IS metafields

history

sociology

politics

philosophy

 

 

What kinds of metatheoretical assumptions serve to orient and ground research I information studies (see Hjørland 1998 & Bates 2005a)?

 

What kinds of methods are used in the pursuit of knowledge in IS?

 

In what essential respects does IS differ from other areas of inquiry? [classification]

 

Goals of philosophy of IS

1. to understand its role in interpreting and changing the world, its internal structure, and its relationships with other fields
2. to provide justifications for any decision to engage in research in IS
3. to provide orientations toward and directions for scholarly practice in IS by identifying the kinds of problems that are most significant, the kinds of questions that are most relevant, the kinds of research questions that are most reliable, and the kinds of answers that are most acceptable

 

nature of IS

1. a definition of information
2. enumeration and description of information-related phenomena
   1. indication of the respects in which and strengths with which they are related
   2. enumeration and description of ways in which people interact with information and with information-related phenomena

 

overlapping subfields and related professions

1. library and information science
2. archival studies
3. social informatics
4. information retrieval
5. knowledge organization
6. information management
7. documentation
8. librarianship
9. bibliography
10. etc.

 

Authors, indexers, and searchers: agents involved in the creation, representation, and seeking of information resources

libraries, archives, and museums: institutions involved in the preservation and provision of access to collections of information resources

 

aboutness, relevance, and work-instantiation: relations that structure networks of information resources

 

more interesting to philosophy of information is the structure of fundamental categories of phenomena developed by the listmaker

MT: and this is why it’s interesting to look at iSchool curricula

 

taxonomists of information-related actions or events use a framework based on the notion of an information life cycle, indicating a reasonably stable consensus about the areas of concern that collectively form the central core of the field of information studies

 

the related goals of IS projects, then, are

1. understanding the nature of information, information-related phenomena, and human-information interaction
2. understanding the identities, purposes, motivations, intentions, needs, desires, and actions of people engaged in interaction with information
3. designing and building systems, services, and structures that help people meet their goals when interacting with information
4. developing and administering policies and institutions that enable and/or constrain people’s interactions with information

 

normative, descriptive, and prescriptive conceptions of information studies

 

interactions with other fields

1. nature of information and of information-related phenomena
   1. metaphysics
   2. epistemology
   3. ethics
   4. logic
   5. art theory
   6. literary theory
   7. semiotics
   8. linguistics
   9. history
   10. activities of information users (behavioral and cognitive models)
       1. biology
       2. psychology
       3. cognitive science
       4. information systems design
          1. engineering
          2. technology
          3. design

i.     computer science

1. policy development and institutional management
   1. social sciences and related applied fields

i.     sociology

ii.     anthropology

iii.     political science

iv.     economics

v.     public policy

vi.     business administration

vii.     law

 

approaches to philosophy of IS

1. descriptive
   1. passive
   2. socio-historical
   3. emphasis on giving an explanatory account of what scholars of information studies actually do and what they have actually done to

i.     locate themselves in the academic universe

ii.     justify their decisions

iii.     orient their practices

1. prescriptive
   1. active
   2. philosophical
   3. determine what information studies should be about

 

Bates’s nomothetic-idiographic spectrum identifies 13 approaches

“what distinguishes the information disciplines is that our "home" universe of study and observation is the universe of documentation.” everyone else focuses on the universe of the living.

“Embedded information has many purposes, but only incidentally has the purpose of communicating or memorializing.” Bates

Bates, M.J. (2007). "Defining the information disciplines in encyclopedia development" Information Research, 12(4) paper colis29. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-4/colis/colis29.html]

 

“An understanding of philosophy of representation, itself a diffuse area, would appear to be a quality shared by proponents of the emergent view that information studies is properly about the relation between people and (not technology, nor even information, but) reality (see Borgman, 1999)” Furner 2010

 

Conceptions of informationàFurner classifies them into families

1. Semiotic
2. Socio-cognitive
3. Epistemic

 

Floridi’s hierarchy of categories of phenomena

1. data
2. semantic information
3. factual information

Floridi’s general definition of information (GDI) specifies three conditions to qualify as information

1. data-ness
2. well-formedness
3. meaningfulness

Floridi’s specific definition of information (SDI) adds a fourth condition: truthfulness

 

generally, people use the GDI, not the SDI, maybe because they have alternatives to truthfulness

 

Bates’s evolutionary framework for the analysis of information and related concepts

Goonatilake’s model of lineages of information flow

1. experienced
2. enacted
3. expressed
4. embedded
5. recorded

 

Patrick Wilson: philosophical analyses of aboutness