The question was asked
> Will computers give us mastery over information?
And comments were included suggesting that computers and programs will not
alone solve the amount of information that we deal with.
Two comments about technology
The Library of Congress has an experimental search form for their online
catalog. The address includes locweb2 and gov, I think. Some of the
features it has include accepting keyword searches, ordering them in the
result list first in adjacency, then nearness, then both keywords being in
the same record. Another feature is the visual information the user has
when making the search. Options appear on the screen, and when none is
selected, the reasonable choice is made (for example, don't limit to any
of the options). Another advantage is having an option in reviewing the
results of sorting the results according to subject headings (even though
the search was made with keyword searches). In my opinion, as someone who
has worked at a University library for over 12 years, those options offer
advanced handling of the data by the computer for the searcher.
Another comment. It seems to me as an apprentice computer programmer, that
tools to identify document parts, main ideas, links between related
information, maybe dictionary lookup, may soon be more easily available
(maybe like real-time spelling checking).
Definitely, there's a need for reflection and deciding what exactly should
be done for us via computers. I could write a program to count the use of
the word "a" in every Internet document I could find, write a master list
of documents with the count for each document, list them by countries, and
so on. Yet there's no reason to do that. The problem is that programmers
don't always know the feature set that benefits most, and users don't know
what among their expert tasks could be directly addressed through
programming. So combined reflection is needed.
Hmm. Could you highlight imperative sentences in yellow? Sure :)
Have a nice day
John Paul Fullerton
jpf@myriad.net
--"John Paul Fullerton" <jpf@mail.myriad.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>