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character of system interrogation, where queries can be revised on the
basis of system responses. Selection labor—distinguished from selection
processes—has begun to reemerge as a single category, although concen-
trated in searching rather than in description. The availability of the entire
utterance for exploitation, the dialogic character of system interrogation,
the concentration of selection labor as a single activity are then analogous
between orality emerging into literacy and modernity.
Description products as records or metadata formed by human
semantic labor on preexisting utterances were not part of information
retrieval under orality emerging into literacy and can be regarded as prac-
tices developed under written literacy, with an often disguised connec-
tion to the constraints of the technologies of written literacy. Semantic
human description labor and its products often are substantively absent
or bypassed in searching under modernity. The human syntactic descrip-
tion labor of premodernity itself is transformed into machine description
processes. The description products of modernity can then be regarded as
partly specific to that era.
Therefore, substantive analogies that run across particular technologi-
cal eras support the more methodological exclusion of human semantic
description labor and its products and the focus on the linear utterance
and procedures for selection from linear utterances in the subsequent con-
sideration of full text retrieval (see table 5.4).
Table 5.4
Inheritances and transformations from orality and literacy
Selection labor
Linear utterance
Dialogic character
Orality
emerging into
literacy
Concentrated in
memorization and
communication
Directly
presented over
time
Human
respondent
Written
literacy or
premodernity
Development of
description labor
and products
Can be read
Absence of human
respondent
Computational
modes or
modernity
Concentrated in
searching
Available for
exploitation, by
computational
(nonlinear)
procedures
Dialogic character
of system
interrogation
