Data, Data everywhere... but what do we do with it?

For this week's reflection, I am going to focus on Daniel Cohen's "From Babel to Knowledge," and Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive, "Searching for History."  First of all, I was a little slow on the uptake when each article was discussing APIs, programming interfaces, H-bots, algorithms--but that's not new.  However, when I did process what Cohen was talking about, I was amazed by what computer programmers are able to accomplish.  The ability to set up search engines to "mine data" and then use that to better construct a website and its efficiency in being available to a greater online audience is quite fascinating.  Before reading the blog "Searching for history," I hadn't given much thought to queries made on search engines.  (I also now know that "clearing history" does not erase the data from existence.  Sigh.  So many things to learn still.)  But the uses of this data are never ending.  Aside from creating programs to search for syllabi, or understanding how people use history, data mining and analysis must support a wide variety of online sites.  

I am currently listening to my all-time favorite Pandora station, Neil Young radio.  And I imagine that Pandora uses some type of data collection that indexes various songs, yet gives them multiple categories (similar to the ingredients of the cocktails index).  In this way, Pandora can be adaptive when you choose to "like" a particular song, or "dislike" another.  The program must then begin to add more songs which match up with that favored song's "ingredients," and vice versa with disliked songs.  

Going back to Cohen's article, I was intrigued by the notion of H-Bot.  Its ability to answer factual queries through data mining, supports the idea that this would free up professors and students to focus on more analytical ventures of topics, not having to get hung up on specific factual details.  This can be related directly to our discussion of Wikipedia a few weeks ago.  This site promotes only factual information, not subjective analysis.  Disregarding its frequent fallacies, this site is in actuality in league with these H-Bot programs, and can help pave the road for more extensive and expansive analysis once the facts have been quickly ascertained.

Go on, get down with your "Old Man"/"Heart of Gold" self...