Information as thing

A French documentalist defined "document" as

"any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental.

Perhaps a better term for texts in the general sense of artifacts intended to represent some meaning would be ______ We could also characterize these texts as "representations" of something or other. However, we could hardly regard an antelope or a ship as being ______

"discourse."

An intangible process is

Information processing, data processing

What is Micheal Buckland's idea of information?

Information-as- process, information-as-knowledge, information-as-thing

A tangle entity is

Information-as-Thing or data or documents

An intangible entity is

Information-as-knowledge

An intangible process is

Information-as-process or becoming informed

Information as evidence

People use evidence for learning

Determine what is imformative

`>Whether some particular thing would be pertinent; and, if so, (2) whether the probability of it being used as evidence would be significant; and, if so, (3) whether its use as evidence would be important.(The issue might be trivial or, even if important, this particular evidence might be redundant, unreliable, or otherwise problematic.) And, if so, (4) whether the importance of the issue, the importance of the evidence, and the probability of its being used-in combination-warrant the preservation of this particular evidence. If all of these are viewed positively, then one would regard the thing-event, object, text, or document-as likely to be useful information and, presumably, take steps to preserve it or, at least, a representation of it.

Types of information

data and (text and documents) and objects

here is a tendency to use ___ to denote nu-merical information and to use _____to denote natural language in any medium.

data, text

Determining what might be informative is a ____ task

difficult

The proper meaning of ____ has been of con-cern to information scientists in the "documentation" movement, seeking to improve information resource management since the beginning of this century.

document

___________ lend themselves even less than objects do to being collected and stored in information systems for future edification

events

, information storage and retrieval systems can deal directly only with "information-as-thing," but the things that can be stored for retrieval

in many ways

Progress in information technology _____ the scope for creating and using information-as-thing. Much of the information in information systems has been processed by being coded, interpreted, summarized, or otherwise transformed.

increases

If you can touch it or measure it directly, it is not knowledge, but must be some physical thing, possibly ______

information-as-thing

If anything is, or might be, _____, then everything is, or might well be, information. In which case calling something "information" does little or nothing to define it. If everything is information, then being information is nothing special.

informative

Since knowledge is intangible then

it must be expressed as some type of information-as-thing such as a document

he actual information-as-_____, also a necessary ingredient, may also be of little direct interest. The focus could well be more on how beliefs change than on which beliefs are changed or which knowledge is represented.

knowledge

Evidence implies

passiveness

Text and documents means

physical documents

Information-as-____ is situational.

process

information-as-____could also be the basis for defining a class of information-related studies.

process

Data

stuff stored in a computer

information systems handle information only in a sense of information dismissed by leading theorists of information. We also concluded that anything might be information-as-_____

thing

ll information systems deal directly with "information-as-___,

thing

representations of knowledge form a distinguishable subset of information-as-____and so could, in principle, be used to identify and define another class of information systems in which the primary concern is based on the knowledge represented. This is the conventional area of information storage and retrieval, subject bibliography, and "knowledge bases" for expert systems

thing

Type means they are same ____ means the instance

token

Further, "information-as-thing," by whatever name, is of especial interest in relation to information systems because

ultimately information systems, including "expert systems" and information retrieval systems, can deal directly with information only in this sense.

Instead of asking what is infromation

we ask people what informed them?

Each of these fields has refined techniques for developing and formalized ways of describing concise and effective representations of their particular kind of information-asthing

we might choose information theory (in the sense of the mathematical theory of signal transmission associated with Shannon and Weaver and that has nothing to do with semantic content (Bar-Hillel, 1964); historical bibliography (the study of books as physical objects); and statistical analysis (identifying and defining patterns in populations of objects and/or events).

Two type of events

1.representations and 2 created or recreated like expeiriment

When does an antelope become a document

When it stops being wild and is documented in zoo

What is information-as-process?

When someone is informed, what they know has changed. Communication of knowledge or news.

Representations have important characteristics:

(1) Every representation can be expected to be more or less incomplete in some regard. A photograph does not indicate movement and may not depict the color. Even a color photograph will generally show colors imperfectly-and fade with time. A written narrative will reflect the viewpoint of the writer and the limitations of the language. Films and photographs usually show only one perspective. Something of the original is always lost. There is always some distortion, even if only through incompleteness. (2) Representations are made for convenience, which in this context tends to mean easier to store, to understand, and/or to search. (3) Because of the quest for convenience, representations are normally a shift from event or object to text, from one text to another text, or from object and texts to data. Exceptions to this, such as from object to object or from document back to object (physical replicas and models) can also be found (Schlebecker, 1977). (4) Additional details related to the object but not evident from it might be added to the representation, either to inform or to misinform. (5) Representation can continue indefinitely. There can be representations of representations of representations. ( 6) For practical reasons representations are commonly (but not necessarily) briefer or smaller than whatever is being represented, concentrating on the features expected to be most significant. A summary, almost by definitio

Document movement affirmed

(1) That documentation (i.e., information storage and retrieval) should be concerned with any or all potentially informative objects; (2) that not all potentially informative objects were documents in the traditional sense of texts on paper; and (3) that other informative objects, such as people, products, events and museum objects generally, should not be excluded (Laisiepen, 1980). Even here, however, except for Wersig's contribution (Wersig, 1980), the emphasis is, in practice, on forms of communication: data, texts, pictures, inscriptions.

What is information-as-thing?

Referring to data and documents which are informative. Expression of knowledge.

What is information-as-knowledge?

The knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event. Information as uncertainty reduction. This is intangible.

Bruckland use two dimensions for discussion

Thing/Process or Entity/NonEntity

AUthor uses what example for difficult to informative example

Trees -rings, wood, heating, etc.