This chapter investigates early attempts in information retrieval to tackle
the full text of document collections. Underpinning a large number of contemporary
applications, from search to sentiment analysis, the concepts
and techniques pioneered by Hans Peter Luhn, Gerard Salton, Karen Spärck
Jones, and others involve particular framings of language, meaning, and
knowledge. They also introduce some of the fundamental mathematical
formalisms and methods running through information ordering, preparing
the extension to digital objects other than text documents. The chapter
discusses the considerable technical expressivity that comes out of the
sprawling landscape of research and experimentation that characterizes
the early decades of information retrieval. This includes the emergence
of the conceptual construct and intermediate data structure that is
fundamental to most algorithmic information ordering: the feature vector.