for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me yet, my dad really wants an organized catalogue of all the movies they own. being the dutiful daughter he's always dreamed of, i've recently spent a whooole lot of time working on that. data-entry can be mindnumbing, but my boundless love for lists and categories has trumped all that.
on the other hand, definitions have been nagging at me. see, if the point is to make movie retrieval more straightforward, the system (i.e. um, me) needs to make good guesses about genre. but genres aren't always intuitive... and certainly they're not objective. case in point: the american president - drama or comedy? (it turns out aaron sorkin himself doesn't think in those categories.) what makes a movie "romantic?" what qualifies as "action?"
oh, and what is a mystery?
3 comments:
You should have asked a librarian to do this for you :P
when i worked at my college library, i got a peek at the process involved in assigning call numbers. in fact, there was a time when i could put books in order without looking at their call numbers! that's definitely coming in handy right now :)
with your penchant for self discovery and commitment to continued growth and understanding, i have every confidence that your movie library will be fully awesome.
- josh
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