D’Andrade, R. (1986). Three scientific world views and the covering law model. In D.W. Fiske & R.A. Shweder (Eds.), Metatheory in social science: Pluralisms and subjectivities (pp. 19–41). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rayward, W. B. (1996). The history and historiography of information science: Some reflections. Information Processing & Management, 32(1), 3–17.
Said, E. (1993). The politics of knowledge. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity and representation in education (pp. 306–314). New York: Routledge.
D’Andrade (1986) presents the covering law model of science, which states that science consists of the search for laws, generalized across a series of events, that explain and predict the chain of events. (pp. 19–20) He argues that this model applies well to physical sciences, less well to natural sciences, and more problematically to “semiotic” sciences. He writes that these are three separate worldviews and that the social sciences, which fit into the category of semiotic sciences, need not feel constrained by the covering law model. The semiotic sciences explore the creation of an imposed order rather than explaining a natural order. They require a creative, interpretive path to discovery of this order. (p. 23) Critics point out the intersubjectivity of social science—the degree to which one even can have different meanings for different people—and some directly reject any science that deals with interpretation of meanings. (p. 31) D’Andrade contends that narrowing the range of possible interpretations through data collection can strengthen research. (p. 33)
Rayward (1996) writes that Information Science’s diffuse and undefined nature poses problems for its historians, and that the field’s interdisciplinarity is a dominant theme. (pp. 3–5) He spends much of his essay explaining the divide between Library and Information Science and Computer and Information Science, but eventually concludes that since so much current (in 1996) research in the former led to the latter, the differences no longer matter, if they ever did. Therefore historians of Information Science can appropriate any discipline they feel is necessary to tell the stories of the field. Information Science, as it is currently understood, appeared with the advent of new information processing machines after World War II. Because of this brief history, most academic treatment of Information Science fits into Braudel’s idea of the durée courte, or short-term history. (pp. 12–13) Rayward suggests two approaches to studying this history: synchronic, which focuses on the various academic endeavors of a single period; and diachronic, which studies a single issue, method, or approach over more than one time period, as defined by the individual researcher. (pp. 13–14)
In Said’s essay (1993), he argues that a politics based strictly upon racial or nationalist identity is insufficient for a post-imperialist, postcolonial world. The original movements of cultural and minority identity activism were meant to include works by previously ignored or undervalued writers and thinkers in the canon, rather than elevating them to a place of honor above the canon. For aiding his thinking, Said credits Frantz Fanon, who warned against “the hijacking of common sense by bureaucrats, technical experts and jargon-wielding obfuscators” (p. 309). This directly echoes (or rather, foreshadows, in real time) last week’s essay by McMurtry. Said specificially describes an incident in which he was excoriated for not including non-European thinkers in a chapter about European intellectual history. Said writes that some circumstances certainly warrant the inclusion of such writers but that simply including a list of their names would undervalue their contributions. I encountered a similar situation when writing a proposal for a new course. The one black member of the department’s curriculum committee demanded that I add “some black names” to the list of required readings, even though the field’s introductory classics have been dominated by white writers.
Despite having no previous academic interest in library and information science, I find myself very much drawn to the interdisciplinarity of it, since my field, media studies, is similarly poorly defined. Rayward’s definition of Information Science as an “interdiscipline” would work well in helping me to define my own field. Since I am interested in the history of the media—and of attempts to understand it—I could directly appropriate Rayward’s discussion of the synchronic and the diachronic for my own work. Even aside from history however, I am heartened by the concept of an “interdiscipline” since my own interests in media studies encompass the fields of sociology, education, history, literature and cultural studies—which has often made it difficult to define myself.
I am also encouraged by D’Andrade’s three-world-view model, since the first two weeks of my readings in the Ph.D. program have focused heavily on the social science experimentation mode of research, which is not how I envisioned the bulk of my own work before matriculating. I have already taken in much of the value of this evidentiary approach, but have been struggling with its limitations, and hoping for a validation of other methods, which I find here.
Said’s essay itself exemplifies both the interdisciplinary and interpretive approaches that I hope to incorporate into my own work, in that Said’s historical, cultural, and literary knowledge all combine to make a powerful argument about society’s intellectual constructs. It is interdisciplinary, echoing Rayward’s description of Information Science. It is also interpretive, rather than trying to demonstrate some sort of general law. It is an argument firmly rooted in time, place, and Said’s own political views, but it is no less strong for that. In fact, had Said not attended the academic conference that launched his line of thinking, his essay might not exist at all.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Weekly reading summary #1
I would imagine that the following will be of limited interest, but I want to post my weekly reading summaries from my introductory class. If you feel like reading such things then please do, by all means. Mostly I'm putting them up to give myself easy reference to them in the future. Like all else on this blog, the copyright on the following commentaries belongs to me. Plagiarists should die.
Buckland, M. (1991). Chapters 1, 4, 5 & 6. In Information and information systems. New York: Praeger.
McMurtry, J. (2002). Preface. In Value wars: The global market versus the life economy. (pp. xii–xxv). Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.
Sapir, E. (1949). Communication. In D.G. Mandelbaum (Ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, (pp. 104–109). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Buckland (1991) essays a definition of “information” as both a practical exercise (for the construction of information storage and retrieval systems) and as an epistemological exploration. He defines “information-as-process” as “the act of becoming informed”; “information-as-knowledge” as “that which is imparted when one becomes informed, and “information-as-thing” as physical representations of information that—while they are not themselves knowledge—impart information, however imperfectly. (p. 43) Knowledge, Buckland argues, is dependent on belief. (p. 40)
McMurtry (2002) asserts that an “unseen moral syntax” (p. xiv) controls what information will be perceived as true. Using the failure of investigative organizations (including media, which he writes are “dominantly owned by military-industrial and infotainment corporations” (p. xii)) to report the international power structure’s complicity in the attacks of September 11, 2001, McMurtry shows how a deeply ingrained value structure contributes to the “inertial acquiescence of the occupied mass mind” (p. xiv).
Sapir (1949), in delineating the various types of communication from interpersonal communication to mass media, and from language to gesture to “social suggestion” (p. 106) argues that these types of communication are linked to the construction of society, which is not a fixed construct, but one that is constantly in flux. In particular he concludes (in a prescient essay originally written in 1931) that evolving communication technologies would force an increasingly smaller global society to overcome its biggest communication obstacle: language translation. He predicts “that the civilized world will adopt one language of intercommunication, say English or Esperanto, which can be set aside for denotive purposes pure and simple. (p. 109)
For my own interests in journalism and media studies, I connect parts of all three of these studies to form a sort of nascent theory of the ultimate goals of the journalistic process. From Buckland (1991) I take the idea that knowledge is dependent on belief, which relates to studies showing that readers’ trust in newsgathering organizations has fallen precipitously low. Regardless of the accuracy of a given news report (Buckland dismisses accuracy as a qualification for information), the public will be disinclined to accept information from that news report if they do not first believe in that information. Of course, Buckland also raises some problems inherent in any physical representation of information: it is liable to be misinterpreted by its consumer, and will be filtered through both human interpretation and the limitations of language by its author. (p. 53) The optimist in me would hope that a news consumer would accept these limitations and therefore, at least provisionally, accept a news report from a reliable source (and I don’t have a method yet for determining what is “reliable”—perhaps that is left up to the relationship between the individual news consumer and the news organization).
The cynic in me however, is liable to turn to McMurtry (2002) for a reason—as a news consumer myself—to distrust these organizations. McMurtry’s argument that an ingrained value structure dictates the ability of certain facts to penetrate the mass mind clearly links to Buckland’s assertion that knowledge depends on belief. If this moral framework is as pervasive and insidious as McMurtry makes it out to be, then that belief system will not allow the mass audience to become informed in Buckland’s definition, since becoming informed relies on “a change in our beliefs” (p. 40)
This pervasiveness, of course, is largely possible because of the globalization of communication that Sapir (1963) predicts. The propaganda that McMurtry reviles has swamped the global communication network that Sapir predicts, overwhelming the construction of a global society, as Sapir defines society. Luckily for adherents to McMurtry’s argument (and though I’m swayed, I’m not yet convinced), Sapir does write that society is a process, and McMurtry’s proposed solution remains achievable: “Once the human project is released from their invisible prison of presupposition, the constitutional resources to steer out of the accumulating breakdown of life conditions become decisively evident” (p. xxv).
As for the ultimate goal of journalism, it could be seen as to inform, in Buckland’s definition, in order to avoid the sort of mass misinformation evident in McMurtry’s essay in order to build Sapir’s conception of society.
Buckland, M. (1991). Chapters 1, 4, 5 & 6. In Information and information systems. New York: Praeger.
McMurtry, J. (2002). Preface. In Value wars: The global market versus the life economy. (pp. xii–xxv). Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.
Sapir, E. (1949). Communication. In D.G. Mandelbaum (Ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, (pp. 104–109). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Buckland (1991) essays a definition of “information” as both a practical exercise (for the construction of information storage and retrieval systems) and as an epistemological exploration. He defines “information-as-process” as “the act of becoming informed”; “information-as-knowledge” as “that which is imparted when one becomes informed, and “information-as-thing” as physical representations of information that—while they are not themselves knowledge—impart information, however imperfectly. (p. 43) Knowledge, Buckland argues, is dependent on belief. (p. 40)
McMurtry (2002) asserts that an “unseen moral syntax” (p. xiv) controls what information will be perceived as true. Using the failure of investigative organizations (including media, which he writes are “dominantly owned by military-industrial and infotainment corporations” (p. xii)) to report the international power structure’s complicity in the attacks of September 11, 2001, McMurtry shows how a deeply ingrained value structure contributes to the “inertial acquiescence of the occupied mass mind” (p. xiv).
Sapir (1949), in delineating the various types of communication from interpersonal communication to mass media, and from language to gesture to “social suggestion” (p. 106) argues that these types of communication are linked to the construction of society, which is not a fixed construct, but one that is constantly in flux. In particular he concludes (in a prescient essay originally written in 1931) that evolving communication technologies would force an increasingly smaller global society to overcome its biggest communication obstacle: language translation. He predicts “that the civilized world will adopt one language of intercommunication, say English or Esperanto, which can be set aside for denotive purposes pure and simple. (p. 109)
For my own interests in journalism and media studies, I connect parts of all three of these studies to form a sort of nascent theory of the ultimate goals of the journalistic process. From Buckland (1991) I take the idea that knowledge is dependent on belief, which relates to studies showing that readers’ trust in newsgathering organizations has fallen precipitously low. Regardless of the accuracy of a given news report (Buckland dismisses accuracy as a qualification for information), the public will be disinclined to accept information from that news report if they do not first believe in that information. Of course, Buckland also raises some problems inherent in any physical representation of information: it is liable to be misinterpreted by its consumer, and will be filtered through both human interpretation and the limitations of language by its author. (p. 53) The optimist in me would hope that a news consumer would accept these limitations and therefore, at least provisionally, accept a news report from a reliable source (and I don’t have a method yet for determining what is “reliable”—perhaps that is left up to the relationship between the individual news consumer and the news organization).
The cynic in me however, is liable to turn to McMurtry (2002) for a reason—as a news consumer myself—to distrust these organizations. McMurtry’s argument that an ingrained value structure dictates the ability of certain facts to penetrate the mass mind clearly links to Buckland’s assertion that knowledge depends on belief. If this moral framework is as pervasive and insidious as McMurtry makes it out to be, then that belief system will not allow the mass audience to become informed in Buckland’s definition, since becoming informed relies on “a change in our beliefs” (p. 40)
This pervasiveness, of course, is largely possible because of the globalization of communication that Sapir (1963) predicts. The propaganda that McMurtry reviles has swamped the global communication network that Sapir predicts, overwhelming the construction of a global society, as Sapir defines society. Luckily for adherents to McMurtry’s argument (and though I’m swayed, I’m not yet convinced), Sapir does write that society is a process, and McMurtry’s proposed solution remains achievable: “Once the human project is released from their invisible prison of presupposition, the constitutional resources to steer out of the accumulating breakdown of life conditions become decisively evident” (p. xxv).
As for the ultimate goal of journalism, it could be seen as to inform, in Buckland’s definition, in order to avoid the sort of mass misinformation evident in McMurtry’s essay in order to build Sapir’s conception of society.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
The Slightly Less Gray Lady
I make my students read the New York Times, and many of them think it's boring. My knee-jerk reaction, as a journalism professor, is to defend it. And while I still do think the Times is probably the best newspaper in the country, I've also come to agree with my students. The Times is boring.
But it got slightly less boring last Sunday with the publication in the Times Magazine of a brilliantly conceived yet poorly executed new section that the editors have dubbed "The Funny Pages." The Funny Pages are divided into three promising sections:
I. The Strip. The first edition of The Strip is an architectural comic of some sort by Chris Ware. I admire Chris Ware quite a bit, and have assigned his graphic novel, 'Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth' to my students. His drawings are spectacular and his stories are touching. They're not particularly funny though. The first episode involves the interior monologue of a townhouse. Don't know where this is going, but I'm intrigued enough to keep reading even though it's neither a strip nor funny.
II. True-Life Tales. The editors say that these will be comic short essays in the mold of James Thurber or David Sedaris, both of whose feet I'm not good enough to kiss. Comic short essays are an underappreciated form, and a regular outlet for them would be great. This first one, by Elizabeth Gilbert and about yoga in the South is OK. I didn't laugh out loud, but these are hit-or-miss. I'll forgive. Especially since I see these as an antidote to the maudlin "Lives" column that is always on the last page of the Times Magazine. I describe the "Lives" personal essays to my students as "The Day I Found Out I had Cancer was the Day my Cat Died."
III. Sunday Serial. The third part of The Funny Pages is the second that's not even intended to be funny (then why the name?). It's a serialized short novel by Elmore Leonard, who writes comic crime novels. This one is some sort of World War II-era mystery story that so far has a German soldier killing himself in a POW camp in Oklahoma. Where it goes from there I don't know. I'm not hooked yet, but I got my friend Jason to hold a newspaper for three minutes and read it (though I've had success in handing him the crossword, too). And that's enough of an accomplishment for me.
I'll keep watching this to see where it goes. I just wish it had a bolder graphic identity. There's an article on Slate right now about the bold graphics of the old New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's paper. Take the talents behind the Funny Papers and let them loose on a broadsheet, and maybe we'll have something interesting. For now though, this is a not-so-terrible start.
But it got slightly less boring last Sunday with the publication in the Times Magazine of a brilliantly conceived yet poorly executed new section that the editors have dubbed "The Funny Pages." The Funny Pages are divided into three promising sections:
I. The Strip. The first edition of The Strip is an architectural comic of some sort by Chris Ware. I admire Chris Ware quite a bit, and have assigned his graphic novel, 'Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth' to my students. His drawings are spectacular and his stories are touching. They're not particularly funny though. The first episode involves the interior monologue of a townhouse. Don't know where this is going, but I'm intrigued enough to keep reading even though it's neither a strip nor funny.
II. True-Life Tales. The editors say that these will be comic short essays in the mold of James Thurber or David Sedaris, both of whose feet I'm not good enough to kiss. Comic short essays are an underappreciated form, and a regular outlet for them would be great. This first one, by Elizabeth Gilbert and about yoga in the South is OK. I didn't laugh out loud, but these are hit-or-miss. I'll forgive. Especially since I see these as an antidote to the maudlin "Lives" column that is always on the last page of the Times Magazine. I describe the "Lives" personal essays to my students as "The Day I Found Out I had Cancer was the Day my Cat Died."
III. Sunday Serial. The third part of The Funny Pages is the second that's not even intended to be funny (then why the name?). It's a serialized short novel by Elmore Leonard, who writes comic crime novels. This one is some sort of World War II-era mystery story that so far has a German soldier killing himself in a POW camp in Oklahoma. Where it goes from there I don't know. I'm not hooked yet, but I got my friend Jason to hold a newspaper for three minutes and read it (though I've had success in handing him the crossword, too). And that's enough of an accomplishment for me.
I'll keep watching this to see where it goes. I just wish it had a bolder graphic identity. There's an article on Slate right now about the bold graphics of the old New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's paper. Take the talents behind the Funny Papers and let them loose on a broadsheet, and maybe we'll have something interesting. For now though, this is a not-so-terrible start.
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