Keywords In and Out of Context

some more thoughts and theories about keywords

  • Vonnegutted

    is a word I’ve just invented to describe the devastation one can feel upon discovering that one’s view of reality is also largely shaped by one’s own lack of experience. For instance, although I was aware that American author Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 (coincidentally, the year in which my own father, also a World Continue reading

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  • So Much for Search

    Here’s a well-written and well-informed article from the current MIT Technology Review on the demise of search engines as we know them: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/06/1108679/ai-generative-search-internet-breakthroughs/ (albeit with a positive PR spin, since the main interviewee is Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who describes AI Overviews as “one of the most positive changes we’ve done to search in a Continue reading

  • The Lure of Associates

    While considerable research attention is being devoted to how large language models are pretrained through exposure to vast textual networks to analyze patterns in order to predict word sequence (see this bibliometric overview in the current issue of Information), today there is comparatively little attention being paid to how children learn language (which is, of Continue reading

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  • Flattening the Memex

    Inspired by Stevan Harnad’s example (though without his genius, alas), I input the final few pages of Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 article in The Atlantic (“As We May Think”) into ChatGPT just now. Bush’s piece is a seminal text in LIS, as his description of the Memex is often (though not always) considered to prefigure Continue reading

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  • Harnad and HAL

    I would be surprised if Stevan Harnad, well-known Canadian cognitive scientist, has never watched Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey, not least because the voice of HAL 9000, the rogue computer aboard the fictional spaceship Discovery One, was done by celebrated Canadian actor Douglas Rain. The final exchange between HAL and sole surviving astronaut Continue reading

About THIS SITE

This site is intended to provide additional information related to my book Keywords In and Out of Context, published in Springer’s Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services series.

I am Betsy Van der Veer Martens, professor emerita at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Library & Information Studies, and my most recent article is “On Thresholds: Signs, Symbols, and Significance” in the Journal of Documentation.

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