Conventional information systems, founded on objectivist assumptions, are inappropriate for social scientists. Starting from a sociological standpoint, this article proposes an alternative type of system, developed during research with a group of subject specialists.
Indexing systems have traditionally been geared to cater for search requests of the form ‘documents about…’. It is far from clear what is meant by the notion ‘about’, but the model that guides indexing is built around it. The procedure is:
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