[I]n the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates commenting that written words are like statues that may imitate life but have no life of their own. He stresses the inert quality of written language: "Writing says one single thing --whatever it may be-- the very same thing forever."...Twenty years ago, Marvin Minsky, a proponent of artificial intelligence, responded to this ancient challenge and imagined a time when people could not imagine a library in which the books did not talk to each other....Google, Amazon, and other companies mine data, analyzing our queries and making inferences about our goals, using as much information as they have to help us spend money. Many of these same techniques can, however, help us learn. In the Perseus Digital Library, we already have the beginnings of new reading environments that help us understand complex documents in a variety of languages. For people studying Plato, for example, the Perseus Digital Library can assemble a range of materials relevant to the Phaedrus, including a Greek text, English translation, and a list of documents that comment on the opening section of the dialogue. The reader can customize the display by explicitly asking for original source text in Greek, choosing a translation font, and making other decisions about what should be displayed. The reader can ask a question about a particular Greek word, and the system can personalize its response: it recognizes that the reader is looking at a dialogue of Plato and highlights all citations to Plato in the online lexicon entry. These electronic actions are simple in nature but profound in their implications. Many different books are, in effect, having a conversation among themselves and deciding how best to serve the human reader.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/07/2005 11:50:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
