20.036 possibly irrelevant conferences &c

                Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 36.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 09:43:25 +0100
         From: lachance_at_chass.utoronto.ca
         Subject: irreverant relevancy Re: 20.030 possibly irrelevant
conferences &c

Willard

I was intrigued by the use of "metaphorical" in your characterization of a
diecticly-indicated space.

> I would also point to the fact that the community is indeed very
> loosely bounded. All sorts inhabit this metaphorical space, and that
> makes it what it is. No need, I say, for us to be singing from the
> same hymn-sheet. Quite the opposite.

So I went to a "hymn book" online and lo found missing sheets. By "hymn
book" I mean an online dictionary. The interface was splendid in picking
up the single word to search and returning an entry from a now public
domain dictionary. However the interface didn't allow a nice quick link to
the material that would explain the abbreviations used in the entry
returned. The was not even a link to the prefatory material of the
edition. And yes I tried Project Gutenberg but the edition there
transcribed from print omits the material. One could of course, as a
traverser of metamorphizing space, send out a call and receive perhaps a
scan of the key to unlocking the mystery of the abbreviations.

I relate this episode in living via the screen not just to sound a
discordant note but also to suggest that an echo-gatherer might be a
suitable function to add to the repetoire of Humanist postings. By this I
mean a posting that picks up relevant (or related) threads from the
archive. Yes, the archive is available to all. However there is value in
watching someone comb the archive esp. in observing the play of shifting
terminology. [e.g. onomastics, names, monikers, epithets, handles]

And so "relevance" returns some 260 hits from the Humanist archives.
"Relevance" plus" list returns 107 or so.
The WWW interface doesn't entertain the possibility of "relevance NEAR
list". If I recall correctly there was a popluar search engine by the name
of Altavista that was capable of such feats ["Altavista" mentioned in some
22 postings to Humanist; "google", 151].

I don't want to rehash search engine shortcomings. New topic: Tag clouds.

"Tag clouds" prior to 2006 no mention on Humanist. "Clouds" some 22
mentions. "Tag" I leave the gentle reader to count.
Received on Sat May 27 2006 - 05:33:43 EDT