A Labor Theoretic Approach - Human Information Retrieval - page 56

Some categories developed primarily for physical and productive labor
explicitly recognized elements of mental labor. According to Marx, uni-
versal labor—“all scientific work, all discovery and invention”—differen-
tiates from communal labor: universal labor is “brought about partly by
the cooperation of men now living, but partly also by building on earlier
work,” while communal labor “simply involves the direct cooperation of
individuals” (1894/1981, 199). Labor might originate as communal labor,
but it is transformed into universal labor as labor-created knowledge dif-
fuses.
Labor separates into communal labor and universal labor.
Communal labor includes individual labor. In both hardware and soft-
ware, information technology results primarily from universal labor.
Human descriptions of information objects (records) result predomi-
nantly from communal labor.
Distinctions of labor, process, and product, understood close to their
ordinary discourse senses, could also be applied to mental labor and
its products. In oral speech, particularly under orality that preceded
the development of written language, labor includes the entire activity
of communication and process and product are not fully separated. In
written language, the product is separate from labor and the possibility
emerges of formalizing the processes involved in making that product.
Under modernity, processes can be conducted automatically. Therefore,
originally undifferentiated labor separates into labor, process, and prod-
uct, with associated changes in the meanings of the constituent terms, or:
Labor separates into labor, process, and product.
We can apply analytic distinctions between labor, process, and product to
modern information retrieval activities and systems, with labor as human
labor, process as a formalized process and often delegated to technology,
and product as the outcome of labor and process (for instance, records or
index descriptions).
We then introduced distinctions specific to mental labor. Mental labor
could be semantic or syntactic, linking a widely held distinction between
levels of analysis to mental labor. Semantic and syntactic mental labor
could be regarded as separating from undifferentiated mental labor.
Human mental labor separates into semantic labor and syntactic labor.