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On 13 Mar 2008, at 19:34, John Smith wrote: > We don't use Dewey but if I go to LC classmark PE 4178 in my library > I will find nothing but poems by T S Eliot and at PE 4178.W2-W25 > nothing but the Wasteland or books about the Wasteland. I won't find > books about waste or land or wilderness. But what does PE4178 *mean*? 4178 isn't in the LOC documentation under PE. -- les > > >>> Could your algorithms even tell me it was a poem? >> Ahh. What is poetry? My algorithms would have a good chance of >> categorising The Wasteland as poetry because it was (a) published >> in a >> literary magazine and (b) written by a man whose speciality was >> poetry. I think Stevan made a similar point about identifying the >> subject area of an article from an understanding of the journal it >> appeared in. Guilt by association. > > Then you are using context and not the content of the document, > Stevan's claim concerned analysis of the content of the document. > Further how do you know that the journal was a literary magazine or > that Eliot wrote poetry? Because a human being asserted it and it > was noted somewhere you could find it. No sophisticated computation > just a lookup of a human applied subject tag. > > Sorry, no cigar (or beer) :-) . > > Regards, > > John.