Episode 9 of our group podcast Digital Campus is now available. In this episode Dan, Tom, and I discuss information overload for humanists. How will we manage to sort through the incredible abundance of historical information being placed online? It was hard enough when the researcher had to look at as many sources as possible in several archives. But soon (a relative concept for an historian) we’ll be able to look at every source in every archive! The old cliché used to be that research in the modern era would be akin to trying to get a drink from a fire hydrant. Now it’s starting to look like Niagara Falls instead. For more on some possible solutions, see the very interesting recent posts from Bill Turkel on searching with compression.
In addition to our discussion of information overload, we also come clean on why we don’t (yet in Dan’s case) own an iPhone. So, download the podcast and add it to your own personal queue of too much information.
It is true that information is pouring faster and faster. To deal with this challenge one can use a) software that extracts and summarizes the essential facts and b) software that visualizes the text information (like MindManager).
One can also combine automatic text summarization with visualization. In the past few years I have been working on both aspects. For anyone who would like to get their web pages and Google searches instantly summarized I can point to Context Organizer (http://www.contextdiscovery.com).
Another improvement can be to apply scripts that summarize large number of search results and report to the user. This way the user takes advantage of a summarizing robot that spiders large number of pages and extracts only the topics that are of interest to the user.
Large amount of information is a good thing providing that we have more practical ways to take advantage of it.
Best regards,
Henry