On Tue, 30 Jul 2013, Stephen Paling wrote:
> My working hypothesis is that exploitable document structures and
> internal metadata are of more use to members of the literary community
> than the mainstays of the metadata we provide, i.e, author, title, and
> subject.
Definitely as step forward, since our traditional "mainstays" (catalogs)
were designed only to act as finding guides to whole entities using the
most general descriptive terms. But how much more expensive would the
process be than simple cataloging, and would there be obstructions to its
funding (probably not, since literature is a relatively non-threatening
field to predators :))?
Is the purpose of your proposed software to automatically both capture
the "exploitable document structures and internal metadata" *and* place
them in a comparative context (e.g. "every mention of an animal, every
instance of a speech by a character"), or would a great deal of human
intervention be required to objectively identify the metadata and feed it
to the software?
One of my "working hypotheses" is that manipulative speech (containing
such things as fallacies of reasoning, glib rhetoric, emotional
manipulation, callousness, distortion, misdirection, projection,
self-obsession, etc.) can be objectively described, permitting computer
analysis (filtering?) of verbal and written statements.
The idea would be to develop objective ways of "scoring" such statements
as to *likely* veracity and constructiveness. Interestingly, manipulative
criticism of the scoring system would also be identifiable.
Sounds like your algorithm concepts might work well for those purposes.
The "objective" elements themselves would come from collaborations between
discourse analysts, psychologists, logicians, philosophers, historians,
etc., as well as input from people who have experienced the feeling of
having been manipulated.
> As for the rest, I re-invoke Godwin's Law
In Godwin's sense that the lessons of history should not be forgotten?
> and the concept of bikeshedding
Forgive me for this: "We could develop tools that defuse the
effectiveness of manipulative rhetoric in controlling modern societies and
perhaps human predation itself. OK, let's start by studying common threads
in fables." :)
Cheers!
jgm
John G. Marr
Cataloger
CDS, UL
Univ. of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
jmarr_at_unm.edu
californiastop_at_hushmail.com
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Received on Tue Jul 30 2013 - 17:12:43 EDT