Les,
> On 25 Jun 2008, at 13:53, Peter Cliff wrote:
>
> > I'm not convinced the content of a document is enough to
> accurately
> > (and sustainably) describe what it is about.
> I think that you are taking a remarkably bold epistemological
> position
> there.
What is so bold about it? All he is saying is that he is not convinced that the contents of a document (with no knowledge of context) are enough to reliably tell us what it is about. This seems intuitively true. If I were given a laundry list from the records of a 400 year old great house I doubt I would recognise half the items listed without access to other documents.
I feel it is you who is bold in challenging him.
We have been here before and when I asked if your algorithms could tell me what the Waste Land (Eliot) was about or even if it was a poem you replied you could tell it was a poem because the writer was a poet and it was published in a poetry journal. In other words you needed to look at the context.
Simple document analysis (without context) has its place as a tool of the information specialist but it is only one tool amongst many. On its own it is has limited value.
Regards,
John.
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