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BEHIND_THE_SIGN

                                   July    22, 2008
                                   January 29, 2023
 
 
On alt.gothic, erithromycin said:

 "Has the visibility of goths like us obscured
  the gothic?  Another form of suicide?"

Hm.

Well, I think the trouble is keyword searches are
easy to automate, but conceptual searches are
exceedingly difficult to scale up -- you need
armies of *intelligent* categorizers and so on.

(Will your folksonomies and your tag clouds ever do
the trick? Tune in for the next episode. Or check the
RSS feed, or something.)

If you want to find something gothic-like that's not
labeled "gothic" it takes a bright person to think of
some good synonyms, and it takes the determination to
put up with a lot of false hits, and a certain saavy       NEAR_VISTA
about search engine hits ("-gothic" to skip the
obvious).


And yeah, it is probably a problem of a
sort that once a category like "goth"
exists, it has a perverse effect of
narrowing options-- you're compelled to          PASSING_AS_PASSE
be either goth or not-goth, and people
searching the information space will be
forced into certain standardized grooves--
get interested in "Joy Division" and
you'll end up checking out Siouxie, though
there isn't really all that much
similarity between the two.


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