"A search on Minoan Crete returns as the 59th result a sermon by John Donne. Examination of the editions reveals nothing about Crete. What's strange is that the results farther down the list seem mostly relevant to the search term again."
My first thought was that some widely published sermon with, say an imprint by "Minoan Press" or some such, was triggering this result. But no. It's a 1626 imprint. We have three "editions" in the RLG Union Catalog -- but they're likely all the same edition. And it's a total of ten holdings (mostly in microform).
Author: Donne, John, 1572-1631.
Title: [Sermon Preached To The Kings Mtie At Whitehall 24 Febr 1625]
A sermon, preached to the Kings Mtie. at Whitehall, 24. Febr. 1625 / by Iohn Donne. And now by his Maiesties commandment published.
Publisher: London : Printed for T. Jones, 1626.
It turns out that the publisher is transcribed in one of the entries as Iones.
After much poking around, the best guess i have for the linkage is that there are works in which Iones, the Protohellenic tribe, and Minoan and/or Crete are linked. I don't see it in the actual data -- the other two relevant works that come up in the search "iones minoan crete" don't seem to have the word iones associated with the record itself. It is possible that , as we use the Subject Authority file to supplement the record with additional access points, that there may be an Iones lurking there
This is one more strike against using the publisher data in the keyword search. Right now we have it ranked as very low -- we should take it our altogether. Yet, as we indexed the publication data, those terms go into the modeling and training done by the Recommind Mind Server. So perhaps the publication data will still produce noise in the results as items without the search term, but that the model thinks are related due to the presence of some term in a publication field.
I hope oddities like these will be overwhelmed by the mass of the data -- our sample database only includes 5% of the book records. Yet seeing all the early modern English spellings in all the sermons and such, I should prepare myself for a plethora of oddities once the full system is in place.
iones minoan crete #1 of 3 -- the other two definitely have to do with ancient Greece.
minoan #73
iones minoan #1 of 83
iones crete #1 of 6
crete #267
donne crete #1
saint Pauls crete #3 of 11 (One of the titles lists the sermon as delivered at Saint Pauls)
saint crete #8 of 16
Iohn Iones #3 of 36 -- lots of sermons, nothing on Crete
Maiesties #37 of 360 -- lots of sermons and very distracting titles.
isaiah crete -- three results, no Donne
iones -- many results, Donne isn't one of them
The Donne records include:
Record ID:ILNGAEY1101B-B
Record ID:CUBGGLAD184553073-B
Record ID:PASG544243-B
jhon donne
Posted by: vegeth at November 24, 2003 12:57 PM