The following fanciful predict-let was penned in 1966:
…it is said that the job of a technical editor may one day be
abolished altogether: in an era in which consoles may soon be found in
every bedroom, technical journals and their editors may be replaced by
a system of universal, personalized dissemination of information…
I’m sure that upon reading this, your head snapped back in admiration
for the writer who anticipated the rich cultural plasma of commentary
and information sharing that is just beginning to coalesce now, forty
years later. I find several pearls of wisdom in this passage by Gerard
Salton, written as he took the prestigious post of Editor-In-Chief of
Communications of the ACM in January 1966. (The passage was
quoted in the January 2008 issue as part of their 50th Anniversary
celebration.
The depth of Salton’s thinking in this passage becomes clearer as one
considers that the made his life-long career in the field of
information retrieval. He is best known for a 1960’s project called
SMART, which Wikipedia
claims
stands for “Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text,” but which a
2005 paper by Eric Thul said means either “System for Mechanical
Analysis and Retrieval” or “Salton’s Magic Automatic Retrieval
Technique.” SMART laid in place the practices that are still the
basis of today’s search systems:
- Semantic classification and indexing of words
-
Counting and weighing words, with an awareness of special elements
such as titles and abstracts -
Finding commonality between documents and search terms through vector
algebra, enhancing the relevancy of results by assigning a higher
importance to rare terms (perhaps SMART’s most important contribution
to improving searches)
Later in his career, in the 1990s, Salton worked on the automated
creation of hypertext from separate documents.
The reason I take off on this tangent about Salton’s cosines is that
peer-generated content and good search systems go hand in hand. One
cannot expect “technical journals and their editors [to] be replaced”
unless readers can trace their way through the oceans of content on
their own. Because the importance of findability came clear to me in
my own research on community documentation, I recently created a
survey on searching
to answer
several questions
related to technical information.
So how do we interpret Salton’s teasing speculation? We have to be
very careful about reading our own understanding of peer development
and review in 2007 back into Salton’s words.
First, it’s not clear whether he was deprecating the roles of editor
as gatekeeper and quality manager, or the existence of journals. His
passage goes on to say “some form of printed record of technical
material is likely to remain with us for a long time to come,” which
is still the widespread opinion today in the age of Amazon.com’s
Kindle. I’m sure the current CACM editor put Salton’s
passage in the 50th Anniversary issue with unshaken confidence in her
own job stability.
In addition to questions concerning the continued existence of
technical journals (whether in print or online),
we now have to consider two strands of development fanning out
from Salton’s visionary prediction:
the role of journals and editors as gate-keepers,
and the role of journals and editors as quality managers.
I distinguished gate-keeping from quality control at the end of my
recent Radar articles on reputation.
I believe that quality control was on Salton’s mind as he wrote his
prediction, conscious of the heavy burden placed on him to ensure the
accuracy of the content he allowed to appear in the computing field’s
leading publication. This is why the passage I quoted about being
replaced went on to say, “editors will, I suspect, be the first to
welcome such a development.”
Perhaps Salton, at the very start of his new position, looked forward
to returning to his research and throwing off the frustrations of
playing midwife to other researchers in their scribblings. More
likely, he assumed that a technical editor would always be required,
but that the difficult and risky parts of the job that concerned
technical accuracy would be offloaded to peer reviewers, as in today’s
Wikipedia.
In no sense, I’m sure, did Salton imagine the logorrhea of the modern
blogosphere, with people waking up in the morning and spilling their
thoughts like an overturned latte on their keyboards, not to mention
the phenomenon of rakes such as Matt Drudge being taken as news
sources. Salton lived in a world of trained researchers reporting only
on things they knew well and checking their results using
well-established quality measures (unless I’m idealizing the research
environment of the 1960s).
Although many computer jobs today require a lot more academic training
and formal certification than they did in 1966, we also have gold
mines of amateur and open source development, and there are positive
aspects to this. The same goes for information production. Does this
mean we’re ready for the job of a technical editor to be abolished?
Anyone who feasts regularly on both blogs (which spice their finger
foods with the most idiosyncratic concoctions) and Wikipedia (which
boils its field-gathered ingredients down to a uniform flavor) can
recognize that there is still room for something that stands part-way
between the two. I love the spontaneous inspirations of bloggers as
well as the rich factual bases provided by wikis, but I also want
carefully argued and well-paced exposition of one point of view by one
qualified author. Few authors can carry this off without editorial
help, as you can demonstrate by checking self-published books.
Editorial help, yes. But by a trained editor? What’s lacking when
commentators and reviewers refine an author’s insight through online
collaboration?
I find that few commentators and reviewers take up the author’s mission
with the same concern that the author feels herself. They come up with
inspired insights concerning one point or another made in her article,
and can adjust individual passages to heighten their impact. But the
good can be the enemy of the perfect. What the author needs is someone
to stand back and ask tough questions about the various emphases
placed on all the different parts of the paper, and their interaction:
-
What assumptions does the author make, and can justly make, about the
reader? -
What change is the author trying to effect in the reader’s point of
view, phrase by phrase and paragraph by paragraph? -
Is each argument being made not only in the manner most likely to
impress the reader, but in the location where the argument can
redirect the reader’s vector of thinking along the greatest possible
angle? -
Do the arguments form not only a forceful sequence, but a scaffold in
which fundamental arguments underpin the most sophisticated ones, in
the tradition of the best classical rhetoric?
These questions are the province of the editor. Any field that
appreciates clarity and precision will benefit from professional
editing. But if it can be rewarded and disseminated only in the same
media where it has traditionally found a home–whether ACM journals or
O’Reilly books–that’s where editors will work. If the new media can
find ways to integrate professional editing into their content, these
media will improve their reach and relevance.
Maybe the next generation of Saltons will create search engines that
vector-multiply the editorial quality of documents into the relevancy
rankings of search results.