One of the most important services a computer can provide for us is a different way of reading. It's fast, bad at grammar, good at counting, and generally provides a different perspective on texts we already know in one way.
And though a text can be a book, it can also be something much larger. Take library call numbers. Library of Congress
headings classifications are probably the best hierarchical classification of books we'll ever get. Certainly they're the best human-done hierarchical classification. It's literally taken decades for librarians to amass the card catalogs we have now, with their classifications of every book in every university library down to several degrees of specificity. But they're also a little foreign, at times, and it's not clear how well they'll correspond to machine-centric ways of categorizing books. I've been playing around with some of the data on LCC
headings classes and subclasses with some vague ideas of what it might be useful for and how we can use categorized genre to learn about patterns in intellectual history. This post is the first part of that.
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Everybody loves dendrograms, even if they don't like statistics. Here's a famous one, from the French Encylopedia.
That famous tree of knowledge raises two questions for me:
