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Another important notion of context surrounding any particular document
is the system of argumentation within which it participates.
The tendency
of search engines to slice and dice documents into salads of their
constituent words has been called the BAG OF WORDS phenomena. It
is typically used in contrast to syntactic parsing methods, which place
these words as part of well-structured, grammatical constructs. But
there is another level of violence done to language when word frequency
counts are collected, and that has to do with the argument structures by
which sentences are strung together to form persuasive communicative
acts.
Many of modern cultures most well-documented communications involve
the use of language as a persuasive device. Mathematical theorem
proving, legal opinions, scientific papers, Op-Ed newspaper and magazine
pages, artistic criticism, all have in common a fundamental purpose of
convincing an audience.
A mathematical paper (purportedly!) convinces by
proving theorems. In legal corpora, the fundamental principal of
stare decisis on which the Common Law tradition is based has
already been mentioned. Within science, varying disciplines have wildly
differing standards for what constitutes a convincing argument.
Political and artistic forms of persuasion are being changed as they
move from the media of newspaper, magazines to the WWW.
While the modes
of argument supporting each of these social activities has diverged,
there remains a common thread connecting all such documents, viz., their
common heritage as written artifacts. Since long strips of papyrus were
first rolled onto scrolls, our expectations about a fundamentally linear
progression through a text have held. The Greeks' theories of
NARRATIVE and RHETORIC , analyzing just how good stories
and persuasive arguments are constructed are still worth knowing today.
Clearly these theories were shaped by the LINEAR MEDIA of scrolls
and books that then conveyed culture. The fundamentally NONLINEAR
capabilities of hypertext media seem to open the door to radically
different notions of argument. On the other hand, many modern theories
of cognition continue to highlight the fundamentally linear and
sequential flow of human attention [Newell90] : we can only think about one
thing at a time, no matter how fast we click. It will probably be
artists, using new forms of media and hypertext authorship, who teach us
the most about how these new technologies can be used most expressively.
It is still much too early to tell just how our existing social
institutions will absorb these technological changes. Attempts to index
musical content offer some glimpses of the future [Bakhnutova97] [Foote97] [Ghias95] [Wold96] .
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Argument Structures