Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Quotidian metamorphise
Happiest legumens
The fragment shown above represents a novel literary form in which each
line combines a unique co-occurrence on Google (2004).
1
The primary
explicit focus of composition centers on the combinatorial possibilities of
the signifier or expression, although the signified or meaning reemerges
forcefully in thematic resonances containing unique combination and
transformation of terms. Composition in this instance also involved a
more deliberate search for a pun that would allude to
hapax legomenon
,
the scholarly term for a word that occurs only once in a classical or bibli-
cal corpus. Because the implied Boolean AND characteristically retrieves
a number of documents from a large corpus, discovering unique co-occur-
rences—even those devoid of semantic interest—is difficult.
The contrast between the retrieval results expected from combining
individual search terms with AND and OR would be relatively well-
known and understood, both from the historical experience from the
1970s of searching systems based primarily but not exclusively on the
representation of single terms taken from source documents, and also
from the theory of computation. Resemblance in the initial ordering of
references would partly disguise the empirical differences in the retrieved
sets obtainable from search engines using a phrase rather than an all the
word search, but the differences would be discernible by the number of
documents retrieved.
Experience in searching newspaper databases—regarded as more
ordinary than scientific or technical discourse—and as anticipating
the issues encountered when other forms of ordinary written discourse
would become subject to computer-based retrieval also revealed the mul-
tivalency—multiple values or meanings, that single words acquire when
detached from their syntagmas. Retrieval recovers the syntagma and
reveals the variety of syntagmatic occurrences. For instance, searching for
the topic
financing of university libraries
in 1993 with a query equivalent
to
university AND library AND finance
retrieved unintended documents:
THE GUARDIAN Copyright (C) Guardian Newspapers Ltd,
1984,1985,1986,1987,1988,1989,1990,1991,1992,1993
>get university
GET UNIVERSITY
3678 ITEMS RETRIEVED SINCE 1FEB92
