Info 218: Concepts of Information Spring 2013

Syllabus & Readings

Week 1

January 22:   Introduction: In search of information

Background:

• Wobbrock, Jacob O., Andrew J. Ko, & Julie A. Kientz, 2009. "Reflections on the Future of iSchools from Inspired Junior Faculty." Interactions 16 (September-October)
• Pollock, Martha E. 2010. "Reflections on the Future of iSchools ." Interactions 17(January-February)

Geoff's Slides

January 24:   Working with Words: Technology, Platform and other key words

Reading:

• Gillespie, Tarleton. 2010. "The Politics of'Platforms,'" New Media& Society 12(3): 347-364.
• Kline, Ronald, R. 2006. "Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy, The Emergence of 'Information Technology' as a Keyword, 1948-1985." Technology & Culture 47(3): 513-535.
• Marx, Leo. 2010. "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept." Technology & Culture 51(3): 561-577.

Background:

• Bennett, Tony, et al., eds. 2005.New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. More entries here. [A Keywords sequel, collectively authored]
• Burgett, Bruce, & Glenn Hendler, eds. 2007. Keywordsfor American Cultural Studies. New York: New York University Press. More here. [Another Keywords sequel]
• Skinner. Quentin. 1979. "The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon." Essays in Criticism 29(3): 205-224.
• Introduction and selections from Raymond Williams, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. New York: Oxford University Press. More entries available here in the Google Books version.
  
• Durant, Alan. 2006. "Raymond Williams's Keywords: Investigating Meanings 'Offered, Felt for, Tested, Confirmed, Asserted, Qualified, Changed'." Critical Quarterly 48(4): 1-26.
•  Gluck, Carol and Anna Lowenhaupt, eds. 2009. Words in Motion: Towards a Global Lexicon. Durham:Duke University Press.
  

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Week 2

January 29:   Exercise: lexicographic investigation

Pick a word or phrase that does a certain amount of ideological or explanatory work in the rough area of "information"--e.g., big data, open source, crowdsourcing, user-centered, social media, 2.0 ... (but not purely marketing hype like "viral," "passionate," "ripple effect" or essentially technical notions like "malware," "distributed processing, etc.)

Pull down a bunch of citations for the item from the Web or Google News, and see if you can sort them into distinct uses or senses à la information.

January 31:   Exercise: counting information

In his introduction to the special section of IJOC [see "background reading," below], Martin Hilbert argues that it is not only statistically feasible, but also analytically insightful to quantify the amount of information handled by society (Hilbert, 2012). Quantify the amount of information you handle (i.e., create or store or consume etc.) in a given place or chosen period of time and assess the statistical feasibility and analytic insightfulness of the result.

Reading:

• Bohn, Roger E. & James E. Short. 2009. How Much Information? 2009: Report on American Consumers. San Diego: Global Information Industry Center.
• Lyman, Peter, H. Varian, K. Swearingen, P. Charles, N. Good, L. Jordan, & J. Pal. 2003. How Much Information? Berkeley: School of Information Management & Systems. Executive Summary.

Background:

• Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York, NY: Basic Books.
• Green, John C. 1964. "The Information Explosion: Real or Imaginary." Science 144(3619): 646-648.
• Hilbert, Martin, et al. 2012. "Info Capacity" International Journal of Communication [Special Section] 6.
• Kallinkikos, Jannis. 2006. The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
• Lesk, Michael. 1996. "How Much Information is There in the World?"
• Machlup, Fritz. 1962. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. 2009. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Pool, I. de S. 1983. "Tracking the Flow of Information." Science 221(4611): 609-613.
• Porat, Marc U.  1977. The Information Economy: Sources and Methods for Measuring the Primary Information Sector. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

Zeitgeist:

• Duguid, Paul. 2009. "Heaven Knows" (Review of Mayer-Schönberger). TLS November 20.
• IBM Global Technology Services. 2006. "The Toxic Terabyte: How Data-Dumping Threatens Business Efficiency."  July.
• Siegele, Ludwig. 2012. "Welcome to the Yotta World." Economist Nov 17.
  
  

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Week 3
February 5:   How Much Information? How Much Data?

Reading:

• Blair, Ann. 2003 "Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca 1550-1700." Journal of the History of Ideas 64(1): 11-28.

Background:

• Tuomi, Ilkka. 1999. "Data is More Than Knowledge: Implications of the Reversed Knowledge Hierarchy for Knowledge Management and Organizational Memory." Journal of Management Information Systems 16(3): 103-117.
  
  

February 7:   History of information — I: The Eighteenth Century

Reading:

• Paul Duguid. 2013(draft). "Information Comes of Age."
• Rosenberg, Daniel. 2012. "Toward a Quantitative History of Data." Papers Presented at the American Historical Association Meetings, Chicago, 2012.

Background:

• Blair, Ann, 2011. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Soll, Jacob. 2009. The Information Master:Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Week 4
February 12:  

Today the class will meet from 1—4 and be divided into two parts:

Part 1: The Public, Public Sphere, Public Information, & Public Opinion

Reading:

• Calhoun, Craig. 1996. "Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere" pp 1-48 in C.Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere.   Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1989. "On the Concept of Public Opinion" pp 236-250 in J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Background:

• Habermas, Jürgen, 1989. "Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere" pp 1-13 in J. Habermas,  The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2008. "Tom Paine's Common Sense and Ours." William & Mary Quarterly 65(4): 633-668.
• Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2008. "Before Democracy: The Production and Use of Common Sense." Journal of Modern History 80(1): 1-54.

Part 2: History of information - II: The last 200 years.

Reading:

• Nunberg, Geoffrey, 1996.  "Farewell to the Information Age" pp 103-138 in G.Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Read pp. 1-23. of this version.]
• The Oxford English Dictionary entry for 'information'. Go to the OED here and look up information. You can skip the first senses under I, but look closely at senses II.4.a; II.5a-e, 6. Look also at the compounds at the end of the entry. Try to read the citations as well, at least from the 18th c. on -- often these help to fill in exactly what the definition means. 
• Gleick, James. 2011. "Prologue" in The Information. New York: Pantheon.

Background:

• Salthe, Stanley N. 2011. "Naturalizing Information." Information 2: 417-425.
• Nunberg, G. 2011. Review of The Information, by James Gleick. The New York Times Book Review March 18.
• Newman, Julian. 2001. "Some Observations on the Semantics of 'Information.'" Information System Frontiers 3:2, 155-167.
• " The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different," Special number of Wired Magazine,June 23, 2008. See in particular Chris Anderson, " The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete."
• Halevy, Alon, Peter Norvig and Fernando Pereira. 2009. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data.” IEEE Intelligent Systems, March-April.
  

Paul's Slides

February 14: NO CLASS 

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Week 5
February 19:  

Today the class will meet from 1—4 and be divided into two parts:

Part 1: From the Bourgeois Public Sphere to the Internet

Reading:

• Darnton, Robert. 2000. "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris." American Historical Review 105(1): 1-35.
• Papacharissi, Zizi. 2002. "The Virtual Public Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere." New Media & Society 4(1): 9-27.
• Poster, Mark. 1995. "The Net as a Public Sphere" Wired 3.11.

Background:

• Dahlberg, L. 1998. " Cyberspace and the Public Sphere: Exploring the Democratic Potential of the Net. Convergence 4(1), 70-84.
• Dean, Jodi. 2003. "Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere." Constellations 10(1): 95-11.
• Poor, Nathaniel. 2005. "Mechanisms of an Online Public Sphere: The Website Slashdot." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 10(2).
• Shirky, Clay. 2011. "The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change." Foreign Affairs 90: 28-41.

Part 2: Exercise — public opinion

February 21: No Class 

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Week 6
February 26:   Information and the State

Reading:

• Giddens, Anthony. 1981. "Surveillance and the Capitalist State" pp 169-176 in A. Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol 1 Power, Property, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Scott, James C., John Tehranian, & Jeremy Mathias. 2002. "The Production of Legal identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname." Comparative Studies in Society and History 44(1): 4-44.

Background:

• Agar, John. 2003.  The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bayly, C.A. 1998. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Campbell-Kelly, Martin. 1996.  "Information Technology and Organizational change in the British Census, 1801-1911" Information Systems Research 7(1): 22-36.
• Cullen, Michael J. 1975. The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research. Harvester Press: New York.
• Hacking, Ian. 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Headrick, Daniel R.. 2000. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Rusnock, Andrea A. 2002. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zeitgeist:

• Barlow, John Perry. 1996. "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace."
• Dyson, Esther, et al. 1994.  "Cybespace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age"
• Read, William H. 1978. "Information as a National Resource" Journal of Communication. 29(1): 172-178.
  
  

February 28:   Exercise - personal information

Recent years have produced numerous policy debates about privacy focussing on "personal information" or "private information" and "personal data" or "private data." At a rough estimate, "personal" is more common than "private in these contexts, and "information" is more common than "data," but the context makes a difference.) Pick one or the other of these alternations (personal/private or information/data) and see if you can come up with some distinction, systematic or not, in the way it's used. If you can't find a difference -- if they seem to be used interchangeably-- that would be interesting too. For starters, you might consider Alan Westin's obituary and the report on the HTC settlement in the same issue of the New York Times. Or look at the way the terms are used in the context "use your _______" (see, eg., http://goo.gl/0N3G6; http://goo.gl/3z9qX; http://goo.gl/j5bzJ; http://goo.gl/bhX8j). Other contexts you might look at include "theft of ____," "disclose _____," etc.

Reading:

• Devries, Jennifer Valentino- & Jeremy Singer-Vine. 2012. "They Know What You're Shopping For." Wall Street Journal December 7.
• Rosen, Jeffrey. 2012. "Who Do Advertisers Think You Are?" New York Times November 30.

Background:

• Duguid, Paul. 2010. "Privacy Degree Zero." The Nation April 5.
• House of Lords. 2009. Surveillance: Citizens and the State. London: HMSO.
• Solove, Daniel J. 2008. Understanding Privacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Westin, Alan F. 1967. Privacy and Freedom. New York: Atheneum

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Week 7
March 5: No Class  

March 7:   Information and the Organization of Knowledge

Reading:

• Burke, Peter. "Classifying Knowledge" pp. 81-115 in P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge. Cambridge:Polity. Gleick, Ch 3.

Background:

• d'Alembert, Jean Le Rond. 1751. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, here.)Book of plates from Diderot's Encylopedie at archive.org. Slide hand icon at bottom to browse.
• Foucault, Michel. 2002. "Classifying" chapter 5 in M. Foucault, The Order of Things. London: Routledge. (trans. of Les Mots et Les Choses,1966). 
Most of the chapter is viewable at Google Books, and a plaintext version is also available here.
• Johnson, Samuel. 1755. "Preface" in S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language. London.
• McArthur, Tom. 1986. Ch 12-15, pp. 91-133 in Worlds of Reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Yeo, Richard. 1991. "Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730-1850." Isis 82: 24-49.

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Week 8
March 12:   Information and the Organization of Knowledge (continued)

Exercise - The internet and the organization of knowledge:

What happens to this global conception of the structure of knowledge in the age of Wikipedia and similar efforts? Is it still preserved in some form? Do the Wikipedians think they're reproducing it (as the -pedia suggests)? Or if it's essentially pluralist and fragmentary, can we really still speak of knowledge as opposed simply to information? One way to come at this is to pick a general topic area in Wikipedia that doesn't have a canonical internal structure (i.e., it doesn't reproduce the contents of an academic curriculum, like a topic in mathematics or cell biology, and its structure isn't determined more-or-less straightforwardly by the properties of its subject -- e.g., an entry for a city, a commercial product, or the career trajectory of a rock band). What we're looking for is "monsters," entries that sit uneasily at the intersection of several distinct knowledge domains, reflecting differences in subject matter, community, etc., and consequently scattered in coverage, tone &/or point of view. (Sometimes this is evident from the "see also" or "external link" sections.)
There's no algorithm for finding these things (is that a logical consequence of their definition?) but see if you can dig one or two out and speculate about what they say about the organization of knowledge.

OR

One can simply bang around in an area one is familiar with (but again, not one that has a standardized canonical structure) looking for entries that suggest the overapping of knowledge categories associated with different domains -- that is, that would present complications for the Encyclopédie picture of knowledge.

March 14:  

Discussion of final projects - I

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Week 9
March 19:   Information & Politics - I
Discussion of final projects - II

Reading:

• Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt Brace. ch. 6-7, 13-14. [Google Book; Also available at Project Gutenberg]
• Popkin, Samuel L.1994. The Reasoning Voter. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chch. 1-3, 5. (Google Book). An abridged version is available via Google Books as "Information Shortcuts and the Reasoning Voter" in Bernard N. Grofman, ed. Information, Participation, and Choice. Michigan, 1995

Background:

• Carey, James W. 1991. "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse" in T.L. Glasser & C. T.Salmon, eds., Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent. New York: Guilford Press.
• Dewey, John. 2003. "The Public and its Problems" in Andreas Hess, ed., American Social and Political Thought. New York: NYU Press.
• Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.
• Downs, Anthony. "An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy." The Journal of Political Economy 65(2): 135-150.
• Kinder, Donald R., 2003. "Communication and Politics in the Age of Information" in D. O. Sears and L. Huddy, eds., Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Page, Benjamin I. and Robert Y. Shapiro, 1992. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

March 21:   Information & Politics - II

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Week 10  —  Spring Break


Week 11
April 2:   Information, Economics & Development

Reading:

• Stiglitz, Joseph E.  2002.  "Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics." The American Economic Review 92(3): 460-501.
• Romer, Paul. 1993. "Idea Gaps and Object Gaps in Economic Development." Journal of Monetary Economics 32(3): 543-573.

Background:

• Akerlof, George A. 1970. "The Market for 'Lemons': Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism." Quarterly Journal of Economics 84(3): 488-500.
• Arrow, Kenneth J. 1984. "Information and Economic Behavior" pp: 136-152 in K. Arrow, Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Babbage, Charles. 1832. Onthe Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London: Charles Knight.
• Cowan, Robin, Paul A. David & Dominique Foray. 2000. "The Explicit Economics of Knowledge Codification and Tacitness." Industrial and Corporate Change 9(2): 211-253.
• Duguid, Paul. 2005. "'The Art of Knowing': Social and Tacit Dimensions of Knowledge and the Limits of the Community of Practice." The Information Society 2005 21(2): 109-118.
• Hayek, Frederich. 1937.  "Economics and Knowledge." Economica 4[NS](13): 35-54.
• Hayek, Frederich. 1945.  "The Use of Knowledge in Society." American Economic Review 35(4): 519-533.
• Hirshleifer, J. 1973. "Where Are We in the Theory of Information?" American Economic Review 2: 31-39.
• Learner, Edward E. & Michael Storper, 2001. "The Economic Geography of the Internet Age." Journal of International Business Studies 32(4): 641-665.
• Machlup, Fritz & Una Mansfield.  1983. "Semantic Quirks in Studies of Information" pp. 641-71 in F. Machlup & U. Mansfield, The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages.  New York: Wiley.
• Shapiro, Carl. 1982. "Consumer Information, Product Quality and Seller Reputation." Bell Journal of Economics 13(1): 20-35.
• Shapiro, Carl & Hal R. Varian. 2000.  Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.  Boston: Harvard University Press.
• Stigler, George J. 1961. "The Economics of Information." Journal of Political Economy 69(3): 213-225.
• Stigler, George J. & Gary S. Becker. 1977.  "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum."  American Economic Review 67(2): 76-90.

Zeitgeist:

• Kelly, Kevin. 1997. "New Rules for the New Economy." Wired 5.09.

April 4:   Information & Intellectual Property

Reading:

• Landes, William, & Richard Posner. 1987. "Trademark Law: An Economic Perspective." Journal of Law & Economics30(2): 265-309.
• Boyle, James. 2009. "Preface," pp. i-xvi in Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Background:

• Casson, Mark C. 1996. "Economics and Anthropology: Reluctant Partners. Human Relations 49 (9)(1966): 1151-1180.
• Fiske, Katherine. 2009. Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Week 12
April 9:   Information, Organizations, & Institutions

Reading:

• Coase, Ronald. 1937. "The Theory of the Firm." Economica 4(NS)(16): 386-405.
• Benkler, Yochai. 2003. "Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm." Yale Law Review 112(3): 369-446.

Background:

• Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Powell, Walter, & Paul DiMaggio. 1981. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Richardson, G.B. 1972. "The Organisation of Industry." The Economic Journal 82(327): 883-896.
• Wildavsky, Aaron. 1983. "Information as an Organizational Problem." Journal of Management Studies 20(1): 29-40.

Zeitgeist:

• Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. Open and Closed. New York Times March 16.
• Shirky, Clay. 2009. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press.
  
  

April 11: Information, Objectivity, & Truth

Reading:

• Schudson, Michael. "The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism." Journalism 2(2): 149-170.
• Mindich, David. 2000. Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism. NYU Press. Introduction and Ch 1, pp. 1-39.
• Datson, Lorraine & Peter Galison. 1992. "The Image of Objectivity." Representations 40 (Special Issue: "Seeing Science"): 81-128.

Background:

• Schudson, Michael. 2003. "Where News Came From: The History of Journalism," pp. 64-89 in M. Schudson, The Sociology of News. New York: Norton.
• Chalaby, Jean K. 2000. The Invention of Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Tucker, J. 1997. "Photography as Witness, Detective, and Impostor: Visual Representation in Victorian Science" in B. Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Green, David. 1984. "Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics." Oxford Art Journal 7(2): 3-16.

Zeitgeist:

• Nunberg, Geoffrey. 2006. "The War on Truth" pp. 168ff in Nunberg, G. Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. NewYork, PublicAffairs. Chapter 11, (175 in pdf) to 185 (191 in pdf).
• "Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two-Decade Low." Pew Research Center, 9/14/09.
• Liberman, Mark (2005-12-23). "Multiplying Ideologies Considered Harmful." Language Log.
• "Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist." UCLA newsroom
• Visit the websites of Media Research Center, Fair.org, mediamatters.org.

Geoff's Slides

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Week 13
April 16:   Information Theory I

Reading:

• Gleick, James. 2011. "Information Theory" Chapter 7; Ch 8 "The Informational Turn"; Ch 9 "Entropy and its Demons" in J. Gleick, The Information..
• Shannon, C.E. 1948. "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." Bell Systems Technical Journal July & October (Reprinted in ACM SIGMOBILE 5(1) 2001: 3-55 Read until you come to a paragraph you don't understand. Read it a second time, then continue until you reach another paragraph you don't understand; read it a second time etc. When you come to the third paragraph you don't understand, stop.
• Shannon,  C.E. 1956. "The Bandwagon." IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2: 3.

Background:

• Gallager, G. 2001. "Claude E. Shannon: A Retrospective on His Life, Work, and Impact." IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 47:7 (November).
• Hartley, R.V.L. 1928. "Transmission of Information," Bell System Technical Journal (July): 535-584.
• Weaver, Warren. 1998 (1949). "Some Recent Contributions to The Mathematical Theory of Communication" introduction to The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press.

April 18:   Information Theory II; Discussion: Final Paper Outlines

Reading:

• Dretske, Fred I. 1983. " The Epistemology of Belief." Synthese 55 (1):3 - 19.

Background:

• Israel, David & John Perry, "What is Information?" pp. 1-19 in P. Hanson, ed., Information, Language and Cognition. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
• Dretske, F. I. 1981. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Dretske, Fred. 1986. "Misrepresentation" in R. Bogdan, ed., Belief: Form, Content, and Function. Oxford University Press. [Google Books, w/ some pages missing.]
• Foley, Richard, 1987. "Dretske's Information-Theoretic Account of Knowledge." Synthese (70) 2: 159-184.

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Week 14
April 23:   Information & Cognitive Science I

Reading:

• Gardner, Howard. 1987. Introduction & Ch. 1, pp. 3-44. in Howard Gardner, The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. New York: Basic Books. [Google Books]
• Miller, George A. 1956. "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." The Psychological Review 63: 81-97.

Background:

• Bolter, David Jay. 1984. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
• Chomsky, Noam. 1959. "Review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner." Originally published in Language 35.
• Johnson, George. 1986. Machinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence. Redmond, WA: Tempus/Microsoft Press.
• Miller, George A. 2003. "The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Perspective." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3 March):141-144.
• Searle, John. 1980. "Minds, Brains, & Programs." The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3): 417-457.
• Simon, Herbert A. 1980. "Cognitive Science: The Newest Science of the Artificial." Cognitive Science 4: 33-46.
• Turing, Alan. 1950.  "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Mind 59(235): 433-460.
• Waldrup, M. Mitchell. 1987. Man-Made Minds: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Walker and Company.

April 25:   Information & Cognitive Science II

Reading:

• Suchman, Lucy. 1993. "Response to Vera and Simon's 'Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation.'" Cognitive Science 17(1): 71-75.
• Vera, Alonso H. & Simon, Herbert A. 1993. "Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation." Cognitive Science 17(1): 7-48.

Background:

• Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1979. What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Harper & Row.
• Duguid, Paul. 2012. "On Rereading. Suchman and Situated Action." Le Libellio d'AEGIS 8(2): 3-9.
• Lave, Jean. 1988. Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Lave, Jean & Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Suchman, Lucy. 2007. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Koschmann, Timothy, et al. 2003. "Plans and Situated Actions: A Retro-Review." Journal of the Learning Sciences 12(2) 257-306, special section on Suchman's work.

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Week 15
April 30:   Information & Education

Reading:

• Saxenian, Annalee. 2012.Can Online Education Technology Improve Excellence and Access at Berkeley? March 2.

Background:

• Brown, John S. & Paul Duguid. 1996. "The University in the Digital Age." The Times Higher Education Supplement (May): 1-4.

May 2:   Wrap

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Week 16 — Reading Week

May 7:   Final paper presentations