Is the particular timeline unfolding as
> expected, and if not, what can be done to reshape it, if anything?
>
> Boy, I resonated with your description (and I think the thick complexity of
> the texts from Jay and others in talking about this recently reflects this)
> about the difficulty in conceptualizing or envisioning these timelines and
> their differences. We really need 4-D visualization tools to even start.
> If you look at the article, "Of Lungs and Lungers" that Geof Bowker and I
> did last year in MCA, there's a (realy funky) attempt to draw how the
> different trajectories fracture, collide, pull each other along.
>
Susan
Thanks for pointing to your article. I read it carefully this time
in the context of dual-scale histograms. It's a beautiful piece with
implications far beyond "the holocausts of the body." I kept envisioning
the classification process used by physicians and nurses and thinking
about the educational process. The pathetic acts like temperature taking
reminded me so much of classroom testing. You also paint a dark side of
classification, where people in power use it to limit the choices of
others. But even the patients did not want to get rid of the measures of
themselves. One side to this dilemma is to continue to improve
classification; another is to make the system more accessible to scrutiny
by everyone, patient or student included (should there be a bill of rights
for students, like the U.S. government is trying to construct for
patients?). An emergent result of your analysis is that the stories that
patients tell themselves amount to another classification, albeit more
variable, personal, and changeable than the ones the "professionals" used.
Sometimes, they can be wrong about themselves with sad or even comforting
consequences. Sometimes, they know things that are not widely known. All
this argues for continuing dialogues.
Another impression that came home was the multiplicity of
dimensions. It was almost enough to make me feel dual-scales were a paltry
weapon to wield against such massive problems. Almost. Because they allow
the comparison of any two dimensions one can imagine, however, they open
up possibilities for analysis that we cannot imagine today. I think it
will be a useful tool.
Alas, I am going to have to sign off xmca for at least a week. I
want to thank everybody who responded to my queries about genre,
multidimensional classifiers, and dual-scale histograms. Being on xmca
this quarter has been one of the most exciting intellectual experiences I
have ever had. I will certainly rejoin as soon as I can.
David