New York Times: Two Indexing Methods

July 31, 2009

Teragram, a unit of SAS SAP, provides software that automatically indexes content for the New York Times’s Web site. I saw a tweet on my Overflight service that pointed out that the newspaper uses humans to create the New York Times Index, a more traditional index. You can find the tweet here. If true, why won’t the Teragram system do both jobs? When financial corsets get yanked tighter, something has to give. My thought is that if the tweet is accurate, is redundancy cost effective? An indication that neither works particularly well? There is a political logic, not a financial logic, at work?

Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2009

Comments

4 Responses to “New York Times: Two Indexing Methods”

  1. Peter Lipps on July 31st, 2009 6:50 am

    Teragram (www.teragram.com) is a division of SAS – not SAP.

  2. Stephen E. Arnold on July 31st, 2009 3:18 pm

    Peter Lipps,

    Thanks, I misstyped.

    Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2009

  3. Text Mining, Voice Mining & Unstructured Data Analysis on September 11th, 2009 4:42 pm

    Man versus Machine — Is the logical operator “&” or “V”?…

    Last Month at the SIGIR meeting in Boston , one of the presentations given by a Teragram customer attracted notice in a twitter post.

    The NY Times automated the tagging of topics for their online website by their implementation of software to au…

  4. Man versus Machine —Logical operator “&” or “V”? « Information Mining – Zenorg R&D on March 25th, 2010 6:19 pm

    […] Stephen Arnold wondered in his blog why an organization might continue to require human labor on a task machine can now perform? Could be political resistance to change? or perhaps the machine fails sometimes? Perhaps the employees without skills to be reassigned are in fact prime for the next round of employees to see a “pink slip” as budgets get cut? […]

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