Keywords In and Out of Context

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I have a “mind of paper” in that much of what I believe I know is actually based on works I’ve read over the decades. One important influence was the late Raymond McInnis, an academic librarian at Western Washington University, who probably should have been cited as a Continue reading

The topic of “coded rhetoric” (often known as “dog whistles“) particularly in research on political discourse has become even more popular, probably due to the apparent increase in instances as well as in the easier access to computational tools for analysis. This is a fascinating use of keywords in its utilization of “hidden meanings” that Continue reading

Okay, I’m taking advantage of an obvious typo (page 51) in an interesting article by Manuela L. Ungureanu (“Olson’s Domestication of Goody’s Literacy Hypothesis: (How) Can Philosophers of Language Help?”) on David Olson’s The Mind on Paper, just because I like the way changing a single consonant in a single preposition can make such a Continue reading

I cited both of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson‘s books on relevance (their 1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition and their 2012 Meaning and Relevance in Chapter 4, so I was quite interested to see Sperber briefly mentioned in the New Yorker’s story on the phenomenology of misinformation, in connection with his distinction between “factual” and Continue reading

I cited Ben Highmore’s excellent “Keywords and Keywording” in chapter 4 as a contemporary introduction to Raymond Williams’ classic book Keywords (and I’ve also linked here to the book’s Wikipedia entry in hopes that someone will edit that in accordance with its importance.) In any case, Highmore is what he calls a cultural theorist “of Continue reading

I cited this 20 year-old book by Roderick Hart and his coauthors in my Chapter 4 as an example of how the keyword analytic approach made famous by cultural theorist Raymond Williams is being used in various fields, but I didn’t go into detail about the book itself or the political keywords analyzed there. I Continue reading

In chapter 6, I highlighted the gradual transition to “modernity” by noting that: “The diffusion of modern technologies can be tracked by the initial dates in the dictionary for the published use of such neologisms as newspaper (1667), bureaucracy (1759), telegraph (1793), steamship (1819), railroad (1822), analytical engine (1843), telephone (1864), and typewriter (1868), all Continue reading

I didn’t have a chance to read Ted Striphas’s latest book, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet, before mine came out, because it was published at roughly the same time last summer. I had previously read and enjoyed his 2011 The Late Age of Print, about the history of the American book industry, though I should Continue reading

According to Ars Technica, some researchers in Germany have been investigating ways in which to determine whether papers have been AI-edited, and, of course, words are key to all these processes. Using a corpus of 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010-2024, the researchers identified word frequency changes, finding for instance that the use of “Ebola” Continue reading

Well, here’s an empirical endeavor (studying the keyword choices of participants in a workshop at the 2018 iSchool conference and of iSchool directors) that I wouldn’t have thought of, using Raymond Williams’ cultural keyword analytics and applying Arthur Frank’s notion of “socio-narratology” to keywords as “stories.” Unsurprisingly, there was no consensus in the various participants’ Continue reading

“On Indexing: The Birth and Early Development of an Idea” by Giancarlo Abbamonte and the late Craig Kallendorf wasn’t published until after my book went to press, so I was unaware of this excellent article on the intellectual history of indexing until recently, when I was casually looking for new citations to the work of Continue reading

I happen to be visiting in Ithaca this month, and I’m reminded that Donna West of nearby SUNY Cortland is one of the leading scholars in deictic theory, which in her hands has become a fascinating mix of Peirce, Piaget, and empirical research on preschoolers’ development of semiotic capabilities. Although I didn’t cite her work Continue reading

Ahmad, Sens, Eesley & Brynjolfsson have just published a study in Nature that shows how ill-informed most corporate advertising execs still seem to be about where their online ads are appearing, an ignorance which also appears to be funding a variety of misinformation-oriented websites. I noted in Chapter 10 that Google has made it increasingly Continue reading

Thinking a little further about Niklas Luhmann and his card index file (which is available online here, though mostly in German, and here is an excellent article about it by project director Johannes F.K. Schmidt), I am reminded of Alberto Cevolini’s work on indexing, which continues to intrigue me. I briefly cited his 2014 “Indexing Continue reading

I didn’t give many examples of keywords actually at work in the book, so I’m taking this opportunity to point to some recent examples of interest. The first is from the AEM Education and Training journal, which deals with emergency medicine, and is titled, “The Keyword Effect: A Grounded Theory Study Exploring the Role of Continue reading

I’m in love with Peter Krapp, professor of media at UC-Irvine, thanks to his woefully undercited “Paper Slips.” Krapp translated Markus Krajewski’s 2011 Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogues, 1548-1929 from the German, which was one of the sources for my own Chapter 7, and went on to write “Paper Slips,” the first chapter in Continue reading

Neanderthal language capabilities are back in the news. According to well-known prehistorian Steven Mithen (whose “Hmmmmm” theory of language evolution I cited in Chapter 3), “the evidence points to key differences in the brains of our species and those of Neanderthals that allowed modern humans (H. sapiens) to come up with abstract and complex ideas Continue reading

I worked in marketing at Cornell University Press in Ithaca while completing my dissertation years ago, and one book on our backlist there happened to be Walter Ong’s 1977 Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, which is one of the lesser-known of his several works on “the word” (his Continue reading

One of the reasons that I chose to create this “post-book” blog is to have a place in which I can add important findings of which I was not aware while I was writing Keywords In and Out of Context. This allows me to live la bella vita as a professor emerita, by which I Continue reading

Today is Earth Day, which I remember celebrating in my high school science class way back in 1970, though, as I recall, it mostly involved picking up trash around our school grounds (including cigarette butts from the “student smoking” area, which back then was an officially sanctioned part of school life.) In any event, I’m Continue reading

The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon is a fairly common situation in which someone is unable to retrieve a known word (usually a noun or proper name) without a protracted series of attempts at associated words or ideas to prompt one’s memory. This has been the subject of substantial research, since the causes remain unknown. Continue reading

I mentioned Chomsky’s “Merge” hypothesis briefly in Chapter 2, but this is another topic that merits (and has certainly received) many chapters (and books) of its own. Some of the more interesting recent articles that have dealt with aspects of “Merge” in reference to the evolution of language include: Hartmann’s 2020 “Language Change and Language Continue reading

Terrence Deacon‘s 1997 The Symbolic Species is briefly mentioned in Chapter 3, but his body of work could undoubtedly have occupied multiple chapters (even if we didn’t mention his brilliant discussion of the limitations of Shannon’s information theory in “Information and Reference”) as he is a leader in the emergence of semiotic cognitive neuroscience, which Continue reading

There is so much going on with animal communication research, particularly in relation to the evolution of human language (far more than the brief account that I provided in Chapter 2), that I thought I’d start this post with a link to Berthet and colleagues’ 2023 primer on “Animal Linguistics” in Biological Reviews, which provides Continue reading

2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of C. K. (Charles Kay) Ogden and I. A. (Ivor Armstrong) Richards’ 1923 book, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language on Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, which the late Umberto Eco termed “A seminal book, whose merit was to say Continue reading

Charles (“Chas”) Hockett of Cornell University was a towering figure in linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s, primarily as a leading proponent of Leonard Bloomfield’s approach to structural linguistics, which purported to offer a systematic, scientific approach to the study of languages, but which has suffered a dramatic decline in popularity in America during the Continue reading

In Chapter Two of my book, I very briefly mention one of the key figures in the study of cross-species communication: the late Thomas Sebeok. Born in Hungary, he came to the United States in 1937, graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree and from Princeton University with master’s and doctoral degrees. Continue reading

One of the great pleasures of writing a book is having the opportunity to become more familiar with the work of those perhaps not directly in one’s own discipline (whatever that may be) but a knowledge of whose work may immeasurably enrich one’s own. Even though I had come across The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Continue reading

are the four fundamentals on which LIS is built, as I argue in Chapter 1, and yet the very complex physical components that underlie all of these abilities (sight, voice, hearing, memory) come in for almost no discussion within the field, though they obviously affect whether and how we can make use of information resources. Continue reading

The “language of thought hypothesis” (LoTH), famously associated with the late Jerry Fodor and not particularly popular in recent years, appears to be recovering some ground, according to Mandelbaum and colleagues, whose “Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought” I cited in Chapter 1. Mandelbaum develops this further with colleagues Quilty-Dunn and Porot Continue reading

I mentioned Robert Worden’s “The Evolution of Language by Sexual Selection” in Chapter 1, as he offers an appealing hypothesis as to the role that language played in human evolution: that what may have begun as a very task-oriented method of communication for group activities only slightly advanced from that of other primates eventually became Continue reading