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December 23, 2010 

Narrative Based Search

Narrative based Search: When we are searching for information from our peers in meatspace, we often find ourselves without the proper jargon or terminology necessary to accurately and concisely ask another person for a specific piece of information. In such situations, we then use a narrative to get the idea across, and the other person can then process the narrative and, using context and related ideas, give us the information we are looking for. Why can’t search on the web be this way?

Searching the web requires that either you know the name of what you’re looking for, or someone looked for it the same way you created your narrative, it using the same words. This is problematic for a number of different use cases. Say you saw a movie, but you have no idea what it was called. Or who was in it. This often happens with old movies, at least for me. So I want to find out more about it, but, uh oh. I’d have to go to Reddit or Yahoo Answers or something similar and give my narrative of the film, hoping someone else has seen it.

Crowdsourcing answers is kind of a fad these days, but it seems to me like with the vast analysis Google has done on the web, and with the massive databases it has amassed with its keyword searches over the years, I have to imagine that they should be able to cross-reference this information to allow for narrative search.

I expect it would work something like this: the user types their narrative. Using keywords in the narrative, a script categorizes the narrative based on hundreds of thousands of tags generated by users. With some noise reduction and some false positive refinement, this could create an extremely accurate categorization with relatively little resources. The categorization tags could then be hashed. That hash could then search the current “keyword” web, and as the results come back, they could be indexed like the original narrative was. The results are then ordered by how close the result hashes are to the hash of the original narrative.

People use natural language to find information. It’s easier, and it makes more sense. If we want to open up the web more than ever, we need to let people find information the same way they think it. And that’s in narrative format.

I’m not a programmer. I’m not a database expert. And I’m certainly not a web search expert. But given how willing people are to freely tag and give information, the database could be easily built, and constantly optimized as people report on the accuracy of their searches and add more tags, resulting in more accurate hashes.

Please post any questions, or if you have any suggestions on how to make this a reality, please hit up the comments. I’d love to see it happen.

August 3, 2008 

Busy Bee, Beaver, Bear, Whatever.

This has been a busy weekend for me. That’s pretty unusual because I typically just end up reading all day Saturday and Sunday. I didn’t get much reading done, unfortunately, but I did get lots of web-ly things done.

First, I moved this blog from tylerfontaine.com over to here, at my shiny, new, name-matching domain. That’s pretty exciting for me, as I’ve been trying to get a Thursday’s Child domain for a while now.

Secondly, I built a blog for my wonderful lady friend, and should go visit Kreestone at Smalltown Dinosaur. There’s no content there yet, but she’s working on that. I ended up being pretty happy with the design, but any comments or suggestions are always welcome.

Thirdly, I created a new more professionally oriented blog over at my other domain. The idea will be to focus on literary criticism, rhetoric, and the like. I’ll be posting some papers I’ve written and my thoughts on the subjects. I’m also working on getting some people together to start a new project, in which the wide reading habits of scholars everywhere can input their analyses on whatever books they have read. Using tags and categories, I hope to be able to track thematic situations across genres, epochs, and cultures. It would be an interesting study if I can get the manpower behind it.

I’m going to actually make an attempt to get back into this blogging thing, including picking back up on Twittering and commenting on all of your blogs again, like I used to. Sorry for the impromptu hiatus, but I really needed it.

February 28, 2007 

New Role Models in the Online Realm

A friend of mine (Rachelskirts) blogged about her the coincidences of her life and the lives of some of her blogging role models. While coincidences are always fun, the thing that really grabbed my attention was this idea of having role models in the digital world.

I guess, given my research of the video game and learning and other forms of digital literacy, I shouldn’t be surprised by this trend. I have made connections, deep emotional connections, with people online whom I have never met, but I have never considered looking toward these people as models for my life.

As we enter the next generation of the digital age, Web 2.0 it’s been called, I think we will see an increase in this sort of thing. As people become more and more integrated with the internet, as more people continue to blog, spilling their hearts, minds, and tears on to the digital pages, there are certainly going to be a number of teenagers and children who will find someone with whom they connect and emulate that person here in the digital world, much like teenagers and children already do in the “real” world.

“Real.” As I typed along, real is the word I chose to delineate between the Internet and the physical. With the increasingly personal nature of the (ironically) impersonal Internet, has the line between the traditional concept of “real” and “virtual” become blurred? The Internet is quickly becoming an online agora. Facebook, Craigslist, Ebay, MySpace, Second Life, and many others are the market and meeting places many are using, and many more are using every day. Why shouldn’t children, teenagers, and young adults find their role models and mentors in these digital forums? It’s an interesting idea, and it’s one into which I plan on looking.