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Syllabus

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Info 218: Concepts of Information

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

Syllabus & Readings
Week 1
19 Jan: Introduction

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.

Zeitgeist:

Slides Geoff
Slides Paul

21 Jan: Information and philology
Reading:

Slides Geoff

Week 2
26 Jan: Ischool Identities
Reading: Slides Geoff


28 Jan: Exercise/discussion: Consuming information
Reading:

Background:

Zeitgeist: Slides

Week 3
2 Feb: How much information

Reading: Background:
  • Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting.New York, NY: Basic Books.
  • Brown, John Seely & Paul Duguid.  2000. "Limits to Information," chapter 1 in The Social Life of Information, Boston: Harvard University Press

  • 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?"
  • Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. 2009. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Harvard University Press
  • Porat, Marc U.  1977. The Information Economy: Sources and Methods for Measuring the Primary Information Sector, Washington,D.C.
Zeitgeist: Slides Paul


4 Feb: Exercise/discussion: Information and the public sphere
Reading: Background: Zeitgeist: Slides

Week 4
9 Feb: Information and news
Reading: Background:
  • Atherton, I. 1999. "The Itch Grown a Disease: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Early Seventeenth Century" in J. Raymond, ed., News, Nespapers and Society in Early Modern Britain. London: Frank Cass
  • Calhoun, Craig, ed. 1996. Habermas and the Public Sphere  (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996
  • Darnton, Robert. "An Enlightened Revolution," New York Review of Books 38 (17 October 24)
  • Fleck, Ludwik. 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
  • Lenoir, Timothy. 1997. Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
  • Povvey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
  • Raymond, Joad, ed. 1999. News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain. London: Frank Cass
  • Sommerville, C. John. 1997. "Surfing the Coffeehouse," History Today 47(6): 8-10
Zeitgeist: Slides Paul

11 Feb: Information and the organization of knowledge
Reading: Background: Slides Geoff


Week 5
16 Feb: Exercise/discussion: Wikipedia project
Reading: Background:
18 Feb: Exercise/discussion: Objectivity

Week 6
23 Feb: Information and the public
Slides Geoff

Reading: Background: Slides
25 Feb: Exercise/discussion: searching the law

Reading: Zeitgeist: Slides

Week 7
2 Mar: Legal information
Guest lecturer: Prof. Robert C. Berring

Reading: Zeitgeist:

4 Mar: Exercise/discussion: information and the census


Week 8
9 Mar: Information and the state
Reading: Background:
  • Agar, John. 2003.  The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
  • Campbell-Kelly, Martin, 2002.  "Information Technology and Organizational change in the British Census, 1801-1911," Information Systems Research 7(1): 35-57
  • 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
  • Oettinger, Anthony. 1980. "Information Resources: Knowledge and Power and the 21st Century," Science[Centennial Issue, July 4] 209 (4452): 191-198
  • Rusnock, Andrea A. 2002. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Zeitgeist:

Slides Paul

11 Mar: Information and politics
Reading:

Background:
  • Dewey, John. "The Public and its Problems," in  Andreas Hess, ed., 2003, American Social and Political Thought, NYU Press. Selection from Dewey's The Public and its Problems, 1927 (Swallow Press, 1991).
  • Carey, James W. "The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse," in Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent
    ed. Theodore Lewis Glasser, Charles T. Salmon. Guilford Press, 1995
  • Anthony Downs. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. See also "An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy," The Journal of Political Economy16(2): 135-150.
  • Kinder, Donald R., 2003. "Communication and Politics in the Age of Information," in David O. Sears and Leonie Huddy, eds., Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, Oxford.
  • Page, Benjamin I. and Robert Y. Shapiro, 1992. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences,
    University of Chicago Press

Slides


Week 9
16 Mar: Exercise/discussion: Information, inference, and political symbols

18 Mar: Discussion of paper topics and course projects
[final project/proposal papers due]

Week 10
Midterm break
- No classes -

Week 11
30 Mar: Information science -- Guest lecture Michael Buckland
Reading:

  • Buckland, Michael. 1991. "Information as Thing," Journal of the American Society of Information Science 42(5): 351-360
Background:
  • Buckland, Michael. 1991. "What Is a 'Document?,'" Journal of the American Society of Information Science 48(9): 804-809

1 Apr: Information theory/Philosophy of information
Reading: Background:
  • 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 have reached the third sentence you don't understand.
  • Rogers, Everett M. and Thomas W. Valente. 1993. "A History of Communication Theory in Communication Research," in Jorge Reina Schement and Brent D. Ruben, eds. Between communication and information, Volume 4. New Brunswick, N. J. Transaction Publishers.
  • Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua and Rudolph Carnap. "Semantic Information." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1953 IV(14):147-157
  • Floridi, Luciano. "Semantic Conceptions of Information," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Dretske, F. I. 1981. Knowledge & the flow of information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Israel, David and John Perry, “What is Information?”pp. 1-19 in Philip Hanson, ed., Information, Language and Cognition. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press
Slides Geoff
6 Apr: Exercise/discussion: Information theory

Week 12
8 Apr: Information and economics
Reading: Background: Zeitgeist: Slides

Week 13
13 Apr: Economics and information, continued; exercise & discussion


Slides (as for April 8)

15 Apr: Philosophy of Information -- Brian Smith, guest
[final project outlines due this week]
Reading:
  • tba
Background: Slides

Week 14
20 Apr: Bandwagon Effects
Slides

22 Apr: Searching for information
Reading: Background: Zeitgeist:

Slides

Week 15
27 Apr: Information and cognitive science
Reading: Background: Slides

29 Apr: Information as social capital
Reading: Literacy Notes
Slides

Week 16
4 May: Presentations


14 May: Final Projects/Papers due