Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A further level of semantic understanding involves knowledge of the
overall system of information system production and of the role or posi-
tion of particular information systems used within that system. The term
system
refers to an interacting set of components rather than a deliber-
ately coordinated or planned system (Roberts 1977). The diffusion of
Internet search engines is changing both the overall system and the nature
of expertise.
A significant contrast between description and search labor lies
between the presence of the object for description and the customary
initial absence of the object in searching. Presence informs description
and absence combined with desire to restore presence motivates search-
ing. Objects or documents recalled in search can be received as exemplar
documents and used (possibly iteratively) to modify the search regarding
choice of terms from the language of representation, where it exists and
can be exploited, and the language of discourse. The presence and absence
of the object creates a particular form of abstraction or disconnection for
machine description processes and human searching of the products of
those processes. In machine description, words are characteristically torn
or abstracted from their context, understood specifically as the line of
writing. They may be considered apart from their lines of writing by a
human searcher, but machine processes restore their various lines of writ-
ing during retrieval. They are then made more fully present and subjected
again to human semantic interpretation, informed by their line of writing
and their broader context (see chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 for fuller discussion
of these patterns). Theoretically, it is possible to reconstruct documents
from full-text descriptions, at least as linear sequences of words. Thus,
the contrast between the presence and absence of the object described ini-
tially distinguishes description from searching: presence informs descrip-
tion and absence motivates searching. The contrast tends to produce a
mirror image of description in searching.
Therefore, search labor parallels description labor, and search labor is
either semantic or syntactic in character. Semantic search labor is inescap-
ably and directly human, while syntactic search labor can be transferred
to technology, where it becomes a machine process. Obtained without a
Procrustean fitting of data to theory and without disguising their con-
trasts, the parallelism between search labor and description labor rein-
