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The Snowman Of Jenna, Jonathan Furner
Fundamental Research Questions In Information Science, Jonathan Furner
Fundamental Research Questions In Information Science, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
No abstract provided.
Philosophy And The Information Sciences, Jonathan Furner
Philosophy And The Information Sciences, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
Philosophy and the information sciences intersect in various ways. Philosophical approaches to the study of information and information-related phenomena focus on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical questions; philosophical approaches to the study of the information sciences focus on methodological issues. Metaphilosophical questions may also be asked about philosophy of information and about philosophy of the information sciences.
Folksonomies, Jonathan Furner
Folksonomies, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
Folksonomies are indexing languages that emerge from the distributed resource-description activity of multiple agents who make use of online tagging services to assign tags (i.e., category labels) to the resources in collections. Although individuals’ motivations for engaging in tagging activity vary widely, folksonomy-based retrieval systems can be evaluated by measuring the degree to which taggers and searchers agree on tag–resource pairings.
Philosophy And Information Studies, Jonathan Furner
Philosophy And Information Studies, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
There are several scholarly activities and practices that coalesce at the intersection of, on the one hand, the interdisciplinary field that is sometimes known as information studies, and on the other, the discipline of philosophy. The aim of this chapter is to distinguish among some of these practices, to identify and review some of the most interesting products of those practices, and to point to ways of assessing the significance of those products—for information studies, for philosophy, and for our general understanding of the world. In the first section, an attempt is made to characterize the subject matter, methods, and …
Dewey Deracialized: A Critical Race-Theoretic Perspective, Jonathan Furner
Dewey Deracialized: A Critical Race-Theoretic Perspective, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
Critical race theory is introduced as a potentially useful approach to the evaluation of bibliographic classification schemes. An overview is presented of the essential elements of critical race theory, including clarifications of the meanings of some important terms such as “race” and “social justice.” On the basis of a review of existing conceptions of the just and the antiracist library service, a rationale is presented for hypothesizing that critical race theory may be of use to the library and information sciences. The role of classification schemes as information institutions in their own right is established, and the Dewey Decimal Classification …
Information Studies Without Information, Jonathan Furner
Information Studies Without Information, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
In philosophy of language, the phenomena fundamental to human communication are routinely modeled in ways that do not require commitment to a concept of "information" separate from those of "data," "meaning," "communication," "knowledge," and "relevance" (inter alia). A taxonomy of conceptions of information may be developed that relies on commonly drawn philosophical distinctions (between linguistic, mental, and physical entities, between objects and events, and between particulars and universals); in such a taxonomy, no category requires the label "information" in order to be differentiated from others. It is suggested that a conception of information-as-relevance is currently the most productive of advances …
Conceptual Analysis: A Method For Understanding Information As Evidence, And Evidence As Information, Jonathan Furner
Conceptual Analysis: A Method For Understanding Information As Evidence, And Evidence As Information, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
The utility of conceptual analysis for archival science is assessed by means of an exploratory evaluation in which the concept of evidence is analyzed. Usage of the term “evidence” in the philosophies of science, law, and history is briefly reviewed; candidates for necessary conditions of evidentiariness are identified and examined; and taxonomies are built of evidentiariness and of archival inference. Correspondences are shown to exist between the concepts of evidentiariness and relevance, and between the domains of archival science and social epistemology, thereby pointing in promising directions for further research. The tentative conclusion is reached that conceptual analysis may profitably …
On Recommending, Jonathan Furner
On Recommending, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
The core of any document retrieval system is a mechanism that ranks the documents in a large collection in order of the likelihood with which they match the preferences of any person who interacts with the system. Given a broader interpretation of “recommending” than is commonly accepted, such a preference ordering may be viewed as a recommendation, made by the system to the information-seeker, that is itself typically derived through synthesis of multiple preference orderings expressed as recommendations by indexers, information-seekers, and document authors. The ERIn (Evaluation--Recommendation--Information) model, a decision-theoretic framework for understanding information-related activity, highlights the centrality of recommending …
Shera's Social Epistemology Recast As Psychological Bibliology, Jonathan Furner
Shera's Social Epistemology Recast As Psychological Bibliology, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
Shera, the library scientist, is often credited with introducing the term and concept of social epistemology; but his idea is most profitably viewed not as a contribution to epistemology or even to the sociology of knowledge, but rather as the forerunner of a document-focused strain of socio-cognitive psychology influential in the information sciences from the 1970s onwards. In turn, the work of Shera and his colleague Egan is itself reminiscent of the psychological bibliology defined by the documentalists Otlet and Rubakin in the early 20th century.
Scholarly Communication And Bibliometrics, Christine L. Borgman, Jonathan Furner
Scholarly Communication And Bibliometrics, Christine L. Borgman, Jonathan Furner
Jonathan Furner
Why devote an ARIST chapter to scholarly communication and bibliometrics, and why now? Bibliometrics already is a frequently covered ARIST topic, with chapters such as that by White and McCain (1989) on bibliometrics generally, White and McCain (1997) on visualization of literatures, Wilson and Hood (2001) on informetric laws, and Tabah (2001) on literature dynamics. Similarly, scholarly communication has been addressed in other ARIST chapters such as Bishop and Star (1996) on social informatics and digital libraries, Schamber (1994) on relevance and information behavior, and many earlier chapters on information needs and uses. More than a decade ago, the first …
The Representation And Comparison Of Hypertext Structures Using Graph Theory, Jonathan Furner, David Ellis, Peter Willett
The Representation And Comparison Of Hypertext Structures Using Graph Theory, Jonathan Furner, David Ellis, Peter Willett
Jonathan Furner
Our concern in the present chapter is with the logical structure of hypertext databases, rather than with any functional aspect of the retrieval system. Specifically, we are interested in the methods that may be used (i) in the representation of such structure, and (ii) in the comparison of representations of different structures. In Section 3, we describe how principles developed in the fields of graph theory and similarity measurement may be applied to these tasks. Firstly, however, we should explain the particular reasons we have for concerning ourselves with these matters; to this end, we outline in Section 2 the …
Measuring The Degree Of Similarity Between Objects In Text Retrieval Systems, David Ellis, Jonathan Furner-Hines, Peter Willett
Measuring The Degree Of Similarity Between Objects In Text Retrieval Systems, David Ellis, Jonathan Furner-Hines, Peter Willett
Jonathan Furner
Describes the use of a variety of similarity coefficients in the measurement of the degree of similarity between objects that contain textual information, such as documents, paragraphs, index terms or queries. The work is intended as a preliminary to future investigation of the calculations involved in measuring the degree of similarity between structured objects that may be represented in graph-theoretic forms. Discusses the role of similarity coefficients in text retrieval in terms of: document-query similarity; document-document similarity; co-citation analysis; term-term similarity; and the similarity between sets of judgements, such as relevance judgements. Describes several methods for expressing the formulae used …