mediated history

Rosenzweig article is very interesting, I’m so used to Google searches for results that are “in the area” of what I’m looking for that I don’t really think about how these algorithms can be used to find specific, very specific and detailed pieces of information.  Since there are so many different articles that have similar information, that manually going through and finding the right article takes too much time (like the useless pieces of information in The Library of Babel) and the machines we’ve created allow us to find the correct information. Rosenzweig created a few tools to look through massive amounts of texts to isolate data or find similar data that can be useful for the researcher.  I’m especially interested in Term Extraction Web Service that was offered by yahoo in the article, since I’m looking at public perceptions of “hacking” it would be really cool if I could see how these related terms change over the years.  Like really, really, really cool and helpful.

Of course, this article was made in 2006, and now, in 2012, our algorithms for searching are ridiculously good.  Searching things on the internet has become such a valuable craft by itself, that knowing how to direct yourself through different search engines or scholarly databases saves HOURS.  I know that there are crude search engines that still are only useful for finding information you already know, like most of the scholarly databases, but I think once the search engine database is improved, or maybe mixed with the specific searches required by JSTOR or other databases, we’ll be at a good place.

Speaking of the Term Extraction Web Service, the Google Ngram Viewer is also a really cool tool for looking at the popularity of certain terms.  Being able to easily compare certain terms is useful when you look at overall trends, but I think it’s important to realize that these numbers could be artificially inflated due to the term becoming more integrated into culture or the amount of books released each year increasing… a statistic I am not sure about. The amount of texts and articles might be increasing, but I think it would be interesting to see overall numbers of publications from 1900s to today.  If the average number of publications increases per year, I want to see how the increase or decrease of these terms in the Ngram compare to the number of publications.

~ by aledere1 on November 12, 2012 .