Topic and topicality

WordNet 2.1 provides the following definition of the noun topic:

Oxford English Dictionary (1933) states that "topic" means place or locality which of course is not only geographical but also in relation to knowledge organization. It is also mentioned that the concept was used by rhetoricians (see also Bloomer, 2001). OED writes further that topic is applied as "A head under which arguments or subjects may be arranged" and in the third main meaning: "The subject of a discourse, argument, or literary composition; a matter treated in speech or writing; a theme...".

 

In the literature of Library and Information Science (LIS) as well as in related fields are words like topic, subject, aboutness, field and theme sometimes used as synonyms. In journals are the expressions topic issue and thematic issue, for example, mostly used synonymously.

 

In linguistics is it common to use the concepts "topic and comment" and this distinction has also been used LIS, by, for example, Yoon (1998).

 

Sometimes, however, distinctions are made with important theoretical implications. It is therefore necessary to consider the meaning of each term carefully. For example made  Wang & Soergel (1993, p. 91) a differentiation between the "topicality" of a document and its "subject area". It is implied by their paper that "topicality" is associated with information from the titles, abstracts and descriptors of documents, while "subject area" rather is associated with the author, the journal , the publisher and their institutional affiliations.

Studwell (1993, p. 11) writes:

 

"Confusion between Disciplines and Topics". LC [Library of Congress] has not done well in differentiating between disciplines and topics in the social sciences. And to make things worse, they have created confusion in two distinct ways. For some disciplines. LC has provided explanatory scope notes to distinguish disciplines from topics. For example: a. the discipline "archaeology" is clearly separated from the topic "Antiquities"....     In other situations, LC has not provided any explanations to help differentiate between discipline and topic. For example: a. the heading "Anthropology" can mean either the discipline or a description of the situation in a given place. That is "Anthropology-China" could mean either the discipline of anthropology in China or studies of the anthropological situation in that country...." (Studwell, 1993, p. 11)


 

It is important to understand what kind of different structures are at play and how they interact. Basically it is important to understand the difference between ontological structures (or structures in reality), epistemological structures (structures in knowledge) and social structures (e.g. in disciplines and citation networks). (Cf., Hjørland, 2003).  Studwell (1993) seems to regard topic and topicality as an ontological rather than as a social category.

 

In topic map terminology is "topic" defined as a symbol used within a topic map to represent a subject.

 

Drabenstott & Vizine-Goetz (1994) uses the term "topical subjects" throughout the book. For example, chapter 9 is termed "Queries for topical subjects not likely to succeed". But what is the difference between "topical subject queries" and "non-topical subject queries"? No clear answer is given in the book, although it is indicated (e.g., p. 51) that topical subject headings in the LCSH are opposed to subject headings referring to periods and geographical subdivisions. A similar understanding is expressed by Elizabeth A. Read:

 

"The phrase "topical" simply means "on a topic". In other words, a topical subject heading simply refers to a heading for a particular subject. This term is used to distinguish these types of subject headings from subject headings of other types, such as personal name subject headings, corporate body subject headings, etc." (Read, 1998).

 

However, periods, places, corporations etc. are also topics. The terminology of LCSH must be considered an idiosyncratic way of defining topic.

 

 

The British information scientist Robert Fairthorne deals with the issues of aboutness and topic:

 
``What discourse speaks of, - that is, what it mentions by name or description - , are amongst its extensional properties. What discourse speaks on, - that is, what it is about -, is amongst its intensional properties. Thus, its topic cannot be determined solely from what it mentions. For this, one must take into account extra-textual considerations, such as who is using it for what purpose, what purpose the author intended it to be used for, and for whom or for what the librarian, or other manager of messages, acquired it. . . . [T]opics are not the properties of text marks as such, but of discourse. . . . [T]o create or assign topics to a text we must consider it in the wider context of what kind of person uses it for what, what other texts are used, and in what ways do these texts depend on each other'' (Fairthorne, 1971, p. 361, 362).

 

Literature:

 

Allen, B. (1991). Topic knowledge and online catalog search formulation.  Library Quarterly, 61(2), 188-213.

 

Bar-Ilan, J. & Peritz, B. C. (2004).  Evolution, continuity, and disappearance of documents on a specific topic on the web: A longitudinal study of "informetrics". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(11), 980-990.  

 

Bloomer, W. M. (2001). Topics. IN: Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. by Thomas O. Sloane. Oxford: Oxford University Press (pp. 779-782). 

 
Boyce, B. (1982). Beyond Topicality: A 2 Stage view of relevance and the retrieval process. Information Processing & Management, 18(3), 105-109.

 

Dehart, F. E. (1983). Topic relevance and retrieval effectiveness. International Classification, 10(1), 9-14.

 

Dehart, F. E. (1982). Topic relevance and BSO switching effectiveness.  International Classification, 9(2), 71-76.

 

Drabenstott, K. M. & Vizine-Goetz, D. (1994). Using Subject Headings for Online Retrieval: Theory, Practice, and Potential. San Diego: Academic Press.

 

Fairthorne, R. A. (1971). Temporal structure in bibliographical classification. In Chan, L. M.; Richmond, P. A. & Svenonius, E. (Eds.): Theory of subject analysis: a sourcebook (pp. 359-366). Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

 

Green, R. (1995). Topical relevance relationships .1. Why topic matching fails. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 46(9), 646-653.  

 
Greisdorf, H. & O'Connor, B. (2003). Nodes of topicality: Modeling user notions of on topic documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(14), 
1296-1304.

 

Hahn, U. (1990).  Topic parsing - Accounting for text macro structures in full-text analysis. Information Processing & Management, 26(1), 135-170.

 

Hjørland, B. (2001). Towards a theory of aboutness, subject, topicality, theme, domain, field, content. . . . and relevance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 52(9), 774–778.

 

Hjørland, B. & Hartel, J. (2003). Ontological, epistemological and sociological dimensions of domains. Knowledge Organization, 30(3-4), 239-245.

 
Janes, J. W. (1994). Other peoples' judgments - A comparison of users and others judgments of 
document relevance,  topicallity, and utility. Journal of the American Society for Information Science,
45(3), 160-171. 
 
Kieft, R. (2000). Suggestions for bibliographic essay topics. http://www.haverford.edu/library/reference/rkieft/indianstopics.html

 

Leide, J. E.; Large, A.; Beheshti, J.; Brooks, M. & Cole, C. (2003). Visualization schemes for domain novices exploring a topic space: the navigation classification scheme. Information Processing & Management, 39(6), 923-940.

 

Li, H. & Yamanishi, K. (2003). Topic analysis using a finite mixture model. Information Processing & Management, 39(4), 521-541.

 

Muresan, G. & Harper, D. J. (2004). Topic modeling for mediated access to very large document Collections. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(10), 892-910.  

 

Osborne, L. N. (1998). Topic development in USENET newsgroups. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(11), 1010-1016.

 

Ozmutlu, H. C. & Cavdur, F. (2005). Application of automatic topic identification on Excite Web search engine data logs. Information Processing & Management, 41(5), 1243-1262.  

 

Ozmutlu, S. & Cavdur, F. (2005). Neural network applications for automatic new topic identification. ONLINE INFORMATION REVIEW, 29(1), 34-53.

 

Pahlevi, S. M. & Kitagawa, H. (2005). Conveying taxonomy context for topic-focused web search. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(2), 173-188.  

 

Read, E. A. (1998). Topical subjects. http://130.15.161.74/techserv/auth/09Subjects/09topic.html

 

Rorvig, M. & Fitzpatrick, S. (1998). Visualization and scaling of TREC topic document sets. Information Processing & Management, 34(2-3), 135-149.   

 

Shiri, A. S. & Revie, C. (2003). The effects of topic complexity and familiarity on cognitive and physical moves in a thesaurus-enhanced search environment. Journal of Information Science, 29(6), 517-526.

 

Stirling, I. A. (2003). Topic mapping for context, searching for content. Online, 27(3), 28-32.  

 

Studwell, W. E. (1993). Library of Congress Subject Headings Relating to the Social Sciences: Some Suggestions for Improvements. Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian, 12(1), 9-20.
 

Wang, P. & Soergel, D. (1993). Beyond Topical Relevance: Document Selection Behavior of Real Users of IR Systems. IN: ASIS'93. Proceedings of the 56th ASIS Annual Meeting. Medford, New Jersey: Learned Information, Inc. (Pp. 87-92).

 

Weinberg, B H. (1988). Why indexing fails the researcher. Indexer, 16(1), 3-6. Available at: http://people.unt.edu/~skh0001/wein1.htm

 

Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. (2006). Topic-comment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-comment

 

Yoon, K. (1998). The use of certainty and the role of topic and comment in interpersonal information seeking interaction. Information Research, 4(2). Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/4-2/isic/yoon.html


 


See also:  Aboutness; Discipline; Domain; Subject; Theme; Topic Map

 

 

 

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 09-08-2006

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