Reader Quotes - page 28
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the press, there are many fine historians in India. From my own generation of scholars, I can strongly recommend - to student and lay reader alike - the work of Upinder Singh on ancient India, of Nayanjot Lahiri on the history of archaeology, of Vijaya Ramaswamy on the bhakti movement, of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the early history of European expansion, of Chetan Singh on the decline of the Mughal State, of Sumit Guha on the social history of Western India, of Seema Alavi on the social history of medicine, of Niraja Gopal Jayal on the history of citizenship, of Tirthankar Roy on the economic consequences of colonialism, of Mahesh Rangarajan on the history of forests and wildlife, and of A. R. Venkatachalapathy on South Indian cultural history.
Ramachandra Guha
What is now called ‘knowledge organisation' in this context has a long history. The simplest forms of a knowledge organisation system (KOS) are, after all, the contents list and the index of a textbook. The knowledge is in the text; the KOS is a supplementary tool that helps the reader to find his way around the text. But as such finding aids have become more complex, and taken on wider functions, they have acquired grander names, such as retrieval languages, taxonomies, categorisations, lexicons, thesauri, or ontologies. They are now seen as schemes that organize, manage, and retrieve information.
Brian Campbell Vickery