Administrivia
Professor Paul Duguid
Office Hours: Monday 10:00am-12:00pm 303 South Hall
Instructor Geoffrey Nunberg
Office Hours: Wednesday 10:30am-12:00pm 303B South Hall
Course Description
This course will explore issues of information quality in mediated communication. How do people reach conclusions about the reliability, value, or authenticity of content? We will consider the problem across time, media and modes, from the coming of the book to the blog, paying particular attention to the interaction of technology, communicative forms, market forces, and institutional and legal frameworks.
Course Information
Course Dates: September 1 to December 8, 2004
Lecture Schedule: Wednesday 1:00pm-4:00pm in 202 South Hall
Units: 3
Grading Option: Letter Grade only
Course Work
I. Introduction
II. Theoretical and Historical Issues
September 8 : Wednesday
Quantity vs Quality (1): Quantity
Required Readings
"Limits to Information" John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid [Online, chapter 1 pp 11-34]
Harvard Business School Press (2000)
"Farewell the Information Age" Geoffrey Nunberg [Online, pp 103-138]
University of California Press (1996)
"Introductory Note on the General Setting of the Analytical Communication Studies" Warren Weaver [Online, pp. 1-28]
University of Illinois Press (1964)
Optional Readings
"Too Much Information" Nathan Cochrane [Online]
"The Truth Is Still Out There" Paul Ginsparg [Online]
"Introduction: The Problem of Communication" John Durham Peters [Handout, pp 1-32]
University of Chicago Press (1999)
Resources
September 15 : Wednesday
Quantity vs Quality (2): Quality, fraud, plagiarism, and hoax--manifestations of "rotten information"
Guest Lecturer: Peter Lyman of SIMS (website)
Required Readings
"Authentic Reproduction" Joseph Loewenstein [Handout, pp 249-262]
University of Chicago Press (2002)
How Much Information--Executive Summary, How Much Information, Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian [Online]
"Afterword" Thomas Mallon [Handout, pp 239-253]
Harvest Books
"Plagiarism" Christopher Ricks [Handout, pp 21-40]
"Digital Representation: Racism on the World Wide Web" Indhu Rajagopal and Nis Bojin [Online]
"A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies" Alan Sokal [Online]
Resources
September 22 : Wednesday
Required Readings
"Information Economics" James Boyle [Handout, pp 35-46]
Harvard University Press (1996)
"The Explicit Economics of Knowledge Codification and Tacitness" Robin Cowan, Paul A. David and Dominique Foray [Online]
"The Use of Knowledge in Society" Freidrich A. von Hayek [Online, 519-30]
"Data Is More Than Knowledge: Implications of the Reversed Knowledge Hierarchy for Knowledge Management and Organizational Memory" Ilkka Tuomi [Online, 103-118]
Optional Readings
"Information and Economic Behavior" Kenneth J. Arrow [Handout, pp 136- 152]
Harvard University Press (1984)
September 29 : Wednesday
Rotten information (2): Pornography and Racism
Required Readings
"Digital Representation: Racism on the World Wide Web" Indhu Rajagopal and Nis Bojin [Online]
First Monday 7.10 (October 2002)
Optional Readings
Due on October 13
Due on October 6
October 6 : Wednesday
Print, authors, authority, and reputation
Required Readings
"The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything You Know about Intellectual Property Is Wrong" John Perry Barlow [Online]
"Preface" James Boyle [Online, pp ix-xvi]
Harvard University Press (1996)
"What Is an Author?" Michel Foucault [Online, pp 141-160]
Cornell University Press (1979)
"Printing, Bookselling, Readers, and Writers in Eighteenth-Century London" Alvin Kernan [Handout]
Princeton University Press (1989)
Optional Readings
"Foucault's Chiasmus: Authorship between Science and Literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" Roger Chartier [Handout, pp: 13-32]
Routledge (2003)
"AHR Forum : How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution? : Grafton, Anthony, Introduction; Eisenstein, Elizabeth, An Unacknowledged Revolution; Johns, Adrian, How to Acknowledge a Revolution; Eisenstein, Elizabeth, Reply" AHR Forum [Handout, 84-129]
"Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist" Lukas Erne [Handout]
Cambridge University Press (2003)
"The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries" Brian Stock [Handout]
Princeton University Press (1983)
"Margins & Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England" Evelyn Tribble [Handout]
University of Virginia Press (1993)
October 13 : Wednesday
Newspapers, the news, and the constitution of the "public sphere"
Secondary readings to be entered.
Required Readings
"The Public Sphere and the Net: Structure, Space, and Communication" Peter Dahlgren [Handout, pp. 33-55]
Cambridge University Press (2001)
"Stories of Information & Objectivity becomes Ideology" Michael Schudson [Handout, pp 88-159]
Basic Books (1978)
"Blog Revolution" Andrew Sullivan [Online]
"The Growth of the Popular Press" Raymond Williams [Handout, pp 173-214]
Chatto & Windus (1961)
Optional Readings
"Swift, Defoe, and the Peace Campaign" J.A. Downie [Handout, pp 131-148]
Cambridge University Press (1979)
"Does an Editors Pencil Ruin a Web Log" Michael Falcone [Online]
"Political Functions of the Public Sphere, & The Bourgeois Public Sphere: Idea and Ideology" Jurgen Habermas [Handout, pp 57-88 (part III)]
MIT Press (1989)
October 20 : Wednesday
Forms of knowledge and communication: Dictionaries, reference books, Journals, databases
Required Readings
"As We May Think" Vaannevar Bush [Handout]
"Vantage Point" Patrick Brown [Online]
"Worlds of Reference" Tom McArthur [Handout, pp. 92-101, 102-109, 124-133, 134-141]
Cambridge University Press (1988)
" The Work of the Encyclopedia in the Age of Electronic Reproduction" Alex Soonjung-Kim Pang [Online]
Due on October 27
III. Applications
October 27 : Wednesday
Due on November 3
November 3 : Wednesday
November 10 : Wednesday
last updated on 2004-09-17 by Lisa