Description and Search Labor
Description and Search Labor
This chapter examines the concepts of description and search labor, both of which, as mental labor, participate in the conditions for other forms of mental labor. It considers distinctions between types of mental labor and their different possibilities for transfer to technology. It then applies the perspective established on mental labor and technology to understand description and search labor and how they are related to selection labor, or the total labor involved in information retrieval. The chapter also discusses labor, process, and product as well as the semantics and syntactics of description labor. It shows that description labor involves cataloging, classification, and database description.
Keywords: description labor, search labor, mental labor, technology, information retrieval, semantics, syntactics, cataloging, classification, database description
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