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September 18, 2017 at 10:15 am #1087Zachary VeithParticipant
- These challenges that Bush describes are twofold; access to information and retrieving that information in a streamlined manner. Access to information is the most obvious challenge. Instead of scouring for new research (taking longer to find it than it would take to read it), the current thought on any subject could be right at one’s fingertips with the memex. Even now, in the digital age, archives are scanning their collections to give instant access to researchers around the world who cannot come in-person. All of this, Bush hopes, will be accomplished in an efficient manner. He detailed many processes of retreating information as “clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail” and hopes his memex would streamline the process for an easy experience in research.
- The researcher, using Bush’s memex, can now compare unlimited sources in their research. This allows scholarly works more arguments to be considered and thus a better circulation of ideas within the field, in a much shorter time-span. In addition, with practically endless storage, these authors can save any and all information they find without worrying about shelf space. This feature of space-less storage can be indispensable to the researcher. As Bush details, even if the information was not relevant before, the memex interface allows the individual to quickly recall the document from the vast reservoirs of saved information it stores.
September 14, 2017 at 6:48 pm #1074Zachary VeithParticipant- Unlike, say, a typewriter, I never really thought of a computer as a physical, mechanical machine. For me, they were always just this box that contained a virtual realm outside the physical world. But reading Gleick’s descriptions of Turing’s and Shannon‘s early “computers,” built to perform mechanical tasks, changed that. I can view computers now as machines being fed information to perform numerous functions. Typing this sentence involves pushing buttons in a certain order, which sends a signal to a receiver, and again and again till a letter appears on my word document. I can now see the mechanical side of computers that I did not before.
- As confusing as much of it was, Shannon’s theories on the predictability of information was interesting. I never thought of how predictable information, especially language, can be. I found Shannon‘s experiment with his wife and the novel (detailed on page 12) really insightful into language. Before, the spelling of words to me was simply “just the way it was.” But now I’m noticing all the patterns, even in the words I’m writing now, of the English language. I can see how, in a way, this repetition makes the transition of written information easier and places less importance on each individual letter.
September 13, 2017 at 9:59 am #1063Zachary VeithParticipant- Cawdrey’s book, and the long history leading up to the modern OED, really interested me. What I found most surprising was the egalitarian nature of Table Alpabeticall. In such a class orientated society as early-modern Britain, this book was written for women and unskilled workers just as much as aristocratic gentlemen. This sort of universal, cross-class publication seems revolutionary for the time.
- The connection I made to Metadata is the impulse of humans to categorize information. Both authors illustrated mankind making a single, cohesive repository of seemingly endless data. For Pomerantz this came as metadata on the internet, for Gleick it was English-language words in a proto-dictionary. Both “database” examples demonstrate the various ways that humans have cataloged information in a logical manner and allowed that information to be easily accessible for the user.
- Reading Gleick makes it obvious how language is simply a web, with each word building off the definitions of others in a traceable manner. This is how he frames the discussion of both the Table Alphabeticall and the OED. Another way of cataloging words in a book that was left out is the Thesaurus. It contains many of the same words, all listed alphabetically too, but provides different information for the specific word (synonyms rather than definitions). So I wonder, when was the first Thesaurus compiled? Was it a contemporary to Cawdrey’s book or is a modern invention, once the language became more structured?
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