There is a scene in the movie, Dead Poet’s Society, where the teacher John Keating, played by Robin Williams, has the class examine a quasi-mathematical model for examining poetry. Keating asks a student to read from an introduction to poetry by J. Evans, Pritchard. Pritchard is not a real scholar but his ideas are similar in some respects to chapter 15 of Laurence Perrine's (1915–1995) Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry according to that scholarly source, the Wikipedia.
Prichard’s approach poetry can be plotted on two dimensions: 1) “How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.” I guess there are no weighting factors allowed here. They may come in the next release.
As the student reads, Keating draws the graph on the blackboard. Pritchard then applies his approach to Bryon and Shakespeare and Keating illustrates these examples on the board. Keating then says this is garbage and has the students rip out the pages describing Pritchard’s approach. Now Keating could have gone on to create the classic consultant’s two x two table with the same data but we get the point.
He says they are not laying pipe but talking about poetry. While Fred Taylor might apply Pritchard to pipe, some pipe fitters might feel there is art here also. In fact, most masters of anything want to go beyond formulas. Aligning with Gopnik’s critique of Robert Parker in Part One of this series, Keating says how can you apply a number to poetry like they do to songs on American Bandstand. “I like Byron but I can’t dance to him, I give him a 42.” He says that in his class there will be no measurement systems imposed by experts, the students will learn to think for themselves. Here is a link to the Measuring Poetry episode on YouTube.
In most activities there is a role for measurement but we cannot let measurement overcome judgment. There is a time to rank order content according to some measurement system to help you find what you are looking for. Again, I used Google to write every part in this series. However, we need a complement to a measurement driven system that allows for human cognition to play a more active role in determining relevance and value. Before we get to the role that the Darwin Awareness Engine (TM) can play in this effort in Part Four of the series, we will examine another trend in the over simplification of content that may be having real consequences. There remain times when precision matters.