Informing Science

This chapter defines the scope of informing science. The chapter begins by examining whether informing science is a discipline or field of knowledge. Next, the development of software engineering and informing science are discussed. The chapter then analyzes four key periods in the history of information processing models: (1) machine-centric computing, (2) application-oriented data processing, (3) service-oriented utility environments, and (4) interactive approaches. Next, the concept of informing science is analyzed, and a matrix model of informing science is presented. The chapter concludes by considering some of the contemporary issues with informing science, including (1) the relationship between ICT as it is applied in businesses and ICT as it is developed as a science in higher education (2) as well as the strategies used by universities for educating students in this field.

Encyclopedic Style

This chapter turns to Trevisa’s accomplished translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s natural encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum. Medieval encyclopedias like Trevisa’s subvert modern expectations of natural history by showing first, that the history of information culture includes both literature and the literary, and second, that the history of English literature includes the translation of big Latin encyclopedias into the vernacular. Trevisa’s continual immersion in De proprietatibus rerum helped him develop a vibrant and affecting prose style, an accumulative style, that was both indebted to Latin encyclopedism and deeply innovative in its shaping of literary English. At the heart of Trevisa’s encyclopedic style is the idea of the “property” as simultaneously a literary ornament and the character or trait of a created thing.

The Information Economy

The term “information economy” first came into widespread usage during the 1960s and 1970s to identify a major transformation in the postwar American economy in which manufacturing had been eclipsed by the production and management of information. However, the information economy first identified in the mid-20th century was one of many information economies that have been central to American industrialization, business, and capitalism for over two centuries. The emergence of information economies can be understood in two ways: as a continuous process in which information itself became a commodity, as well as an uneven and contested—not inevitable—process in which economic life became dependent on various forms of information. The production, circulation, and commodification of information has historically been essential to the growth of American capitalism and to creating and perpetuating—and at times resisting—structural racial, gender, and class inequities in American economy and society. Yet information economies, while uneven and contested, also became more bureaucratized, quantified, and commodified from the 18th century to the 21st century. The history of information economies in the United States is also characterized by the importance of systems, networks, and infrastructures that link people, information, capital, commodities, markets, bureaucracies, technologies, ideas, expertise, laws, and ideologies. The materiality of information economies is historically inextricable from production of knowledge about the economy, and the concepts of “information” and “economy” are themselves historical constructs that change over time. The history of information economies is not a teleological story of progress in which increasing bureaucratic rationality, efficiency, predictability, and profit inevitably led to the 21st-century age of Big Data. Nor is it a singular story of a single, coherent, uniform information economy. The creation of multiple information economies—at different scales in different regions—was a contingent, contested, often inequitable process that did not automatically democratize access to objective information.

The Information Literacy Movement of the School Library Media Field: A Preliminary Summary of the Research

The authors summarize the proceedings of two major conferences, the Treasure Mountain Research Retreat VI and the International Association School Librarianship conference. In addition, the authors look at the entire history of information literacy and bring together the theory development, the research, and practice in school libraries since the late 1980s. Information literacy and critical thinking ideas from the fields of education, cognitive psychology and educational technology have been included.

Information Theory: Deep Ideas, Wide Perspectives, and Various Applications

The history of information theory, as a mathematical principle for analyzing data transmission and information communication, was formalized in 1948 with the publication of Claude Shannon’s famous paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” [...]