Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Summary
Analogous concepts in partly separate scholarly discourses support the
value of selection power. Librarianship held a comparable concept in bib-
liographic control, indexing endorsed the discriminatory power of a term
(a crucial factor in obtaining control), and cybernetics valued control and
navigation. In addition, the value of selection power was supported by
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disputes within philosophy;
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a fictional critique of hierarchical classifications;
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the etymology of intelligence;
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and more specifically in relation to information retrieval systems, ordi-
nary discourse comments on information retrieval.
The concept of selection power was elucidated and understood as the
human faculty for discrimination; we endorse it here as the primary
design and evaluation principle for information systems. As a special
case of implementation, selection power absorbed query transformation,
appropriate in certain circumstances and compelled by certain forms of
technology (for instance by the batch-processing methods of the 1950s).
Thus, the first proposition for developing a labor theoretic approach to
information retrieval asserts the value of selection power both as a prop-
erty of human consciousness and as a primitive term, open to elucidation
but not further decomposition.
Selection Power and Selection Labor
The relation between selection power and selection labor is not con-
ceived either ahistorically or independently of technology. For instance,
in primarily oral societies, forms of recitation not equivalent to verbatim
repetition but still dependent on individual memory within a communal
context were crucial to knowledge preservation by renewal (Goody and
Watt 1968). The Icelandic law-speaker provides a transitional form that
both inherits elements from orality and anticipates characteristics of writ-
ten literacy. The law-speaker was required to recite the law and to answer
queries on legal and parliamentary procedures by oral pronouncements
based on his memory of the law (Njal 1280/1960, 306-308). From a
modern perspective, the law-speaker could be regarded as an information
