Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information Two Volumes (1959) / Chapter Skim
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On the Coding of Geometrical Shapes and Other Representations, with Reference to Archaeological Documents
On the Coding of Geometrical Shapes and Other Representations, with Reference to Archaeological Documents
Pages 889-902
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From page 889... ...
c. GARDIN Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.
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From page 890... ...
The merits of such designations tend to be threefold: objective, i.e., conform to fixed standards of description, irrespective of personal appreciations; international, i.e., independent of national differences in the process of naming identical entities; analytical, i.e., capable of being broken down into several terms, which makes for a more compact storage, and a more flexible .
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From page 891... ...
The "building," for instance, is sometimes termed a hut or a skyscraper, but many times also a four-floor house, a flat roof house, etc., according to its shape, its height, etc. The analyst has therefore to consider the various manifestations of each motive; and his first task is to try to reduce the total set of variations, for all the motives taken into consideration, to a limited number of abstract terms, which take up different meanings according to the particular motive with which they are combined.
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From page 892... ...
4. Applications to a specific field, archaeology The theoretical developments which form the subject of the preceding paragraphs have found an application in a systematic experiment carried out under the auspices of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for a specific field, archaeology.
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From page 893... ...
, actually distributed in two parallel series of ten signs each, rectilinear and curvilinear, and, on the other hand, ten sorts of geometrical arrangements (affixes) , subdivided into about thirty variants indicated by vowel gradations for each affix, one determines a first series ofprimary ornaments (about six hundred)
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From page 895... ...
A series of conventions fixes the dividing lines between base and body, neck and body, etc., so as to channel individual appreciations into a unique pattern, close to common usage. Each part is then dea / 1 )
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From page 896... ...
In turn, the vertical section is divided into two conventional parts, which it has proved convenient always to distinguish on each side of a horizontal plane imagined at one of the following levels (Fig. 3~: maximum (a)
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From page 897... ...
, which, combined with the 81 previous formulas, determine 243 types of profUes for the main body. At this stage the purely morphological description of any of those 243 shapes is ejected with only five terms, chosen among a total vocabulary of One.
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From page 898... ...
ActuaDy, among those 27 terms, eleven recur twice (d, v,x; i,u,o, and each of the five arithmetical expressions) , so that the total number of descriptive features amounts in fact to only sixteen distributed under six head1ngs.
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From page 899... ...
Actions. The manifold variety of actions represented on the iconographical documents which we have considered has been analyzed in terms of only two notions, negative and positive, specific meanings being provided by the context.
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From page 900... ...
Various logical devices, supported by statistical observations, make it possible to abstract those grammatical features themselves, for certain classes of iconographical elements (humans, animals, plants, etc.) , so as not to raise unduly the amount of terms in the code.
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From page 901... ...
They are not directly concerned either with the meaning of the various notions to which they lead, from a scientific point of view; their main purpose is to substitute combinations of weD-defined terms for synthetical descriptions which usually convey information either too vague or insufficient.
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