Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 460.
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: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com> (62)
Subject: Re: 15.456 rationale of e-text
[2] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance) (15)
Subject: Re: 15.456 rationale of e-text
[3] From: Mark Horney <mhorney@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> (27)
Subject: Searching by inspection
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 06:28:03 +0000
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@mulberrytech.com>
Subject: Re: 15.456 rationale of e-text
Willard and readers:
At 01:30 AM 1/16/02, Norm Hinton wrote:
>... I don't
>use a dictionary just to find out one thing about one word -- some of
>the most useful things I know about language come from paging through
>the book looking for the word I want, and I can never put a good
>dictionary down without browsing both in the vicinity and by flipping
>pages at random.
>
>Apparently the folks who programmed the AHD don't get it. I can look up
>a word and get the info --even the I-E material. But that's all.
Or they do get it, and are withholding that particular functionality from
the electronic product in order to maintain the distinctive value,
desirability and salability of the paper resource. :->
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit; but on the other hand I can imagine
several ways -- albeit scholar-intensive to produce -- to design electronic
interfaces that work, if not to emulate the tactile pleasures of browsing
the bound volume, at least the fun and potential serendipity of it. Even
some ways that would give you broader range for exploration than the serial
alphabetic presentation of the book. This is not to take issue with the
basic point Norm makes -- I too love dipping into my AHD, as I do digging
in the paper OED, and don't foresee any other medium giving me the same
thing -- but just to say it's slippery.
...
>In fact, search capabilities are the ONLY reason I can imagine for
>having any book in electronic form.....
This may be a bit extreme. We are still at the point where we are, for the
most part, imitating what we do with print in our electronic efforts --
read, peruse, look up. The capabilities of electronic interfaces to do new
things, or make lighter work of old things, are still largely unexplored
(the HyperActiveText of the web, with all its strengths and weaknesses,
would be the exception that proves this rule). The early days of print are
possibly a useful analogy. Only when print stopped trying to imitate
manuscript, and started taking advantage of what print could do that
manuscripts could not (for example, leveraging mass production to provide
standard referencing schemes to commonly-cited authors like Plato and
Aristotle), did the technology's true capabilities and significance begin
to emerge.
But noticing the virtue of a feature that expresses, particularly strongly,
the strengths of the codex form, should not blind us to the possibilities
of electronic media when doing their own thing -- some of which,
paper-based media do relatively poorly, if at all. As an example, I submit
for your attention an *early* prototype of a study resource I've been
working on. It's at
http://www.piez.org/wendell/Amsel/Amsel.html
and has been tested in IE5 and NN 6 (it relies on W3C DOM-compliant
scripting, available only in late browsers). Apologies also for the awful
translation: a friendly native speaker has promised to help me with the
German; this is very preliminary. (But you don't need to know German to
understand what I'm doing here.)
But of course, such a creature may not be a "book".
Cheers,
Wendell
======================================================================
Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 06:28:36 +0000
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Re: 15.456 rationale of e-text
Norman,
The only reason?
> In fact, search capabilities are the ONLY reason I can imagine for
> having any book in electronic form.....
What about the ease of communicating with students and colleagues (nice to
be able to copy and paste rather than rekey a citation)?
What about the ability to access the data through voice-synthesis or
reformatting presentation for big fonts?
What about being able to compute for example run a simple count (which of
course depends upon search capabilities)?
BTW, I've had fun doing a search on Google for "hinton only humanist"
which for me is the equivalent of a book browse :)
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm
per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 06:32:19 +0000
From: Mark Horney <mhorney@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
Subject: Searching by inspection
This distinction between "browsing" around, what I would call "searching by
inspection" and the "keyword" searching available in computer systems is
important to keep in mind when designing media. The technology of printed
books allows for and perhaps facilitates inspection. Keyword searching is
rather more difficult, with nothing more than the index and the table of
contents to assist readers. Computer systems, especially those that allow
full boolean searching are great at the keyword seaching but often terrible
at inspection, especially if it's web pages you're searching and you have a
slow internet connection. Hypertext designers must remember keyword
searching is fine IF YOU KNOW WHAT KEYWORDS TO LOOK FOR. For the rest of
us, they must also design features that faciliate browsing.
It is my hypothesis that electonic books will become the most useful in
situations where one is "studying" a book, as opposed to "reading" a book.
I think the activities one engages in during study can be substantially
assisted by functions that can be built into an electronic edition,
functions that are often difficult to manage in paper editions. For just
reading however, I agree, I don't yet think there's much value added in the
electronic form.
Mark Horney
Mark Horney, Ph.D.
Center for Advanced Technology in Education
University of Oregon
1244 Walnut St
Eugene, Oregon 97403
(o) 541/346-2679 FAX: 541/346-6226
mhorney@oregon.uoregon.edu
Web de Anza: http://anza.uoregon.edu
The Intersect Digital Library: http://intersect.uoregon.edu
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