stephenerobertson@hotmail.co.uk
Subject: Let’s have a pastime
Hi, Steve, how is your life going nowadays? I know you are formally retired. Meanwhile, I do need some pastimes. The following is one of them:
In retrospect, it is a great historical mystery why in 1975 the First International Research Forum in Information Science (IRFIS) was held in London and the cognitive turn occurred subsequently, both centering around School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) of University College London (UCL). Reader Bertram Brookes was the leader, though the chief of SLAIS was a new Professor Brian Vickery of librarianship who was regarded as an expert in information retrieval, especially classification.
Back then, meanwhile, Brookes appeared mainly to aim for the theoretic foundation of information science, likely to differentiate it from librarianship. Therefore there must be a tension between both. And it may be that to hire Vickery was to fire Brookes. Anyway, until the end of 1974 when I finished my study at SLAIS, Brookes was ready for neither IRFIS nor the cognitive turn, as far as my knowledge goes. And the same was true with his two doctoral students, Stephen Robertson and Nicholas Belkin. Nevertheless, Brookes formally declared in IRFIS that information science had arrived as a science at last.
Therefore, something else must have existed. And I argue that it was my MSc thesis submitted to UCL at the end of 1974. For it was highly cognitive and my supervisor Brookes acknowledged it was exceptionally well done. And IRFIS may have served as “invisible college” or free informal discussion of my thesis, though lacking References, hence my Unfinished Symphony. Nevertheless, there was something terribly surprising, namely “contextual cognition” in addition to so-called citation-context indexing and digital citation tracking.
The minimal contribution of my thesis is proved by the actual development of citation-context indexing systems, including CiteSeer, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic (withdrawn for the reason unknown), and many others. CiteSeer was patented for the automation aspect only, not for the principle or theoretic aspect, which is mine. The historical question remains whether the co-authors knew and used my thesis. So plagiarism may matter. Microsoft Academic may have been withdrawn for that reason.
My primary objective was to help scholars perform citation tracking better than their traditional way. While citation-tracking, they are highly cognitive to make best use of contexts. Thus both contextualism and cognitivism matter. Actually my thesis consumes most of the text to argue for both. I believe this theoretic contribution looking like a bonus is much more than the technical one mentioned above. Marc de Mey in 1975 IRFIS formulated the development stages of information science as monadic → structural → contextual → cognitive. But my thesis is based on the contextual + cognitive stage at the same time. Profound context calls for highly intelligent cognition. Both should go hand in hand.
I conclude that my thesis is quite a success both technically and theoretically. Unfortunately, however, it still remains buried. So it should be exposed to surprise the world and to let it know the truth. No one but Brookes would wish so. In 1989, the year of the World Wide Web, 14 years after I finished my study, Brookes asked Eisuke Naito, one of my classmates, to visit and ask me to write to him. He sent me the following photo where he is gesturing to put something into the postbox, suggesting me to write to him. Foolishly, however, I did not write to him. But he would like to let me know that something terribly great has been resulting from my thesis. It could be the WWW, I imagine happily!
By the way, you may ask how is your thesis related to the WWW based on hypertext? Good question! Citation links the citing to the cited, as hypertext does from text to text. Meanwhile, ENQUIRE the earlier version was not accepted by CERN in 1980 for the reason unknown. CERN may worry about likely plagiarism. In 9 years, the WWW was proposed instead, and the worry may have mostly vanished. Nevertheless, the CERN management may have wished a gentlman’s agreement with me through Brookes. How nice it is! And I wish you all to enjoy this episode as you do historical novels, however serious I am.
Sincerely yours,
Kyung-Youn Park,
now Mark Park,
in memory of “mark and park,”
coined by Robert Fairthorne.
2016-10-02 Mark Park
