Merriam Webster defines Context this way:
: the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning
Vague. Fuzzy. They didn’t really know what Context is. Because Context was a Rabbit Hole. But the Blind Guy figured it out.
I started this project because a client, and friend who created the Streetcar.org website had a complaint. “This site is a treasure trove of history, but nobody knows it.”. So I ventured to build a simple WordPress plugin to build trees showing readers all the stories lying within nearly 1,0000 posts. It seemed straightforward until I dived into the Rabbit Hole of Context.
If a Tag is an atom, Context is a creature out of Quantum Mechanics. In fact, it’s a cat.
Schrodinger’s Cat. Seriously.
In the thought experiment, a cat is locked in a box with a hamme poised over a vial of cyanide, connected to another vial with a radioactive substance. If the substance decays, the hammer crashes on the vial of cyanide, killing the cat. But inside, unseen, in the box, the Cat is both dead and alive. When the box is opened & we can take measurements, then, the cat is either dead or alive. Quantum Scientist call this a colllapse of a Hilbert Field superposition to one outcome.
Given that context, context is the thing that collapses many potential meanings of a thing into one authoritative meaning. So, a better definition of Context is
Context is 1+ things that collapses many potential meaning of a piece of content to 1 meaning agreeable to consensus or statistically significant to automated processes.
Context can be seen as a formula, Context + Content = Meaning.
A Context is some form of agreement, explicit like an agenda or circumstance, implicit like environment,, authoritative like verification or corroboration, and/or quantitative as in a correlation.
My algorithms use multiple types of context:
- Multiple tags that appear in more than one post, a correlation.
- Measuring how often tag clusters occur together, Statistical
- Under which scope, tree-wise, branch-wise, node-wise, content type wise, circumstantial.
- in what type of tree and in what flavor, environmental