Contexts and contents

One pattern I come around to often is “context” vs. “content”, and the malleability between them.

In this framing, a “context” a whole—a big soup of information—and a piece of “content” is some kind of part of that whole—a little noodle or veggie in the soup. Ideally the “content” is something atomic and irreducible, but the fun part is that irreducibility is almost never possible, so you instead have to make tradeoffs about what is useful or what you want to mean.

Par example

One pretty classic example is a price of text, like a novel. The novel forms the whole “context”, and the smallest “contents” that make up that context are all the individual words.

Clearly, there are other “content” boundaries you could draw: chapters, paragraphs, pages, lines, sentences, etc. could each be the granularity we’re interested in for retrieving bits of info or making meaning somehow. In the other direction, “context” is also not really fixed: if I’m trying to determine the meaning of a paragraph (as an individual piece of content), its meaning is colored by its context within the novel…but it is also colored by its context within the chapter, or even by things outside of our original context (e.g., maybe the meaning is slightly different if we include other works by the author in the “context” we’re considering).

If you think big (and small) enough, even individual words or morphemes tunnel between micro and macro information: a word’s meaning is usually contextual but also brings its own content-full meaning—but that meaning is informed by the context of a whole language, which is itself informed by people using it across space and time. Everything is, to some extent, interconnected and not entirely reducible. But it’s neat to find useful patterns that make meaning and representation out of it all.

Why call them that?

There are probably more precise or accurate terms to use than “context” and “content”—both field-specific ones (like “corpus” and “document” in the linguistic/NLP world) and more generalizable ones (like, I dunno, set theory probably has terms for this?). But I come back to these words in my own head because they aren’t rigorously defined, so it’s easier to avoid being overly-rigid about what is what. And also I like the alliteration. It’s fun.