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Syllabus

Readings

Info 218: Concepts of Information

School of Information, UC Berkeley, Spring 2010
Paul Duguid, Geoff Nunberg, instructors

Assignments

Depending on the assignment, we will encourge you to work individually or collectively on these. Assignments will be related one way or another to the appropriate class and you will be expected to connect your findings to the reading. You will be asked to report on your work in class time. If you wish (and we encourge this) to use a presentation, please send it to one of us before the class, preferably in pdf format.


Week 2
26 Jan: Ischool identities
  • After looking at the ischool elevator stories the faculty provided in 2008, please prepare one of your own -- a prepackaged description of what exactly the program is about and why we're different from other faculties, which you might give to a vaguely interested friend, relative, or airline seat mate. This shouldn't take longer to recite than the length of an elevator ride -- the iSchool elevator! It shouldn't require a trip to Dubai. Submit it to Paul and Geoff by email before class.
28 Jan: Exercise/discussion: Consuming information

Assignment:
  • Keep a diary of your information consumption (however you choose to define it) for a few hours (or a few days, whichever seems most manageable according to your definition). Be sure to come up with a numerical total and be prepared to defend the number, your definition, and your consumption and to discuss your findings in class.
Reading:

Background:

Zeitgeist: Week 3
4 Feb: Exercise/discussion: Information and the public sphere

Assignment:
  • Popular articles sometimes discuss the idea of the Internet as a "public sphere." Find such a discussion (hint: put 'Internet AND "public sphere" into Google News, LexisNexis, Proquest news sources, or some such) and explore how and why it is using this term. Find another article for a general audience that talks about the public sphere in a contemporary context but not about the Internet and consider the extent to which the concept of public sphere in the two cases is or is not distinct.

    Here are a couple of additional questions that might help to center in on one aspect of the issue -- but there's no need to address any of these if you are already taking this in some other direction.

    1. The notion of the public sphere is sometimes applied to the internet as a whole and sometimes to various sub-discourses or (putative) virtual communities (e.g., Slashdot, the open source movement, etc.) Does one or the other of these applications of the concept seem more appropriate?

    2. What do you think of Poster's argument that the protean nature of online identities makes the net fundamentally different from the "classical" public sphere?

    3. Of the various criteria that people invoke to define the public sphere (autonomy/independence, equality, inclusiveness/accessiblity, rationality of discussion, etc.), do one or more strike you as particularly relevant/irrelevant to the application of the notion to the internet?
    In addition to the Papacharissi, you might find useful the discussion in the following, if necessary:

    Allison Cavanagh. 2007. Sociology in the Age of the Internet. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. pp 59 ff.
    Dahlberg, Lincoln. 2001. "Computer-Mediated Comunication and the Public Sphere: A Critical Analysis", JCMC 7(1)
Reading: Background: Zeitgeist: Week 5
16 Feb: Exercise/discussion: Wikipedia project

Assignment:
  • Find four Wikipedia articles, two of which you consider authoritative & well-organized, and two of which you consider unreliable and/or poorly organized. Your judgment can be based either on internal grounds or on the basis of your independent knowledge of the subject matter -- in either case, say which and why.

    One article in each pair should deal with a topic in a well-behaved or canonized area of culture --for examlpe, an article on a scientific topic, a literary or artistic movement or figure   (that belongs to "high culture"), a historical event, or some other subject whose study belongs to some well established discipline or literature. The other should deal with a topic belonging to popular culture, broadly construed (even if it is also dealt with in a scholarly literature), a word or concept that's bandied about in the media, etc.

    For each article try to say why the collective authority process did or didn't work, and whether this principle generalizes (i.e., are most articles about subjects in this field likely to be reliable?). It may be helpful to look at the history & contributors (e.g., what other articles did they contribute to?)

    Finally, try to get a sense of how this article fits into the treatments of the larger field it belongs to. Does Wikipedia give one a sense of this topic as part of a larger organization of knowledge?

    You're encouraged to do this assigment in pairs. It isn't necessary to write up the entire exercise -- some background plus enough to put up for a presentation. If you find this is taking more time than it should (you be the judge, but it shouldn't take more than 5-7 min. to present), simplify it by reducing the number of Wikipedia entries or leaving out some part of the assignment. If you have any further questions or need clarifications, email Paul or me.
Reading: See readings for 2/16 on syllabus page Zeitgeist

Slides

18 Feb: Exercise/discussion: Objectivity

Assignment:



Week 6
25 Feb: Exercise/discussion: searching the law

Assignment:
  • Read ProCD v Zeidenberg. In class on Thursday you will be divided into two teams, one of which will be asked to support and the other oppose the decision, using whatever sources and resources you think useful and dispositive.


Week 7
4 Mar: Exercise/discussion: information and the census

Assignment:
  • Take a couple of US census forms from different periods--or take a US and foreign census form--and explore what they (and perhaps the controversy around them) might tell us about changing ideas of what is and is not considered legitimate state information--or of what might be considered information at all. Work in pairs if you can. Send any material us you want to present before the discussion class on Thursday.
Sources:
Zeitgeist:
Week 8
11 Mar: Exercise/discussion

Slides

Week 9
18 Mar: Exercise/discussion: political symbols
[final project/proposal papers due]

Week 10
Midterm break
- No classes -


Week 13
13 Apr: Exercise/discussion
[final project outlines due]

Assignment:
    Find a discussion for a general or specialized audience that handles economic views of information in interesting and insightful or in problematic and incoherent ways. Consider how this discussion does or does not map on to other generally held ideas about information that we have discussed so far.
Reading:
    see reading for April 8

Week 14
22 Apr: Exercise/discussion

Assignment:


Week 16
3 May: Presentations

5 May: Presentations