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Abstract

This paper describes the cultural construction of classification as exemplified by the French Encyclopòudists, Jean d'Alembert and Denis Diderot, and the encyclopaedism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge analysing original texts digitized and encoded using XML and an adaptation of TEI. 1. Introduction This paper, focusing an encyclopaedism, is part of a larger study exploring the cultural construction of classification. The larger study explores possible foundations for bias in the structure of classifications with a view to more equitable practice. Bias in classification has been documented relative to race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality and other factors. Analyses and proposed solutions have addressed only acute biases in particular systems, not the systems themselves. The project tentatively identifies the systemic roots of bias are culturally specific and reflected in the structure of conventional classifcatory practices. A wide range of western cultural texts from classic Greek philosophy to twentieth-century ethnography is being analysed. The consistency with which certain presumptions are revealed, no matter how different the philosophical and social views of the authors, indicates their ubiquity in western thought, though it is not mirrored in many other cultures. We hope that an understanding of these fundamental cultural presumptions will make space for development of alternative approaches to knowledge organization that can work alongside conventional methods. This paper describes an example of the first phase of the project, which is a deconstruction developed from relevant texts. In the context of encyclopaedism the key texts used in this paper are Jean d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie, selections from Denis Diderot's contributions to the Encyclopedie, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Treatise an Method and Prospectus of the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. We are analysing these texts in digital form using Extensible Markup Language (XML) implemented via a document type definition (DTD) created for the purpose including elements of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). We will first explain the encoding methodology; then define the differences between the French Encyclopaedists and the English Coleridge; deconstruct these differences by allowing the commonalities between the texts to emerge; and, finally, examine their cultural specificity.

Type

a