Week before last I was given a new (and very unexpected) project at work. I was asked to adjust the relevance ranking on the OPAC. My eyes lit up and in the inside I was bouncing around doing my little woo-hoo dance. Of course I jumped at the chance and said ‘oooh! yes please!’. Foolish, foolish woman. The first thing you learn in the military is to never, ever volunteer. Never.
Adjusting the relevance ranking means changing the precision recall of the algorithm. Simple enough. Erm, no. Thing is I am not really sure what result we are looking for. Nope, been given no guidance on that one. I guess the point is to make observations, analyse usage behaviours and stats, write a lovely long report and pass it on to someone else to decide what on earth to do with it all. Another problem is that I am not a Maths person, I’m not even a Comp Sci bunny. My background is very much in the arts and humanities tradition. English Lit, Medieval History, Music - those are my areas of comfort. Yet I now find myself analysing not comparative translations of The Dream of the Rood but rather a bunch of numbers which cunningly, grotesquely twist and dance in front of my eyes and taunt me with their incomprehensibility. My plan is to just play. Tweak this, fiddle with that and see what happens. I can’t exactly break it . . . can I?
I take comfort in the fact that none of the students (or staff for that matter) will even notice the algo has changed. Heck, most of them wouldn’t even recognise an OPAC if they stood in one, and in this case, that aint exactly a bad thing.
“Master Plan”, Split Enz
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