Keywords In and Out of Context

some more thoughts and theories about keywords

  • 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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  • Catachresis If You Can

    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

  • Telltale Terminology

    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

  • The dark supply-side of keyword monetization

    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

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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