The last post in this series gave a tutorial and do-it-yourself section on observation. This one gives some general guidelines for how to conduct analysis and interpretation, once you’ve done enough observation. This tutorial isn’t meant to be all encompassing, just to give some key concepts for research, especially dealing with the process of catalyzing categories.

The post I intend to follow this one with will either be a do-it-yourself section on analysis and interpretation, or bridge over from the “what” of this three-part process to the “so what” and explore how it applies to creating a set of categories for streams within emergence.

ANALYSIS STAGE

Once we are immersed in details, we can begin sifting through them, continuing to observe but also now looking more intentionally for probable points of connection:

  • Relationships among the details (what kinds of features do or do not appear together).
  • Types of patterns in the relationships (how do those factors connect with each other, or not; how clusters of items that seem to relate to each other might form a category, and how clusters of categories might relate).
  • Trends in the patterns (what items or groups of related items seems to have more emphasis or power at a specific point in time, or what seems to be changing over time, or are more items now fitting into multiple categories whereas before they were in just one single category).

Granted, we may have started perceiving patterns intuitively, even before we searched for them. But there are some important tools and concepts that will help us work our way through the analysis state intentionally. Differentiation is one of those important technical concept in the skill of categorization. Differentiation helps us identify critical elements that distinguish two similar items from one another. If you’re familiar with wikipedia, you’ve run across the term disambiguation for a similar process to clarify what a particular encyclopedia entry does and does not relate to.

For instance, in my studies of linguistics, we learned about identifying the specific features in related words that distinguish them from each other. Usually, we put words into “minimal pairs” that had only one different feature. If I remember right (and if I don’t, please don’t send my grade school grammar teacher to run after me!)

  • The words this and that are both singular relative pronouns where the only distinctive feature is distance: this is close, and that is farther away.
  • Similarly, these and those are plural relative pronouns where the distinctive feature is distance – these refers to things that are close by, and those refers to things that are farther away.
  • This and these are a minimal pair where the first is singular and the second is plural; same with that and those.

As we continued noting the inherent features of various words, we found different combinations that created minimal pairs where we could analyze meaningful distinctions and create categories. When you get to the phase of discerning what is meaningful, that is half in the world of analysis, and half in the world of interpretation. Figuring out what is a significant distinction is about prioritization – a prime feature will usually catalyze a category, although it’s always possible to create categories based on less important features. (Okay, I know this is getting all ishy-squishy, but hey! We’re talking art here, not mechanical science!)

Observation, differentiation, prioritization, and categorization – those are all tasks essential to the creating of a dictionary and a grammar for a language that has never been put into writing before. So, as I mentioned in an earlier post, when we talk about the taxonomies of emergence, it’s like we are discussing how to do a dictionary and grammar for a culture and its subsets. Of course there will be disagreements on how best to draw the boundaries and “rules” and formulas, but if we expect to interpret it more accurately in the long run, we’ve just got to do it … Sufficient quality and quantity of analysis provides the base for better interpretation, just as quality and quantity observation provides the base for better analysis.

Next post in this series: Moving into the interpretation stage, focusing on how to create sets of meaningful categories.

Jump back to Taxonomies of Emergence, Part 3 – Tutorial and D-I-Y on Observation.