Foundations of Information Science

Total amount of required viewing for this week: 76 minutes

Total amount of required reading for this week: 3,700 words

📺 To view before this meeting:

1. Martin “Tantacrul” Keary, “Notation must die: The battle for how we read music.” 2023.

   View. 76 minutes
   Viewing tips

   This excellent (but rather long) video is about music notation (and a little about chess notation). But the story it tells about music notation also exemplifies many of the ideas about knowledge, meaning, and information that we’ll be exploring this semester. I recommend watching the entire thing, but if you are pressed for time, it is broken into chapters. You can watch each chapter until you start to drift, then skip to the next chapter.

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Buckland, Michael. “Individual and Community.” In Information and Society. MIT Press, 2017. PDF.

   3,700 words

Total amount of required reading for this week: 6,500 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Shaw, Ryan. “Semiosis at an Intersection.” In Selecting Systems, 2021. PDF.

   2,600 words
2. Shaw, Ryan. “Semiosis on the Front Page.” In Selecting Systems, 2021. PDF.

   3,900 words

Total amount of required reading for this week: 9,500 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. Buckland, Michael. “Discovery and Selection.” In Information and Society, 135–52. MIT Press, 2017. PDF.

   2,900 words
4. 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.

5. 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.

Total amount of required reading for this week: 8,400 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. World Meteorological Organization. “Principles of Cloud Classification.” In International Cloud Atlas, 2017. PDF.

   1,600 words
3. Dupré, John. “Scientific Classification.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3 (May 1, 2006): 30–32. PDF.

   1,200 words
4. Optional

   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
5. 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

Total amount of required reading for this week: 3,400 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. 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.

2. Optional

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

   3,000 words

Total amount of required reading for this week: 6,500 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. 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.”

Total amount of required viewing for this week: 48 minutes

Total amount of required reading for this week: 4,400 words

📺 To view before this meeting:

1. Mattes, Eva, and Franco Mattes. The Bots. 2020. https://dis.art/series/the-bots.

   View. 48 minutes
   Viewing tips

   The Bots is a video installation work created by media artists Eva & Franco Mattes. The Frankfurter Kunstverein describes the work as follows:

   They present anonymous testimonies from content moderators who have worked for Facebook in Berlin. Six videos have been created … The films were executed with the typical aesthetic and features of online make-up tutorials. The statements in the films are derived from investigative research and interviews conducted with numerous witnesses employed as service providers for Facebook. The films were interpreted by actors so as to anonymise the statements of the content moderators. They perform the role of influencers addressing their followers directly. They recorded the videos using smartphones, for which reason the images are in portrait format. Advice on make-up products alternates with distressing descriptions of moderators’ work.

   To view the videos, you will need to log in. I will post the login information to the course announcements list.

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Irani, Lilly. “Justice for ‘Data Janitors.’” Public Books, January 15, 2015. https://www.publicbooks.org/zaloom-tribute-2021-justice-for-data-janitors/.

   4,400 words
2. Optional

   Roberts, Sarah H. “Understanding Commercial Content Moderation.” In Behind The Screen, 33–72. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. PDF.

   20,200 words
   Reading tips

   In this chapter from her book Behind the Screen, Sarah Roberts provides an overview of commercial content moderation at companies like Facebook. She explains what commercial content moderation is, who does it, and the conditions under which they work.

Total amount of required reading for this week: 7,100 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Bates, Marcia J. “The Invisible Substrate of Information Science.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science; New York 50, no. 12 (October 1999): 1043–50. PDF.

   2,500 words
2. Agre, Philip E. “Institutional Circuitry: Thinking about the Forms and Uses of Information.” Information Technology and Libraries 14, no. 4 (December 1995): 225. PDF.

   4,600 words

Total amount of required reading for this week: 10,700 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “The Attention Machine.” In Antisocial Media. Oxford University Press, 2021. PDF.

   10,700 words
2. Optional

   DeLong, J. Bradford. “The Attention Economy Goes to Court.” Project Syndicate, November 9, 2023. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/google-antitrust-case-puts-attention-economy-on-trial-by-j-bradford-delong-2023-11.
3. Optional

   Wu, Tim. “Attention Brokers,” 2015. PDF.

   8,400 words