- Aug 2022
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www.ischool.berkeley.edu www.ischool.berkeley.edu
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Michael Buckland coined in 1991 the phrase "information as thing" and discussed this concept in relation to evidence.
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- Sep 2015
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asistdl-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.uky.edu asistdl-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.uky.edu
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Librarianship, in contrast, follows a more service-ori-ented and empowerment-oriented value system.
Makes me think how Shilton's work on social values in design, which feels scientific to me.
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Local file Local file
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It is not asserted that sorting areas of information science with respect to their relationship to informa- tion-as-thing would produce clearly distinct popula- tions. Nor is any hierarchy of scholarly respectability intended.
It does seem implied though. The activity of objectifying information is a useful fulcrum for discovering the topology of information systems. But I suspect that one could have written similar papers using one of the other cells of his matrix? Or perhaps it wouldn't have been concrete enough? Is information as thing a requirement for information science? Science after all is the study of the physical universe, the things. Could there be a science of information without treating information as a thing? It makes me think of the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. Also, Kuhn's paradigm shifts. We can't really write ourselves out of the equation can we?
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These differences provide one basis for the comparative analysis of information storage and retrieval systems.
Comparative Information Studies.
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ultimately information systems, including “expert systems” and information re- trieval systems, can deal directly with information only in this sense
Is this really true? Don't people interact with these systems all the time? Aren't they used as communication devices between people now all the time? I could imagine someone saying that information is never just a thing, but always part of a process.
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“Information-as-thing”, then, is meaningful in two senses: (1) At quite specific situations and points in time an object or event may actually be informative, i.e., constitute evidence that is used in a way that affects someone’s beliefs; and (2) Since the use of evidence is predictable, albeit imperfectly, the term “information” is commonly and reasonably used to denote some popu- lation of objects to which some significant probability of being usefully informative in the future has been at- tributed.
This sounds spot on, but it doesn't sounds like information as thing anymore. It has people as a fundamental part of the equation.
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As a practical matter some consensus is needed to agree on what to collect and store
So the problem of scoping information is really an economical problem of what do we store, what do we keep, and what do we forget and let go of.
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ut, as noted above, we could in principle say that of any object or document:
Why is this a problem though? Aren't there a universe of "situations"? Why would we want to constrain them?
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Therefore we retain our simpler view of “in- formation-as-thing” as being tantamount to physical evidence: Whatever thing one might learn from (Orna & Pettit, 1980, p. 3)
Why is that simpler? I would've thought the broader definition was simpler to justify.
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fossils, footprints, and screams of terror.
:-) love these lists of objects, remids me of OOO
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Indeed it would be a logical development of current trends in the use of computers to expect a blurring of the distinction between the retrieval of the results of old analyses and the presentation of the results of a fresh analysis
Not only that, but computer systems and networks are so complex that information itself is becoming event like in its dependencies and contingencies.
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How different the study of history would be if they could!
Why is it useful to think of documents separate from the events that created them, and the events that they participate in?
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Hence “document” originally denoted a means of teach- ing or informing, whether a lesson, an experience, or a text.
It's almost as if something must be made into a document in order for it to be observed in a particular way. Or that looking at something in a particular way turns it into a document.
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On this view objects are not ordinarily documents but become so if they are processed for informational purposes.
This seems key.
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ny concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phe- nomenon, whether physical or mental.
ahh, now this is more like it ; what role does reconstructing play here. Did he translate "représenter" as reconstruct? They seem quite different.
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uthentic
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ob- jects that are not documents in the normal sense of being texts can nevertheless be information resources,
Briet's Antelope.
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It is wise not to assume any firm distinction between data, docu- ment, and text.
Why is it wise to not distinguish between them, but to distinguish between different uses of the word information?
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English law,
Suddenly struck by the role of the forensic imagination in this definition of information.
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authentic historic pieces of evidence
Authentic for what purpose? So much to unpack here.
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Oxford English Dictionary,
It is truly interesting the degree to which Buckland uses the dictionary, which is such a socially constructed thing.
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trace.
Latour again ; aren't these traces part of a network of activity? Can they really be thought of outside of it, independent of the context they were created in? Why is it necessary?
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Further, the term “evidence” implies passiveness. Evidence, like information-as-thing, does not do any- thing actively. Human beings do things with it or to it.
Is evidence truly not doing anything? Reminds me of non-human actors in Latour.
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reverse the process and ask people to identify the things by or on account of which they came to be in- formed.
This reversal makes the assumption that something informed them?
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However, the representation is no more knowledge than the film is the event. Any such representation is necessarily in tangible form (sign, sig- nal, data, text, film, etc.) and so representations of knowledge (and of events) are necessarily “information- as-thing.”
Don't these information things need to have people around to make them information?
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lan- guages evolve
This seems to be quite an admission, that the whole study of information as it rests on language is deeply contingent -- and somewhat unscientific?
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But if the principal uses can be identified, sorted, and characterized, then some progress might be made.
So this paper is itself an information processing problem. Why does information science always have to feel like mirrors pointed at mirrors, or a Borgesian nightmare?
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