A Series of Essays by Michael Gorman

Capricho nº 43, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

Go to the website for the series on the Britanica Blog.

This series is to include three two-part essays, as part of Britannica’s “Web 2.0″ forum. The essays deal with the quality of information that can be obtained from the World Wide Web with emphasis on the performance of search engines. They appear to be controversial, and I would say thought provoking.

Here are some excerpts:

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s Dr. Nathan Null, “a White House Situational Science Adviser,” tells us that: “Situational science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts.”.....

The Spanish artist Goya (1746-1828) experienced the turmoil of the Napoleonic years and the war that ravaged Europe, including Spain. His vision included a private world of nightmares. One of the most famous products of this vision was the etching Number 43 of the series Los caprichos (The Caprices, 1799); the etching is called El Sueño de la Razon Produce Monstruos (”The sleep of reason brings forth monsters”). Goya is widely credited with having the clairvoyance of genius, and this image of the sleeping artist surrounded by the winged ghoulies and beasties unleashed by unreason has been seen as a prediction of, and warning about, the state of civilization in the two hundred years since.....

Information retrieval systems have been studied for many decades. In the course of that study two important criteria have been developed to evaluate such systems—those criteria are recall and relevance. The first measures the percentage of pertinent documents retrieved from a database (for example, if there are 100 documents on Zambian agriculture in a database and a search on that topic retrieves 76 of them, the recall is 76%). The second measures the supposed appropriateness of the documents that have been retrieved (for example, if you retrieve 100 documents when searching for Zambian agriculture and 76 of them are actually about Zambian agriculture, the relevance is 76%).

Information retrieval systems achieve high recall and relevance rates by the use of controlled vocabularies (indexing terms, etc.) and present the results of complex searches in a meaningful and usable order. By any of these criteria, Google and its like are miserable failures. A search on those engines on anything but the most minutely detailed topic will yield many thousands of “results” in no useful order and with wretched recall and relevance ratios. However, even when the documents retrieved by a search engine are on the subject sought, the quality of the material - often community-generated material that pops up high on a hit list because the material is free and easily accessible — is shoddy or irresponsible.....

There are three levels of research using texts. The first and most rigorous is enquiry using primary sources (documents and texts created during the time being studied or after that time by persons who were observers of the events in question) that seeks to establish new knowledge, change previously accepted knowledge, or synthesize existing knowledge to shed new light on a topic. The second is consulting authoritative secondary sources (scholarly books and articles, entries in reliable, expert-based encyclopedias, and others that describe or analyze a topic but are at least one step away from the actual event, written by authors with credentials, and published by reputable publishers) in order to acquire knowledge and understanding. The third, which scarcely deserves the title of research, consists of unorganized and serendipitous consultation of unauthoritative or uncertain sources (reading popular nonfiction, mass-market magazines, or “googling” a topic).

Comment: I have considerable sympathy for Gorman's concern for quality of information, and indeed for the need for high levels of information literacy required to sort good from bad information in the information rich cyberspace.

I would suggest that it is important to consider the costs and benefits of alternative means of finding information. As I was thinking about this, I wanted to find a quotation. I searched the Internet, and quickly got all that I needed. I did not need accuracy on the author of the quote, but only to know that it was out there and to refresh my mind on its specific wording. It would be silly to go to the library and do a detailed search to satisfy such a trivial urge. On the other hand, I think it quite appropriate for the president of the United States to order thousands of people in the government to do in depth studies, including the collection of original information, to decide whether or not to go to war; an Internet search does not suffice. JAD