I appreciate the effort, but...
Hey boing boing, hey Siva, I think what you're looking for is Library and Information Science.
Lots of "economists, sociologists, linguists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, communication scholars, lawyers, computer scientists, philosophers, and librarians" have contributed to this field.
And, well, I guess I can see why someone would want to invent a new one, as us here in library-land haven't done a very good job of protecting the information commons from enclosure.
sigh.
Lots of "economists, sociologists, linguists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, communication scholars, lawyers, computer scientists, philosophers, and librarians" have contributed to this field.
And, well, I guess I can see why someone would want to invent a new one, as us here in library-land haven't done a very good job of protecting the information commons from enclosure.
sigh.
3 Comments:
At 8:30 PM ,
Trent said...
I'll start out in snark mode: If it gets off the ground as something other than a shrewd intellectual marketing move, "Critical Information Studies" will probably resemble nothing so much as LIS sans much in the way of concern for the pragmatics of information system design, user services, IR, document representation, etc.: in other words, it'll be like LIS with texts (and the hermeneutic machinery associated with textual interpretation) taking the place of those poor dull users. At least CIS scholars will be able to congratulate themselves for their courageous counterhegemonic positionality.
My own lapsed litcritter's cynicism aside, this might mean that some of the work that's done in LIS eventually gets wider exposure in the sorts of organs that literary intelligentsia value. I can even imagine that the work of some genuinely good people (like Sandy Berman, Catherine Pawley, or Hope Olson) will get championed. I don't think, though, that Sivi really cares that much about collections development policy or other dull empiricist stuff like that.
At 3:25 PM ,
Siva said...
Thanks for your comments (and for linking!). I have taught in a Library school, a communication department, a history department, an American Studies department, and a journalism school. So my intention was to demonstrate that people in all corners of campus are thinking about this stuff. And when they start thinking and writing together about it, it means something important and very cool.
So Trent is right on with both his points. This is an attempt at marketing (the jury is still out on its shrewdness). I hope to get everyone in all these areas to be rather excited about the multidisciplinary potential here.
And yes, one of my missions in life is to get people all over the intellectual and academic worlds to take library and info studies seriously. I do care about collection development policy and other dull empricist stuff. I just don't know enough about it to write about it intelligently.
So what I am describing does go beyond LIS. It includes anthropologists and literary theorists. While LIS people read such work, it's usually in the service of what I am calling CIS. So I am just naming what other smarter people have been doing for some time.
Somebody had to do it!
At 1:43 PM ,
Trent said...
Sivi, thanks for your reply. Part of my snarkiness derives from my own schizy background. Along with the MLIS, I've got a ph.d. in English. When I was finishing up my ph.d., I spent a year as a writing assistant in the public policy studies program at my graduate school and was struck by the disjunct between the sorts of cultural theory I was working with as a literary scholar and the very pragmatic, practical, and important stuff the policy students wrestled with. I was absorbed by the cultural logic of late capitalism, they by where you put the stop signs. And while I didn't have the urge to get a MPPS on top of everything else, I wasn't sure which of us was being the more mundane.
Good luck with getting something happening with the cultural studies / information studies hybrid. And keep me posted--tghill62@u.washington.edu.
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