_An unedited version of a talk given at the conference[Public
Library](http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/program/2014/events/public-library/)
held at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 1 November 2014._
_Bracketed sequences are to be reformulated._
Poetics of Research
In this talk I'm going to attempt to identify [particular] cultural
algorithms, ie. processes in which cultural practises and software meet. With
them a sphere is implied in which algorithms gather to form bodies of
practices and in which cultures gather around algorithms. I'm going to
approach them through the perspective of my practice as a cultural worker,
editor and artist, considering practice in the same rank as theory and
poetics, and where theorization of practice can also lead to the
identification of poetical devices.
The primary motivation for this talk is an attempt to figure out where do we
stand as operators, users [and communities] gathering around infrastructures
containing a massive body of text (among other things) and what sort of things
might be considered to make a difference [or to keep making difference].
The talk mainly [considers] the role of text and the word in research, by way
of several figures.
A
A reference, list, scheme, table, index; those things that intervene in the
flow of narrative, illustrating the point, perhaps in a more economic way than
the linear text would do. Yet they don't function as pictures, they are
primarily texts, arranged in figures. Their forms have been
standardised[normalised] over centuries, withstood the transition to the
digital without any significant change, being completely intuitive to the
modern reader. Compared to the body of text they are secondary, run parallel
to it. Their function is however different to that of the punctuation. They
are there neither to shape the narrative nor to aid structuring the argument
into logical blocks. Nor is their function spatial, like in visual poems.
Their positions within a document are determined according to the sequential
order of the text, [standing as attachments] and are there to clarify the
nature of relations among elements of the subject-matter, or to establish
relations with other documents. The [premise] of my talk is that these
_textual figures_ also came to serve as the abstract[relational] models
determining possible relations among documents as such, and in consequence [to
structure conditions [of research]].
B
It can be said that research, as inquiry into a subject-matter, consists of
discrete queries. A query, such as a question about what something is, what
kinds, parts and properties does it have, and so on, can be consulted in
existing documents or generate new documents based on collection of data [in]
the field and through experiment, before proceeding to reasoning [arguments
and deductions]. Formulation of a query is determined by protocols providing
access to documents, which means that there is a difference between collecting
data outside the archive (the undocumented, ie. in the field and through
experiment), consulting with a person--an archivist (expert, librarian,
documentalist), and consulting with a database storing documents. The
phenomena such as [deepening] of specialization and throughout digitization
[have given] privilege to the database as [a|the] [fundamental] means for
research. Obviously, this is a very recent [phenomenon]. Queries were once
formulated in natural language; now, given the fact that databases are queried
[using] SQL language, their interfaces are mere extensions of it and
researchers pose their questions by manipulating dropdowns, checkboxes and
input boxes mashed together on a flat screen being ran by software that in
turn translates them into a long line of conditioned _SELECTs_ and _JOINs_
performed on tables of data.
Specialization, digitization and networking have changed the language of
questioning. Inquiry, once attached to the flesh and paper has been
[entrusted] to the digital and networked. Researchers are querying the black
box.
C
Searching in a collection of [amassed/assembled] [tangible] documents (ie.
bookshelf) is different from searching in a systematically structured
repository (library) and even more so from searching in a digital repository
(digital library). Not that they are mutually exclusive. One can devise
structures and algorithms to search through a printed text, or read books in a
library one by one. They are rather [models] [embodying] various [processes]
associated with the query. These properties of the query might be called [the
sequence], the structure and the index. If they are present in the ways of
querying documents, and we will return to this issue, are they persistent
within the inquiry as such? [wait]
D
This question itself is a rupture in the sequence. It makes a demand to depart
from one narrative [a continuous flow of words] to another, to figure out,
while remaining bound to it [it would be even more as a so-called rhetorical
question]. So there has been one sequence, or line, of the inquiry--about the
kinds of the query and its properties. That sequence itself is a digression,
from within the sequence about what is research and describing its parts
(queries). We are thus returning to it and continue with a question whether
the properties of the inquiry are the same as the properties of the query.
E
But isn't it true that every single utterance occurring in a sequence yields a
query as well? Let's consider the word _utterance_. [wait] It can produce a
number of associations, for example with how Foucault employs the notion of
_énoncé_ in his _Archaeology of Knowledge_ , giving hard time to his English
translators wondering whether _utterance_ or _statement_ is more appropriate,
or whether they are interchangeable, and what impact would each choice have on
his reception in the Anglophone world. Limiting ourselves to textual forms for
now (and not translating his work but pursing a different inquiry), let us say
the utterance is a word [or a phrase or an idiom] in a sequence such as a
sentence, a paragraph, or a document.
## (F) The
structure[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=1
"Edit section: \(F\) The structure")]
This distinction is as old as recorded Western thought since both Plato and
Aristotle differentiate between a word on its own ("the said", a thing said)
and words in the company of other words. For example, Aristotle's _Categories_
[lay] on the [notion] of words on their own, and they are made the subject-
matter of that inquiry. [For him], the ambiguity of connotation words
[produce] lies in their synonymity, understood differently from the moderns--
not as more words denoting a similar thing but rather one word denoting
various things. Categories were outlined as a device to differentiate among
words according to kinds of these things. Every word as such belonged to not
less and not more than one of ten categories.
So it happens to the word _utterance_ , as to any other word uttered in a
sequence, that it poses a question, a query about what share of the spectrum
of possibly denoted things might yield as the most appropriate in a given
context. The more context the more precise share comes to the fore. When taken
out of the context ambiguity prevails as the spectrum unveils in its variety.
Thus single words [as any other utterances] are questions, queries,
themselves, and by occuring in statements, in context, their [means] are being
singled out.
This process is _conditioned_ by what has been formalized as the techniques of
_regulating_ definitions of words.
### (G) The structure: words as
words[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=2
"Edit section: \(G\) The structure: words as words")]
P.Oxy.XX 2260 i: Oxyrhynchus papyrus XX, 2260, column i, with quotation from
Philitas, early 2nd c. CE. 1(http://163.1.169.40/cgi-
bin/library?e=q-000-00---0POxy--00-0-0--0prompt-10---4------0-1l--1-en-50---
20-about-2260--
00031-001-0-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=POxy&cl=search&d=HASH13af60895d5e9b50907367) 2(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:POxy.XX.2260.i-Philitas-
highlight.jpeg)
Ephraim Chambers, _Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and
Sciences_ , 1728, p. 210. 3(http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-
bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-
idx?type=turn&entity=HistSciTech.Cyclopaedia01.p0576&id=HistSciTech.Cyclopaedia01&isize=L)
Detail from the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon, c1843.
Dictionaries have had a long life. The ancient Greek scholar and poet Philitas
of Cos living in the 4th c. BCE wrote a vocabulary explaining the meanings of
rare Homeric and other literary words, words from local dialects, and
technical terms. The vocabulary, called _Disorderly Words_ (Átaktoi glôssai),
has been lost, with a few fragments quoted by later authors. One example is
that the word πέλλα (pélla) meant "wine cup" in the ancient Greek region of
Boeotia; contrasted to the same word meaning "milk pail" in Homer's _Iliad_.
Not much has changed in the way how dictionaries constitute order. Selected
archives of statements are queried to yield occurrences of particular words,
various _criteria[indicators]_ are applied to filtering and sorting them and
in turn the spectrum of [denoted] things allocated in this way is structured
into groups and subgroups which are then given, according to other set of
rules, shorter or longer names. These constitute facets of [potential]
meanings of a word.
So there are at least _four_ sets of conditions [structuring] dictionaries.
One is required to delimit an archive[corpus of texts], one to select and give
preference[weights] to occurrences of a word, another to cluster them, and yet
another to abstract[generalize] the subject-matter of each of these clusters.
Needless to say, this is a craft of a few and these criteria are rarely being
disclosed, despite their impact on research, and more generally, their
influence as conditions for production[making] of a so called _common sense_.
It doesn't take that much to reimagine what a dictionary is and what it could
be, especially having large specialized corpora of texts at hand. These can
also serve as aids in production of new words and new meanings.
### (H) The structure: words as knowledge and the
world[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=3
"Edit section: \(H\) The structure: words as knowledge and the world")]
Boethius's rendering of a classification tree described in Porphyry's Isagoge
(3th c.), [6th c.] 10th c. 4(http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/sbe/0315/53/medium)
Ephraim Chambers, _Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and
Sciences_ , London, 1728, p. II. 5(http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-
bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-
idx?type=turn&entity=HistSciTech.Cyclopaedia01.p0015&id=HistSciTech.Cyclopaedia01&isize=L)
Système figuré des connaissances humaines, _Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers_ , 1751. 6(http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/content/syst%C3%A8me-figur%C3%A9-des-
connaissances-humaines)
Another _formalized_ and [internalized] process being at play when figuring
out a word is its [containment]. Word is not only structured by way of things
it potentially denotes but also by words it is potentially part of and those
it contains.
The fuzz around categorization of knowledge _and_ the world in the Western
thought can be traced back to Porphyry, if not further. In his introduction to
Aristotle's _Categories_ this 3rd century AD Neoplatonist began expanding the
notions of genus and species into their hypothetic consequences. Aristotle's
brief work outlines ten categories of 'things that are said' (legomena,
λεγόμενα), namely substance (or substantive, {not the same as matter!},
οὐσία), quantity (ποσόν), qualification (ποιόν), a relation (πρός), where
(ποῦ), when (πότε), being-in-a-position (κεῖσθαι), having (or state,
condition, ἔχειν), doing (ποιεῖν), and being-affected (πάσχειν). In his
different work, _Topics_ , Aristotle outlines four kinds of subjects/materials
indicated in propositions/problems from which arguments/deductions start.
These are a definition (όρος), a genus (γένος), a property (ἴδιος), and an
accident (συμβεβηϰόϛ). Porphyry does not explicitly refer _Topics_ , and says
he omits speaking "about genera and species, as to whether they subsist (in
the nature of things) or in mere conceptions only" 8(http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm#C1),
which means he avoids explicating whether he talks about kinds of concepts or
kinds of things in the sensible world. However, the work sparked confusion, as
the following passage [suggests]:
> "[I]n each category there are certain things most generic, and again, others
most special, and between the most generic and the most special, others which
are alike called both genera and species, but the most generic is that above
which there cannot be another superior genus, and the most special that below
which there cannot be another inferior species. Between the most generic and
the most special, there are others which are alike both genera and species,
referred, nevertheless, to different things, but what is stated may become
clear in one category. Substance indeed, is itself genus, under this is body,
under body animated body, under which is animal, under animal rational animal,
under which is man, under man Socrates, Plato, and men particularly." (Owen
1853, 9(http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm#C2))
Porphyry took one of Aristotle's ten categories of the word, substance, and
dissected it using one of his four rhetorical devices, genus. Employing
Aristotle's categories, genera and species as means for logical operations,
for dialectic, Porphyry's interpretation resulted in having more resemblance
to the perceived _structures_ of the world. So they began to bloom.
There were earlier examples, but Porphyry was the most influential in
injecting the _universalist_ version of classification [implying] the figure
of a tree into the [locus] of Aristotle's thought. Knowledge became
monotheistic.
Classification schemes [growing from one point] play a major role in
untangling the format of modern encyclopedia from that of the dictionary
governed by alphabet. Two of the most influential encyclopedias of the 18th
century are cases in the point. Although still keeping 'dictionary' in their
titles, they are conceived not to represent words but knowledge. The [upper-
most] genus of the body was set as the body of knowledge. The English
_Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences_ (1728) splits
into two main branches: "natural and scientifical" and "artificial and
technical"; these further split down to 47 classes in total, each carrying a
structured list (on the following pages) of thematic articles, serving as
table of contents. The French _Encyclopedia: or a Systematic Dictionary of the
Sciences, Arts, and Crafts_ (1751) [unwinds] from judgement ( _entendement_ ),
branches into memory as history, reason as philosophy, and imagination as
poetry. The logic of containers was employed as an aid not only to deal with
the enormous task of naming and not omiting anything from what is known, but
also for the management of labour of hundreds of writers and researchers, to
create a mechanism for delegating work and the distribution of
responsibilities. Flesh was also more present, in the field research, with
researchers attending workshops and sites of everyday life to annotate it.
The world came forward to unshine the word in other schemes. Darwin's tree of
evolution and some of the modern document classification systems such as
Charles A. Cutter's _Expansive Classification_ (1882) set to classify the
world itself and set the field for what has came to be known as authority
lists structuring metadata in today's computing.
### The structure
(summary)[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=4
"Edit section: The structure \(summary\)")]
Facetization of meaning and branching of knowledge are both the domain of the
unit of utterance.
While lexicographers[dictionarists] structure thought through multi-layered
processes of abstraction of the written record, knowledge growers dissect it
into hierarchies of [mutually] contained notions.
One seek to describe the word as a faceted list of small worlds, another to
describe the world as a structured lists of words. One play prime in the
domain of epistemology, in what is known, controlling the vocabulary, another
in the domain of ontology, in what is, controlling reality.
Every [word] has its given things, every thing has its place, closer or
further from a single word.
The schism between classifying words and classifying the world implies it is
not possible to construct a universal classification scheme[system]. On top of
that, any classification system of words is bound to a corpus of texts it is
operating upon and any classification system of the world again operates with
words which are bound to a vocabulary[lexicon] which is again bound to a
corpus [of texts]. It doesn't mean it would prevent people from trying.
Classifications function as descriptors of and 'inscriptors' upon the world,
imprinting their authority. They operate from [a locus of] their
corpus[context]-specificity. The larger the corpus, the more power it has on
shaping the world, as far as the word shapes it (yes, I do imply Google here,
for which it is a domain to be potentially exploited).
## (J) The
sequence[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=5
"Edit section: \(J\) The sequence")]
The structure-yielding query [of] the single word [shrinks][zuzuje
sa,spresnuje] with preceding and following words. Inquiry proceeds in the flow
that establishes another kind[mode] of relationality, chaining words into the
sequence. While the structuring property of the query brings words apart from
each other, its sequential property establishes continuity and brings these
units into an ordered set.
This is what is responsible for attaching textual figures mentioned earlier
(lists, schemes, tables) to the body of the text. Associations can be also
stated explicitly, by indexing tables and then referring them from a
particular point in the text. The same goes for explicit associations made
between blocks of the text by means of indexed paragraphs, chapters or pages.
From this follows that all utterances point to the following utterance by the
nature of sequential order, and indexing provides means for pointing elsewhere
in the document as well.
A lot can be said about references to other texts. Here, to spare time, I
would refer you to a talk I gave a few months ago and which is online 10(http://monoskop.org/Talks/Communing_Texts).
This is still the realm of print. What happens with document when it is
digitized?
Digitization breaks a document into units of which each is assigned a numbered
position in the sequence of the document. From this perspective digitization
can be viewed as a total indexation of the document. It is converted into
units rendered for machine operations. This sequentiality is made explicit, by
means of an underlying index.
Sequences and chains are orders of one dimension. Their one-dimensional
ordering allows addressability of each element and [random] access. [Jumps]
between [random] addresses are still sequential, processing elements one at a
time.
## (K) The
index[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=6
"Edit section: \(K\) The index")]
Summa confessorum [1297-98], 1310. 7(http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/illmanus/roymanucoll/j/011roy000008g11u00002000.html)
[The] sequencing not only weaves words into statements but activates other
temporalities, and _presents occurrences of words from past statements_. As
now when I am saying the word _utterance_ , each time there surface contexts
in which I have used it earlier.
A long quote from Frederick G. Kilgour, _The Evolution of the Book_ , 1998, pp
76-77:
> "A century of invention of various types of indexes and reference tools
preceded the advent of the first subject index to a specific book, which
occurred in the last years of the thirteenth century. The first subject
indexes were "distinctions," collections of "various figurative or symbolic
meanings of a noun found in the scriptures" that "are the earliest of all
alphabetical tools aside from dictionaries." (Richard and Mary Rouse supply an
example: "Horse = Preacher. Job 39: 'Hast thou given the horse strength, or
encircled his neck with whinning?')
>
> [Concordance] By the end of the third decade of the thirteenth century Hugh
de Saint-Cher had produced the first word concordance. It was a simple word
index of the Bible, with every location of each word listed by [its position
in the Bible specified by book, chapter, and letter indicating part of the
chapter]. Hugh organized several dozen men, assigning to each man an initial
letter to search; for example, the man assigned M was to go through the entire
Bible, list each word beginning with M and give its location. As it was soon
perceived that this original reference work would be even more useful if words
were cited in context, a second concordance was produced, with each word in
lengthy context, but it proved to be unwieldy. [Soon] a third version was
produced, with words in contexts of four to seven words, the model for
biblical concordances ever since.
>
> [Subject index] The subject index, also an innovation of the thirteenth
century, evolved over the same period as did the concordance. Most of the
early topical indexes were designed for writing sermons; some were organized,
while others were apparently sequential without any arrangement. By midcentury
the entries were in alphabetical order, except for a few in some classified
arrangement. Until the end of the century these alphabetical reference works
indexed a small group of books. Finally John of Freiburg added an alphabetical
subject index to his own book, _Summa Confessorum_ (1297—1298). As the Rouses
have put it, 'By the end of the [13]th century the practical utility of the
subject index is taken for granted by the literate West, no longer solely as
an aid for preachers, but also in the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and
both kinds of law.'"
In one sense neither subject-index nor concordane are indexes, they are words
or group of words selected according to given criteria from the body of the
text, each accompanied with a list of identifiers. These identifiers are
elements of an index, whether they represent a page, chapter, column, or other
[kind of] block of text. Every identifier is an unique _address_.
The index is thus an ordering of a sequence by means of associating its
elements with a set of symbols, when each element is given unique combination
of symbols. Different sizes of sets yield different number of variations.
Symbol sets such as an alphabet, arabic numerals, roman numerals, and binary
digits have different proportions between the length of a string of symbols
and the number of possible variations it can contain. Thus two symbols of
English alphabet can store 26^2 various values, of arabic numerals 10^2, of
roman numberals 8^2 and of binary digits 2^2.
Indexation is segmentation, a breaking into segments. From as early as the
13th century the index such as that of sections has served as enabler of
search. The more [detailed] indexation the more precise search results it
enables.
The subject-index and concordance are tables of search results. There is a
direct lineage from the 13th-century biblical concordances and the birth of
computational linguistic analysis, they were both initiated and realised by
priests.
During the World War II, Jesuit Father Roberto Busa began to look for machines
for the automation of the linguistic analysis of the 11 million-word Latin
corpus of Thomas Aquinas and related authors.
Working on his Ph.D. thesis on the concept of _praesens_ in Aquinas he
realised two things:
> "I realized first that a philological and lexicographical inquiry into the
verbal system of an author has t o precede and prepare for a doctrinal
interpretation of his works. Each writer expresses his conceptual system in
and through his verbal system, with the consequence that the reader who
masters this verbal system, using his own conceptual system, has to get an
insight into the writer's conceptual system. The reader should not simply
attach t o the words he reads the significance they have in his mind, but
should try t o find out what significance they had in the writer's mind.
Second, I realized that all functional or grammatical words (which in my mind
are not 'empty' at all but philosophically rich) manifest the deepest logic of
being which generates the basic structures of human discourse. It is .this
basic logic that allows the transfer from what the words mean today t o what
they meant to the writer.
>
> In the works of every philosopher there are two philosophies: the one which
he consciously intends to express and the one he actually uses to express it.
The structure of each sentence implies in itself some philosophical
assumptions and truths. In this light, one can legitimately criticize a
philosopher only when these two philosophies are in contradiction." 11(http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/busa-1980.pdf)
Collaborating with the IBM in New York from 1949, the work, a concordance of
all the words of Thomas Aquinas, was finally published in the 1970s in 56
printed volumes (a version is online since 2005 12(http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/it/index.age)). Besides that, an
electronic lexicon for automatic lemmatization of Latin words was created by a
team of ten priests in the scope of two years (in two phases: grouping all the
forms of an inflected word under their lemma, and coding the morphological
categories of each form and lemma), containing 150,000 forms 13(http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/busa-1980.pdf#page=4). Father
Busa has been dubbed the father of humanities computing and recently also of
digital humanities.
The subject-index has a crucial role in the printed book. It is the only means
for search the book offers. Subjects composing an index can be selected
according to a classification scheme (specific to a field of an inquiry), for
example as elements of a certain degree (with a given minimum number of
subclasses).
Its role seemingly vanishes in the digital text. But it can be easily
transformed. Besides serving as a table of pre-searched results the subject-
index also gives a distinct idea about content of the book. Two patterns give
us a clue: numbers of occurrences of selected words give subjects weights,
while words that seem specific to the book outweights other even if they don't
occur very often. A selection of these words then serves as a descriptor of
the whole text, and can be thought of as a specific kind of 'tags'.
This process was formalized in a mathematical function in the 1970s, thanks to
a formula by Karen Spärck Jones which she entitled 'inverse document
frequency' (IDF), or in other words, "term specificity". It is measured as a
proportion of texts in the corpus where the word appears at least once to the
total number of texts. When multiplied by the frequency of the word _in_ the
text (divided by the maximum frequency of any word in the text), we get _term
frequency-inverse document frequency_ (tf-idf). In this way we can get an
automated list of subjects which are particular in the text when compared to a
group of texts.
We came to learn it by practice of searching the web. It is a mechanism not
dissimilar to thought process involved in retrieving particular information
online. And search engines have it built in their indexing algorithms as well.
There is a paper proposing attaching words generated by tf-idf to the
hyperlinks when referring websites 14(http://bscit.berkeley.edu/cgi-
bin/pl_dochome?query_src=&format=html&collection=Wilensky_papers&id=3&show_doc=yes).
This would enable finding the referred content even after the link is dead.
Hyperlinks in references in the paper use this feature and it can be easily
tested: 15(http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/papers/dissertation-
abstract.html?lexical-
signature=notemarks+multivalent+semantically+franca+stylized).
There is another measure, cosine similarity, which takes tf-idf further and
can be applied for clustering texts according to similarities in their
specificity. This might be interesting as a feature for digital libraries, or
even a way of organising library bottom-up into novel categories, new
discourses could emerge. Or as an aid for researchers to sort through texts,
or even for editors as an aid in producing interesting anthologies.
## Final
remarks[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=7
"Edit section: Final remarks")]
1
New disciplines emerge all the time - most recently, for example, cultural
techniques, software studies, or media archaeology. It takes years, even
decades, before they gain dedicated shelves in libraries or a category in
interlibrary digital repositories. Not that it matters that much. They are not
only sites of academic opportunities but, firstly, frameworks of new
perspectives of looking at the world, new domains of knowledge. From the
perspective of researcher the partaking in a discipline involves negotiating
its vocabulary, classifications, corpus, reference field, and specific
terms[subjects]. Creating new fields involves all that, and more. Even when
one goes against all disciplines.
2
Google can still surprise us.
3
Knowledge has been in the making for millenia. There have been (abstract)
mechanisms established that govern its conditions. We now possess specialized
corpora of texts which are interesting enough to serve as a ground to discuss
and experiment with dictionaries, classifications, indexes, and tools for
references retrieval. These all belong to the poetic devices of knowledge-
making.
4
Command-line example of tf-idf and concordance in 3 steps.
* 1\. Process the files text.1-5.txt and produce freq.1-5.txt with lists of (nonlemmatized) words (in respective texts), ordered by frequency:
> for i in {1..5}; do tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' < text.$i.txt | tr -c '[a-z]'
'[\012*]' | tr -d '[:punct:]' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 1nr | sed '1,1d' >
temp.txt; max=$(awk -vvar=1 -F" " 'NR
* 2\. Process the files freq.1-5.txt and produce tfidf.1-5.txt containing a list of words (out of 500 most frequent in respective lists), ordered by weight (specificity for each text):
> for j in {1..5}; do rm freq.$j.txt.temp; lines=$(wc -l freq.$j.txt) && for i
in {1..500}; do word=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=2 -F" " 'NR
line {print
$field}' freq.$j.txt); tf=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=1 -F" " 'NR
* 3\. Process the files tfidf.1-5.txt and their source text, text.txt, and produce occ.txt with concordance of top 3 words from each of them:
> rm occ.txt && for j in {1..5}; do echo "$j" >> occ.txt; ptx -f -w 150
text.txt.$j > occ.$j.txt; for i in {1..3}; do word=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=1
-F" " 'NR
line {print $field}' tfidf.$j.txt); egrep -i
"[alpha:](/index.php?title=Alpha:&action=edit&redlink=1 "Alpha: \(page does
not exist\)") $word" occ.$j.txt >> occ.txt; done; done
Dušan Barok
_Written 23 October - 1 November 2014 in Bratislava and Stuttgart._
Traditional libraries are increasingly putting their holdings online, if not
in competition with Google Books then in partnership, in order to keep pace
with the mass digitization of content. Yet it isn't only the big institutional
actors that are driving this process forward: small-scale, independent
initiatives based on open source principles offer interesting approaches to
re-defining the role and meaning of the library, writes Alessandro Ludovico.
A deep conflict is brewing silently in libraries around the globe. Traditional
librarians - skilled, efficient and acknowledged - are being threatened by
bosses, themselves trying to cope with substantial funding cuts, with the word
"digital", touted as a panacea for saving space and money. At the same time,
in other (less traditional) places, there is a massive digitization of books
underway aimed at establishing virtual libraries much bigger than any
conventional one. These phenomena are questioning the library as point of
reference and as public repository of knowledge. Not only is its bulky
physicality being questioned, but the core idea that, after the advent of
truly ubiquitous networks, we still need a central place to store, preserve,
index, lend and share knowledge.
Tablet-PC on hardcover book. Photo: Anton Kudelin. Source: Shutterstock
It is important not to forget that traditional libraries (public and private)
still guarantee the preservation of and access to a huge number of digitally-
unavailable texts, and that a book's material condition sometimes tells part
of the story, not to mention the experience of reading it in a library. Still,
it is evident that we are facing the biggest digitization ever attempted, in a
process comparable to what Napster meant for music in the early 2000s. But
this time there are many more "institutional" efforts running simultaneously,
so that we are constantly hearing announcements that new historical material
has been made accessible online by libraries and institutions of all sizes.
The biggest digitizers are Google Books (private) and Internet Archive (non-
profit). The former is officially aiming to create a privately owned,
"universal library", which in April 2013 claimed to contain 30 millions
digitized books.1 The latter is an effort to make a comparably huge public
library by using Creative Commons licenses and getting rid of Digital Rights
Management chains, and currently claims to hold almost 5 millions digitized
books.
These monumental efforts are struggling with one specific element: the time it
takes to create digital content by converting it from another medium. This
process, of course, creates accidents. Krissy Wilson's blog/artwork _The Art
of Google Books_2 explores daily the non-digital elements (accidental or not)
emerging in scanned pages, which can be purely material - such as scribbled
notes, parts of the scanning person's hand, dried flowers - or typographical
or linguistic, or deleted or missing parts, all of them precisely annotated.
This small selection of illustrations of how physicality causes technology to
fail may be self-reflective, but it shows a particular aspect of a larger
development. In fact, industrial scanning is only one side of the coin. The
other is the private and personal digitization and sharing of books.
On the basis of brilliant open source tools like the DIY Bookscanner,3 there
are various technical and conceptual efforts to building specialist digital
libraries. _Monoskop_4 is exemplary: its creator Dusan Barok has transformed
his impressive personal collection of media (about contemporary art, culture
and politics, with a special focus on eastern Europe) into a common resource,
freely downloadable and regularly updated. It is a remarkably inspired
selection that can be shared regardless of possible copyright restrictions.
_Monoskop_ is an extreme and excellent example of a personal digital library
made public. But any small or big collection can be easily shared. Calibre5 is
an open source software that enables one to efficiently manage a personal
library and to create temporary or stable autonomous zones in which entire
libraries can be shared among a few friends or entire communities.
Marcell Mars,6 a hacktivist and programmer, has worked intensively around this
subject. Together with Tomislav Medak and Vuk Cosic, he organized the HAIP
2012 festival in Ljubljana, where software developers worked collectively on a
complex interface for searching and downloading from major independent online
e-book collections, turning them into a sort of temporary commons. Mars'
observation that, "when everyone is a librarian, the library is everywhere,"
explains the infinite and recursive de-centralization of personal digital
collections and the role of the digital in granting much wider access to
published content.
This access, however, emphasizes the intrinsic fragility of the digital - its
complete dependence on electricity and networks, on the integrity of storage
media and on updated hard and software. Among the few artists to have
conceptually explored this fragility as it affects books is David Guez, whose
work _Humanpédia_7 can be defined as an extravagant type of "time-based art".
The work is clearly inspired by Ray Bradbury's _Fahrenheit 451_ , in which a
small secret community conspires against a total ban on books by memorizing
entire tomes, preserving and orally transmitting their contents. Guez applies
this strategy to Wikipedia, calling for people to memorize a Wikipedia
article, thereby implying that our brains can store information more reliably
than computers.
So what, in the end, will be the role of old-fashioned libraries?
Paradoxically enough, they could become the best place to learn how to
digitize books or how to print out and bind digitized books that have gone out
of print. But they must still be protected as a common good, where cultural
objects can be retrieved and enjoyed anytime in the future. A timely work in
this respect is La Société Anonyme's _The SKOR Codex_.8 The group (including
Dusan Barok, Danny van der Kleij, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk) has
printed a book whose content (text, pictures and sounds) is binary encoded,
with enclosed visual instructions about how to decode it. A copy will be
indefinitely preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France by signed
agreement. This work is a time capsule, enclosing information meant to be
understood in the future. At any rate, we can rest assured that it will be
there (with its digital content), ready to be taken from the shelf, for many
years to come.