Glenda B. Claborne
520 Assignment 1 – Resource Evaluation
The MIT Encyclopedia
of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS)
Edited by Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil
Digital Version: http://cognet.mit.edu/library/erefs/mitecs/
Print Version: September 2001; ISBN 0-262-73144-4; 1/2 x 11, 1104 pp. $68.00/£45.50
“The
jungle is in us, in our unconscious, and we have succeeded in projecting it
into the outside world, where now the Saurians are lustily playing about again
in the form of cars, airplanes and rockets. If a psychologist should
participate in your world conference, he would be up against the thankless task
to make his colleagues from other disciplines see where they had the blind
spot. The human mind will sacrifice everything for a new gadget but will
carefully refrain from a look into itself."
Thus was Carl Jung quoted by Samuel Jay Keyser, the Peter de Florez Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, when he introduced Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, at the latter’s lecture on his latest book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/23/. The quote was taken from a letter that Jung wrote in 1960 in response to a request by one J.P. Holliday, a weapons engineer, asking Jung to join a world conference on peace.
Contrary to Jung’s complaint, researchers into the jungles of the
mind seem to have not had the thankless task of making colleagues in other
disciplines see where they had the blind spot. In fact, since its beginnings in
the 1960s, the field of cognitive and brain sciences has evolved into a major
multi-disciplinary effort involving such distant fields as linguistics and
computer science as well as fields that have traditionally studied the nature
of the mind and the human condition such as psychology and philosophy. One of
the field’s pioneers, Noam Chomsky, stands as a symbol of a scientist able to
distinguish himself within the boundaries of his field as well as make a stand
on the pressing issues in the
Yet despite this phenomenal growth in the
field of cognitive and brain sciences, it was only recently that a niche for a
comprehensive reference work in the field has been filled by the MIT
Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS). The encyclopedia aims to “serve
researchers working in different traditions across a variety of fields in
cognitive science.” There are now undergraduate and graduate
programs in cognitive and brain sciences in many major research universities
and there are also several notable textbooks written on cognition and the mind.
MITECS aims to represent the diversity of theoretical and methodological
approaches driving the study of the mind and the brain.
The encyclopedia is one of 4 major works in the reference
collection of the CogNet Library which is part of MIT CogNet: The Brain
Sciences Connection. MIT CogNet (http://cognet.mit.edu) is the major digital project of the MIT
Press and brings together a growing collection of searchable digital resources
in the cognitive and brain science disciplines and makes them available online
in one place. In addition to the online library, MIT CogNet
also provides information resources on jobs, news, graduate programs, seminars,
and call for papers in the field of cognitive and brain sciences. As part of these
larger endeavors, each page in MITECS displays the logos for MIT Press and MIT
CogNet as well as the latter’s main menu bar placed horizontally at the top of
each page.
The material in MITECS consists of 471 articles each written by a
leading researcher on the topic. These articles can be accessed from hyperlinks
either through a title index in which the articles are arranged alphabetically from
Acquisition, Formal Theories of to X-bar Theory or from a main table of
contents in which the articles are grouped into six sections into which MITECS
classifies the cognitive and brain sciences. These six sections are: 1)
Philosophy 2) Psychology 3) Neurosciences 4) Computational Intelligence 5)
Linguistics and Language, and 6) Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. MITECS
considers the last section as adding to its effort to integrate the diverse
areas of study in the cognitive and brain sciences.
Each section is introduced in a long essay by an advisory editor,
a feature that is considered novel in this type of resource. The introductory
essay for each section provides the reader with a general idea of the
contributions of the domain to the field of cognitive and brain sciences. Each
introductory essay is presented with the main entries as in-page links at the
top of the page. Each essay, like each of the articles, has hyperlinks within
the main text that links the reader to related topics within MITECS. Related
topics are introduced as See Also hyperlinks. A comprehensive bibliography is
provided at the end of each essay and each article. The articles are concise
and include figures and diagrams that clearly illustrate the topic.
The title index lists the corresponding author for each of the 471
articles and the main table of contents also lists the corresponding editor for
each of the 6 sections. But MITECS also has a separate author index in which
the authors are arranged alphabetically with a link to their respective
articles. The email addresses of the contributors and editors are included in
the table of contents for each of the 6 sections. In many cases, a link to the
personal or institutional websites of the authors and editors are also
included. The authors and editors are from major research universities in the
MITECS can only be searched using the general search feature of
MIT CogNet. The reader can search according to the main areas of CogNet, namely
1) Library 2) News 3) Jobs 4) Seminars 5) Graduate Programs 6) Call for Papers,
or 7) All of Cognet. The search box is included on the upper-right corner of
every page of CogNet and the areas are in a drop-down list to the right of the
box. The search results are displayed with the name of the area on the left
side of the page and the corresponding number of items found on the right hand
side of the page. But the search feature of MITECS does not really narrow
searches according to the area that one specifies on the drop-down menu. For example,
a search on Noam Chomsky in the area of seminars lists the areas searched to
include Library: Books, News, and the 4 major reference works from the library
as well. One has to click on the an area in the results page which takes one to
the table of contents of a resource which may yet take one to another table of
contents. The search terms are not highlighted in the final article so it is
hard to find where in the text was the term found. This happened with other
searches I did in each of the specific areas which suggests that the search
feature is not properly configured. However, I think this deficiency can be
compensated by the indexes and tables of contents in MITECS.
The layout of the pages is clean. The color scheme is a cool blue
as seen in the logos for the MIT Press and MIT CogNet, the register and search
bar just below the logos, and the tabbed, horizontal main menu on every page.
Navigational structures include “next” and “previous” links at the beginning
and end of each page. The reader also knows where he/she is in a hierarchy of
topics which includes the resource (MITECS) at the top, the table of contents
next, and then either the particular article or a section main page (but no
more than 3 levels in the hierarchy).
At this point in its development, the resources in MITECS are not
yet linked to resources outside of the encyclopedia. The preface to the
encyclopedia however notes that it aspires to making the encyclopedia a core
reference for the extended community and will do this by providing a growing
collection of links to other cognitive science resources on the web not only at
the level of the encyclopedia as a whole but down to the level of each section
and article included in it.
Although MITECS is geared primarily for researchers in the field
of cognitive and brain sciences, the general public can have an abstracts-only
access of the online version for free. Individuals who buy the book can also
have full-text access to the online version. And of course, MITECS offers site
licenses to libraries and institutions. These many points of access to MITECS
helps in ensuring that the interdisciplinary nature of the cognitive and brain
sciences reaches out to more fields of study, especially in fields that
emphasize a social constructivist approach to understanding human behavior and
societies. Perhaps then the study into the jungle that is in us can be married
to the study of the jungle that is outside us.