Julian Warner – författare

An overview of information retrieval rooted in the humanities and social sciences but informed by an understanding of information technology and information theory.

Information retrieval in the age of Internet search engines has become part of ordinary discourse and everyday practice: “Google” is a verb in common usage. Thus far, more attention has been given to practical understanding of information retrieval than to a full theoretical account. In Human Information Retrieval, Julian Warner offers a comprehensive overview of information retrieval, synthesizing theories from different disciplines (information and computer science, librarianship and indexing, and information society discourse) and incorporating such disparate systems as WorldCat and Google into a single, robust theoretical framework. There is a need for such a theoretical treatment, he argues, one that reveals the structure and underlying patterns of this complex field while remaining congruent with everyday practice.

Warner presents a labor theoretic approach to information retrieval, building on his previously formulated distinction between semantic and syntactic mental labor, arguing that the description and search labor of information retrieval can be understood as both semantic and syntactic in character. Warner''s information science approach is rooted in the humanities and the social sciences but informed by an understanding of information technology and information theory. The chapters offer a progressive exposition of the topic, with illustrative examples to explain the concepts presented. Neither narrowly practical nor largely speculative, Human Information Retrieval meets the contemporary need for a broader treatment of information and information systems.

The Supreme Court of the United States in Feist v. Rural (1991) required that databases must have a minimal degree of creativity for copyright. The judgment was highly significant and the subsequent period is understood as the post-Feist era. It has been globally influential. However, the decision is extremely complex and remains unsatisfactorily interpreted. In particular, it has been impossible to illuminate the creativity requirement.

The book gives an account of the decision’s conceptual structure, focusing on its full delineation of the opposite to creativity. In a radical and unprecedented innovation, it is correlated with an automatic computational process. Creativity itself is understood as non-computational or directly human activity concerned with meaning. Determining the presence of creativity is reduced to a four-stage test. This work then has acute practical current relevance to property in data in the digital age; it will also be of theoretical interest to, and is aimed at, researchers in, practitioners, and students of intellectual property worldwide.

The Supreme Court of the United States in Feist v. Rural (1991) required that databases must have a minimal degree of creativity for copyright. The judgment was highly significant and the subsequent period is understood as the post-Feist era. It has been globally influential. However, the decision is extremely complex and remains unsatisfactorily interpreted. In particular, it has been impossible to illuminate the creativity requirement.

The book gives an account of the decision’s conceptual structure, focusing on its full delineation of the opposite to creativity. In a radical and unprecedented innovation, it is correlated with an automatic computational process. Creativity itself is understood as non-computational or directly human activity concerned with meaning. Determining the presence of creativity is reduced to a four-stage test. This work then has acute practical current relevance to property in data in the digital age; it will also be of theoretical interest to, and is aimed at, researchers in, practitioners, and students of intellectual property worldwide.

We do not need to look far for signs of divided consciousness with regard to books and computers. For instance, the United Kingdom Data Protection Act 1984 gave British subjects some rights of access to computer-held information on themselves but not to paper records. From Writing to Computers takes as its central theme the issue of a unifying intellectual principle to connect books and computers. Julian Warner uses an approach based on semiotics, and also draws on linguistics, information science, cognitive science, philosophy and automata studies. Covering a range of topics from the relations between speech and writing, to transitions from orality to literacy and claims for a transition to an information society, the author aims throughout to render complex ideas intelligible without loss of rigour. From Writing to Computers addresses ordinary readers who, as social beings and members of political communities, are affected by, and implicated, in significant developments in methods for storing, manipulating and communicating information. It is also intended for students of the disciplines on which the book draws: semiotics, information studies, linguistics, computer science, philosophy and psychology.

We do not need to look far for signs of divided consciousness with regard to books and computers. For instance, the United Kingdom Data Protection Act 1984 gave British subjects some rights of access to computer-held information on themselves but not to paper records. From Writing to Computers takes as its central theme the issue of a unifying intellectual principle to connect books and computers. Julian Warner uses an approach based on semiotics, and also draws on linguistics, information science, cognitive science, philosophy and automata studies. Covering a range of topics from the relations between speech and writing, to transitions from orality to literacy and claims for a transition to an information society, the author aims throughout to render complex ideas intelligible without loss of rigour. From Writing to Computers addresses ordinary readers who, as social beings and members of political communities, are affected by, and implicated, in significant developments in methods for storing, manipulating and communicating information. It is also intended for students of the disciplines on which the book draws: semiotics, information studies, linguistics, computer science, philosophy and psychology.