Zipf’s law – something else I was introduced to by Is That A Fish In Your Ear, the stimulating book about translation by David Bellos.
But it sounded vaguely familiar, rang some sort of bell – 80/20, negative exponential, something like that?
Google found me a paper which looked within my scope: Power Laws, Pareto distributions & Zipf’s law, not too mathematical, well written, by an author with a wide range – city populations, earthquakes, wars, moon craters, book sales, incomes …
Well that was just the first page, but now that I have (slightly belatedly) realised that my laptop came complete with a preloaded Adobe reader I have had the luxury of being able to download such documents to read at my leisure at home, without having to use up some of my precious time online or pay for a printout.
And so it came about that last Sunday, usually a time spent sorting out & tidying up & catching up, I found myself exercising intellectual muscles I had almost forgotten that I had, rather than the straightforwardly interesting read I was expecting.
In fact the experience left me pondering whether some of the difficulty was just me or whether reading from a screen really does call on previously un- or little-used cognitive functions or abilities that we all have to develop.
I have long been aware that I simply cannot properly assimilate densely argued textual information when reading with my head up. Is this because I have spent more than 60 years reading with my head down, from paper(s) which are spread over a flat horizontal desk, or resting on my knee, or propped up against the marmalade on the breakfast table?
Does it have something to do with the fact that reading is often closely associated with writing, recording notes or the results of calculations by hand, which of course involves watching what my hand is doing?
Would I find it easier to read with my head up if I had, after all, learned to touch type when I was young?
I remember turning green with envy one day in the microfilm room of the university library; there was I, labouring to make manuscript notes from the (printed Parliamentary Papers) on the screen, while at an adjacent desk sat a (male, not all that young, probably American) person, fingers flying over the laptop as he gazed steadfastly, transcribing direct to disc the old, handwritten manuscript document on his screen.
But then expert secretaries & typists will tell you that they produce fast, accurate scripts without knowing anything about or absorbing the content at all. So perhaps the American had to go away & read the document to find out what it said, while I had already a good idea of how the new information fitted in with the rest of my research.
Musicians, when they need a score, for the most part read with their heads down. The exception may be players of an upright piano, church organ, or in a marching band; organists however must simultaneously do other complicated things – changing stops & playing pedals with their feet. Marching bands must also master the art of keeping in step.
I cannot think of any circumstance, at least since the invention of the book, when humans were regularly required to absorb complex information while reading with their heads up – nothing longer than a nameboard, sign or inscription – no more than the 64 letters & spaces of the on-screen subtitle, less than allowed in a Tweet. Of course the sheer weight of a book made it impractical to hold it up to read, & why go to the bother of building a vertical rest when the simpler horizontal surface of a table or the slightly raked one of a lectern would do.
So the question is whether reading ‘better’ with your head down is learned, or physiologically innate.
The sheer bulk of early desk top computers & work stations did not allow for anything other than the head-up position, unless there were specially adapted desks. Thank heavens for laptops.
But reading anything other than a relatively straightforward narrative is not easy if you can see only one small section at a time. Anything more complex …
This particular paper on power laws makes things more complicated by being printed over two columns per page – presumably to meet the requirements of a print journal. Then there is the conventional academic furniture of footnotes (at the foot of each page) & bibliographic references (at the back) plus multiple graphs & mathematical equations to consult. A recipe for giddiness, when you cannot even mark your place by holding your finger between the pages.
While it is true that clever people have invented ways of making this easier to do on screen (hovering mice?) & some of them may be available on my lap top. I just haven’t yet got that far up the learning curve.
It is also true that over time we as authors & originators too will think of different methods of organising, presenting & conveying information.
For one thing most written texts, in the form to which we have grown accustomed to them, contain a great deal of redundancy in terms of the quantity of hard information encoded therein. Yes, there is a lot of soft information, about the character of the writer etc, but a lot could be removed without damage to the main points. And form always affects content, so there is an inevitable degree of self-editing by an author to fit the space available.
Then there is the question of the thousand word picture, &, increasingly, animations.
I was particularly attracted to this paper about power laws because it contains a whole section on the mechanisms which may give rise to such distributions in either natural or man made systems. Some of these involve complex physics.
In my opinion users & analysts of statistics often fail to pay enough attention to the processes which generated them, & therefore assume over-simple structures of causation.
In the present case, when it came to these more complicated processes with even more diagrams, I longed for some animations instead. But until that day, there is really no alternative to printing out the pages so that I can spread them out to look at.
Still, at least I was able to assess the worth of the expenditure before I opened my purse.
I have so far been coy about the authorship & provenance of this paper. That is because the version which I originally downloaded appeared to be a complete orphan – no author's name, no title (of either parent institution or publication) & no date, though it is clearly post-2003 (UK traffic statistics for that year are quoted, which show that motorway speeds peak at 5mph above the current limit of 70).
Another Google search however revealed that it is Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law by M. E. J. Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, published in Contemporary Physics, Vol. 46, No. 5, September–October 2005, 323 – 351
PS the first time I ever heard of the 80/20 rule (expressed in those very terms) was in the 1980s in relation to GP appointments, 80% of which were said to be with 20% of the patients on his list.
