Information Research Weblog

Given there hasn't been a lot of traffic on the eText post, which is presumably because we all agree with it, we need perhaps to wonder what comes next?

We have lots of texts, paper, electronic, and presumably some other bits we haven't worked out yet. At the moment, we have grep.

Once upon a time, some documents were catalogued, This gave them a special status (about which we complained) and they were allocated references (the structure of which we complained about too).

Now we have grep.

Except for some documents, which are catalogued.

But now we don't know the rules for keywords, string occurrence in author field, and so forth, so really we have grep.

Once upon a time, if you searched in a library catalogue under Michelangelo, which is as good a place to start as any, you would have perhaps found a reference saying see Buonarroti (by now incidently I have scope for many typos, which if cards were filed M, i, c, h, wouldn't have mattered very much, but with grep each one does.). Now if I grep on Michelangelo, I get film makers, other poets and all sorts of stuff.

So we have lost rather a lot? Michelangelo makes a good case, for finding out about his poetry, rather than simply the Sistine Chapel, the Last Judgement or David, takes quite a lot of work, for a variety of reasons we might go into.