Selection Power and Selection Labor - Human Information Retrieval - page 24

four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive . . . Age known by marks in mouth.”
(1854/1989, 6) (a description that does resemble eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century taxonomies for the horse [Linne 1792; Donovan 1820],
themselves influenced by the Aristotelian method of definition by genus
and species)—are presented as harsh. Outside the restricting enclosure of
the town, a different metaphor for knowledge is discernible:
They walked on across the fields and down the shady lanes, sometimes getting
over a fragment of a fence so rotten that it dropped at a touch of the foot, some-
times passing near a wreck of bricks and beams overgrown with grass, mark-
ing the site of deserted works. They followed paths and tracks, however slight.
(Dickens 1854/1989, 353)
The value of an information system could lie in the ability it offers dis-
criminatingly to follow “paths and tracks, however slight.”
The etymology of intelligence offers further support for the signifi-
cance of selection power. Traced to its Latin form ( inter-legere : to choose
from or between things), intelligence is strongly analogous to selection
power, implying deliberate choice rather than domination by brute needs.
Plutarch's account of the formation of the Roman military legion is better
known:
When the city was built, in the first place, Romulus divided all the multitude
that were of age to bear arms into military companies, each company consisting
of three thousand footmen and three hundred horsemen. Such a company was
called a “legion,” because the warlike were selected out of all. (1914, 123)
Thus, division or differentiation of individuals represents a further char-
acteristic of man in the polis in its initial realization as the city-state. The
current discussion conceives intelligence as a quality of human conscious-
ness rather than inhering in the objects differentiated.
Comments on information systems by contemporary ordinary discourse
are highly significant but difficult to produce as evidence. Evaluative crite-
ria may be given by implication rather than fully and directly articulated.
Yet a searcher who complains that it is difficult to control the number
of records retrieved invokes a principle of discriminatory power. More
explicitly, one spoken response to a presentation of the value of selection
power was, “that's the basis [an enhanced capacity for informed choice]
on which people use systems anyway” (Warner 2000, 79). Not influenced
directly by the query transformation tradition, extradisciplinary written