Re: [EXTERNAL] 11 American Nations

Posted by Parks, Raymond on Nov 11, 2013; 7:01pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/11-American-Nations-tp7584250p7584274.html

The SPEME algorithm works for historical analysis by looking at multiple sources (primary, secondary, et cetera) and placing the person within those spectrums.  Once you have the sources placed within those spaces (and they are spaces, not just ranges), one can look at their differences and see if those are observational or cultural (i.e. did one person only see the war events from limited perspective or does he have a cultural bias about the warring parties).  Only then do you have a chance at understanding what was probably the reality - if you can keep your cultural biases out of the process.

As for the "good enough" issue - I think it is possible for ordinary individuals to duplicate the 11 nations work using other methods if they are willing to put in the non-trivial effort.  You could use free or low-cost resources at either Amazon or Microsoft to pull in all of the data one considers relevant from the WWW, run it through MapReduce (preferably using an abstraction language), and generate analyses.  Finding like-minded individuals would distribute the load.  The Internet and WWW make this possible - before them, only an academic with access to a lot of source material could have done it.  Likewise, only like-minded academics would have found each other and distributed the work load.  Now, like-minded ordinary individuals can find each other via the Internet and WWW.  This is part of the major current phenomenon of our time - the gradual shift of what used to require large, communal resources to the possibility of being done by individuals.

LIbrary science is driven by categorization and customers - what doesn't the library have and what will the library patrons demand.  I'm sure there are many librarians who think the works of Will and Ariel Durant are substandard - but their libraries have those books.  BTW, I personally like their work for the breadth and, if one considers the background of the authors, the books can be used with that grain of salt.

Ray Parks

Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager

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On Nov 11, 2013, at 11:13 AM, Stephen Thompson wrote:

Ray:

Thanks for the resources to investigate.  This will take a bit of time. 

However, at what point do you say "I don't have the time to duplicate or generate my own
research to derive a model similar to 11 Nations"?  We can not all be experts in everything.  At
some point we must depend on others to have done a "reasonably" objective job of creating
their model. 

I don't know of a formal rubric / algorithm / process by which one critiques scholarly works
from outside the field.  I am sure such tools exist.  It looks like you are showing one below. 

I wonder if there is such a process taught in Library Science?  Do such folks need to critique
books as they are published as to the efficacy of adding them to the local collection?

StephT 

On 11/11/2013 11:40 AM, Parks, Raymond wrote:

I would analyze this using the algorithm I learned from my history teacher in high school - Social, Political, Economic, Moral, Emotional - drawing on openly available information from the World-Wide Web.  In some ways, this is a big data exercise, albeit drawing from previous big data sources.

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