| It
often happens, in the development of academic disciplines, that
important ideas are proposed, then forgotten about, then rediscovered
much later – when their full significance is realized as a
result of some quite separate discovery.
I will give examples of ideas which are often thought of as quite
modern, although they have a very long history. (Some of the main
scholars involved are given in brackets.)
1500s:
language teaching textbooks (Bellot)
300 AD – 1949(!): concordances for textual exegesis (Eusebius,
Cruden, Busa)
1750s – 1900s: corpora, dictionary construction (Johnson,
Murray)
1890s – 1950s: corpora, other applications (Kaeding, Thorndike,
Gougenheim)
1900s – 1930s: collocations (Bally, Porzig, Palmer)
1950s: concordances for information retrieval (Luhn)
Two things are notable about the development of ideas in all these
areas.
1. Theoretical insights arose out of practical applications.
2. The full significance of the theoretical insights became clear
– sometimes much later – when improved techniques of
visualization were developed.
Visualization techniques, which allowed patterns to be seen in complex
non-numerical data, depended in turn on technological developments.
Once these visualizations are available, verbal explanation may
be of secondary importance: the patterns are obvious. One picture
is, as they say, worth a thousand words.
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