Greetings,
I am just reporting observations, and not being critical or judgemental.
But I wonder if these phrases form a decent definition of information
science, so elusive after 60 years.
I first ran into this triumvirate twenty years ago (get the UTK thing?)
and at that time it was my first exposure to the intersection of these
ideas under Jose-Marie G. It was exciting. No one that I had run into
before had ever pulled this Venn diagram together.
Twenty years later, I'm seeing the same thing presented at Penn State
(http://bulletins.psu.edu/undergrad/courses/A/IST/110) as an undergraduate
course as a Brand New Concept.
The triumvirate is also presented as "information, people, and
technology" at the current iSchools website at
http://ischools.org/
I looked at ALISE.org, and it doesn't have a mission statement, and
doesn't include these words (or any others, for that matter).
I looked at the ASIST.org web site, and they are still celebrating the
name change to "and Technology" which happened what, a decade ago? "This
year's conference theme offers an opportunity to reflect on all the
changes that impact on human information interaction and their
implications for information science and technology." Sort of the right
words.
In other words, there is still not a good definition of "information
science" out there.
I googled "information technology people" and came up with a journal at
http://www.itandpeople.org/
which might be worth paying attention to, in its 26th year of
publication.
I googled "users technology knowledge" which turned up a bunch of
articles containing one or two terms but not three.
I looked at the Wikipedia article for the definition of "information
science" and it was the usual mishmash of unconnected topics. The ideas
here are not bad, and not irrelevant. I wonder what they would look like
if they were re-organized under the people - users/information - knowledge
/information technology framework.
Is there a decent definition of information science in this mess? I
think that there is. In multiple layers.
First layer. Venn diagram and explain the intersection of users -
people/information - knowledge/information technology.
Second layer. Explain these sectors. Yes, in full this means in the
information - knowledge section how publishing works, where books come
from, how books are published via the web, history of books, meaning of
bibliography, the whole nine yards. How cultures are preserved via the
written word. In full in the information technology section this means
going back to hieroglyphics and the creation of and preservation of the
written word, but also telegraphs and their relationship to text msging,
the written vs spoken word (the telephone), representation of language and
letters (ASCII eg), verbal vs graphic representations of information,
computing as priesthood and personal computers, networked information. I
know very little about users and how they process/acquire information.
Third layer: How these three sectors interact.
This foundation for a definition of "information science" in the
intersection of "people - users/information - knowledge/ information
technology" both avoids, and embraces folks who try to distinguish
between informatics, computer science, natural or engineered information
systems, philosophical systems regarding epistemology. The history of
science goes in the Knowledge section. Documentation goes in the
Technology section. Everyone has a place.
The base phrase is "information science." It is defined as the
intersection between "people, information, and technology".
We're done for the night. Happy Saturday, everyone.
--gw
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Gretchen Whitney, PhD, Retired
School of Information Sciences
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA [log in to unmask]
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/
jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html
SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
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