serendipity
So I’ve been watching a lot of videos from TED recently; I posted one about historical levels of violence to my tumblelog a couple of days ago.
Another interesting one is this bubbly talk about dictionaries:
She makes a lot of interesting points, but I couldn’t help noticing she also makes a common blunder: she states that online dictionaries, compared to paper ones, lose the quality of serendipity.
I’ve heard this complaint about the internet before, and it just floors me. The internet is the greatest possible engine of serendipity. (I’m pretty sure I stole that line from somewhere, btw)
I recently tested a youtube-esque video service being tested by my department at work; I uploaded an Alison Krauss video I happened to have on my machine. This led me to visit her official website, which, like most musician’s sites, kind of sucks for content. This led me, of course, to the real live YouTube, where I searched for Alison Krauss, saw a video in the search results titled “Cluck Old Hen-Alison Krauss/Sierra Hull“, was duly impressed, and followed a link to a “related” video called “sierra hull playing roanoke on guitar”:
I had never heard of Sierra Hull, and now I’m serioiusly considering buying her album. How is that less serendipity than I would experience in the real world, say by flipping through the racks at a record store? A given store might not even have Sierra’s album, and anyway, I don’t visit record stores.
An online dictionary has the potential for great serendipity — just let the page for an individual entry show content from nearby entries; define “nearby” not just by spelling but by definition (i.e., thesaurus functionality), language of origin or other etymological info, or even obscure academic measurements of lexical distance. Add in a “random word” or “word of the day” feature.
All the serendipity you could ask for, says me.
