12.0131 patterns? Boolean habits?

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Thu, 16 Jul 1998 08:17:22 +0100 (BST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 12, No. 131.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

[1] From: Willard McCarty <Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> (33)
Subject: patterns

[2] From: Francois Lachance <lachance@chass.utoronto.ca> (17)
Subject: habit and boolean searches

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 16:43:54 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: patterns

Peter Brook begins his recently published autobiography Threads of time: A
memoir (Methuen Drama 1998) thus:

"I could have called this book False Memories. Not because consciously I
want to tell a lie but because the act of writing proves that there is no
deep freeze in the brain where memories are stored intact. On the contrary,
the brain seems to hold a reservoir of fragmentary signals that have neither
colour, sound, or taste, waiting for the power of imagination to bring them
to life. In a way, this is a blessing.

"At this moment, somewhere in Scandinavia, a man with a prodigious capacity
for total recall is also recording his life. I am told that as he puts down
every detail that his memory provides, it is taking him a year to write a
year, and as he started late he can never catch up. His predicament makes it
clear that autobiography has another aim. It is to peer into a bewildering
confusion of indiscriminate, incomplete impressions, never quite this, never
quite that, in an attempt to see whether, with hindsight, a pattern can
emerge."

Reading this last night, in the afterglow of a hot bath and on the edge of
sleep, it occurred to me that looking for patterns in literature, the basic
activity of the literary critic, is mutatis mutandis the same kind of thing.
What are the textual symbols but "fragmentary signals... waiting for the
power of imagination to bring them to life"? What does an open-minded
reading yield if not "a bewildering confusion of indiscriminate, incomplete
impressions, never quite this, never quite that" out of which we attempt to
find a pattern? And what does this have to do with computing? Once again we
are reminded of how heavily we must qualify the vaunted objectivity of
computational analysis. As with wetware so with hardware and software.

Since these thoughts did not disperse with the dawn but kept their charm
late into the afternoon, I decided to post them to you for whatever they may
be worth. The book certainly begins in a masterful way.

WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)171 873 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 873 5801
e-mail: Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/>

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 16:53:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: Francois Lachance <lachance@chass.utoronto.ca>
Subject: habit and boolean searches

Willard,

I was recently preparing some presentation materials on WWW search
engines. My audience included people who had never or rarely used
Boolean operators in their searches. I noticed that the Altavista help
materials <http://altavista.digital.com/av/content/help_advanced.htm>
subtly create user habits that maximize matches. The operators are
listed in a table from top to bottom (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR); the use of
brackets is mentioned but not explained. I hazard the hypothesis that
new learners will tend to use AND alone in their initial searches. To
be fair to the folks at Digital, the search engine was first developed
to find matches based on "rank" i.e. frequency of occurence; the
Boolean operators were added later.

I know that Humanist counts many librarians and information studies
professionals as subscribers. I was wondering if any of them might
wish to comment on how Boolean operators used to be taught and how
materials on the WWW now present them.

Curious about a historically informed comparison,

Francois

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