The Life and Times of Aboutness: A Review of the Library and Information Science Literature
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective – This paper explores the concept of “aboutness”, its related terms, and the process of aboutness determination as found in the Library and Information Science Literature. Methods – A review of the literature pertaining to aboutness determination and related terms specific to Library and Information Science was undertaken, borrowing extensively from the literature review of Daniel Joudrey’s (2005) dissertation, Building puzzles and growing pearls: A qualitative exploration of determining aboutness, as well as examining a small selection of research and articles not discussed by Joudrey. In addition, a concept map was developed to outline many of the concepts and theories found. Results – The LIS literature demonstrates conflicting positions surrounding the term aboutness and its correlates. Despite the lack of firm agreement on terminologies, the notion of subject is explored because it featured prominently in the literature. As well, intensional and extensional aboutness are explored in contrast to a more subjectivist perspective which asserts that a document's aboutness cannot be separated from its reader. Aboutness determination is also examined through the lens of theme and rheme, that is what is presupposed in a document versus what is new. Aboutness from the user perspective featured considerably in the literature, with many authors asserting both the importance and the challenge of mediating knowledge on behalf of the user. The stage of aboutness determination in the complete process of subject indexing is also presented here, and the findings demonstrate that the stages are anything but linear and sequential. Conclusion – While the findings are more expositional than conclusive, they demonstrate the complexities and challenges surrounding the concept of “aboutness” and the process of its determination. The value of this review is in its ability to present the ways in which scholars and practitioners have attempted to grapple with this conundrum. Although indexers may find temporary solace in cataloguing manuals that outline aboutness determination procedures, underneath these “safe surfaces” is an ambiguous concept further complicated by obscure and incomplete processes. This review provides an opportunity to reflect on those challenges and to further the discussion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.530 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it