Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In contrast to premodern practices, systems with syntactically based
description processes—human labor transferred to technology—have
proliferated, as exemplified by Internet search engines. Primarily syntac-
tic and machine processes increasingly generate the descriptions used for
searching the texts of works or citations between works on both Amazon.
com
(Amazon 2007) and Google.com
(2007a, b, c). (Amazon's “search
inside this topic” facility offers a concordance for the particular text,
and Google's descriptions or indexes provide weighted concordances;
machine processes produce both systems syntactically). Therefore, human
labor embodied in the written text of the documents described provides
a resource for description. Description processes can aid specificity in
retrieval, but the very number and diversity of results obtained may trans-
fer selection labor to the searcher. The links or traces left by semantically
guided explorations of resources can be exploited to determine the order
of references in retrieval and could be regarded as products of a form
of unpaid semantic description labor. The increasing dominance of the
Google search engine, which might appear to contradict assertion of the
proliferation of syntactically based systems, can be regarded as the diffu-
sion of an effective syntactic system, with some monopolistic forces aiding
its dominance. The market for information services has been regarded as
acting as a regulative mechanism that eliminates or corrects errors; a bet-
ter mechanism of correction remains undetermined (Swanson 1980, 128).
Although syntactic processes for selecting and ordering documents may
be open to unlimited variations derived from primitive computational
operations, only some of these variations may be interesting or useful.
One task for information retrieval research would involve attempting to
understand the effectiveness of Google, including the effects of syntac-
tic transformations on the semantic interpretation of words and phrases;
subsequent chapters will address these issues.
Appropriately exploited for searching, the greatly increased scope of
syntactically generated descriptions can enhance human capacities. For
example, using Google's advanced topic search
function to find the exact
phrase “power of knowledge objectified” yields a range of discussions
of Marx's (1859/1973) conception of technology: “
organs of the human
brain, created by the human hand
: the power of knowledge, objectified”
(706) (Google 2007c). Such a search requires understanding patterns of
