The Antelope File

When Michael Buckland says "On this view 'information' includes but extends beyond communication." he pays uncited homage to the inventor of Information Theory, Claude Shannon, and his 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," available online from Bell Labs at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html. His paper invented methods of computing message complexity, ways of measuring and offsetting noise, and led directly to packet switching and queuing theory, the foundations of the Internet. In his view, information was the stuff that communications systems communicated; in Buckland's hierarchy of information, it populates the tangible/process grid. This is an important instance of "information-as-thing" that heretofore has dominated my conception of information.

In an attempt at removing my programmer blinders, though, I googled some interested primary source material at the Library and Information Science Program of Wayne State University. For a course called "History and Foundations of Information Science and Culture", the instructor (Ron Day) assembled some fascinating glimpes into pre-digital information processing. Memex and Ted Nelson fans must read "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext". He also found a variation on Buckland's "What is a Document" called "What is a Digital Document" (available at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/digdoc.html... apparently Day and Buckland have had discussions about this.) Reading this material helps clarify Day's thesis that today's "Information age" is nothing new, that there have been other information ages and paradigm shifts and utopian information-based futures.

The key for my meek understanding of this so far is from the "...Digital Document" article: "The evolving notion of "document" among Otlet, Briet, Schuermeyer, and the other documentalists increasingly emphasized whatever functioned as a document rather than traditional physical forms of documents. The shift to digital technology seems to make this distinction even more important." This makes much more sense to me than Briet's antelope argument. This meshes with Brown and Duguid's argument of the functional (social) role of the document, in whatever form it might be instantiated. I'm not a B&D fan and I disliked their book (The Social Life of Information) but it lets me place weblogs and smart mobs squarely in the continuum of information science. We as info-geeks must manage this stuff, wherever it comes from and in whatever form; we have to design the metadata to make it discoverable; and we have to design archival strategies so it will survive until practitioners of the next information age belatedly discover it seventy five years hence.

Rich