Amazon as a bibliographic tool
I readily admit that I have used Amazon.com as an easy way to create a preliminary bibliography. Even one of my teachers privately recommended it to me. I also like to use it to read the Introduction of books (through the “Look Inside Feature”) I was supposed to buy or would buy. These facts are all an introduction to a query about SIPs. As described inWilliam Turkel’s Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape, an SIP (Statistically Improbable Phrase) is “a phrase that is common in the book you are looking at, but that doesn’t commonly appear in many other books.” Has anyone used this feature of Amazon or of a similar site before? It would seem to be a better way to find related books than “Other customers bought…”
January 29th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
You know what–I noticed those phrases last semester when looking for children’s books for my internship project. What’s cooler is that instead of just SIP’s there is also a link for the various educational scales which tell the reader what age group/level these particular books are for. It seems to be an incredibly useful tool to find what other books use the same phrase–and consequently a method of finding additional secondary literature for a research project…..
January 31st, 2006 at 12:32 am
I honestly think the readings for this week made me trust Amazon just a little bit more. I’ve played with SIPs in my own projects — compiling a database of keywords in Congressional debate — and find them fascinating.
However, be careful trusting such things. I read a story in the Washington Post (probably within the last year) about how skewed some of the results are — especially the reading levels ones. I guess _War and Peace_ (or some other tome) was at a “children’s” level while a picture book got one of the highest ratings. I don’t remember why that happened though, so maybe someone with more technical knowledge than I can explain?
January 31st, 2006 at 11:21 am
I’m a little torn on the amazon as a research tool subject. I had seen SIPs before but never really used them. I think that could be a cool resource. But I think the best part of amazon.com is the search inside the book function, where if you only remember a word or two of something you read in the book you can go there and just search for the phrase you remember and see where it is in the book. If only they had all the books I want to research on their website as well. But beyond this function I just feel like you get a sense of the book’s premise but not too much of where it fits historiographically, which is why I switch over to JSTOR. But I do think I’ll start doing a quick perusal of amazon as well from now on.
January 31st, 2006 at 3:15 pm
I never noticed SIP’s before on Amazon. One thing that does bother me slightly about the site is the way it remembers things you have purchased before and adjusts the advertisements on your page accordingly. Not that it creeps me out or anything, but that its not all that accurate. I once bought a few CD’s for my father off of Amazon and ever since then my welcome page lists every Bob or Rita Marley CD there is. Don’t get me wrong I like them, but thats not who I am or cd’s I would seek out to buy…so their whole advertising strategy seems disjointed in some ways.
February 7th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
With reference to the NYT article and their warning - Programs that do stuff like this are unreliable, that’s a fact. What is important is that they do it at all. Expecting things to go right is, shall we say, naive. There are technologies like this that are very useful. You just have to look at what you get out of them and use your highly trained sensibilities to tell the difference between Sesame Street and Tolstoy. I can think of one good reason it would make that particular error right away.
Can I compare it to having an assistant? Since when was an assistant perfect? Especially a student assistant, intern, or T.A.
Finally, with respect to Amazon’s “memory” - you can edit your collection of browsed books and bought books. It IS tedious, but I recently got rid of a bunch of stuff that I had bought for presents. The things we go through for our friends!