Models For and Models Of
- Models For provide frameworks for learning/building
- Models Of provide examples of what can be done using the Models For
- Models Of can become Models For and vice versa ('intertransposability!')
This Models concept is based on a slight misreading/misremembering of Anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ book The Interpretation of Cultures in college. More on that below.
For our purposes, we think of Models Of as examples of static web projects that one can use as inspiration and Models For as the templates/frameworks from which one can build their own static web projects.
Most of the frameworks featured here as Models For are intended to be copied (usually by clicking “Use This Template!” on a GitHub repository’s main GitHub page) and then revised with the users own content.
By replacing the “models” contents with your own, a user gets an in depth tour of the workings of the repository/framework, creating an educational/development experience where one learns by building.
CollectionBuilder, Wax, Ed, Oral History as Data – these are all models for building specific web projects. And the creators of these projects have gradually moved from calling them “Tools” to referring to them as “frameworks” or “templates.”
Models Of can also become Models For (this “intertransposibility,” Geertz argues, is central to human thought! - p.94). So if, for instance, one wanted to replicate the map feature and essay layouts set up in Storying Extinction, one needs to just import that repository into their own account and start editing it.
The Lib-Static website privileges this “model of/model for” metaphor because it centers the educational nature and potential of its approach.
The Origins of this Particular Idea
The concept of Models Of/Models For does not begin or end with Geertz, but the thought process I had for thinking through the lib-static approach as models began with my remembering my struggling with this, one of his major arguments/metaphors relative to his definition of Religion.
In the chapter “Religion as Cultural System” Geertz attempts to define religion as, well, a cultural system, and argues that much of a religion’s power comes from its ability to be a “model of” reality and “model for”
The term “model” has, however, two senses—an “of” sense and a “for” sense—and though these are but aspects of the same basic concept they are very much worth distinguishing for analytic purposes. In the first, what is stressed is the manipulation of symbol structures so as to bring them, more or less closely, into parallel with the pre-established nonsymbolic system, as when we grasp how dams work by developing a theory of hydraulics or constructing a flow chart. The theory or chart models physical relationships in such a way—that is, by expressing their structure in synoptic form—as to render them apprehensible; it is a model of “reality.” In the second, what is stressed is the manipulation of the nonsymbolic systems in terms of the relationships expressed in the symbolic, as when we construct a dam according to the specifications implied in an hydraulic theory or the conclusions drawn from a flow chart. Here, the theory is a model under whose guidance physical relationships are organized: it is a model for “reality.”Clifford Geertz, “The Interpretation of Cultures,” p. 94
So the misremembering portion has to do with more of the “Models Of” side of things: wheras Geertz’ examples of a model of is more like a wireframe of a website than the actual website. Here, we are simplifying the idea a little, but I think the “intertransposibility” principle, and the educational/habit forming emphases are equivalen for both our usage and Geertz’ –> Geertz uses imprint learning in Animals as an example of “Models for” in that it “ involves the presentation of an appropriate sequence of behavior by a model animal in the presence of a learning animal” (Ibid.).
contributor:
Devin Becker (University of Idaho Library)
last update: 2021-08-04