Thursday - Sunday, 6 - 9 Sep
Capurro, Rafael and Birger Hjørland. “The Concept of Information.” ARIST 37, 2003: 343-411.
This is an excellent and lengthy review article on the concept of information. It is much broader in coverage than just IS, though, looking also at the concept interdisciplinarily and, in specific, in the natural sciences, the social sciences and humanities, and in LIS.
It is, as one might imagine for a lit review, full of useful sources. My only complaint—and it is mostly inwardly focused on my monolingualism—is that the authors cite a lot of German sources, including some of the more interesting sounding ones. [I know David, it is not too late to learn.]
For instance, although I did not fully accept some of the ideas attributed to Weizsäcker, I can fully accept these ideas:
Finally, Weizsäcker points to the “unavoidable circle” between language and information; that is, between word plurivocity and conceptual univocity, as a characteristic of exact thinking. The reason is that we are finite observers and actors within language as well as within evolution. We cannot, in Kantian terms, understand things as they are in themselves and therefore we never have fully univocal concepts (Weizsäcker sources omitted, emphasis mine, 363).
Contrast this with this view from Priss, commented on here.
The advantage of formalizations, however, is that notions are defined with absolute precision within the formal realm and that they therefore may be implementable in software (draft 12).
The implications of Weizsäcker’s comment run deep for machine inferencing.
There are even a fair few decent looking sources for the more politically active/socially conscious amongst us. For example:
Braman supposedly shows the different approaches to defining information for policy makers and how this is, in fact, a political decision (373-74).
Braman, S. (1989). Defining information: An approach for policymakers. Telecommunications Policy, 13 (1), 233-242. This article is also cited on p. 345 and on p. 346.
“Romm (1997) shows that serious ethical implications are involved in defining something as factual as opposed to meaningful” (387).
Romm, N. (1997). Implications of regarding information as meaningful rather than factual. In R. L. Winder, S. K. Probert & I. A. Beeson (Eds.), Philosophical aspects of information systems (pp. 23-34). London: Taylor & Francis.
Lengthy, but recommended.
Sunday - Saturday, 9 - 15 Sep
Harris, Roy. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. 1st ed, Kidlington, Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1998.
Read chaps. 1-5.
Wednesday, 12 Sep
Harel, David. Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can’t Do. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. (Text for LIS452)
Read ch. 1. [book arrived late.]
Saturday, 15 Sep
Downey, et. al. How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (2nd ed). at Open Book Project. (Text for LIS452)
- Ch. 3: Functions
- Ch. 4: Conditionals and recursion
- Ch. 5: Fruitful functions
- Ch. 6: Iteration
I actually read a lot more this week but it was mostly a different kind of reading as I began work on my bibliography. More on that topic later.