A Labor Theoretic Approach - Human Information Retrieval - page 64

diffusion within the primary literature as well as the searching process.
Regarding primary literature, Marx's phrase comes from the dominant
English language translation of the Grundrisse , published in 1973 and
not yet subject to processes of secondary diffusion that might have ena-
bled discussion of Marx's theme of technology as a human construction
without using the significant phrase. For searching, the understanding
that phrase searching often exclusively yields tokens of the intended type
could have been obtained by reiterated searches on different phrases. 5
Theoretically, we can explain the correspondence of tokens to type from
the perspective of information theory regarding transition probabilities
between letters and also between words, understood as cohesive groups
of letters (Shannon 1951/1993). Chapter 7 discusses the understanding
of the structure of written language obtainable from information theory.
Semantic description processes bypassed in the discovery of documents
still may be exploited to obtain copies of those documents from librar-
ies or bookshops, using their own humanly and semantically constructed
records. The enhancement of human capacities itself creates partly novel
difficulties—selection from an enlarged body of potentially relevant and
now more readily discoverable primary literature, and understanding how
to exploit syntactically generated descriptions. Developments in descrip-
tion practices have increased and slightly transformed search labor.
Distribution of the products of semantic description labor (for instance,
catalog records) emerged in premodernity and continues in modernity with
elements of continuity and modulation. Thus, the costs of human seman-
tic labor required to produce descriptions are effectively shared, although
semantic labor itself is not directly divided. WorldCat , for instance,
contains the products of semantic description labor as catalog records.
Records are created by communal labor, guided by the universal labor
embodied in codes, understandings, and precedents for document descrip-
tion. The products of communal labor (catalog records) are distributed
to participating libraries, which use syntactic and primarily technology-
based processes to incorporate them into their own institutional catalogs
(WorldCat 2007). Amazon.com also uses products of human semantic
description labor as records for books, although Amazon's standards are
less full and exacting than those required by WorldCat (WorldCat 2007;