A Cognitive Analysis of Categorization from the Perspective of Prototype Theory: Using High School Students Classifying Websites as An Example

In recent years, the user-oriented approach has gradually become the norm of classification research. Following the line, this Master’s thesis aims to explore how people classify Websites. From the perspective of Rosch’s Prototype Theory, this research attempts to conduct a cognitive analysis of categorization to seek a better understanding of the process and structure of categorization. It is hoped that the findings of this study will help the LIS field to device a more suitable classification scheme that meets users’ cognition.The interviewees of this study were 16 high school students who were recruited to do a classifying task. Twenty-two Websites were selected in advance and the interviewees were asked to classify these Websites into five predefined categories. After the classifying task, a semi-structured interview was conducted with each interviewee to further investigate the thoughts underlining his/her classifying behavior.It was found that the keywords used by these interviewees were dispersed. For most Websites, there was no consensus of the interviewees in choosing the keywords. In addition, these keywords could be grouped into the following four groups: Subject, Characteristics of Websites, Institutional factor, and Geographic area. The reasons why they chose these keywords could be grouped into four types as well: for retrieving, for generally describing a Website, for specifying the feature(s) of a Website, and to link a Website and its related category.When classifying Websites into categories, most interviewees did not seem to have a clear definition of each category. They classified Websites based on their intuitions or an obscured image of each category. The Websites grouped in the same category were not assembled based on the definition of a category. Instead, there were brought together according to the likeness of each other and family resemblance. Even though a Website is related to a certain topic, if it is too general or too superficial, the interviewees will not treat this Website as a representative or prototype of the category. They prefer to have a Website that provides more detailed or scholarly information of a topic. They would consider this kind of Website as a prototype of a category. It is also interesting to note that these interviewees would use ‘Other’ category to denote the following situations: Websites not belonging to the five predefined categories, Websites that have similar topic/subject but different facet, and Websites with similar topic but the interviewees could not find an appropriate name to label it at the moment.The relation between categories basically can be classified into two types: mutually exclusive and interrelated. However, for most categories, the line between two adjacent categories is not clear cut. The vagueness was mainly caused by the Websites containing multiple subjects. Some interviewees would classify this kind of Websites into multiple categories, therefore blurred the border line between or among categories.In an interactive retrieval process, can we let people indicate a document or Website as a prototype of the information that he/she is looking for, and then retrieve more similar documents or Websites? Based on the findings, the investigator proposes that prototype can be considered as a factor for relevance feedback retrieval. The investigator also re-examines the appropriateness of applying Rosch’s Prototype Theory in LIS field and suggests some new directions for further studies.