Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 3.1
Nineteenth-Century Identity Description Practices
Description labor, processes, and products can be realized and discerned in
activities other than cataloging and indexing. For instance, descriptions of
people for the purposes of controlling travel and citizenship have intensi-
fied since the developments in global communications (both physical trans-
port and message transmission) in the mid- to late-19th century. Identity
descriptions of people and descriptions of documents may share a similar
but more explicitly conceived aim to identify and differentiate objects for
descriptions (for instance, individuals as citizens). Jules Verne gives a gently
ironic account of the process of acquiring a passport in Paris in 1859:
He then went to the prefecture of the Seine—for Jacques 'the lord mayor's parlour'—
where he boldly requested a passport for the British Isles. His description was taken
down by an old, myopic clerk whom the progress of civilization would one day
replace by an officially designated photographer. (1992, 6-7).
Photographs are a more effectively translingual but not culturally invariant
means for recognizing identity than verbal descriptions.
Prior to the use of photographic images for establishing identity, or in
the empirical absence of an identifying image from a particular situation,
other behavioral characteristics were used to identify individuals or to dif-
ferentiate them from other individuals with whom they were or could be
confused. In Thomas Hardy's “The Three Strangers,” an escaped prisoner,
who had been due to be hanged, is identified by his “musical bass voice that
if you heard it once you'd never mistake as long as you lived.” (1888/1976,
34). In O. Henry's “The Theory and the Hound,” a wife murderer—whose
verbal description could encompass his companion even though “[t]hey
bore little resemblance one to the other in detail,”—is differentiated by his
highly angry response to the investigating sheriff's deliberate cruelty to an
animal: “I never yet saw a man that was over fond of horses and dogs but
what was cruel to women” (1910/1993, 401, 406). Both narratives reveal
an ordinary discourse understanding of the crucial value ascribed to an
identifying or discriminatory variable.
In modern practice, description processes in many situations are del-
egated largely to technology for the production of images, requiring
human semantic labor for recognition or comparison of image and person.
Consider, for instance, the making of images and their interpretation by
airport security systems.
description of objects, and, more intensely, in the compilation of indexes
from these descriptions. In particular, syntactic components of description
are being transferred from human labor to machine process. Descriptions
are becoming more full and exact, enabled but not compelled by the
