Keywords In and Out of Context

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