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Another potential source of information about documents that we can use
to augment statistial keywords is ``cultural'' information, capturing
some features of the social relationships among authors in a
field. Most of our discussion of documents has been as if they were
completely dead artifacts. But documents are written by people,
authors who write from a particular perspective. When their writing is
in science, or the law, or any other tradition within which they
participate, we can make reasonable guesses about some aspects of what
it is they are trying to say.
An author's education, in particular,
offers clues as to how we can interpret their words. Work and writing in
many fields requires extensive, graduate education. Students are soon
moved from common ``core'' curricula to more advanced material. Kuhn and
others have analyzed the central role textbooks play as part of the
social process of codifying a discipline [REF162] . As students move beyond common
textbooks to the specialized training, their approach to the problem
often resembles that of their teachers (at least as long as they are
around the teacher). By knowing something about the author's education,
and especially about their dissertation advisor, we may have a basis for
interpreting their writing. The importance of dissertations as an
academic resource was recognized as early as 1940 by University
Microfilms Inc. (UMI) as copies of virtually every dissertation
published by many universities was microfilmed. UMI (now the Information
and Learning division of Bell \& Howell) makes its Dissertation Abstracts
corpus available for WWW searching.
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Social relations among authors
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