Category: Uncategorized

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? →

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 →

At the heart of Betty Smith's 1943 novel A tree grows in Brooklyn is the image of a Tree of Heaven growing in harsh urban surroundings. The tree's survival in the heart of a grom part of the city is a metaphor for people's ability to flourish in the most difficult environments. [EcoBrookyn say the… Continue reading A tree grows in Southwark →

A rather sad post for the first one after a break. CityLIS PhD student Christopher Serbutt sadly died last year, after a long period of ill-health, so that there was a posthumous award. Titled The changing place of information: an examination and evaluation of how the context in which an object is set affects the… Continue reading Documentation and the museum object →

And just like that ... activity started again on this blog. One might have thought that a series of lockdowns, working from home for a year, and an unprecedented emphasis on digital communication, might have inspired more blog-writing effort. Clearly it was like that for some people; not for me, alas. At least I had… Continue reading And just like that →

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 →

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 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 →