Information Technology Reference
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extended sequences from the syntagma and the message—to the phrase
and the multiword sequence—has been demonstrated.
Less explicit assumptions of information retrieval research also demand
reconsideration. The view that an index description must be briefer than
the document described can be regarded as a historically specific product
of the storage constraints imposed by print and early modern computer
technologies. Rather neglected considerations of the depth of indexing
could be revisited. Most strongly, the assumption of deterministic modes
of interrogating systems, which correspond to the batch processing of the
1950s, can be replaced by a theoretically supported preference for nonde-
terminism. The preference for nondeterminism concurs with advocacy of
selection power over query transformation as a design principle for infor-
mation retrieval systems, particularly when selection power is conceived
as property of human consciousness rather than of system processes.
Library and Information Science
From the perspective of library and information science, exposing
humanly assigned metadata as a historically specific development of pre-
modernity—not fully present in orality emerging into literacy but persist-
ing into modernity as a renewed inheritance—was crucially relevant for
the labor theoretic approach and the practice of information retrieval.
Such recognition enables theoretical separation of the current value of
metadata from its persistence as an inheritance of modernity. In a synthe-
sis that combines recognition of humanly assigned metadata as a specific
historical phase with the semantics developed, such metadata could be
regarded as gathering together different units from the syntagma, yield-
ing generic power (or in some less frequently occurring applications,
differentiating identical units of expression) and thus enhancing the pos-
sibilities of specificity in searching (figure 9.1). We suggested here that
humanly assigned metadata could maintain its value for generic capacity
(that is, collecting together disparate items or aspects of items from the
original discourse). Currently, the separation of value from inheritance
has occurred more frequently in practice than in theory, which has been
constrained by intellectual inheritance and may require further transfor-
mation (Wilson 2001).
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