Documentary Languages and the Demarcation of Information Units in Textual Information: The Case of Julius O. Kaiser’s Systematic Indexing

Abstract

Information retrieval (IR) is a central task of information science (IS). Traditionally, IR has focused on document retrieval: however, another, long-established approach to IR—that of information analysis—has sought to decompose documents into retrievable units of information. This paper examines the method of information analysis propounded by one of its pioneers, the business librarian Julius Otto Kaiser (1868–1927), and its theoretical presuppositions about the nature of information. Kaiser viewed information almost exclusively in terms of text and recognized that it had both ontological and epistemological dimensions. On one hand, he held that textual information is an entity of some sort and so capable of being indexed: on the other, he deemed it to be both the product, and occasion, of interpretation on the part of author and reader alike. Kaiser’s method of information analysis sought to decompose documents into units of information on the basis of their semantic content, using a documentary language as a tool for demarcating such units. Analysis of this language indicates that it both incorporated objective features of texts (i.e., extracted terms) and gave indexers considerable interpretative leeway in establishing the boundaries of information units. Kaiser’s version of information analysis constitutes an early attempt to take account of both the ontological and epistemological features of information and so enriches our image of the information-analytic approach, which has traditionally been construed as founded in a positivistic. “objective” view of information alone.