Episode 09 – Too Much Information
3 July, 20072 comments
What are students, researchers, and librarians supposed to do with the tremendous volume of digitized scholarly materials now available to them? We discuss the problem of information overload in this week’s feature segment. The news roundup turns into an iPhone-fest–or is it an iPhone-bashing? Dan tries not to go near an iPhone for fear of an impulse buy, while Tom and Mills debate the true value of Apple’s new gadget. Helpful tips for the week include a site for getting to know “learning 2.0,” a great new blog on museums and technology, and a digital Time Magazine archive.
Links mentioned on the podcast:
Learning 2.0
Electronic Museum
Time Magazine, 1923-2007
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Running time: 51:07
Download the .mp3.
Henry Lewkowicz : 11th July, 2007
Hi,
It is true that information is pouring faster and faster. To deal with this challenge one can use a) software that extracts and summarizes the essential facts and b) software that visualizes the text information (like MindManager).
One can also combine automatic text summarization with visualization. In the past few years I have been working on both aspects. For anyone who would like to get their web pages and Google searches instantly summarized I can point to Context Organizer (http://www.contextdiscovery.com).
Another improvement can be to apply scripts that summarize large number of search results and report to the user. This way the user takes advantage of a summarizing robot that spiders large number of pages and extracts only the topics that are of interest to the user.
Large amount of information is a good thing providing that we have more practical ways to take advantage of it.
Best regards,
Henry
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