Domain Analysis

Domain analysis is the socio-cognitive research programme proposed by Birger Hjørland and Hanne Albrechtsen in 1995, which holds that the most fruitful object of study for information science is the knowledge domain understood as a discourse or thought community within society's division of labour. Rather than grounding information organization in the isolated mental processes of an individual user, domain analysis grounds it in the shared literature, paradigms, terminology, and social practices of a subject field. Hjørland and Albrechtsen set out eleven complementary approaches — from producing literature guides and special classifications to bibliometric, historical, and epistemological study — and Clare Beghtol's work on literary warrant and consensus showed how a domain's own published discourse supplies the empirical basis for its categories. The method turns the design of classifications, thesauri, and retrieval systems into an evidence-based study of how a community actually thinks and writes.