East Asian Studies 190: Information Ecology and the New Bibliography

Dr. Hugh Blackmer
Wednesdays 3-5
Parmly 302

for 30 April and assignment for next week
for 7 May and assignment for next week
IIASA data
for 14 May and assignment for next week
Information Commons ...and the final assignment for Wednesday 28 May.

This course is intended to provide support for East Asian Studies majors who will be writing Senior Papers, by assisting their development of skills in searching and documenting. Necessary as those skills are, they don't make for a very exciting course if that's all we do, so it's been my pleasure to augment each year's iteration of the course with some bits of spice. This year we have the further difficulty that more than half of those registered for the course are Seniors with no particular interest in East Asian Studies, and no need at all to learn about the niceties of searching and documenting. How to make the most of the opportunity to do something interesting for them, while also fulfilling the needs of the East Asian Studies folks?

The only approach that makes sense to me is to shift the focus for both constituencies, providing whatever specific and targeted assistance the East Asian Studies people require on a 1:1 basis, but broadening the purpose of the course to an empirical exploration of the question of how W&L publics actually use information in its many forms. For those who are Seniors this offers the opportunity to do something truly useful as a parting gift: contribute to our understanding by telling their own stories as information users, and doing ethnography to gather data on the experience of others in their cohort. For those who aren't graduating this year, it's an opportunity to think about aspects of information that may expand what you do in all your future courses.

The last decade has brought continual and transformative changes to the world(s) of Information. On the one hand, the palette of information media has expanded gloriously. On the other, the available digital tools have put the possibility of communicating to broader (even global) audiences within reach. The potentials and the responsibilities are much greater, and very likely to continue to develop in surprising ways. It is clear that we all have to learn and to practise new skills.

Just how people use the Information resources available to them is an empirical question. Librarians and professors make a variety of assumptions about what students know and should know, and put a lot of effort into prescriptive statements on "information fluency", but very little energy seems to go into exploring how the range of information resources is actually used, and how use is changing. If we are to plan for the future sensibly, we have to go beyond pious hopes and lists of desiderata; if we are to make wise resource allocation decisions, we need to know what our users need and how they seek it.

What you'll be doing:

• East Asian Studies majors will each work on a topic of individual choice and prepare a bibiographic essay (in the form of linked Web pages) to summarize the information resources that seem most important for the topic. Think of this as akin to a "literature review" chapter in a thesis, but work toward going beyond a list of sources: explain to yourself and the reader why a resource is included, and what it contributes to an understanding of the topic.

• Seniors will develop an ethnographic report (in the form of linked Web pages) on information use at W&L, including both an exploration of their own evolution as information users, and observations/reportage of the uses made by other members of the class of '03.

In principle, I think it should be possible to do serious and significant research on anything. Some subjects lend themselves more easily to the 'academic' mode that is supposed to be the reason for 190 courses, because the materials are relatively obvious and easily available in academic libraries, but the realities are that Internet sources are, for most students most of the time, the court of first resort. I'll be showing you examples of ways to find and manage information, across the spectrum of media.

Preliminary Infocensus: for us to collaborate on refining and extending

Reading:

This one for Wednesday the 30th: Information Ecologies chapter 4 from from Nardi and O'Day Information Ecologies: Using technology with Heart (MIT Press 1999), also available here --and see also questions

These we'll get to later:

Improving our ability to improve: A call for investment in a new future (Keynote address, World Library Summit, April 23 - 26, 2002, Singapore by Douglas C. Engelbart, The Bootstrap Alliance )

The Digital Library: Without a Soul Can It Be a Library (Gail McMillan, Director Virginia Tech Digital Library and Archives)

The Library of Babel: The dream of cyberspace as a Universal Library (Dominic Gates, PreText Magazine, Oct 1997)

KnowledgeSpaces (Denham Grey) --especially but not only Information Ecology

Codex, memex, genex: The pursuit of transformational technologies (Ben Shneiderman)

Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web 1998 - 2002 (Edward T. O'Neill, Brian F. Lavoie and Rick Bennett, OCLC Office of Research, D-Lib Magazine April 2003 Volume 9 Number 4)