Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have dramatically different expectations of companies that are categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and actions. In this book, a team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Drawing on research in various fields, including cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp, occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a “conceptual space.” Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental representations of categories. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts. Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new understanding of everyday situations and interactions.

Note about this ebook: This ebook exploits many advanced capabilities with images, hypertext, and interactivity and is optimized for EPUB3-compliant book readers, especially Apple's iBooks and browser plugins. These features may not work on all ebook readers. We organize things. We organize information, information about things, and information about information. Organizing is a fundamental issue in many professional fields, but these fields have only limited agreement in how they approach problems of organizing and in what they seek as their solutions. The Discipline of Organizing synthesizes insights from library science, information science, computer science, cognitive science, systems analysis, business, and other disciplines to create an Organizing System for understanding organizing. This framework is robust and forward-looking, enabling effective sharing of insights and design patterns between disciplines that weren’t possible before. The Professional Edition includes new and revised content about the active resources of the "Internet of Things," and how the field of Information Architecture can be viewed as a subset of the discipline of organizing. You’ll find: 600 tagged endnotes that connect to one or more of the contributing disciplines Nearly 60 new pictures and illustrations Links to cross-references and external citations Interactive study guides to test on key points The Professional Edition is ideal for practitioners and as a primary or supplemental text for graduate courses on information organization, content and knowledge management, and digital collections. FOR INSTRUCTORS: Supplemental materials (lecture notes, assignments, exams, etc.) are available at http://disciplineoforganizing.org. FOR STUDENTS: Make sure this is the edition you want to buy. There's a newer one and maybe your instructor has adopted that one instead.

Silicon Valley investor Ryn Brennan is on the verge of achieving everything she dreamed. She's succeeded in the male-dominated venture capital world, has a supportive husband, and is about to close the deal of her career. Everything is going exactly as planned, until she meets Carly, her husband's mistress, across the negotiating table. Carly clawed her way back from being a teenage runaway to become an accomplished scientist, caring single mom, and co-founder of her startup. Once she marries her loving fiancé, she'll secure the complete family she craves. But she's blindsided to discover her not so perfect fiancé is already married—to Ryn, her company's biggest investor. In an industry full of not-so-subtle sexism, can the two women rise above, and work together to overcome heartbreak, and ensure their success?

This book offers a systematic account of syntactic categories - the building blocks of sentences and the units of grammatical analysis, and explains their description in different formal as well as functional theories of language, including language typology. Its clear and balanced exposition will be widely welcomed by students.

Is there a vector space whose dimension is the golden ratio? Of course not—the golden ratio is not an integer! But this can happen for generalizations of vector spaces—objects of a tensor category. The theory of tensor categories is a relatively new field of mathematics that generalizes the theory of group representations. It has deep connections with many other fields, including representation theory, Hopf algebras, operator algebras, low-dimensional topology (in particular, knot theory), homotopy theory, quantum mechanics and field theory, quantum computation, theory of motives, etc. This book gives a systematic introduction to this theory and a review of its applications. While giving a detailed overview of general tensor categories, it focuses especially on the theory of finite tensor categories and fusion categories (in particular, braided and modular ones), and discusses the main results about them with proofs. In particular, it shows how the main properties of finite-dimensional Hopf algebras may be derived from the theory of tensor categories. Many important results are presented as a sequence of exercises, which makes the book valuable for students and suitable for graduate courses. Many applications, connections to other areas, additional results, and references are discussed at the end of each chapter.

This up-to-date introductory treatment employs category theory to explore the theory of structures. Its unique approach stresses concrete categories and presents a systematic view of factorization structures, offering a unifying perspective on earlier work and summarizing recent developments. Numerous examples, ranging from general to specific, illuminate the text. 1990 edition, updated 2004.

An array of general ideas useful in a wide variety of fields. Starting from the foundations, this book illuminates the concepts of category, functor, natural transformation, and duality. It then turns to adjoint functors, which provide a description of universal constructions, an analysis of the representations of functors by sets of morphisms, and a means of manipulating direct and inverse limits. These categorical concepts are extensively illustrated in the remaining chapters, which include many applications of the basic existence theorem for adjoint functors. The categories of algebraic systems are constructed from certain adjoint-like data and characterised by Beck's theorem. After considering a variety of applications, the book continues with the construction and exploitation of Kan extensions. This second edition includes a number of revisions and additions, including new chapters on topics of active interest: symmetric monoidal categories and braided monoidal categories, and the coherence theorems for them, as well as 2-categories and the higher dimensional categories which have recently come into prominence.