July 13, 2008 11:58 am
Published by Fran
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: what categories reveal about the mind by George Lakoff is a hefty tome and a core text in cognitive science. It is 587 pages long, so there are a lot of ideas in there and I am not going to do it justice in this little blog post! Basically, Lakoff starts by bringing together aspects of the work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, anthropologists, and psychologists – primarily Eleanor Rosch to show how the notion of meaning being rooted in context rather than in some external objective ideal has risen to... Read more »
July 10, 2008 3:53 pm
Published by Fran
A research paper on web search, which argues that use of websites is not always informational in the classic information retreival sense. A web user may simply be navigating or attempting some sort of transaction, such as shopping. The author, Andrei Broder, worked at Alta Vista and then IBM.
July 7, 2008 6:07 am
Published by Fran
Pace layering in ia is a paper by D. Grant Campbell and Karl V. Fast from the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario. They bring pace layering theories from ecology and environmental science into information architecture, viewing ia as an “ecology”. Basically, ecologists have noted that events occurring over different timescales interact to affect an environment – something like the lowering of the water table would be a slow event, but a flash flood would be a fast event. Only by looking at the ways these differently “paced layers” interact, can you predict how the local... Read more »
July 2, 2008 5:44 am
Published by Fran
Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age was well worth a read (the link is to a serious review). I found it a bit hard going to start with (but I’d always rather be challenged than patronised) probably because it began with a scholarly overview of concepts of culture. I enjoyed the interesting juxtapositions, such as the way the concept of text as artefact has changed since medieval times and how the idea of text as a performance is returning in the online arena. With chapters looking at the effect of the cyber revolution on notions... Read more »
June 29, 2008 12:43 pm
Published by Fran
The ISKO event at UCL on Thursday was fascinating. It was a real treat to hear the eminent Brian Vickery summarise the last 75 years of information retrieval developments, setting out the key questions to be answered and the challenges still to be overcome. At 90 years old he has a unique overview, having been a key member of the Classification Research Group and director of SLAIS. He pointed out that most retrieval systems have a particular user community in mind and that this affects the choice of information collected as well as the way the collection is structured. He... Read more »
June 28, 2008 1:20 pm
Published by Fran
Language and Social Identity is a collection of fascinating sociolinguistic papers. Dealing with gender and ethnicity, the researchers seek to show how stereotypes often arise from simple linguistic misunderstandings. For example, one paper argues that speakers of Indian English tend to use pronouns, conjunctions, and intonation very differently to speakers of UK English. UK speakers typically fail to pick up on the Indian English speakers’ cues and assume that what they are saying is confused or incoherent. Conversely, Indian English speakers think the UK English speakers must be either daft or extremely patronising because of their apparent failure to understand... Read more »
June 25, 2008 5:12 am
Published by Fran
7th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop at the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries is taking place in Aarhus in September. Topics of contributions include: * Concepts of Digital Libraries and digital content * Collection building, management and integration * System architectures, integration and interoperability * Information organisation, search and usage * Multilingual information access and multimedia content management * User interfaces for digital libraries * User studies and system evaluation * Digital archiving and preservation: methodological, technical and legal issues * Digital Library applications in e-science, e-learning, e-government, cultural heritage, etc. * Web... Read more »
June 21, 2008 12:56 pm
Published by Fran
SAGE will be running a free trial to its entire portfolio of Information Science journals throughout July and August. To sign up (for access to journals such as the IFLA Journal, Journal of Information Science and Information Development) go to http://online.sagepub.com/cgi/freetrial (from the 1st of July). Alternatively email infoscience@sagepub.co.uk to be informed when the trial goes live.
June 18, 2008 5:23 pm
Published by Fran
The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web New York Times review of the Mundaneum Museum.
June 15, 2008 9:03 am
Published by Fran
Sorting Things Out – Classification and its Consequences is a joy of a book, crammed with research and insights. It is very well written but is aimed at a serious academic audience, so pretty dense and packed with references. Bowker and Star examine in depth the development of the International Classification of Causes of Death, going back to 17th century archives and considering how something as apparently obvious and clearcut as death is in fact mired in political, religious, and economic biases. They go on to discuss the treatment of TB patients and the development of the Nursing Interventions Classification,... Read more »