Glossographia brings us a funny story from the depths of Google Scholar, which is Google's full-text-searching answer to searchable catalog subscription indexes like JSTOR, SciFinder, etc.
One of my students in my introductory linguistic anthropology course this term is doing a paper on linguistic aspects of laughter and humor. During my search, I encountered the following citation (direct from Google Scholar to you):
Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.
After I stopped laughing, I set to figuring out what was going on.
The answer turns out to be a metadata problem that's endemic to machine indexing. It serves to illustrate the differences between machine and human indexing, and also to spark an interesting discussion in the comments about the relative merits of Google Scholar and the subscription services. Academics or former academics may enjoy it. It reminds me a bit of the perennial "Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia Britannica" debate, even as it reminds one of the commenters more of John Henry, the steel-drivin' man.
(h/t Eugene Volokh, from whom I take the title of this post)
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