Eigen-Arnett Educational & Cultural Foundation
17 Lake Potomac Court
Potomac
,Maryland 20854-1226
Phone: 240 988-7400
Fax: 301 299-3727
E-Mail: info@EAfoundation.com
Web: www.EAfoundation.com
Press Release
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For release at:
May 25, 2006.
12:30 AM
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For More Information Contact:
Ramona E. F. Arnett
rarnett@EAfoundation.com
240 988-7400
|
World's Largest
Collection of Political & Historical Quotations Available on the Web
Powerful Tool Includes Sources & Citations
to Meet Journalistic, Editorial and Scholarship Standards
www.politicalquotes.org
Now available to students, educators, scholars, journalists and political
figures, Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations in available free
of charge at
www.politicalquotes.org. Over 40,000 quotations from more than 11,000
different historical and political figures can be accessed through a powerful 4th
generation search engine that is simple to use for the novice, yet powerful
enough for the most complicated Boolean and conceptual searches for the
sophisticated researcher.
"It is the ideal aid for a student's paper, a teacher's lesson, a scholar's
book, a journalist's lead, or a politician's speech," said Ramona E. F. Arnett,
President of the Eigen-Arnett Educational & Cultural Foundation, a
non-profit, IRS approved 502(c)(3) foundation which has made this magnificent
collection available to all at no cost. "There are no sign-in's or any
other requirement for use other than an Internet connection and a web
browser. There is no spyware or any other mechanism that would
inconvenience the user. Our foundation funds make that possible."
The collection is offered with an incredible, precedent shattering license to
use the copyrighted collection for almost any purpose.
Arnett explained, "We live in a capitalistic society and the material should be
available for newspapers, book authors, web site developers, television
producers, or other commercial uses as well as that for students and
scholars. We just ask that credit be given, and the only limitation is
that no-one can sell or offer the entire collection or a large part of it."
Dr. Lewis Eigen, the Editor & Compiler, has been at work on this project for
almost 30 years. A small portion of the collection was published several
years ago as The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations. Dr,
Eigen explained. "It took almost 1,000 pages to present just 12,000
quotations. The book was just too inefficient a vehicle for massive
collections like this. One of the reasons is that unlike almost all the
quotation collections offered on the web, Eigen's Quotations has citations
and/or sources for almost all of the quotes. "The web is the greatest
tool for scholarship since the book," Eigen explained, "but unfortunately there
is also much junk on the web. Most quotations on the web offer no
citation so that editors, journalists, teachers and scholars rarely have some
reasonable assurance that the quotations are accurate or even authentic.
There are unfortunately thousands of spurious and bogus quotations on the
web. Some are the result of well-intentioned efforts, but others are
deliberately spurious, bogus quotes which unethical partisans make up to
support their ideological, political positions. When one web site carries
the spurious quote, others pick it up indiscriminately. Citations are the
safest assurance, but even some quotations with citations are forgeries."
Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations has made a number of
technical and scholarly breakthroughs. The most dramatic of these is Conceptual
Indexing. Eigen explained, "Searching on the web is
historically done by searching for words in the text. Even Google,
the greatest of the current search engines uses this method primarily.
However, for quotations, it is often the case that the key meaning of the quote
cannot be gleaned by the few words themselves. Take Kennedy's famous
quotation: 'Say not what your country can do for you. Say what you can do
for your country.' If you were searching a collection of quotations and
searched for 'patriotism' or 'duty,' you would ideally find that Kennedy
quotation. But that does not happen with any of the web quotation
collections and does not with Google or other modern engines. But
with our search engine, you will find it easily."
Eigen does not claim any great technological breakthrough that will
automatically add conceptual index terms to literal text. "We did it the
old-fashioned way," Eigen explained. "The other editors and I have read
every quotation in the collection and using our guidelines have added the
conceptual terms which describe the quotation but which might not be present in
the verbiage." There are over 17,000 different conceptual index terms
which the user might search for, and when applied to the quotations, there are
over a quarter of a million terms attached to the over 40,000 quotations.
Mrs. Arnett, the foundation president compared the size of Eigen's collection to
others. "Consider that the Eigen Collection is slightly larger than Bartlett's
Quotations and almost as large as the Columbia Collection of Quotations.
However, these collections cover all subjects from love to cooking. Eigen's
Political & Historical Quotations includes only political and
historical quotes. In that sense, it is by far the world's largest
repository of political and historical quotations, dwarfing Bartlett's and
Columbia and all others in this arena.
Another tool that the Eigen Collection offers is that of a technical thesaurus.
Search for quotations dealing with the "military" and "Blacks." What
typically one might not get is a quotations which uses the word
"military" and the term "Negro" was used instead-or "African American."
In the Eigen collection, ask for any one and you will get the quotations using
the synonyms as well.
Another important feature of Eigen's Political & Historical Quotations,
which no other quotation collections have, is the ability to do "fielded
searches." Ramona E. F. Arnett explained, if you search for quotations
using the terms "John" and "Kennedy," you would get all the quotations by John
Kennedy and about John Kennedy. If one wants the former, in Eigen's
Quotations, you just search the author field. If one wants the quotes
about Kennedy, search only the conceptual index field. If a student is
interested in quotations about illicit drugs, in most collections all the
quotations would come up where the word "drug" was used in the quote, even in
the pharmaceutical sense. This problem is easily solved with Eigen's
Collection by searching for the term "drugs" in the quotation itself and using
the negative function provided excluding those quotations which have "medicine"
in the conceptual index terms."
The normal kinds of compound quotations are easy so that one can, with a single
search, return all the quotations which any particular figure-say Abraham
Lincoln-said about treason or labor. When a search is returned, the first
lines of the quotation appear along with the author so that the user can choose
whether to display the quotation in full. Using the fielded search power, it is
easy to find quotations about the slavery of Indians in Colonial America or the
views on slavery of the Popes of the Roman Catholic Church.
The quotations are also classified by Category. One of the
favorite categories is "Compliments & Insults." Using the category
concept for example, we can search for all the insults of say Richard Nixon or
any other figure. We use Nixon as the example because he holds the record
of having more insults directed at him than any other politician or public
figure.
When one displays the quotations in the Eigen Collection, three other unusual
but powerful features become evident. First, the dates of birth and death
of the quotee usually appear. There are few quotation web sites which do
this. Also, the political offices or other positions the quotee held are
usually included. In addition, a graphic of the quotee also appears
beside the quotation for most of the quotes. There are those of course
for which no graphic is available or at least has not been yet found by Eigen
and his staff. As a matter of fact, users are invited to submit graphics
where they are missing or make any other suggestions or criticisms. Eigen
explained, "We do not allow a user to change the data base in any way as some
other indiscriminate quotation web sites do. We have special forms
designed where the user can make suggestions and submit them, but all are
carefully vetted and researched by our editorial staff before they are
included.
When a search returns a set of quotations, Eigen's Political and Historical
Quotations has carried some of the ranking techniques pioneered by
Google to a new level. The proprietary search engine that the Foundation
has developed , Dynamic Quotesearcher™, maintains a complete historical record
of all the searches that have ever been done. Counts are maintained on
the number of times a search has "found" each quotation, and also the number of
times that users have displayed each particular quotation. When the list
of found quotations is displayed for a user, it is ranked by these variables so
that the most "popular" quotations are listed first. A popularity index
number appears next to each quotation so this information is transmitted to the
user in addition to being used for ranking the order of presentation.
Another component of the Eigen collection is Context. Many
of the quotations have editorial commentary explaining a host of things
including terminology from another era, historical facts putting the quotation
in context or important facts about the authorship of the quotation
itself. For example, Kennedy's famous "Ask not ." quote was actually
drafted by his chief speechwriter, Theodore Sorenson, who claims that he
developed the line from Kennedy's statements made several times earlier.
This context information appears with the quotation.
One of the most powerful concepts of computers is the ability to use hyper
text. It is the ideal tool for cross referencing. And this
collection makes use of hypertext as no other quotation tool on the web has yet
to achieve. Many of the quotations have cross references to other
quotations which might be earlier or later versions of the quotations or
derivations thereof-or contrary views-especially where the particular
politician being quoted has flip-flopped or changed his/her mind over
time. The user is hypertexed to each from the other. Dr. Eigen gave
this example: "Kennedy's memorable quotations of 'Ask not .' actually was
not the first time that this notion had been expressed. Kennedy was not
even the first President to articulate the idea. There are a number of
other similar expressions and the Eigen Collection user will see a section on
'Related Quotes.' Clicking on any of the numbers in that section jumps to
the related quotation-which in this case, are the earlier versions of Kennedy's
quotation. Were Kennedy or Sorenson familiar with any of these?
Sorenson claims he was not, but you can make your own judgment when exploring
all the hypertext links."
Quotations, ever since Bartletts, were assumed to have had their
origins in written sources. Even speech quotations were included only if
they had appeared in print or a written, published manuscript. However,
Father Simpson, in his great quotation collection, Simpson's Contemporary
Quotations, pioneered the use of quotations from contemporary, 20th
century media-radio and TV. We have followed Father Simpson's innovative
example. For contemporary quotations the audio and other media citations
almost outnumber the printed. Eigen has gone one step further and
included quotations from the Internet and the World Wide Web. The
collection does not include simply "scraping" quotations from other web
collections. However, there are many web sites of serious journalistic
and scholarly standards and these have been used as sources. For example,
many newspapers first publish articles on the web edition, and the printed
edition follows. Further many have articles on the web edition for which
there was no room in the printed edition. Some of the Internet Blogs
maintain very high standards. There are many wonderful scholarly web
sites that contain material that meets the highest academic and journalistic
standards of authenticity. We use these with no pause or concern.
Other web sites have virtually no standards, and we avoid these.
For the educator, scholar or editor, there is an over 100 page manual specifying
the criteria that Eigen and his team have used for inclusion of quotations,
classifying nationalities, inclusion of attributed quotations, selection of
political positions, and a number of other elements. There is a unique
analysis which explains for students and other scholars and editors what
characteristics make for a good quotations. It is a favorite of many
journalists and their editors.
For the many millions of Americans who have slightly impaired eyesight,
www.politicalquotes.org has a user selected adjustment to enlarge the size of
the type fonts on the screens or on printouts of hard copy.
The proprietary search engine was
designed by the SHS Division of ORC Macro, the nation's leading developer of
informational and academic websites that are accessed by millions of
people. The data base utilized is Microsoft Sequel Server, and the
Web Server is Microsoft IIS. The proprietary search engine, Dynamic
Quotesearcher™, is written in Microsoft .net. The web site
is dynamically driven. The quotations are not stored in any static web
pages. Rather, whenever any user conducts a search, the SHS created Dynamic
Quotesearcher™ creates, on the fly, web pages uniquely for that user
only. The servers of the SHS server farm have the capacity to handle many
millions of searches a month and sufficient bandwidth is provided by the SHS
T-3 connections to the Internet.
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