Kindle
Following up on yesterday's BB post about David McRaney's sociological analysis of LOLcats, image macros, and invisible cheezborgahs, Internet knowitall Simon Spero says:
McRaney's recent article [McRaney 2007],whilst interesting from the syntactics perspective, fails to cite the relevant literature, and as a result does not satisfactorily align his work to the central research questions within the field.Previousleh on BB:The methodology applied in [Spero 2007] uses a Description Logic approach to the begin the process of unifying the emergent ontology of lolcats with the rules of cuteness heuristically determined in Frost's definitive and ongoing survey [Frost 2005].
Our study revealed several strengths and weaknesses inherent in a pure Description Logic approach. Although it was trivial to dervive a solution to the lolcat/cheezeburger hypothesis (lolcat can has multiple cheezeburger), other classifications are not expressible without the use of more powerful formalisms.
For example, due to monotonicity constraints, it is not possible to encode the knowledge that, whilst by by default things that look like Hitler are not cute, a kitten that looked like hitler, wrapped in a burrito, with its paw up, might be a CuteThing. Also, without the use of higher order reasoning capabilities, it is non-trivial to describe the set of things accompanied by smaller versions of themselves.
[McRaney 2007] David McRaney, L337 Katz0rz, 1 J. Am Soc. Macrologists available at [Link] (2007)
[Spero 2007] Simon Spero, Loltology - I saw ur mom on teh sermantic webz, 1 LJ. Am. Lolbrarian. Assoc (2007) available at [Link].
[Frost 2007] Meg Frost, The Rules of Cuteness, J Cuteology (2005-2007, ongoing) available at [Link]