Information The Artificiality of Documents: or, Resurrecting the Human in Information Science .

1. Information The Artificiality of Documents: or, Resurrecting the Human in Information Science. Thoughts on the (In)Completeness of Information Management / Science / Studies / Systems Michael Buckland American Society for Information Science and Technology SIG History and Foundations of Information Science Long Beach, October 21, 2003

2. Tendencies reinforcing the objectification of information. Trend to Information-as-Thing: 1. By Design - Modernist emphasis on “facts,” e.g. Wilhelm Ostwald, Paul Otlet, monographic principle, hypertext. - Mass media, based on new information technology, leads to second-hand factoids. (Walter Benjamin). - Increasing dependence on “second-hand information” (Patrick Wilson).

3. Tendencies toward the objectification of information. Trend to Information-as-Thing: 2: Technology. - The huge growth of modern information technology in the 20th century. IT can operate only on physical entities. Standardization helps. - Rise of commodification of “information” tends to packaging of standardized “information.” - Formalism encourages mechanistic views of role of humans (AI, conduit theory)

4. Tendencies reinforcing the objectification of information. Trend to Information-as-Thing: 3: Social - High social prestige of formal science encourages formalization and scientism in social sciences, LIS. - Formalism encourages mechanistic views of role of humans (AI, conduit theory) - Rise of commodification of “information” tends to packaged of standardized “information.” Use is consumer choice, rather than knowing /learning. Strong trend to “scientific” or “idealistic” objectivism, standards, and formal algorithms

5. Consequences of reification of information - 1 - Heavily reductionist view of information management / science / studies as being only within IT. - Natural language processing, based ons character strings, statistical analysis and syntax, with little attention to linguistics, semiotics (Peirce, Wittgenstein), pragmatics? - Attention deflected away from process of knowing / becoming informed and to data and records. - Example IR depends on relevance, an imperfectly defined metric.

6. Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information. (1990, pp 72-73.) reproduces figures carved on Dighton Writing Rock in south east Massachusetts. He shows that different transcriptions of the carvings look quite different. The carvings have been recognized as being Scythian text or Viking text about the travels of Thorfinn the Hopeful or Phoenician or Algonquin!

7. A charming drawing by Cem in The New Yorker, reproduced in E. R. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983, p 56), shows a classroom of small of children. A girl dances, trying to depict a flower in bloom. Each other child constructs a different meaning of what the dance depicts, no two are the same and none is a flower in bloom. This goes to the heart if Information Science: Performances can be documents, meaning is constructed, and information is charmingly human. But which funding agency would appreciate this image of IS?

8. Consequences of reification of information - 2 - Sustained disregard for role of humanities (representation, interpretation, symbolism). - Disregard for aesthetic and affective aspects of becoming informed, role of belief, cognitive authority. - The “death” of the human user in IS (and IT) – or, rather, the adoption of a reductionist, mechanistic entity model of the “user” which never could be very human. The fundamental difference between IS and IT is lost if IS regarded only in terms of IT.

9. Constructive responses: Resurrecting the human - 1 1. Shift emphasis from formalisms (fixity, algorithms) to a focus on processes and events - Information-as-phenomenon: - - Perception is an event. - - Each act of remembering is an event, we remember differently each time. - Constructivist theories of knowledge: Knowing is an event, e.g. Oral history; understanding of cultural heritage.

10. Constructive responses: Resurrecting the human 2. Acknowledge the artificiality of documents (Info-as-thing) at three levels 1 - Documents are artifacts, some thing that is made, algorithms are man-made. 2 - Meaning is constructed individualistically, document by document, person by person, time after time. 3 - A document is meaningless without a context; contexts are personal/social, fluid, and unstable. - - Meaning depends on a constructed context, set of relationships, an epistemology. e.g. Darwinism; impact of Freudian theories.

11. Constructive responses: Resurrecting the human 3. Frame the field, choose the horizons - Creation, distribution, and utilizationof knowledge (Economist Fritz Machlup). - Application of IT (Economics). If it uses “IT,” it must be Information! 4. Become concerned with other kinds of knowledge - away from academic science or engineering, with high affect, highly aesthetic, e.g. Cultural heritage.

12. Placing documents in meaningful contexts, meaningful situationally for individuals, is the essence of Information Science. Vesa Suominen. Filling Empty Space: A Treatise on Semiotic Structures in Information Retrieval, in Documentation and in Related Research. University of Oulu, Finland, 1997. Michael Buckland buckland@sims.berkeley.edu