David Blair

David C. Blair (1947-2011) was an American information retrieval expert.

Life

David Clark Blair was born on May 23, 1947 in Salem, Oregon. After living in Taiwan and Pakistan, he received a BA degree from Whitman College, a liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Washington, and then a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981. At Berkeley he studied in the School of Library and Information Studies (later renamed School of Information). His doctoral dissertation, Pragmatic aspects of inquiry, directed by Patrick Wilson, examined the use of language in everyday ("mundane") searches. He also served in the US Navy and remained in the US Navy Reserve until 1989.

After his doctoral studies, Blair became professor of business information technology in the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan until, after a long illness, he died in May 2011.

Contributions

Demonstration of the retrieval inadequacy of searching unedited natural language text without vocabulary control. Blair and M. E. Maron were commissioned to assess the adequacy of the STAIRS system, which simply looked for search terms in an unedited text corpus, when used for evidence discovery for a law suit. Legal assistants thought they were finding 70% of relevant documents (70% recall). Blair and Maron determined that they were in fact retrieving only about 20%, largely because of variety in word usage. For example, a search for documents about accidents using the term "accident" would not retrieve a document if the politer term "incident" had been used. This paper is regarded as a classic in the information retrieval literature.
Blair argued that in contrast to an emphasis on categorization, the philosophy of language had the best theory for understanding meaning in language. And within the philosophy of language, the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was found to be most perceptive.
His numerous other publications included discussion of the distinction between data retrieval and document retrieval.

Publications

"Information retrieval." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 30.o 6.
"Searching biases in large, interactive document retrieval systems." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 31, no 3.
An evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text document-retrieval system," with M. E. Maron. Communications of the ACM 28, no 3 (March 1985): 289-299. [1]
"STAIRS Redux: Thoughts on the STAIRS evaluation, Ten Years After," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 47, no.1 (Blair, 1996): 4-22.
Language and Representation in Information Retrieval. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1990.
Wittgenstein, language, and information : back to the rough ground! Dordrecht : Springer, 2006. A extension of the discussions in Language and Representation in Information Retrieval.
"The data-document distinction in information retrieval." Communications of the ACM 27, no 4 (1984): 369-374.
"The data-document distinction revisited." The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems. 37, no. 1 (Winter 2006) 77-96.

Awards

American Society for Information Science. Best Information Science Book of the Year, 1990.

Life

Contributions

Publications

Awards

Further reading