The following message is being re-posted on behalf of David Seedhouse, as it
'bounced back' due to using the "Reply-To" function [replying to Paul Lee's
message of Monday December 2, 1996] and leaving in the original headers.
 Unfortunately, the list-serv computer at York U. has trouble recognizing
which address it is to send a message to when confronted with several "To"
fields. the easiest way to avoid this error is to insert a > bracket in
front of any line in the message which might be a problem - usually only the
"To" and "From" fields.
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Subject: Re: Pseuds' Corner

>   Paul Lee wrote

>There is so much out there, how do we
> 1) narrow the search, and 2) search in a synthetic manner.
>
> Narrowing became an issue for me recently when I was researching my
> contribution to "The 1997 Guide to Healthcare Resources on the Internet"
> (ed. John Hoben / published by Faulkner & Gray).  I did a search for the
> phrase "healthy community" and got over one million URL's back.  I
> decided to analyze the term "community" for its related meanings using a
> controlled lexical focus, as oppossed to broader professional and
> vernacular usage.  Mining the US National Library of Medicine's
> "Knowledge Source Server" I found related terms in several indexing
> systems.  The printout was 140 pages long.  Again, a significant barrier
> to narrowing in that I couldn't keep that many pages of terms juggled in
> my mind at once.
>
> I analyzed these related terms and found I could depict the relations
> graphically on a single large sheet.  This allowed me the insight that
> in fact the multifarious terms with a definable relationship to
> "community" that we use in technical languages associated with health
> are ALL lexically interrelated to one another!  This is rather
> marvelous, because the opposite was certainly possible - that several
> islands of terms could exist with no common lexical heritage.  It also
> implies that our language has built into it an explicit basis for
> synthetic understanding.

I'm sorry but I just can't let this pass without comment. ;->
 What a staggering thing to say.  How have you managed to get around in the
world without realising this before now?

I intend to submit this to the UK satirical journal Private Eye -
they devote a regular section to just this sort of thing .....    ;-)

> This is all preliminary research.  Where it is going is that health
> promotion at the societal level needs to be articulated in an elaborated
> fashion in order to begin the construction of scientific models, and
> then rational policies and wise allocations of resources.


Best wishes

David
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