ETHICAL ASPECTS IN KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE ISKO INTERNATIONAL EVENTS

New technologies, the effects of globalization, multiculturalism and an
increasingly immediate access to information demonstrate that ethical dilemmas are
considerably more present in the development of information processes. Considering
the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) as an institutionalized
international space in the work of themes focused on Knowledge Organization and
Representation, it is questioned concerning the ethical themes regularly discussed in
its annals. As a primary objective, it was intended to demonstrate an overview of these
studies, to theoretically assist research in this sense and express what is the main view
of the researchers on this theme, considering the ideas not only stated in the text but
from a further perspective, of the buildings behind these investigations. For that, we used
discourse analysis as a methodological foundation, a methodology that arises through the
studies of Pechêux and related to Foucault’s texts. The research information source was
the annals of ISKO’s international events, in which terms that characterized this universe
were applied as a search strategy, such as culture, ethic*, gender, privacy, prejudice, and
bias. These terms were searched in the areas with the most informational contente in the
articles, that is, title and abstract. After recovery, the corpus was applied to the qualitative
analysis software Sketch Engine and systematically analyzed from the discourse analysis
approach. It can be concluded from this analysis that the discourse on these terms in
the ISKO environment around issues such as misrepresentation in languages considered
universal, the exclusion of marginalized groups in society, and the change of paradigms of
information access from the technological development.