February 2009
2 posts
Kittler | Text →
Approaches to Net Based Learning, Experiences with... →
July 2008
4 posts
floridi on the three approaches to information →
data-information-knowledge is a fairytale →
pragmatic theory of information →
the word for information in Japan has a military...
In the Meiji Era, the modernization period in Japan in the late 19th century, when a lot of new terms and concepts were imported from European countries and North America, the scholars struggled to invent new Japanese words to translate those new imported ones. Jouhou is among these new invented words. According to some authors the word jouhou was used as Japanese translation of several different...
June 2008
17 posts
wittgenstein and orality →
Librarianship and the Philosophy of Information...... →
search for "the problem with information" →
kittler zur einfuehrung →
media techonology FORCES information out
“Machines take over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in the past, merely those of muscles. And with this differentiation – and not with steam engines and railroads – a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic” (Kittler, GFT, 16).
Derrida Overview, also the famous story from... →
What if expository writing (with all its citations, footnotes and bibliographies) did not amount to a conversation between and across various âsourcesâ â what if knowledge did not HAVE a…
yeah, you WOULD LIKE TO THINK things have changed!
Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair indeed, theories of the postmodern—whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation—bear strong fmaily resemblance to all those more ambition sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a while new type of...
1 tag
The James G. Olle Studentships 2008-09
The Library and Information History Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is to fund annual studentships up to a total annual sum of £500 to encourage the level of activity in library history. These awards are named after the late James G. Ollé, an active teacher and writer in library history.
Prospective candidates for the studentships should be...
Havelock claims that the concept of information...
The language of Homer is a storage language devised orally for the purpose of survival.
Devising a spoken language for this purpose for contemporary Greeks was one thing; devising a means for transmitting its record was something else—a task undertaken by the Greek alphabet. This same instrument has made possible the formation of those concepts of information, of code, of cultural storage,...
wiki on Orality →
1 tag
In the age of orality/aurality, action and speech...
“he next instance of objectivity provoked by the orality/literacy collission appeared when Malinowski published “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages (1923). Like WOod, and unlike Rousseau who relied on hearsay reports, the author as a professional anthropologist had made actual contact with pre-literate societies and made the interesting observation, pregnant for later...
shit i disagree with →
a device is not neutral
If we take the case of writing implements, we can more clearly see both the positive role that can be played by technological things as well as the special danger they present to which Borgmann has made us sensitive. Like bridges the style of writing implements reflects their place in the history of being. The fountain pen solicits us to write to someone for whom the personality of our handwriting...
“the essential move that made computers: storing instructing
“At first...”
Marxist Media Theory →
word recognition →
Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm... →
May 2008
17 posts
Information always comes from another person...
The duplication in print of extant scribal maps and anceint geographical treatises, even while seeming to provide evidence of “backsliding,” also provided a bassi for unprecedented advance. To found knowledge of the whole world “on first hand information” is, literally speaking, quite impossible. Access to a wide variety of secondhand information furnished by reports,...
Elizabeth Eisenstein's point: the printing press...
Heidegger on the thesis that language is...
Now, one could believe the technoligical interpretation of language as a means for communicating and notfying to be self-evident insofar as technology is iteself understood as a means and everything is concieved only according to this respect. However, considering what we have already discussed regarding what is peculiar to technology and language, this explanation remains at the surface. Instead...
response to review of Critique of Information →
another history of information
Peters, J. D. (1988). Information: Notes toward a critical history. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 12, 10-24.
There are a lot of so-called 'information...
If we agree with Spang-Hanssen that definitions are legitimate ways to boost the status of a profession and research field, we must face the fact that such use can cause internal confusion and lack of self-respect in the discipline. Schrader, among others, has demonstrated this outcome. He studied about 700 definitions of information science and its antecedents from 1900 to 1981 and found that:...
handwriting texts does not establish a greater...
Every hand-copied book, it is sometimes said, ‘was a personal achievement.’ Actually, a great many hand-produced books were farmed out piecemeal to be copied and worked over by several hands. But even where a single hand runs from incipit to colophon and full signature is given at the end, there is almost no trace of personality left by the presumably ‘personal achievement’...
macluhan, baudrillard, cultural theory →
From language and floating to code and flickering:...
“Language is not a code,” Lacan asserted, because he wanted to deny one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and signified. In word processing, however, language is a code. The relation between machine and compiler languages is specified by coding arrangement, as is the relation of the compiler language to the programming commands that the user manipulates. Through these...
Truth in an ancient predecessor vs truth 'out...
‘It is also worth considering that different meaning may have been assigned terms such as ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, ‘discovery’ and ‘recovery’, ‘invention’ and ‘imitation’ before important departures from precedent could be permanently recorded. ‘Throughout the patristic and medieval periods, the quest for truth is...
the one who keeps information is not you, but a...
“Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection. We’re still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen—what is given is exactly the infromation but not the sensation; it is apatheia, this scientific impassibility which makes it...
Farradane waves the informational pirate flag...
In spite (or perhaps because) of expansion, the longstanding debates about ASLIB’s purpose and identity (see pp. 86-87) finally erupted in the post-war years. Fundamentally, the debate was rooted in the contradictions inherent in ASLIB’s dual ‘professional’ and ‘corporate’ role, and fuelled by uncertainties latent [in] the associations relationship to library...
the man who coined the term "information science"
Jason Farradane Jason Farradane graduated in chemistry in 1929 at what is now Imperial College and started work in industry as a chemist and documentalist. After working in research at the Ministry of Supply and the Admiralty during World War II, he first made an impact with a paper on the scientific approach to documentation at a Royal Society Scientific Information Conference in 1948. He was...
railroad management culture points to...
McCallum’s innovations in managerial principles and techniques, as well as innovations by a few other railroad managers, were wikdely publicized through such railraod periodicals as Henry Varnum Poor’s American Railroad Journal. Poor, who extolled the innovations, generalized and extrapolated from them in ways that emphasized the connection between managerial theory and systematic...