On Dec 7, 2009, at 8:42 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> In today's environment where indexers are better tools for finding information than databases, and where recommendations are seen as more useful than controlled vocabulary terms, our library catalogs need to go beyond what they are today. I believe that niche is in putting to use the items in our collections. Putting them into the context of the user and allowing the user to manipulate them in any number of meaningful ways. The things described at the Digital Humanities and Computer Science conference represent just such a applications.
Today a colleague pointed me towards an example in Wired Magazine link demonstrating some of what I allude to above:
Take one experiment. Moretti decided to test the idea that
Victorian writers, through their choice of adjectives, might
reveal their belief that moral qualities were indivisible from
reality itself and that physical traits reflected a person's
virtue. So he assembled a database of 250 novels and sent the
file to computer scientists at IBM's Visual Communications Lab,
who turned the books into a series of word clouds. "Boom! There
were exactly the adjectives I had hoped would pop up!" he says.
"Adjectives like strong, bright, fair, in which the physical and
the moral blend."
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/pl_print
Such functionality could easily be incorporated into our "catalogs" to make the content more useful and to enable users to evaluate it more effectively. People don't need to find as much as the need to use.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Mon Dec 07 2009 - 11:53:19 EST