The title of this post comes from a 2016 item on Paul Gilster Centauri Dreams blog, in which he discusses some of the unexpected discoveries about the former planet Pluto coming from NASA's New Horizons probe, particularly its atmosphere and its geological activity. Gilster writes of "that interesting interplay between the distant thing imagined and… Continue reading The distant thing imagined
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Overload in the time of Covid
My colleague Lyn Robinson and I have been writing about issues of information overload for many years now, our latest output being a review article forthcoming from Oxford University Press. The Covid-19 situation, and the amount of information (and misinformation and disinformation) that has accompanied it, has created a new public interest in overload. We… Continue reading Overload in the time of Covid
In further praise of dissertations
In a post of five years ago, I noted the academic quality and professional relevance of the dissertations produced by CityLIS Masters students, and the wide range of topics and approaches they include. Since then we have developed a series of virtual collections of dissertations in particular subject areas: art and artists, history, science and… Continue reading In further praise of dissertations
Remembering Mr. Kemp: Gardening in a ‘book-making age’
I have a long-standing interest in the Victorian information environment, which is many ways still influences our own. In particular, I have been fascinated by how information-rich was the world of botany, horticulture and the design of parks and gardens in that period. Several of the leading garden designers were also prolific authors and editors,… Continue reading Remembering Mr. Kemp: Gardening in a ‘book-making age’
Both a borrower and a lender be? Is LIS research used outside the discipline?
Library/information science academics have been troubled for a long while as to whether anyone outside our discipline takes any notice of our research, since the issue was first thoroughly discussed in a paper by Blaise Cronin and Stephen Pearson. It is well-known that much of LIS's toolkit of theories and concepts, and the data to… Continue reading Both a borrower and a lender be? Is LIS research used outside the discipline?
Google’s Global Media Literacy Summit
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to attend Google's Global Media Literacy Summit for 2019, in the shiny new surroundings the of Google's London headquarters at King's Cross. Introducing the day, Ramya Raghavan, head of civics and news outreach at Google, made a point that I often try to emphasise: that our… Continue reading Google’s Global Media Literacy Summit
CoLIS10 Ljubljana
The 10th CoLIS (Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conference was held earlier this month (16-19 June 2019) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, organised by the Department of Librarianship, Information Science and Book Studies at the University of Ljubljana. (It really doesn't seem three years since the last CoLIS conference.) The conference chairs were Polona Vilar and… Continue reading CoLIS10 Ljubljana
Unveiling of nature or social creativity: classification and discovery in astronomy: updated
Updated May 2019 Steven Dick has written an article on this topic, focusing on the classification itself, for the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization: Astronomy's Three Kingdom System: a comprehensive classification system of celestial objects (2019). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It has always interested me to see how the development of ideas of classification and categorisation in the information… Continue reading Unveiling of nature or social creativity: classification and discovery in astronomy: updated
Still waiting for Carnot: information and complexity
Back in 2015, Lyn Robinson and I published an article in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology [1], which gave an analysis of the relation between information and complexity, showing that ideas of complexity, organization, and 'interesting order', were intertwined with concepts of information, and of entropy. In particular, we noted… Continue reading Still waiting for Carnot: information and complexity
Deep down things revisited: information and physics
This post gives an update on the development of the idea of information as a constituent of the physical world, and is a companion piece to earlier posts on information in the biological domain, on the conservation of information, on quantum information, and on the theory of relativity and its informational component. All are expressions… Continue reading Deep down things revisited: information and physics
The Occasional Informationist 