17.276 queries and observations

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Oct 03 2003 - 01:05:35 EDT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 276.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                            www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

       [1] From: Alexandre Enkerli <aenkerli@indiana.edu> (18)
             Subject: Active Vocabulary

       [2] From: ahg@servidor.unam.mx (19)
             Subject: Hypothesis: shift in fundamental assumptions of
                     cataloguing practice

       [3] From: "C. Perry Willett" <pwillett@indiana.edu> (13)
             Subject: J.M. Coetzee: Nobel laureate, computing humanist?

    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 06:01:02 +0100
             From: Alexandre Enkerli <aenkerli@indiana.edu>
             Subject: Active Vocabulary

    This is something I keep coming across, especially on the Web. A specific
    word used by one person starts to appear everywhere. The kind of word you
    know but never use, you start using in conversation after reading or
    hearing it. A fascinating phenomenon from many different points of view:
    literary, cognitive, sociolinguistic, commercial...
    Of course, I might notice it more because of the context but there's
    something to be said about words suddenly gaining frequency. And this is
    not just for catch-phrases and buzzwords. Even fairly neutral words may
    look like they tie two articles or two conversations. And they can only
    imply these two occurrences or spring into a meme-like epidemic propagation.
    Anyone working on anything like this? There's bound to be a body of
    literature on such subjects but what would be a quick summary of such
    literature?

    Thank you for your help.

    Alexandre Enkerli
    Ph.D. Candidate
    Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
    Indiana University

    --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 06:01:31 +0100
             From: ahg@servidor.unam.mx
             Subject: Hypothesis: shift in fundamental assumptions of
    cataloguing practice

    Dear Colleagues,

    Recently I wrote a short article on possible changes in the basic
    assumptions at
    work in cataloguing practice. The hypothesis I present results, in some sense,
    from a reflection on the application of the "clean separation of presentation
    and content" notion to cataloguing and metadata processing. (I believe the
    argument I develop may also have some interesting implications for
    computing and
    humanitites/social science research in general.)

    The text is available (in Spanish only) from <http://www.nongnu.org/durito/>
    under a Creative Commons license.

    Any comments on the text would be most welcome. I'm also looking for paper or
    electronic publishers of this text (or an English version thereof) who don't
    mind me continuing to distribute it via the Web.

    Thanks,
    Andrew Green

    -------------------------------------------------
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    --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 06:02:15 +0100
             From: "C. Perry Willett" <pwillett@indiana.edu>
             Subject: J.M. Coetzee: Nobel laureate, computing humanist?

    Congratulations to J.M. Coetzee for receiving the Nobel
    prize in literature. There's a story on CNN today
    <http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/10/02/nobel.literature.ap/index.html>
    that claims Coetzee "holds a Ph.D in computer-generated
    language." This had me racing for biographical sources,
    but it doesn't seem to be true--his dissertation was on
    stylistics in the works of Samuel Beckett. According to
    a few biographical dictionaries, he did work for a year
    or two as a programmer at IBM in London in the early 1960s.

    Perry Willett
    Main Library
    Indiana University
    pwillett@indiana.edu



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