Perspectives on Information Course Introduction January 25, 2016

Course Introduction

What’s in Information Studies? Some professional and research areas

Professional areas Librarianship – Public / Academic / Corporate – Law / Health – Technical Services / Public Services Archives and Preservation – Records Management – Preservation Museums – exhibit design – collection management

Professional Areas Data Managers and Curators – for scientific and scholarly data Knowledge Management – corporate environment – documents and people Records Management – government environment Information Architecture – web design – taxonomy development

Professional areas Interaction design / User experience – for social networks, web design Web Design Data Science – Analysis and mining massively large datasets – often with web data for commercial applications

Some research areas Information Organization – Knowledge representation – Organization for access Information Policy and History – ethics – library history – information in cultural contexts

more research areas Information Retrieval – historically, oriented around textual documents – e.g. music IR, micro-document IR Use and Users – Information Seeking Behavior – Information Needs of Particular Groups – Information needs around particular kinds of information

research areas Social (or socio-technical) Informatics – impact of technologies in societal contexts – you can’t get one side right without the other Children’s Literature and Youth Services – issues of representation and culture – historical views Computer Science – algorithmic side

More research areas _____ Informatics – Medical-, Museum-, Bio- Archives and Preservation Digital Humanities Human Computer Interaction CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work)

Research methods in IS Qualitative social science research – ethnographic methods – interviews, focus groups – observation Quantitative social science research – surveys Cognitive psychology – eye tracking

Research methods con’t Usability testing – questionnaires, observation, task testing, interview Historical methods System analysis and design – requirement analysis, technological specification

Meetings and Greetings Find a partner Interview your partner about: – Their name / perferred form of address – How long have they been at the iSchool – How do they get their news? Introduce your partner to the class

Information as a concept and a thing

Nunberg “information is able to perform the work it does precisely because it fuzzes the boundaries between several genetically distinct categories of experience.”

Nunberg Information as intelligence Information as veridical

Two senses particular: – knowledge concerning some particular fact, subject or event abstract – a kind of intentional substance that is present in the world

Buckland's Three Principle Uses of the word "information": – information as process – information as knowledge – information as thing "Information-as-thing is of special interest in the study of information systems. It is with information in this sense that information systems deal directly."

Buckland's Four Aspects

Buckland: Information as evidence "In a significant sense information is used as evidence in learning – as the basis for understanding." "the term 'evidence' implies passiveness." – "Evidence, like information-as-thing, does not do anything actively" – "Human beings do things with it or to it."

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