Information overload, and its attendant pathologies of information, wrongly thought to be a product of the digital age, of social media, and the like, have received much comment in recent years. With attention focused on the ways in which the digital environment removes many of the informational frictions in the communication chain, the long history… Continue reading Overload, attention and medieval diagrams
Category: information behaviour and literacies, understanding
Equations, images, understanding?
In previous posts, I have touched on understanding, and the complementary nature of conscious human understanding and the more opaque, to us at least, understanding produced by AI systems. Such systems, particularly those described as deep-learning, produce an 'understanding' of large and complex data sets, but without employing the kind of concepts on which humans… Continue reading Equations, images, understanding?
Complementary understandings
I have argued for a while that the promotion of understanding is as important for the information sciences as the communication of information and the sharing of knowledge; see an earlier post on this idea. One of the difficulties in discussing this topic is the lack of clarity as to what exactly it means to… Continue reading Complementary understandings
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
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
Supporting truth and promoting understanding: knowledge organization and the curation of the infosphere
This is an updated text of a keynote address given at the Fifteenth International ISKO Conference, Porto, 9th July 2018. A brief account of the conference is given in an earlier blog post. Supporting truth and promoting understanding: knowledge organization and the curation of the infosphere David Bawden and Lyn Robinson Abstract This paper considers… Continue reading Supporting truth and promoting understanding: knowledge organization and the curation of the infosphere
Into the infosphere: theory, literacy and education for new forms of document
This is a slightly revised version of a chapter contributed by myself and Lyn Robinson to a Festschrift in honour of our colleague Professor Tatjana Aparac-Jelušić, of the University of Zadar in Croatia. We came to know Tatjana particularly through the LIDA conferences, of which she has been the inspiration and main organiser, through her… Continue reading Into the infosphere: theory, literacy and education for new forms of document
CoLIS 9 Uppsala
The latest in the series of CoLIS (Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conferences was held at the University of Uppsala at the end of June, following on from CoLIS 7 in London in 2010, and CoLIS 8 in Copenhagen in 2013. This is, I think, my favourite conference from the viewpoint of getting new… Continue reading CoLIS 9 Uppsala
“A different kind of knowing”: speculations on understanding in light of the Philosophy of Information
This is a slightly updated and extended version of a paper by myself and Lyn Robinson, presented at the 9th Conceptions of Library and Information Science conference, Uppsala, 28 June 2016. It includes some additional points raised in discussion of the paper. Introduction This is a different kind of knowing… It’s like understanding, I suppose… Continue reading “A different kind of knowing”: speculations on understanding in light of the Philosophy of Information
The noblest pleasure: theories of understanding in the information sciences
This is a modified and updated version of a chapter published in 'Theory development in the information sciences' (edited by Diane Sonnenwald, University of Texas Press, 2016, pages 281-299). Some newer references are included here, but for the full bibliography, see the original chapter. My aim in writing the chapter was to set out my… Continue reading The noblest pleasure: theories of understanding in the information sciences
The Occasional Informationist 