Literary Warrant Analysis

Literary warrant analysis is the method of justifying the classes and terms of a knowledge-organization system by reference to the actual content of a domain's published literature, rather than to abstract logic or a designer's intuition. The principle, traceable to E. Wyndham Hulme's 1911 idea that classification should be warranted by the books that exist, was given an empirical, corpus-based operationalization by Clare Beghtol in her study of fiction studies, where she used subject descriptors in a bibliographic database to quantify how strongly the domain's literature supported particular concepts and where the field reached consensus. Within Hjørland and Albrechtsen's domain-analysis programme, literary warrant is the empirical anchor that ties a classification or thesaurus to the discourse it serves. The analysis assembles a representative corpus, extracts and counts concepts, measures their warrant, gauges consensus, and lets that evidence determine what the system should contain and how finely it should distinguish.