Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Conclusion
At the semantic level, the process of information retrieval may remain
far more enduringly intractable and, despite technological and system
developments, not amenable to teleological transformation. One mid-
eighteenth-century comment, by a lexicographer who relied partly on
his own accumulated knowledge for making a monolingual dictionary
(Boswell 1791/1980, 131-132),
6
still gives the most convincing account
of the process of information retrieval:
When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things
unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should
revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which
I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into
those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should
display my acquisitions to mankind. . . . But these were the dreams of a poet
doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for
instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had
brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I
doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the under-
taking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find
by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained:
I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that topic referred to topic,
that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed;
and that thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to
chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was
still beheld at the same distance from them.
I then contracted my design, determining to confide in myself, and no longer to
solicit auxiliaries, which produced more incumbrance than assistance: by this I
obtained at least one advantage, that I set limits to my work, which would in time
be finished, though not completed. (Johnson 1755/1982, 21-22)
Mental labor is both made explicit and alluded to in repeated analogies
between literature searching and physical mining. The Aristotelian notion
of deliberation—“to deliberate whenever I doubted”—is also critiqued
implicitly. The contrast between “finished” and “completed,” a subtle
distinction between the meanings of words made in a lexicographic con-
text, has relevance here: this particular sequence of chapters ends, but the
research agenda is not complete.
