{"id":1372,"date":"2009-07-14T07:43:16","date_gmt":"2009-07-14T14:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=1372"},"modified":"2009-07-14T07:46:56","modified_gmt":"2009-07-14T14:46:56","slug":"the-reports-of-the-death-of-text-are-greatly-exaggerated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=1372","title":{"rendered":"The reports of the death of text are greatly exaggerated"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to the question “What will change everything?<\/a>,” Marti Hearst wrote<\/a> in edge.org<\/a> on the increasing ubiquity of video and audio, and on how these media are encroaching on the “market share” of text for communication in our society. It’s an interesting piece: the premise is that as video and audio have become increasingly easy to create and distribute, their use has started supplanting text in communication. She cites examples of success rates of podcasts as marketing vehicles, YouTube video comments, and people pointing cameras on themselves to pose questions to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

And she has a point. When video was difficult or expensive to create, it was a fringe medium, restricted to broadcast-only situations. These days, a cheap web cam is all you need to broadcast yourself. The interaction is as easy as typing, and you don’t have to know how to spell. A preview of this phenomenon was available to 1990s Canadian TV audiences through the popular Speakers’ Corner<\/a>, a video booth near CityTV in Toronto where anyone could record a short video of themselves that would (eventually) get aired. (The booths were later installed in other Canadian cities.)<\/p>\n

In his reaction to this article, Andrew Dillon<\/a> pointed out<\/a> that rather than being replaced by video and audio, text would supplemented by them. His argument was based on psychological considerations, although he did not articulate them explicitly. I would like to take a complementary approach, and critique the edge piece from a more technological perspective.<\/p>\n

Marti Hearst’s article glosses over an important aspect of text that sets it apart from other media, namely the relative ease with which text structure can be associated (approximately) with meaning. Text is such an important part of the computer era because it can be tokenized, parsed, indexed, and searched relatively easily. Most of the text we create is stored somewhere (traditionally on paper, but increasingly on some computer network) for subsequent retrieval. While in many cases this retrieval happens through metadata that is equally applicable to other media, in many other cases\u00a0 textual documents are retrieved by searching on their content. This is a capability that we now take for granted, but its ubiquity rests squarely on the ease of processing text for indexing and on the ease of generating queries that return useful information.<\/p>\n

If it were hard to parse documents into semantically useful chunks (as it is with video), or if it were hard to construct queries that identify desired documents (as it is with video), we would not be able to take advantage of the large variety of information that is “out there.” Following links and doing metadata-based search does not scale well to the web, or even to collections of moderate size unless a lot of (expensive) manual effort is devoted to indexing the materials.<\/p>\n

Video is now easy to create, but it is still difficult to index and to query without relying on textual proxies. Furthermore, it is unclear to me that the general case of querying video based on its content is likely to be solved any time soon. While many demonstration systems have been built to query video based on various low-level features such as color histograms and spatial features, these map poorly to things that people actually care about. Manual indexing, even of the “wisdom of crowds” type alluded to in the edge article, cannot scale to the scale of the web. Audio is an interesting intermediate case because it can be converted automatically more easily to and from text, which can then be used to index and retrieve it.<\/p>\n

Even when we watch movies that evoke strong emotional responses, we use words when\u00a0 communicating with others about our experiences. It is this extreme (inherent?) facility with language for communication, coupled with the relative ease of processing it that gives text special status in our culture. Our improved ability to record ourselves on video or audio may increasingly enhance our communication, but these media are unlikely to be generally effective in the absence of text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to the question “What will change everything?,” Marti Hearst wrote in edge.org on the increasing ubiquity of video and audio, and on how these media are encroaching on the “market share” of text for communication in our society. It’s an interesting piece: the premise is that as video and audio have become increasingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1393,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions\/1393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}