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Info 218: Concepts of Information Spring 2012
School of Information, UC Berkeley, Spring 2012
Paul Duguid, Geoffrey Nunberg, instructors
Required Reading:
Gleick, James. 2011. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood New York: Viking.
Week 1
17 Jan: Introduction
Slides: Geoff
19 Jan: Exercise: I-School Identities
Reading
- 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)
- iSchool Faculty. 2008. "Elevator
Stories."
- Brouillon, L. 1956. Science and Information Theory. New York: Academic Press.
- Schrader,Alvin M. 1984. "In Search of a Name: Information Science and Its Conceptual Antecedents," Library and Information Science Research 6(3): 227-272
- Verity, John, 1994. "The Information Revolution: Introduction," Business Week, May 18, 1994.
Week 2
24 Jan: Playing With Words: "Technology," "Platform," and Other "Keywords"
Reading
- Marx, Leo. 2010. "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept," Technology & Culture 51(3):561-577.
- Gillespie, Tarleton. 2010. "The Politics of 'Platforms,'" New Media & Society 12(3): 347-364.
- Duff, A. S., Craig, D., & McNeill, D. A. 1996. "A Note On the Origins Of the 'Information Society.'" Journal of Information Science, 22(2): 117 -122.
- Jones, William. 2010, "No
Knowledge but through information"
<="" em=""> 15(9-6). - Rosenberg, Daniel. 2012. "Toward a Quantitative History of Data," Paper Presented at the American Historical Association Meetings, Chicago. [author's draft; available through bspace]
- 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.
- Kelly, Kevin. 2010. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking.
- Duguid, Paul. 2011. "Spin Cycle" (Review of Tim Wu, The Master Switch, & Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants. Nation, January 10/17
26 Jan: Exercise: Producing and Consuming Information
Reading
- Lyman, Peter, & Hal Varian,. 2003. "How Much Information?: Executive Summary
- Bohn, Roger E. & James E. Short. 2009. How Much Information? 2009: Report on American Consumers
Week 3
31 Jan: How Much Information?
Reading
- Blair, Ann. 2003 "
Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca 1550-1700," Journal of the History of Ideas 64(1): 11-28
- Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting.New York, NY: Basic Books. Blair, Ann, 2011. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Brown, John Seely & Paul Duguid. 2000. "Limits to Information," chapter 1 in The Social Life of Information, Boston: Harvard University Press.
- Green, John C. 1964. "The Information Explosion: Real or Imaginary," Science 144(3619): 646-648.
- 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.
- Machlup, Fritz. 1962. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton 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, D.C.
- Rosenberg, Daniel. 2010. Introduction [to panel of historians on Information Overload]. Journal of the History of Ideas. 64(1): 1-9.
- 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.
2 Feb: History of "Information"—1
Reading
- Nunberg, Geoffrey, 1996. "Farewell to the Information Age" in G. Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book, Berkeley: University of California Press. Read pp. 1-23.
- 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. The
Information. Pantheon. "Prologue." Online here if
you haven't received/dowloaded your copy yet.
- Salthe, Stanley N. 2011. "Naturalizing Information." Information 2011, 2, 417-425.
- Nunberg, G. 2011. Review of The Information, by James Gleick. The New York Times Book Review, March 18, 2011.
- Newman, Julian. 2001. "Some
Observations on the Semantics of 'Information.'" Information System Frontiers, 3:2,
155-167.
Week 4
7 Feb: History of "Information"—2
Reading: See 2 Feb.
9 Feb: The "Public," the Public Sphere, and Public Opinion
Reading
- Habermas, Jürgen, 1989. "Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere" pp 1-13 in Jürgen Habermas, 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [download from bspace]
- Calhoun, Craig. 1996. "Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere," pp 1-48 in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
- Calhoun, Craig, ed. 1996. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Darnton, Robert. 2000. "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris" American Historical Review 105(1).
- Darnton, Robert. 1991. "An Enlightened Revolution," New York Review of Books 38 (17 October 24)
- Habermas, Jürgen, Sara Lennonx, & Frank Lennox. 1974. "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article." New German Critique 3(Autumn): 49-55.
- Hohendahl, Peter. 1974. "Jürgen Habermas: &39;The Public Sphere.&39 New German Critique 3(Autumn): 45-48.
- Raymond, Joad, ed. 1999.
- Sommerville, C. John. 1997. "Surfing the Coffeehouse," History Today 47(6): 8-10
- Shirky, Clay. 2008. "The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers," Boing Boing, December 28
Slides Paul
Week 5
14 Feb: From the Bourgeois Public Sphere to the Internet
Reading
- Habermas, Jürgen, 1989. "On the Concept of Public Opinion" pp 236-250 in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- 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 (November)
16 Feb: Exercise: Public Opinion
Week 6
21 Feb: 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.
- 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.
- 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.
23 Feb: Information and the Organization
Reading
- Kline, Ronald, R. 2006. "Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy, The Emergence of 'Information Technology' as a Keyword, 1948-1985." Technology and Culture 74: 513-535
- Raff, Daniel & Peter Temin. 1991. "Business History and Recent Economic Theory: Imperfect Information, Incentives and the Internal Organization of Firms" pp: 7-41 in Peter Temin, ed., Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Week 7
28 Feb: Information and Objectivity
- 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 and Peter Galison. 1992. "The Image of Objectivity." Representations 40 (Special Issue: Seeing Science): 81-128.
- Schudson, Michael. 2003. "Where News Came From: The History of Journalism," pp. 64-89 in Michael 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 Bernard Lightman, ed. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Green, David. 1984. "Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics." Oxford Art Journal7(2): 3-16.
- 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). [download from bSpace.]
- "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.
1 Mar: Exercise: Objectivity
Week 8
6 Mar: Information and Political Science
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
- Dewey, John. "The Public and its Problems," in Andreas Hess, ed., 2003, American Social and Political Thought, New York: NYU Press. Selection from Dewey's The Public and its Problems, 1927 (Swallow Press, 1991).
- Carey, James W. 1991. "The
Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse," in Theodore Lewis
Glasser & Charles T. Salmon, eds., Public Opinion and the
Communication of Consent.
- 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 awnd Politics in the Age of Information," in David O. Sears and Leonie Huddy, eds., Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Page, Benjamin I. and Robert Y. Shapiro, 1992.
8 Mar: Exercise: Political Science
Week 9
13 Mar: Information and the Organization of Knowledge
Reading
- Burke, Peter. "Classifying Knowledge" chapter 5 in Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity.
- Gleick, Ch 3.
- Yeo, Richard. 1991. "Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730-1850." Isis, 82: 24-49.
- McArthur, Tom. 1986. Ch 12-15, pp. 91-133 in Worlds of Reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Samuel Johnson. 1755. Preface to the Dictionary of the English Language, London.
- Foucault, Michel. 2002. "Classifying." Chapter 5 of 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. - d'Alembert, Jean Le Rond. 1751. Preliminary Discourse to
the Encyclopedia of Diderot, Selections
from Part I. (Entire text can be found here.)
Book of plates from Diderot's Encylopedie at archive.org. Slide hand icon at bottom to browse.
15 Mar: Exercise: The Internet and the Organization of Knowledge
Final Paper/Project Proposals Due
Week10
20 Mar: Theories of Information—1
Reading
- Gleick, James. 2001. "Information Theory" Chapter 7; Ch 8 "The Informational Turn"; Ch 9 "Entropy and its Demons."
- 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 (March): 3.
- 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 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.
22 Mar: Information, Economics, and Development
- 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.
- 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.On the 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.
- Fama, Eugene. 1970. "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work," Journal of Finance 25(2): 383-417.
- Hirshleifer, J. 1973. "Where Are We in the Theory of Information?,"American Economic Review, 2: 31-39.
- 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.
- 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," in The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. New York: Wiley: 641-71.
- 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.
- Kelly, Kevin. 1997. "New Rules for the New Economy," Wired 5.09.
Week 11
Midterm break
- No classes -
Week 12
3 April: Information, Economics, and Development—2
Reading Background Zeitgeist: Slides Paul
10 Apr: Theories of Information—2
Reading
- Fred I. Dretske. 1983."The Epistemology of Belief." Synthese 55 (1):3 - 19.
- 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.
- Dretske, F. I. 1981. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Foley, Richard, 1987. "Dretske's 'Information-Theoretic' Account of Knowledge.' Synthese Vol. 70, No. 2, Feb., 1987
- Fred Dretske. 1986. "Misrepresentation."
In R. Bogdan (ed.), Belief: Form,
Content, and Function. Oxford University Press. Google Books, w/
some pages missing.
Week 13
5 Apr: Information and Cognitive Science—1
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. (At 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.
- Simon, Herbert A. 1980. "Cognitive Science: The Newest Science of the Artificial," Cognitive Science 4: 33-46.
- Miller, George A. 2003. "The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective." Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3 March): 141-144.
- Chomsky, Noam. 1959. "Review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner.". Originally published in Language 35.
- Bolter, David Jay. 1984. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
- Turing, Alan. 1950. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 59(235): 433-460.
- 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.
- Searle, John. 1980. "Minds, Brains, & Programs," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3): 417-457
- Waldrup, M. Mitchell. 1987. Man-Made Minds: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Walker and Company.
12 Apr: Discussion: Outline of Finals Papers/Projects
Slides
Week 14
17 Apr: Information and Cognitive Science—2: Critique-Planning, Learning, Designing
Reading
- Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. 1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (2): 155–169.
- Simon, Herbert A. 1973. “The Structure of Ill Structured Problems.” Artificial Intelligence 4 (3–4): 181–201.
- Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1979. What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Harper & Row.
- 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.
- Rittel, Horst W. J. 1972. “On the Planning Crisis: Systems Analysis of the 'First and Second Generations.'” Bedriftsokonomen 8: 390–396.
- Suchman, Lucy. 1986. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- 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.
- "Plans and Situated Actions: A Retro-Review"Journal of the Learning Sciences 12(2) 257-306, special section on Suchman's work.
Kartik's Slides
19 Apr: Literacy, then and now
Reading
Background
Neil Selwyn, Neil. 2004. "Reconsidering Political and Popular Understandings of the Digital Divide." New Media & Society, 6(3): 341-362
Week 15
24 Apr: Searching for Information
Reading
- Bush, Vanevar. 1945. "As We May Think." The Atlantic (July)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Paul's Slides
26 Apr: Wrap: Has This Course Provided Any Information?
Week 16: Reading Week
1 May: Final Paper/Project Presentations
11 May: Final Paper/Project Due