Information retrieval (IR) is considered to be the science of searching for information from a variety of information sources related to texts, images, sounds, or multimedia. With the rise of the internet and digital databases, updated information retrieval methodologies are essential to ensure the continued facilitation and enhancement of information exchange. Critical Approaches to Information Retrieval Research is a critical scholarly publication that provides multidisciplinary examinations of theoretical innovations and methods in information retrieval technologies including search and storage applications for data, text, image, sound, document, and video retrieval. Featuring a wide range of topics including data mining, machine learning, and ontology, this book is ideal for librarians, software engineers, data scientists, professionals, researchers, information engineers, scientists, practitioners, and academicians working in the fields of computer science, information technology, information and communication sciences, education, health, library, and more.

A critical history of the modern tradition of documentation, tracing the representation of individuals and groups in the form of documents, information, and data. In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on the documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on the work of the French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores the understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines the transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in the representation of individuals and groups, first in the forms of documents, then information, then data. Day investigates five cases from the modern tradition of documentation. He considers the socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, “the father of European documentation” (contrasting it to the hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); the shift from documentation to information science and the accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots—to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social “big data” as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers the status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.

Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using examples and figures, making it perfect for introductory courses in information retrieval for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computer science. Based on feedback from extensive classroom experience, the book has been carefully structured in order to make teaching more natural and effective. Slides and additional exercises (with solutions for lecturers) are also available through the book's supporting website to help course instructors prepare their lectures.

"This book is the Bible for anyone who needs to manage large data collections. It's required reading for our search gurus at Infoseek. The authors have done an outstanding job of incorporating and describing the most significant new research in information retrieval over the past five years into this second edition." Steve Kirsch, Cofounder, Infoseek Corporation "The new edition of Witten, Moffat, and Bell not only has newer and better text search algorithms but much material on image analysis and joint image/text processing. If you care about search engines, you need this book: it is the only one with full details of how they work. The book is both detailed and enjoyable; the authors have combined elegant writing with top-grade programming." Michael Lesk, National Science Foundation "The coverage of compression, file organizations, and indexing techniques for full text and document management systems is unsurpassed. Students, researchers, and practitioners will all benefit from reading this book." Bruce Croft, Director, Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts In this fully updated second edition of the highly acclaimed Managing Gigabytes, authors Witten, Moffat, and Bell continue to provide unparalleled coverage of state-of-the-art techniques for compressing and indexing data. Whatever your field, if you work with large quantities of information, this book is essential reading--an authoritative theoretical resource and a practical guide to meeting the toughest storage and access challenges. It covers the latest developments in compression and indexing and their application on the Web and in digital libraries. It also details dozens of powerful techniques supported by mg, the authors' own system for compressing, storing, and retrieving text, images, and textual images. mg's source code is freely available on the Web.

Now in a fully updated edition, this invaluable reference work is a fundamental resource for scholars, students, conservationists, and citizens interested in America's national park system. The extensive collection of documents illustrates the system's creation, development, and management. The documents include laws that established and shaped the system; policy statements on park management; Park Service self-evaluations; and outside studies by a range of scientists, conservation organizations, private groups, and businesses. A new appendix includes summaries of pivotal court cases that have further interpreted the Park Service mission.