Libtools

There is plenty of evidence that users will respond to concept clusters that represent something other than the subject of the thing: and by that I mean the genre of the thing. Although it may be a term that is somewhat oblique, genre represents facets that are based on the functionality, purpose, presentation, or use of the resource.

Humans have commonly-held concepts that turn out to be recognizable groupings of things which aren’t subjects, that is, they are groupings which are not concerned with the aboutness of the thing.

The commonly-held and shared conception of the utility of a ‘telephone book’ does not include reading such a thing from beginning to end, since this type of collection of words/numbers isn’t intended to be used in such a fashion. That doesn’t mean that a telephone book cannot be used in that fashion (i.e., read front to back) to alleviate wakefulness, or for the purposes of a filibuster, and so on, but those are instances of atypical uses.

User domain is important, though. There can be multiple commonly-shared views of the thing, e.g., telephone books can be recognizable members of other genres, for example “booster seats” or “height extenders.” Different purpose, different genre, different domain.

We should be increasingly concerned to expose genre, since it allows the user to focus on things that groups of words do other than be read narratively as strings.

Particularly when there is a surfeit of words (for example, massive retrieval results), the way those words are grouped or presented, their purpose and functionality, rises to the forefront and provides an extremely useful handle. The grouping of words is fundamentally how language is acquired in the first place, so it’s particularly important to make note of that resonance.

Genre can be a superior filter because it can more closely associate the intention of the searcher/viewer with a group of found information objects.