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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:
- Bell, Vaughan. 2010. "Don't Touch that Dial: A
History of Media Technology Scares, from the Printing Press to
Facebook," Slate Feb 15
- IBM Global Technology Services, 2006. "The
Toxic Terabyte: How Data-Dumping Threatens Business Efficiency,"
July.
- Hemp, Paul. 2009. "Death
by Information Overload," Harvard Business Review 87(9):
82-89
- Schiffman, Betsy. 2008. "Web
2.0 Preview: Torture by Information Overload," Wired Blog
- Foley, John. 1995. "New Tools Can
Help Tame an Ocean of Data," Information Week. October 30
Slides Paul
4 Feb: Exercise/discussion: Information and the public
sphere
Reading:
Background:
- Associated Press. 2010. "Quake
Relief: The Culture of Now v. the Real World, Mercury News,
Jan 23 [Rajesh]
- Brooks, David. 2010. "The
Geezers' Crusade," New York Times, Feb 1 [Andy, Noah]
- Cavanagh, Alison, 2007.
Sociology in the Age of the Internet, Milton
Keynes: Open University Press
- Cohen, Patricia. 2009. "Tracking
News via Cyberspace," New York Times [Noah]
- Editorial. 2009. "Internet
Emerging as a New Stage for Public Debate (but there are also worries
whether these online discussions are degenerating into reckless
rhetoric", The Nation, September 6 [Nathan]
- Frank, Robert H. 2008. "Why
Self Interest Isn't Everything, New York Times, January
10. [Yiming]
- Han. S. 2008. "Digital
Divid: The Shadow of Network Society," Korea Herald,,
Sept 4 [Sean, Yiming]
- Heneghan, Tom. 2008. "Religion
Slowly Returns to Public Sphere in France," Reuters UK, Sep 12
[Nathan]
- Martin, Courtney E. 2008.
"Counter Cyberbullies with Compassion," Christian Science
Monitor, July 10 [Michael]
- Nabulsi, Karma. 2008. "Obama's
Old Virtues: The Political Strategy of the Democratic Favourite Has its
Roots in a Rich Republican Tradition," Guardian August 4
[Noah]
- Tan, Keith Gerard. 2010. "The
New Ugly S'Porean, Temask Review, January 26 [Sean]
- Dahlberg, Lincoln. 2001. "Computer-Mediated
Comunication and the Public Sphere: A Critical Analysis", JCMC
7(1)
- Pokharel, Prabhas. 2010. "How
Mobile Voices Developed a Citizen Media Platform," Media Shift Idea
Lab (pbs), Jan 26 [Sean]
- Special Correspondent. 2005. "Public
Sphere is Dead in Kerala, Says K.N. Panikkar," The Hindu,
Dec 11 [Michael]
- Waddington, Lynda. 2010.
"Legislators, Religious Group Team Up For 'Christian Education' Series
at Capitol," Iowa Independent, Jan 25 [Tiffany]
- Yuan, W 2010. "Online
Voices May Deafen Us to Silent Majority," Global Times,
Feb 4. [Andy]
- Zublin, Fiona. 2010. "New
Theatre Work Is Inspired by Internet Chat Groups for the Suicidal,"
Washington Post, January 25 [Tiffany].
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:
- *Johnson, Samuel. 1755. Preface to the Dictionary of the English
Language
, London
- Foster, Roy. 2010. Who
Was Who in Ireland?, TLS, February 3
- Foucault, Michel. "Classifying." Chapter 5 of The Order
of Things.
Routledge, 2002 (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.
- 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.
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:
- Schudson, Michael. 2003. "Where News Came From: The History
of
Journalism," Ch. 4 in The Sociology
of News, Norton. Pp. 64-89.<
- 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 Bernard Lightman, ed. Victorian Science in Context.
University of Chicago Press.<
- Green, David. 1984. "Veins
of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics." Oxford Art Journal7(2)
Photography, pp. 3-16.
- Nunberg, Geoffrey. 2006. Talking
Right, PublicAffairs. Ch. 11, "The War on Truth," pp. 169-185.
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:
- Lippmann, Walter. 1922.
Public Opinion. New
York: Harcourt Brace. Chch. 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:
- 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:
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:
- Ancori, Antoine Bureth & Patrick Cohendet. 2000. "Economics
of Knowledge: The Debate about Codification & Tacit Knowledge,"
Industrial and Corporate Change, 9(2): 255-287
- Arrow, Kenneth J. 1984. "Information and Economic Behavior"
in K.
Arrow, Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp:
136-152
- Cassady, John. 2010.
"Chicago Interviews," New Yorker blog.
- 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. "Untidy
of Untractable? G.B. Richardson's View of Economics," Aegis le
Libello 2-6
- 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
- Hirshleifer, J. 1973. "Where
Are We in the Theory of Information?,"American Economic Review,
2: 31-39
- Krugman, Paul. nd. "The Fall and Rise
of Development Economics" Working Paper[?]
- 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,” in The
Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. New
York: Wiley: 641–71
- Richardson, George B. 1960. Information
and Investment: A Study in the Working of the Competitive Economy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press
- 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.
- Simon, Herbert A. 1999. "The
Many Shapes of Knowledge," Revue d'Économie Industrielle
88: 23-39
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:
Background:
Slides
Week 14
20 Apr: Bandwagon Effects
Slides
22 Apr: Searching for information
Reading:
Background:
- Battelle, John. 2005. The Search: How Google and Its
Rivals Rewrote
the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York:
Portfolio.
- Brin, Sergey & Lawrence Page, 1998. "Anatomy of a
Large-Scale, Hypertextual Digital Search Engine"
- Buckland, Michael K. 1997. "What
Is a 'Document'?" Journal of the
American Society for Information Science 48(9): 804-809
- Buckland, Michael K. 1992. "Emanuel
Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush's Memex,"
Journal of the
American Society for Information Science 43(4): 284-294
- Duguid, Paul. 2010. "The
World According to Grep: A Progress from Open to Closed? in Konrad
Becker & Felix Stalder, eds., Deep Search Vienna:
Studienverlag, 2009
- Raff, Adam. 2009. "Search,
but You May Not Find," New York Times, December 28.
- Chartier, Roger. 1994. The Order of Books: Readers,
Authors, and
Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries.
Stanford: Stanford University Press
- Geertz, Clifford. 1978. "The Bazaar Economy:
Information and Search in Peasant Marketing," 68(2):28-32.
- Otlet, Paul, 1990. "Something
about Bibliography," pp.11-24 in W.
Boyd Rayward, ed., International
Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays of Paul
Otlet. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Internet Archive
Zeitgeist:
Slides
Week 15
27 Apr: Information and cognitive science
Reading:
Background:
- Bolter, David Jay. 1984. Turing's Man: Western Culture
in the Computer Age.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
- Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1979. What Computers Can't Do: The
Limits of
Artificial Intelligence. New York: Harper & Row
- Gardner, Howard, 1987. The Mind's New Science: A
History of the
Cognitive Revolution. New York: Basic Books.
- Johnson, George. 1986 Machinery of the Mind: Inside the
New Science
of Artificial Intelligence. Redmond, WA: Tempus/Microsoft Press
- Miller, George A. 1956. "The
Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity
for Processing Information," Psychological Review 63(2):
81-97
- Searle, John. 1980. "Minds,
Brains, & Programs," The
Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 3(3): 417-457
- 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.
- Waldrup, M. Mitchell. 1987. Man-Made Minds: The Promise
of
Artificial Intelligence. New York: Walker and Company
Slides
29 Apr: Information as social capital
Reading:
Literacy Notes
Slides
Week 16
4 May: Presentations
14 May: Final Projects/Papers due
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