Foundations of Information Science

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 13,100 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Abbott, Andrew. “The Information Professions.” In The System of Professions, 215–246. University of Chicago Press, 1988. PDF.

   13,100 words
   Reading tips

   This is an excerpt from a book that advances a theory about how professions change over time, so there is some discussion of that theory here. Don’t worry too much about that—focus on how Abbott tries to define what “the information professions” are, and especially his discussion of the attempt to create a combined jurisdiction that would unify quantitative and qualitative information.

   Abbott’s story ends in 1988, so there is obviously more to say about what has happened to the “information professions” since then.

2. Optional

   Reid, Edna O. “Transitioning from an M.L.S. to M.I.S. Career. A Case Study from a Black Information Scientist.” In The Black Librarian in America Revisited, edited by E. J. Josey, 216–223. Scarecrow Press, 1994. PDF.

   2,400 words
   Reading tips

   In this essay Edna Reid describes her career as an information scientist, providing a view from the inside of the “combined jurisdiction” of information science, as well as showing the wide variety of contexts within which data and information professionals work.

3. Optional

   The iSchool Inclusion Institute. “What Are the Information Sciences?,” January 23, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200123161101/http://www.i3-inclusion.org/about/what-are-the-information-sciences/.
   Reading tips

   This page is useful for its extensive list of graduate Courses, specializations, and research areas in the data and information sciences, organized by the (other) undergraduate majors that they relate to.

4. Optional

   Boykis, Vicki. “Data Science Is Different Now,” August 7, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200807191324/https://veekaybee.github.io/2019/02/13/data-science-is-different/.
   Reading tips

   A practicing data scientist deflates some of the hype around this “hot job.”

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 9,200 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Buckland, Michael. “Introduction.” In Information and Society, 1–19. MIT Press, 2017. PDF.

   3,800 words
2. Buckland, Michael. “Document and Evidence.” In Information and Society, 21–49. MIT Press, 2017. PDF.

   5,400 words
3. Optional

   Turner, Deborah. “Orally‐based Information.” Journal of Documentation 66, no. 3 (April 27, 2010): 370–83. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220411011038458.

   7,000 words
   Reading tips

   Historically the data and information professions have focused almost entirely on written material. But as Deborah Turner argues in this article, we ought to recognize how much communication and learning happens through speech and gestures and other aspects of “face-to-face” communication. Though orality (communicating through speech and gesture) is often contrasted with literacy (communicating through the written word), the distinction becomes blurred when one takes a broad view of documentary practices (especially now that sharing oral communication via audio and video can be even easier than writing something).

4. Optional

   Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. “Reading the Background.” In The Social Life of Information, 173–205. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. PDF.

   10,600 words
   Reading tips

   In this chapter from their book The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid explain why despite 50+ years of digital computers and networks, we still use a lot of paper documents.

5. Optional

   Whitworth, Andrew. “Basic Concepts and Terminology.” In Radical Information Literacy, 11–26. Amsterdam: Chandos, 2014. PDF.

   6,500 words
   Reading tips

   This introduction to a book about information literacy (which the author abbreviates as IL) introduces some key concepts, including:

   the intersubjective creation of meaning

   information landscapes

   cognitive authority

6. Optional

   Brown, Marion. “Improvisation and the Aural Tradition in Afro-American Music.” Black World 23, no. 1 (November 1973): 14–19. https://books.google.com/books?id=TjoDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PA14.
   Reading tips

   In this short article jazz musician and musicologist Marion Brown traces the connection and blurs the (European) line between oral communication and musical improvisation.

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 16,000 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Fiske, John. “Communication, Meaning, and Signs.” In Introduction to Communication Studies, 3nd ed., 37–60. London ; New York: Routledge, 2010. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unc/reader.action?docID=958077&ppg=90.

   8,400 words
2. Fiske, John. “Codes.” In Introduction to Communication Studies, 3nd ed., 61–79. London ; New York: Routledge, 2010. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unc/reader.action?docID=958077&ppg=114.

   7,600 words
3. Optional

   Rolling, James Haywood Jr. “Text, Image, and Bodily Semiotics: Repositioning African American Identity.” In Semiotics and Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, and Significance, edited by Deborah L. Smith-Shank, 72–79. Reston, Va.: National Art Education Association, 2004. PDF.

   6,100 words
   Reading tips

   In this chapter James Haywood Rolling, Jr. uses semiotic analysis to demonstrate how human bodies can be “documentary.” Like Deborah Turner’s work on orality, his argument calls attention to broader patterns of meaning-making beyond the exchange of written documents. Rolling Jr. emphasizes the role of visual culture in meaning-making, looking at how white supremacist culture in the US employs visual signs to “define and delimit” Black American identity, and how Black Americans have countered that denigration by using photography and other technologies of image-making to construct a collective identity independent of white America.

4. Optional

   Daylight, Russell. “The Semiotic Abstraction.” Semiotica 2017, no. 218 (January 26, 2017). PDF.

   3,700 words
   Reading tips

   This article compares how the concept of abstraction is understood by computer scientists and semioticians. The author argues that semiotic systems should be understood as “machines for creating differences,” of which computers are one kind.

5. Optional

   Martynenko, Grigory. “Semiotics of Statistics.” Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 10, no. 2 (2003): 105–15. PDF.

   3,800 words
   Reading tips

   This author of this article analyzes statistics as a semiotic system. This view is useful for thinking about statistics as a means of and tool for communication, rather than simply an abstract body of mathematical knowledge. The author argues for a theoretical distinction between “virtual statistics” (the abstract body of mathematical knowledge) and “actual statistics” (how people actually employ statistics in specific circumstances). This is analogous to the theoretical distinction between actual speech and the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of language.

6. Optional

   Akrich, Madeline, and Bruno Latour. “A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies.” In Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 259–64. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. PDF.

   1,400 words
   Reading tips

   This short manifesto by Madeline Akrich and Bruno Latour argues that “semiotics is the study of order building … and may be applied to settings, machines, bodies, and programming languages as well as texts … semiotics is not limited to signs; the key aspect of the semiotics of machines is its ability to move from signs to things and back.”

7. Optional

   Fry, Paul. Semiotics and Structuralism. ENGL 300: Introduction to Theory of Literature. Open Yale Courses, n.d. https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300/lecture-8.
   Reading tips

   This lecture video does a good job of introducing the basic ideas of semiotics, though from the perspective of someone studying literature rather than from the perspective of someone studying data and information systems.

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 6,600 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Weaver, Warren. “Recent Contributions to The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” September 1949. PDF.

   6,000 words
   Reading tips

   Claude Shannon, an engineer who worked at Bell Labs, developed a mathematical theory of communication that came to be known as “information theory.” The papers in which Shannon developed his theory were originally published in 1948 in two parts in the Bell System Technical Journal. A year later, Warren Weaver published this summary of Shannon’s work.

   There is some math in this report. If you’re not mathematically inclined, just skip over it—it isn’t necessary to understand the math in order to understand the basic ideas.

2. Shannon, Claude. “The Bandwagon.” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2, no. 3 (1956): 3. PDF.

   600 words
   Reading tips

   About six years after information theory made its debut, Shannon wrote this one-page editorial.

3. Optional

   Fiske, John. “Communication Theory.” In Introduction to Communication Studies, 3nd ed., 5–21. London ; New York: Routledge, 2010. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unc/reader.action?docID=958077&ppg=58.

   6,600 words
   Reading tips

   This chapter from a standard introductory textbook in communications explains information theory (the author calls it communication theory) in more modern and accessible terms.

4. Optional

   Gleick, James. “Information Theory.” In The Information, 1st ed., 204–232. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. PDF.

   9,100 words
   Reading tips

   This chapter from science writer James Gleick’s book The Information is an engaging mini-biography of Claude Shannon, but it is also an accessible introduction to information theory.

5. Optional

   Eckersley, Peter. “A Primer on Information Theory and Privacy.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, August 10, 2020. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/primer-information-theory-and-privacy.

   700 words
   Reading tips

   This short article use the information theoretic concept of entropy to explain why it is so easy to identify individual people based on their web browsing activity.

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 16,900 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Zerubavel, Eviatar. “Introduction / Islands of Meaning / The Great Divide / The Social Lens.” In The Fine Line, 1–17, 21–24, 61–80. New York: Free Press, 1991. PDF.

   16,900 words
   Reading tips

   Eviatar Zerubavel is a cognitive sociologist, meaning that he studies how social processes shape our thinking, and he’s written a number of fascinating and accessible books on the topic. These are selections from his book The Fine Line about making distinctions in everyday life.

2. Optional

   Glushko, Robert J, Paul P Maglio, Teenie Matlock, and Lawrence W Barsalou. “Categorization in the Wild.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 4 (April 2008): 129–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.01.007.

   5,000 words
3. Optional

   Lakoff, George. “The Importance of Categorization / From Wittgenstein to Rosch.” In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. PDF.

   21,600 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 10,100 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Daston, Lorraine. “Cloud Physiognomy.” Representations 135, no. 1 (August 1, 2016): 45–71. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2016.135.1.45.

   10,100 words
2. Optional

   Dupré, John. “Scientific Classification.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3 (May 1, 2006): 30–32. PDF.

   1,200 words
3. Optional

   Latour, Bruno. “Visualisation and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands.” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 1–40. PDF.

   9,200 words
   Reading tips

   Latour uses some unusual terminology in this article. He refers to documents as inscriptions and practices of documentation as inscription procedures. He also refers to documents as immutable mobiles, highlighting what he considers to be two of their most important qualities: immutability and mobility.

   Latour is interested in the relationship between practices of documentation and thinking (cognition). His basic argument is that what may seem like great advances in thought are actually better understood as the emergence of new practices of documentation. Latour focuses primarily on documents as aids to visualization rather than as carriers of information. Thus he begins by discussing the emergence of new visualization techniques, such as linear perspective.

4. Optional

   Bennett, Claudette. “Racial Categories Used in the Decennial Censuses, 1790 to the Present.” Government Information Quarterly 17, no. 2 (2000): 161–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0740-624X(00)00024-1.

   7,000 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 14,400 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Hunter, Eric. “What Is Classification? / Classification in an Information System / Faceted Classification.” In Classification Made Simple, 3rd ed. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. PDF.

   5,600 words
2. Berkeley, Edmund C. “Boolean Algebra (the Technique for Manipulating AND, OR, NOT and Conditions).” The Record 26 part II, no. 54 (1937): 373–414. PDF.

   3,400 words
   Reading tips

   This article is by Edmund Berkeley, a pioneer of computer science and co-founder of the Association for Computing Machinery, which is still the primary scholarly association for computer scientists. But he wrote this article in 1937, before he became a computer scientist—because computers had yet to exist. At the time he was a mathematician working at the Prudential life insurance company, where he recognized the usefulness of Boolean algebra for modeling insurance data. He published this article in a professional journal for actuaries (people who compile and analyze statistics and use them to calculate insurance risks and premiums).

   Berkeley uses some frightening-looking mathematical notation in parts of this article, but everything he discusses is actually quite simple. The most important parts are:

   pages 373–374, where he gives a simple explanation of Boolean algebra,

   pages 380–381, where he considers practical applications of Boolean algebra, and

   pages 383 on, where he pays close attention to translation back and forth between Boolean algebra and English.

3. Kent, William. “Attributes / Types and Categories and Sets / Models.” In Data and Reality, 77–94. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1978. PDF.

   5,400 words
   Reading tips

   This is an excerpt from one of my favorite books, Data and Reality by Bill Kent. Kent was a computer programmer and database designer at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, during the era when the database technologies we use today were first being developed. He thought deeply and carefully about the challenges of data modeling and management, which he recognized were not primarily technical challenges.

   The fixed-width typewriter font makes this reading look old-fashioned, but nothing in it is out-of-date. These are precisely the same issues data modelers and “data scientists” struggle with today.

4. Optional

   Evans, Eric. “Crunching Knowledge.” In Domain-Driven Design. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004. PDF.

   3,000 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 18,400 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Wilson, Patrick. “Subjects and the Sense of Position.” In Two Kinds of Power, 69–92. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. PDF.

   11,900 words
   Reading tips

   In this chapter Patrick Wilson considers the problems that arise when one tries to come up with systematic rules for classifying texts by subject.

   Wilson can be a bit long-winded, but his insights are worth it. (You can skip the very long footnotes, so this reading is actually shorter than it looks.) What Wilson calls a “writing” is more typically referred to as a text. In this chapter he is criticizing the assumptions librarians make when cataloging texts by subject. The “sense of position” in the title of the chapter refers to the librarian’s sense of where in a classification scheme a text should be placed. Although he is talking about library classification, everything Wilson says is also applicable to state-of-the-art machine classification of texts today.

2. Maron, M. E.“Automatic Indexing: An Experimental Inquiry.” Journal of the ACM 8, no. 3 (July 1961): 404–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/321075.321084.

   6,500 words
   Reading tips

   Bill Maron was an engineer at missile manufacturer Ramo-Wooldridge when he began investigating statistical methods for classifying and retrieving documents. In this paper he describes a method for statistically modeling the subject matter of texts. He introduces the basic ideas behind what is now known as a Bayesian classifier, a technique that is still widely used today for a variety of automatic classification tasks from spam filtering to face recognition.

   Trigger warning: math. The math is relatively basic, and if you’ve studied any probability, you should be able to follow it. But if not, just skip it: Maron explains everything important about his experiment in plain English. Pay extra attention to what he says about “clue words.”

3. Optional

   Hacking, Ian. An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. PDF.
4. Optional

   Smucker, Mark D. “Information Representation.” In Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval, edited by Ian Ruthven and Diane Kelly, 77–93. London: Facet Pub., 2011. PDF.

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 17,100 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Buckland, Michael, and Christian Plaunt. “On the Construction of Selection Systems.” Library Hi Tech 12, no. 4 (1994): 15–28. PDF.

   8,100 words
   Reading tips

   An examination of the structure and components of information storage and retrieval systems and information filtering systems. Argues that all selection systems can be represented in terms of combinations of a set of basic components. The components are of only two types: representations of data objects and functions that operate on them.

2. Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121–136. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652.

   9,000 words
3. Optional

   Buckland, Michael. “Discovery and Selection.” In Information and Society, 135–52. MIT Press, 2017. PDF.

   2,900 words
4. Optional

   Sawyer, P. H.“Technical Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough.” Past & Present, no. 24 (1963): 90–95. PDF.

   2,600 words
5. Optional

   Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.” Social Studies of Science 14, no. 3 (1984): 411–428. PDF.

   3,400 words
   Reading tips

   The authors are attacking what they describe as “linear” models of technological development, which focus on a series of “technological breakthroughs” leading inevitably to where we are today. They argue that looking at the actual historical development of a technology like the bicycle shows that what seem in retrospect to be obvious “technological breakthroughs” were not at all obvious at the time.

   It may help to consult these pages to get a sense of the different bicycle models discussed in the reading:

   • Boneshaker
   • Club “safety ordinary” bicycle
   • Facile “safety ordinary” bicycle
   • Guilmet’s bicycle
   • Kangeroo bicycle
   • Lawson’s “Bicyclette”
   • Macmillan’s bicycle
   • Penny-farthing or “ordinary” bicycle
   • Star bicycle
   • Xtraordinary “safety ordinary” bicycle
6. Optional

   Joerges, Bernward. “Do Politics Have Artefacts?” Social Studies of Science 29, no. 3 (1999): 411–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631299029003004.

   11,100 words
7. Optional

   Campanella, Thomas J. “Robert Moses and His Racist Parkway, Explained.” Bloomberg CityLab, July 9, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20200719205411/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained.

   1,400 words
   Reading tips

   The parkway bridges of Long Island, built by city planner Robert Moses, provide an illustrative example of how people talk about technology and society.

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 6,800 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Warner, Julian. “Description and Search Labor for Information Retrieval.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, no. 12 (2007): 1783–1790. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20664.

   6,800 words
   Reading tips

   Warner’s writing can be hard to follow at times. If you’re getting bogged down, focus on trying to understand the various categories of labor that Warner identifies, and how they relate to one another. What does he mean by “the dynamic compelling the transfer of human syntactic labor to technology stemming from the costs of direct human labor” (page 1789)?

2. Optional

   Seligman, Ben B. “The Social Cost of Cybernation.” In The Evolving Society: The Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution—Cybernetics and Automation, edited by Alice Mary Hilton, 159–66. New York: Institute for Cybercultural Research, 1966. PDF.

   2,600 words
3. Optional

   Boggs, James. “The Negro and Cybernation.” In The Evolving Society: The Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution—Cybernetics and Automation, edited by Alice Mary Hilton, 167–72. New York: Institute for Cybercultural Research, 1966. PDF.

   1,900 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 13,100 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Hjørland, Birger. “Classical Databases and Knowledge Organization: A Case for Boolean Retrieval and Human Decision-Making during Searches.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66, no. 8 (August 1, 2015): 1559–75. PDF.

   2,800 words
   Reading tips

   This is an excerpt from an article arguing that, though they are perceived as outdated, selection systems based on Boolean algebra (more commonly referred to as Boolean retrieval systems) are preferable for some purposes because they offer more opportunities for human decision-making during searches.

2. Rieder, Bernhard. “Scrutinizing an Algorithmic Technique: The Bayes Classifier as Interested Reading of Reality.” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 100–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1181195.

   10,300 words