Keywords In and Out of Context

some more thoughts and theories about keywords

  • 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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  • The Dog Whistle Dataset

    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

  • The Mind of Paper

    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

  • The Relevance of Symbolic Belief

    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

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  • The Listness of Lists

    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

  • Political Keywords: Using Language That Uses Us

    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

  • Donna West and the Dawn of the Deictic

    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

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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