Babble vs. Scribble: Divide and Filter [Comment on Origgi on Eco on "Authors and Authority" in http://www.text-e.org/debats/ ]
Stevan Harnad In making the implicit analogy between the entire contents of the Web and the contents of a library or encyclopedia we are conflating things that should be distinguished, and thereby inventing hybrid problems that could be much more sensibly solved by simply partitioning the online corpus a priori with tags that are no more "authoritative" than simply indicating the pre-web provenance of the item, if it has one (e.g., journal-name). (That is what I meant to imply with my hypothetical example of what we would do if everyone's every spoken and unspoken thought suddenly materialized as a competing URL on the web, indexed by google. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1893.html The point of the thought experiment was to remind us how and why this is a non-problem in the analog world of written and spoken discourse and mentation, simply because "babble" is "tagged" babble by its medium, and thereby "filtered" from "scribble." The "authoritativeness" of scribble is partly ex officio, because the Gutenberg costs of disseminating one's every verbal and mental rumination in print were prohibitive. On the web they are not, but does that mean we must now treat all effusions and diffusions on a par simply because they are there?) > G. Origgi: "I agree... that the open access of the whole corpus of peer > reviewed literature will be one of the most important improvements of > the Web as a cultural tool... Still... Most people, even scientists, do > not know how to orientate themselves within domains that are outside > their professional competences. These days, I am looking for a online > course for learning how to design dynamic webpages with Dreamweaver software..." First, how did people orient themselves outside their professional competences in the Gutenberg age, when confronted by the contents of libraries and bookstores, of books, journals, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets? For the "authoritative" material, there were always their "authoritative" sources, "tagging" them. Outside one's professional competence one could still make do with those signposts. So, to a first approximation, the authoritative corpus need merely be made airborne, along with its signposts. This not only restores our terrestrial navigation guides for the airborne incarnation of the scribble, but it immediately sectors the scribble from the babble (dictascript?) that is already up there. Now, on to Dreamweaver software: I ask, timidly, whether, for example, consumer questions should be conflated with scholarly ones, any more than babble with scribble? Does it help to baptize as one generic "problem" the problem of finding scholarly sources for "holoenzyme... gracilis..." or educational sources for "holy grail" or gastronomic sources for recipes for hominy grits? To a first approximation, sectoring the web (with provenance-tags) according to whether items are or are not refereed-journal items already reduces the noise/signal ratio. The big task is of course getting all 20,000 refereed journals airborne. But am I simply obsessed with refereed journals, or are there not similar a priori provenance-tagging solutions for other sectors of the web, short of having to have heroic scouts pick through it all for us to sort out the reliable bits, or, worse, having to follow the depth of the virtual trails left by everyone making their way randomly through all of it? I am not declaring the problem of navigating the current web, tel quel, for all purposes, "solved" by these a priori considerations! I am simply suggesting that we may be conceptualizing the problem in the wrong way, and that importing more of the terrestrial corpus, and sectoring the web, and hence the problem, may be a more promising path to the solution(s) than continuing to treat generic navigation of the current web as the prototype of the problem. > G. Origgi: "Filtration and education are not two distinct problems: > education IS a system of filtering information, as Umberto Eco rightly > points out in our interview. But people cannot be educated in [every] > domain" I'm afraid I find the PROVISION of ("authoritative") information to be the primary "informatic" function, its tagging/certification as reliable (peer review) the secondary one -- both of these are done by qualified specialists -- and then its imparting to the uninformed (education) the tertiary one. One would hope that the information's (quaternary) use would then be guided by the user's education. Yes there is an element of selecting ("filtering") the relevant sources in providing an education, but let us not forget that that filtration was performed on relatively refined candidates (published terrestrial scribble) rather than on every piece of babble that automatically became a candidate merely for having uttered a pertinent keyword! > G. Origgi: "The Web give[s] us the new possibility to access > information in domains for which we do not have any criteria of > evaluation. This is really new: to access the same information before > the Web you should already possess a lot of meta-knowledge about how to > reach this information and to classify it. Now you can just type > Astrophysics with Google and see what you find as a result." And once the full peer-reviewed astrophysical corpus is online, freely accessible, and reliably tagged as such, the user will be in at least as good a position as when consulting the collection of the best terrestrial library on the subject -- except that even then merely the keyword "astrophysics" would not have served him too well. (An encyclopedia might, after all, be the better choice for that.) Stevan Harnad