Luca Giusti

1. 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019 PENOMBRA ALLE SORGENTI SRR, APUPA PATTERN, MARKETING E KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION Luca Giusti

2. From birth to “rebirth” Due anni di “penumbra” “it might be interesting to link the 125 birth anniversary to another next anniversary: the centenary of his "rebirth" as a librarian, a turning point in his life and the source of a profound innovation in Library Science” • Bibliotime • ISKOI group «Modello APUPA e penombra della conoscenza» • Roma • Porto • Bangalore Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

3. From birth to “rebirth” Imagine to travel with a time machine. Imagine to go exactly a century ago, we can see SRR young, gaining his first didactical experiences, developing the first attempts of his own mathematical-pedagogical mix. Young SRR Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

4. Jan 4th 1924: from professor to librarian Could this be the most suitable date to symbolize the "rebirth" of SRR? • I think we should consider what SRR wrote: • the choice to change his job was mainly determined by economic reasons; • when he saw the job posting, that profession didn’t appeal to him; • he applied for the job because an acquaintance insisted on it; • after a few days, he would regret that choice. Welcome to first Madras University librarian Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

5. Before the end of 1924: the meccano-facet intuition However, before leaving the new job, he accepted the advice to try to study Library Science. He left for England in September ‘24 and returned to India in June ‘25. Even before the end of ‘24 he seemed completely transformed: once a reluctant librarian, he then turned into a expert in classification, already experienced enough to have the famous meccano intuition. So, did the real breakthrough happen thanks to the experience he had in England? It seems to me very unlikely, Colon/ ellypse School of Librarianship, University College, London precisely because of the short time that proved necessary for his transformation. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

6. Watershed: from personal crises to innovations In order to try and address these topics, I think it is important to celebrate January 4th, 1924 not as a conversion, but precisely as a watershed between two phases of the same process. The awareness of the vulnerabilityof schools and libraries in the face of the growing information overflow produced by media led SRR to periodic personal crises. These crises, however, do not seem destructive, but rather a source of profound innovations in research. Let's try to demonstrate this pattern "crisis> turning point> innovation", examining the events of the months that preceded the turn of January 4th, 1924 and then of those that followed. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

7. BeforeJanuary 4th: India 1917-23 SRR worked as a school teacher for a very short period, from July 1917 to December 1923. However, the subtitle of the book "New Education and School Libraries" -written as a final summary at the end of his life- is "Half-century experience": it seems that the school remained at the center of his life. In the book he recalls the difficulties he encountered as a teacher, for example the misunderstandings with colleagues due to his tendency to personalize curricula. SRR 1973 The reference to the figure of Ramanujanseems significant because SRR could have connected his death, which occurred exactly in 1920, with the misunderstanding of Ramanujan’s genius by the school. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

8. «New education» • This book and its title are the clearest proof of the importance that Dewey’s “New Education” approach had had for SRR since the publication of School and Society: SRR called this book an “epoch-making book”. • In 1919 Dewey went to Japan on sabbatical leave to experiment on the field the New Education theory as a factor of democracy: • in 1920 Dewey wrote the book "Democracy and education“. • In the same year he visited Madras and met the secretaries of the Madras Teacher’s Guild; • SRRwas among these and encountered Dewey. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

9. «The overloadparadox» Around 1920 Ranganathanreports a dense list of new technologies restructuring the approach to knowledge, risking to cause a curriculum overload in students. It is the risk that the knowledge acquired in case of overflow is less than the knowledge resulting from a smaller flow that doesn’t exceed the human capability to process it. In the 1910 book How We Think, Dewey repeatedly highlighted the risk of “overloaded curricula.” SRR adhered to John Dewey’s analysis that the solution to the risk of overload is largely a matter of depth. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

10. Library as a hub of the school SRR extracts from Dewey’s books, and proudly republishes, the map of an ideal school; Significantly the library is at the center of the school, close to daily activities, where cognitive needs emerge. SRR’s interest in Dewey’s theories will accompany him in the course of all his life, as we can see from the way he speaks about the meeting he had with Dewey, during his 1950 trip to the United States. (SRR 1973 DF6) Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019 (1973), Par. CB2

11. Dewey, Bliss The depth of Dewey's interests took him far beyond the disciplinary limits of philosophy and pedagogy. In particular, he showed interest in Library Science and was in contact with his great innovator Henry Evelyn Bliss. Dewey wrote the introduction for the fundamental book of him and for the Knowledge organization history. Book dedicationby HE Bliss was really significant. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

12. First crisis /turningpoint • Perhaps SRR was convinced that it was difficult to apply New Educationwithout more efficient document classification systems. • All of this may have influenced SRR’s choice to quit his teaching job to devote himself to modernizing library science, without abandoning mathematics, but rather using it to empower classification. • This may represent a key to interpret the speed of what happened in England. John Dewey Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

13. Journey to England (1924-25) SRR studied library science with Charles Berwick Sayers. Sayers was one of the first to define a grammar of classification. He introduced SRR to it and to innovative Community reading centers, where the users did not go just to get the books they had in mind, but to browse and meet other people. SRR felt that the classification systems were inadequate to support this type of process. And this triggered a new crisis. C.Berwick Sayers Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

14. Second turningpoint From this crisis he emerged thanks to the intuition he had of facets, while he was visiting a department store in London. It was not just any department store; it was Selfridges, which was one of the very first large con- temporary department stores in Europe. Until then, you would enter an English shop only if you were going to buy something, and not simply to have a look. At Selfridges everyone could enter the department store and spend a few hours without any pressure to buy. >Spot Selfridges, Oxford Street Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

15. Meccano demo The Meccano that SRR saw was not a closed boxin a shop window or on a shelf, but pieces in action, masterfully arranged by a sales assistant in a demonstration that lasted over an hour. Later in his life, SRR telling about that assistant told:“spread out before him, in a more or less Apupa pattern” Meccano box Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

16. Meccano and sareesspread out This passage establishes a connection between the Meccano episode andthe famous metaphore of the saree: in both cases he uses the term “spread out”. Furthermore the passage explicitly quotes the Apupa pattern, published a quarter of a century later. Both require someone to arrange knowledge in a convenient order (We are going to see it later). Theseevidencessuggest a continuitybetween the professor and the librarian. I think that all these are not simple coincidences and that the contemporary pragmatist movement(founded by Dewey) acted as a bridge between these two worlds (as we will discuss later on). Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

17. USA: World War II acceleration During II World War US governmenthad funded great multidisciplinary research centers to develop the atomic bomb before Germany. After the War Big ICT companieswas born, inheriting potential and criticalities of big research center. The scientists -and aboveallcompetitiveness andproductivity- suffered because of this information overload. Manatthan Project plant Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

18. SRR’s third crisis Third turning point • The mould should be capable of mechanizing their sequence. • The number of connecting digits was too small […] • Abstract classification had to supply a more complex model or mould. • He named it “Depth Model “or Mould. SRR had a new crisis because he felt that: • the information flows had further increased • the number of facets were insufficient • the units of knowledge were getting smaller and smaller. • the number of connecting digits was too small Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

19. “Need for help from the CATALOGUE” It took me some time to understand the nature of the concept of APUPA: not simply an operative application of Library Science, but a vision, a strategic address. The title above is that of section 48 of Philosophy of Library classification; it remind us that shelves can count on the help of catalogs. Probablyhe is referring to the idea of the catalog classified and sorted by subject. Probably not only, indeed. New technologies may have come to the rescue of SRR’s imagination: those were the years when mechanical calculator became electromechanicaland the computer industry appeared. Little further, section 51 specifies that APUPA's implementation could be realized through the "punched cards" of the catalog, which are more agile and practical to dynamically rearrange, compared to books and shelves: a code language like the raised points in a braille-book or the punched holes in a monotype-spool or in an automatic telegraph spool.(SRR 1950, 51b. sec.51) Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

20. Punched cards SRR makes an explicit reference to punched cards, in Classification, coding and machinery for search, a 1950 essay that he published in Paris for Unesco. The ideal of an automatic arrangement becomes somehow feasible through the miniaturization of the electromechanic gears of the catalog. Click the https://youtu.be/BlUWg2nxCz0?t=22sto see BM Punched cards promo 1951 >Video IBM Punched cards promotional video – 1951 Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

21. The McBee Company industrializedthem Particularly he adopted a particularkind of punched card with holes on the edges The EdgeNotchedCards Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

22. The McBee Company industrializedthem Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

24. Click https://youtu.be/-mQ5p1pL-M0 to see Edge Notch Card demo Anyway SRR probably thought that a faceted cards filtering process could also be made with simpler tools, available in small rural libraries of Indian villages.

25. From Penumbra to Umbra? • Alfred North Whitehead had built a system of metaphors around the concept of “penumbra of consciousness”. we must remember that what Whitehead defines as the “concrescenceprocess” always generates something new (the “actual entity”), rather than recognizing (that is, clarifying) something that already exists...The selective character of the individual aim obscures the infinite possibilities of the external totality. Like in “exclude-filters” or in color “subtractive synthesis”, where information is created by exclusion from the whole, by obscuring its possibilities. As for the choice of a counterintuitive pattern that goes from penumbra to umbra, which reverses the common representation of consciousness as a path from shadow to light, Whitehead writes about the process of concrescence: “many prehensions from past occasions come together in the "concrescence" to form one space-time event which then becomes just one of many past occasions that are in the light cone of a future occasion”. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

26. Back to sources of Pragmatism • So, Whitehead renewed a challenge that four decades earlier had been launched by William James, the founder of the pragmatist movement, criticizing the “ridiculous” creed of the empiricist philosophers. From William James "Principles of Psichology“ >video If we then consider the cognitive function of different states of mind, we may feel assured that the difference between those that are mere acquaintance…is reducible almost entirely to the absence or presence of psychic fringes or overtones. Knowledge about a thing is knowledge of its relations….Of most of its relations we are only aware in the penumbral nascent way of a fringe of unarticulated affinities about it The traditional psychology, talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. The height of the curve above the line stands for the intensity of the brain processes Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

27. James, Wundt, Leibniz The structure of the prehension-apprehension dichotomy seems to be a reference to Leibnitz’s perception-apperceptionrevitalized by the progress of the theories of perception in Germany in those years. In the 1860s Helmoltz, Young and Max Schultze had introduced the "duplicity theory"; This theory demonstrated that in the retina there were two basic types of photoreceptors (cones, responsible for Scotopic vision and rods responsible for Photopic vision). Each had separate visual functions and different filtering strategies. • The birth of psychology as a discipline originates from this context: • William James is a disciple of Helmolz, together with Wundt, who managed in Lipsia the first laboratory devoted to studying mental processes experimentally by mesuring them. • In the same city of Lipsia two centuries earlier Leibniz had anticipated this approach with the concept of “small perception”. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

28. Peirce, Sylvester and Leibniz In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore becomes a mathematical capital: James Joseph Sylvester, Charles Sanders Peirce, Arthur Cayley, John Dewey. In a 1903 article Peirce refers to a controversy with Sylvester on UMBRAL CALCULUS, a type of mathematical notation used to describe the properties of a universe of values contained in a matrix through a function that Sylvester first called “umbra.” First of all, Peirce criticizes the metaphor of umbra: “ion or radicle would be far better […] They are just like chemicals radicals, each having a certain number of unsatisfied wants”. The continuity with William James’s description of psichological processes is surprising. Luca Giusti – 9° Incontro ISKO Italia - Firenze, 11 Aprile 2019

29. ThunchaththuRamanujanEzhuthachan Keralaschool George GheverneseJoseph of Manchester University studied the relationship between Ramanujan and the School of Kerala; a deep mathematical-astronomical tradition that Europe and Jesuits had carefully studied since the Renaissance. Leibniz and Kepler took from Jesuits the fruits of the first colonial trade: the knowledge.

30. January 4th 2024 I hope it will find us all ready to truly welcome Thank You! l.giusti@liguriadigitale.it "the future that happened a century ago" Luca Giusti - The penumbra of knowledge - Bengaloru- Aug 9, 2018

31. “The boundary-line between irrelevant/relevant records Isn’t sharp and clear-cut. Various degrees of intensity are possible” Let’s imagine a reader in front of a shelf, He’s looking for a particular topic; …A totally or intimately relevant record may be called “Umbral Record” What’s the Apupa Pattern? …A partially irrelevant...“Penumbral Record”… A totally irrelevant…“Alien Record.” SRR(1951) “Classification and Communication”

32. The APUPA pattern provides that “the most relevant records are in the centre until they have nothing to do with the object of interest anymore. and the other records stand fanned out on either side of the center in decreasing order of their relevance” SRR (1951) sect.321 These consecutive phases are codified in the acronym APUPA: U P P A A