"By the 1580s," Ogilvie writes, "the botanical tyro had to master
a tremendous number of words, things, and authorities." And during this
period botanical literature increasingly sought to address precisely
this concern. Already in the 1550s, with the work of Conrad Gesner and
Remert Dodoens, Ogilvie observes a shift from an older form of botanical
treatise, descended from the alphabetical materia medica, to a
new form organized around "tacit notions of similarity" among different
natural types. Not that all of these developments were useful. As
Ogilvie notes, the move toward similarity was not a direct move toward
scientific taxonomy, and in different works vastly different categorical
schemes applied, so that the same plant might be grouped with "shrubs"
in one and, in another, with "plants whose flowers please." Eventually,
with Caspar Bauhin at the end of the sixteenth century and John Ray at
the end of the seventeenth, Ogilvie notes the rise of a new class of
scientific literature aimed not only at describing and organizing natural
facts but at doing the same work for scientific texts themselves.
Joshua Yeidel on 09 Feb 09Calais is an initiative by Thomson Reuters to connect the world's content by providing automated metadata (let's just call it tagging) services. The Calais service takes your text and uses sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to extract the people, organizations, companies, geographies and events hidden within it.
