An interesting post by Jim Stogdill on the Radar O'reilly blog highlights the current limitations of the Google age (wondrous as it is). He started thinking about the implications of the Bezos comment from the Kindle announcement, “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.”
"The problem is that old books reference people and other stuff that a contemporary reader would have known immediately, but that are a mystery to me today - a mystery that needs solving if I want to understand what the author is trying to say, and to get that sense of how they saw the world. If you want to see what I mean, try reading Winston Churchill's Second World War series."
Even going forward in a digitized world this problem remains. What precisely is the meaning? – without it being filtered and recast by well-meaning Wikipedia editors. Ultimately, time as a dimension is important to meaning. Time, meaning, and by definition context, constantly change. Even efforts to hyperlink usage and meaning in digital need to address this element, otherwise the problem persists of needing to go to the research library to get unvarnished understanding of the author’s contemporary meaning.
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