Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 464.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
[1] From: John Lavagnino <John.Lavagnino@kcl.ac.uk> (16)
Subject: Re: 16.461 confirmation of likely words?
[2] From: Michael Hart <hart@beryl.ils.unc.edu> (13)
Subject: Re: 16.461 confirmation of likely words?
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 07:17:35 +0000
From: John Lavagnino <John.Lavagnino@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 16.461 confirmation of likely words?
Matt Kirschenbaum writes---
> I'm trying to track down a discussion by Umberto Eco where he
> defines information as something like (I'm paraphrasing) the
> confirmation of unlikely facts. For example, if I'm told by a
> landlord that an apartment will cost $550 to rent, that's
> _information_ because it's unlikely that the apartment would
> have cost $550 (as opposed to $449 or $551 or $448 or $552,
> etc.)
I don't know about Eco's discussion, but much the same idea is part of
information theory as developed by Claude Shannon and the like. One
discussion that has a good survey of manifestations of the idea is
Charles Cole, "Shannon Revisited: Information in Terms of
Uncertainty", *Journal of the American Society for Information
Science* 44:4, May 1993, 204-211.
John Lavagnino
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 07:18:11 +0000
From: Michael Hart <hart@beryl.ils.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: 16.461 confirmation of likely words?
You might try this on:
"It has been said that narrative worlds are always *little worlds*, because
they do not constitute a maximal and complete state of things...In this sense
narrative worlds are *parasitical*, because, if the alternative properties are
not specified, we take for granted the properties that hold good in the real
world. In *Moby Dick* it is not expressly stated that all the sailors aboard
*Pequod* have two legs, but the reader ought to take it as implicit, given that
the sailors are human beings. On the other hand, the account takes care to
inform us that Ahab had only one leg, but, as far as I remember, it does not
say which, leaving us free to use our imagination, because such a specification
has no bearing on the story." -- from *Kant and the Platypus*
benjamin sTone
Freelance Agent of Chaos
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