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The article extends the distinction of semantic from syntactic labour to comprehend all forms of mental labour. It answers a critique from de Fremery and Buckland, which required envisaging mental labour as a differentiated spectrum.

The paper adopts a discursive approach. It first reviews the significance and extensive diffusion of the distinction of semantic from syntactic labour. Second, it integrates semantic and syntactic labour along a vertical dimension within mental labour, indicating analogies in principle with, and differences in application from, the inherited distinction of intellectual from clerical labour. Third, it develops semantic labour to the very highest level, on a consistent principle of differentiation from syntactic labour. Finally, it reintegrates the understanding developed of semantic labour with syntactic labour, confirming that they can fully and informatively occupy mental labour.

The article further validates the distinction of semantic from syntactic labour. It enables to address Norbert Wiener's classic challenge of appropriately distributing activity between human and computer.

The article transforms work in progress into knowledge for diffusion.

It has practical implications for determining what tasks to delegate to computational technology.

The paper has social implications for the understanding of appropriate human and machine computational tasks and our own distinctive humanness.

The paper is highly original. Although based on preceding research, from the late 20th century, it is the first separately published full account of semantic and syntactic labour.

This paper reviews developments from a study of the reception of the Research Assessment Exercise 1996. Research evaluation, including the value of citation analysis and the responsibilities attaching to publication of citation analyses, is considered. The distinctions made in the communication model for analysing reception, between dissemination and diffusion and between esoteric and exoteric media and communities, are developed further. Information transfer is represented as an explicable process. Possible further developments, including the appropriate relation to disciplines with related interests in the social communication of knowledge, are anticipated.

Information science has been convincingly characterised as a response to developments in information and communications technologies and as part of the gestalt of the computer. Despite this, it has had a limited understanding of information technology and has repressed or disguised its origins. Its understanding of itself and its potential for contribution to other discourses has thereby been restricted. The paper develops an understanding of information technology. The idea that the computer as a machine is concerned with the transformation of information, not material or energy, is extended to other information technologies. Technology is regarded as a radical human construction, in a position derived from Marx and mediated by economics. On these bases, an understanding of information technology as a form of knowledge concerned with the transformation of signals from one form or medium into another is proposed. Invention, innovation, and diffusion are distinguished as stages in the development of technologies. For modern information technologies, the history of copyright can provide indicators for innovation and diffusion. The mid‐ to late 19th century, in the United States and between the United States and Europe, is identified as the critical period for diffusion. An explanation for this is proposed in terms of the dynamism of the period, its hospitality to innovation, and in the United States continental expansion and developing links with Europe.

The contrast between the value placed on discriminatory power in discussions of indexing and classification and on the transformation of a query into a set of relevant records dominant in information retrieval research has not yet been fully explored. The value of delivering relevant records in response to a query has been assumed by information retrieval research paradigms otherwise differentiated (the cognitive and the physical). Subsidiary concepts and measures (relevance and precision and recall) have been increasingly subjected to critiques. The founding assumption of the value of delivering relevant records now needs to be questioned. An enhanced capacity for informed choice is advocated as an alternative principle for system evaluation and design. This broadly corresponds to: the exploratory capability discussed in recent information retrieval research; the value of discriminatory power in classification and indexing; Giambattista Vico‘s critique of the unproductivity of Aristotelian methods of categorisation as routes to new knowledge; and, most significantly, to ordinary discourse conceptions of the value of information retrieval systems. The criterion of enhanced choice has a liberating effect, restoring man as an artificer and enabling a continuing dialectic between theory and practice. Techniques developed in classic information retrieval research can be adapted to the new purpose. Finally, the substitution of the principle of enhanced choice exemplifies the development of a true science, in which previous paradigms are absorbed into new as special cases. Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water‐rugs, and demi‐wolves, are clept All by the name of dogs: the valu’d file Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The housekeeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous Nature Hath in him clos’d; whereby he does receive Particular addition, from the bill That writes them all alike; Shakespeare. Macbeth. c.1606.

The distinction between a meta‐ and an object‐language has become increasingly familiar in information science, through the diffusion of the concept of metadata. A significant antecedent to this distinction can be found in the development of formal logic. This paper proposes an analogous distinction for information retrieval research, between the metalanguage of discourse about information retrieval systems and the object‐language of transformations within systems. In formal logic, acceptance of a meta:object distinction has had a clarifying and simplifying effect. An understanding of potential object‐language transformations as the writing, erasure, and substitution of symbols has also been developed. The existing metalanguage of information retrieval research has displayed a founding assumption (the value of delivering all, and possibly only all, the records relevant to a given query), some central concepts, entities for evaluative purposes, and derived measures. An alternative founding principle of enhanced informed choice is endorsed. The emerging view of operations within information retrieval systems such as transformation, sorting, and partitioning is strongly analogous to the more fully established account of possible object‐language transformations in formal logic. Analytical clarity has been obtained and economy in research effort is made possible.

Information science has differentiated information technology from productive technology, but the common concept of technology remains largely unexplored. A view of technology as a human construction, applied to productive technology, has begun to be developed to comprehend information technology. Information technology is regarded as a form of knowledge concerned with the transformation of signals from one form or medium into another. Analogous, although not identical, concepts of universality can be distinguished for both productive technology and for information technology. The steam engine has been regarded as a universal source of motive power and of the computer as a universal information machine. Universality helps account for the wide adoption of the steam engine and the computer. For both forms of technology, theoretical considerations related to universality and working constructions embodying universality have, in contrasting ways, been partly separate developments. Further possibilities offered by a view of information technologies as human constructions are indicated.

In this conceptual essay, the purpose of this paper is to argue that the structure of databases and other information systems provides valuable information beyond their content. The author contends that reading databases – as a separate, distinct activity from retrieving and reading the documents that databases contain – is an under-studied form of human-information interaction. Because the act of reading databases encourages awareness, reflection, and control over information systems, the author aligns the author’s proposal with “slow” principles, as exemplified by the slow food movement.

This paper presents an extended argument to demonstrate the value of reading a database. Reading a database involves understanding the relationship between database structure and database content as an interpretation of the world. For example, when a supermarket puts vermicelli in the pasta section but rice vermicelli in the Asian section, the supermarket suggests that rice vermicelli is more “Asian” than “noodle.” To construct the author’s argument, the author uses examples that range from everyday, mundane activities with information systems (such as using maps and automated navigation systems) to scientific and technical work (systematic reviews of medical evidence).

The slow, interpretively focused information interactions of reading databases complement the “fast information” approach of outcome-oriented retrieval. To facilitate database reading activities, research should develop tools that focus user attention on the application of database structure to database contents. Another way of saying this is that research should exploit the interactive possibilities of metadata, either human-created or algorithmically generated.

This paper argues that information studies research focuses too heavily on seeking and retrieval. Seeking and retrieval are just two of the many interactions that constitute our everyday activities with information. Reading databases is an area particularly ripe with design possibilities.

The aim of this paper is to reveal an information dynamic in which technology or dead labour is substituted for living mental labour.

A comparative historical review of technologies for reproducing written utterances and their relation to living labour.

A dynamic for mental labour, similar to that for physical labour, is isolated.

The productivity paradox, a central concern of the information systems literature, is dissolved.

The paper is relevant to both information science and information systems. Understanding an information dynamic can enable intervention in that dynamic.

The principal aim of this study is to examine the transmission of ideas across time in disciplines selected from the humanities and social sciences. Citation analysis is used to trace the diffusion of ideas as they are embodied in monographic publications. The study is part of a developing research programme and is intended to establish a framework to inform future developments. Four specific hypotheses are developed and tested. They are concerned with: the relative impact of monographs and journal articles produced within a discipline; the distinction between core and non‐core group monographs; the correlation between the reception and intellectual survival of a monograph; and the comparative level of impact of monographic and journal article publication by a single author. It is concluded that the presence of core or elite groups can be perceived in all aspects of the study. The validity of the methodologies employed is strengthened by the sharp distinctions between groups of monographs and of authors revealed by the analysis of data. Further analysis is needed to explore intra‐ and inter‐disciplinary diffusion of ideas over time in greater depth.

Speculations on the possibility of computers displaying intelligence are usually traced to Turing's 1950 paper, ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’. Claims for the literal intelligence of an appropriately programmed computer were publicly refuted by Searle in 1980. Optimism about the adequate simulation of intelligence is now further diminished. Analogies between the computer and the brain or mind have persisted. A contrasting perspective which links computers with documents through writing and through the faculty for constructing socially shared systems of signs has also been developed. From this perspective it can be shown that (i) claims for the literal intelligence of a computer rest on a similar basis to claims for the intelligence of a document, the production of depersonalised linguistic output, and (ii) that such claims are subject to an identical objection, that linguistic output is made available without a prior act of comprehension by the artefact. This paper places the Turing test in its intellectual and historical context. A claim that written words can give the appearance of intelligence, without the human capacity for dialectic response, is found in Plato's Phaedrus. This, too, must be placed in its historical context of a transition from predominantly oral to oral and written communication. Demonstrating that there are extensive similarities between the claims of computers and documents to literal intelligence is part of a progressive demystification of the computer.