Interdisciplinary Concepts of the ‘Work’ Entity—Crossing Cultural
Boundaries for Information Retrieval
Sponsored by SIG-CR and SIG-HFIS
Richard P. Smiraglia (moderator)
Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University
720 Northern Blvd., Brookville NY 11548
Email: Richard.Smiraglia@liu.edu
Jonathan Furner
Department of Information Studies, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles
300 Young Drive North, Mailbox 951520, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520
Email: jfurner@ucla.edu
Birger Hjorland and Jack Andersen
Royal School of Library and Information Science
6 Birketinget, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
Email: bh@db.dk and jan@db.dk
Introduction
The purpose of this panel is to explore
further our understanding of the “work”
entity and its role in information retrieval. In
the past, works have been discussed in the
context of bibliographic control, but
research into the nature of works has begun
to yield both empirical and theoretical
understanding of the nature of the “work”
entity. The importance of the work to
IFLA’s FRBR entity-relationship model
represents a major milestone in the history
of bibliographic retrieval. Other metadata
models, such as the CIDOC CRM, seek to
represent the work notion in the context of
systems for organization of cultural heritage
artifacts and their representations. In fact,
the concept of the work has been critical to
many disciplines over time. These notions of
the nature of a work are complementary and
help provide important contextual
information for the design of work-centered
information retrieval.
A work, at a basic level, is a deliberately
created knowledge-record (i.e. a text, and
oeuvre, etc.) representing a coordinated set
of ideas (i.e., ideational content) that is
conveyed with the purpose of being
communicated to a consumer. A document
may contain one or more works, and a work
may exist on one or more documents. Quite
frequently, as it turns out, a given work
exists in many instantiations, which means it
appears on many different documents, which
presents an interesting problem for
information retrieval.
In 2003, a panel on “works as entities for
information retrieval” presented basic
definitions and demonstrated operational
concepts of “works.” The panel proposed
here was developed from the question and
answer discussion period following that
panel. In this second look at the work entity,
we will visit interdisciplinary concepts of
the work, which demonstrate some of the
ways in which works help bridge cultural
boundaries. Richard Smiraglia will describe
the concept of the musical work from
semiological and epistemological
perspectives. Jonathan Furner will describe
the concept of the work in the visual arts,
exploring developments in the ontology of
art and cultural informatics. Birger Hjørland
and Jack Anderson will bring speech act
theory, social semiotics and related
perspectives to bear on the distinction
between concepts of “work,” “document,”
and “genre.”
Musical Works as Information Retrieval
Entities
Richard P. Smiraglia
Musical works form a key entity for music
information retrieval. A musical work is an
intellectual sonic conception. Musical works
take documentary form in a variety of
instantiations. (i.e., a sounding of it as in
performance, or its representation in printing
as in score). The primary purpose of any
physical instantiation of a work is to convey
the intellectual conception from one person
to others. Because musical works
fundamentally are meant to be heard,
physical instantiations are not of primary
importance in the exchange between creator
and consumer. Rather, they are media
through which musical ideas captured at one
end of the continuum may be reproduced so
that they may be absorbed at the other.
Because a musical work must first exist in
time to be apprehended by an audience, the
more accurate instantiation of a musical
work truly is likely its performance. A
performance of a musical work, and by
extension a recording thereof, delineates the
time factor of a musical work for the
receiving audience. Musical works, defined
as entities for information retrieval, are seen
to constitute sets of varying instantiations of
abstract creations. This presentation will
incorporate a survey of major musical
epistemological and semiological arguments
about the nature of the musical work.
The Ontology of Works in the Visual
Arts
Jonathan Furner
The nature of the "work" in the visual arts
has historically been a topic of central
concern in the philosophy of art and
aesthetics. More recently, theorists, system
designers, and data modelers in library,
archive, and museum studies have become
increasingly interested in clarifying the
concept of the artwork so that access to
museum objects (as artworks or as
instantiations, reproductions, records, etc. of
artworks) can be improved. Clarifications of
this kind have been reified in data models
such as IFLA's FRBR and CIDOC's CRM.
In the proposed talk, the speaker will
explore the links between recent
developments in the ontology of art and in
cultural informatics, and will evaluate the
impact each has had (and is likely to have)
on the other.
Speech Act Theory and Social
Semiotics: Perspectives on the Work
Entity
Birger Hjørland and Jack Andersen
When we define (scientific) words we do
so in order to accomplish something. When
we speak, we perform a speech act.
According to speech act theory the meaning
of words should be understood in relation to
the speakers intention with his or her speech
act. We may ask: Is there water in the
refrigerator? If somebody answer "yes"
because there is a tomato and there is water
in tomatoes, speech act theory would say
that he has misunderstood the question.
Even though there is water in the
refrigerator in literal meaning, the answer is
wrong because it is implied that the person
asking the question was thirsty and wanted
some water to drink. Speech act theory is
related to pragmatism and to other theories.
It has important implications for information
science. It has implications for theories of IR
and knowledge organization, but it has also
important implications for how to define our
core terms like “information”, "documents",
"work" and "genre". Such concepts should
be defined in relation to the theoretical work
we want them to accomplish in information
science.