Lecture 02: Information

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Lecture 02 Information
IS 202 Information Organization and Retrieval

• Prof. Ray Larson Prof. Marc Davis
• UC Berkeley SIMS
• Tuesday and Thursday 1030 am - 1200 am
• Fall 2003
• http//www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is2
  02/f03/

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Lecture Outline

• What Is Information?
• History of Information Search and Organization
• Discussion Questions
• Action Items for Next Time

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Lecture Outline

• What Is Information?
• History of Information Search and Organization
• Discussion Questions
• Action Items for Next Time

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What is Information?

• There is no correct definition
• Can involve philosophy, psychology, signal
  processing, physics
• Cookie Monsters definition
• news or facts about something

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What is Information?

• Oxford English Dictionary
• Information
• Informing, telling thing told, knowledge, items
  of knowledge, news
• Knowledge
• Knowing familiarity gained by experience
  persons range of information a theoretical or
  practical understanding of the sum of what is
  known

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Assignment 1 - Discussion

• What is information, according to your background
  or area of expertise?

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What Is Information?

• Relating data to a context (situational
  interpretation)
• Anything that is important to anyone
  (significance)
• World ?data ?information ?knowledge
• Requires community of interpretation
• All information is dependent on context

• Capable of being recorded and stored and
  transmitted (also in physical form e.g.,
  fossils)
• Information must be recorded
• Information is a record of something that can be
  reused
• Information is a commodity

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What Is Information?

• Negentropy
• Potential energy to become knowledge
• Potential for it to be built upon
• Does information have to be related to true
  data?
• Can information be downgraded to data if it is
  forgotten?

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Types of Information

• Differentiation by form
• Differentiation by content
• Differentiation by quality
• Differentiation by associated information

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Information Properties

• Information can be communicated electronically
• Broadcasting
• Networking
• Information can be easily duplicated and shared
• Problems of ownership
• Problems of control

Adapted from Silicon Dreams by Robert W. Lucky
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Intuitive Notion (Losee 97)

• Information must
• Be something, although the exact nature
  (substance, energy, or abstract concept) is not
  clear
• Be new repetition of previously received
  messages is not informative
• Be true false or counterfactual information is
  mis-information
• Be about something
• This human-centered approach emphasizes meaning
  and use of message

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Information from the Human Perspective

• Levels in cognitive processing
• Perception
• Observation/attention
• Reasoning, assimilating, forming inferences
• Knowledge
• Justified true belief
• Belief
• An idea held based on some support an internally
  accepted statement, result of inductive
  processes combining observed facts with a
  reasoning process

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Information from the Human Perspective

• Does information require a human mind?
• Communication and information transfer among ants
• A tree falls in the forest is there information
  there?
• Existence of quarks

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Meaning vs. Form

• Form of information as the information itself
• Meaning of a signal vs. the signal itself
• What aspects of a document are information?
• Representation (Norman 93)
• Why do we write things down?
• Socrates thought writing would obliterate serious
  thought
• Sounds and gestures fade away
• Artifacts help us to reason
• Anything not present in the representation can be
  ignored
• Things left out of the representation are often
  what we dont know how to represent

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Information

• Consider Borges infinite Library of Babel
• It has all possible data combinations of letters
• Does it therefore contain all possible
  information?
• What about all possible knowledge?
• What about wisdom?
• Is the Internet a prototype Library of Babel?

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Information Theory

• Claude Shannon, 1940s, studying communication
• Ways to measure information
• Communication producing the same message at its
  destination as that seen at its source
• Problem a noisy channel can distort the
  message
• Between transmitter and receiver, the message
  must be encoded
• Semantic aspects are irrelevant

Noise
Message Source
Desti- nation
Receiver
Trans- mitter
Channel
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Information Theory

• Better called Technical Communication Theory
• Communication may be over time and space

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Human Communication Theory?
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Communication Theory

• Encompasses a vast array of disciplines
• Mass communications, literary and media theory,
  rhetoric, sociology, psychology, linguistics,
  law, cognitive science, information science,
  engineering, etc.
• Questions
• What and how we communicate
• Why we communicate
• What happens when communication works and when
  it doesnt
• How to improve communication

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Why Study Communication Theory?

• Our understanding of what, how, and why we
  communicate informs our
• Theory of information and practice of information
  production
• Analysis, design, and evaluation of information
  systems and applications
• How we work together in teams
• How we read texts and talk with one another in
  this course
• Law and public policy

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Etymology of Communication

• Communication - c.1384, from O.Fr. communicacion,
  from L. communicationem (nom. communicatio), from
  communicare "to impart, share," lit. "to make
  common," from communis (see common).
• Common - 13c., from O.Fr. comun, from L. communis
  "shared by all or many," from L. com- "together"
  munia "public duties," those related to munia
  "office." Alternate etymology is that Fr. got it
  from P.Gmc. gamainiz (cf. O.E. gemæne), from PIE
  kom-moini "shared by all," from base moi-,
  mei- "change, exchange."
• Remuneration - c.1400, from L. remunerationem,
  from remunerari "to reward," from re- "back"
  munerari "to give," from munus (gen. muneris)
  "gift, office, duty." Remunerative is from 1677.

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What and How Do We Communicate?

• What gifts do we give each other?
• What do we do with these gifts?
• How does this gift exchange bring us together (or
  not)?

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The Conduit Metaphor

• Language functions like a conduit, transferring
  thoughts bodily from one person to another
• In writing and speaking, people insert their
  thoughts or feelings in the words
• Words accomplish the transfer by containing the
  thoughts or feelings and conveying them to others
• In listening or reading, people extract the
  thoughts and feelings once again from the words

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Conduit Metaphor Minor Frameworks

• Thoughts and feelings are ejected by speaking or
  writing into an external idea space
• Thoughts and feelings are reified in this
  external space, so they exist independent of any
  need for living beings to think or feel them
• These reified thoughts and feelings may, or may
  not, find their way back into the heads of living
  humans

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Toolmakers Paradigm
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Semantic Pathology

• Semantic Pathology
• Whenever two or more incompatible senses capable
  of figuring meaningfully in the same context
  develop around the same name
• Example
• This text is confusing.
• Text(1) The layout/font of the text is
  confusing.
• Text(2) The argument of the text is confusing.
• Question Where is Text(2)?

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Lecture Outline

• What Is Information?
• History of Information Search and Organization
• Discussion Questions
• Action Items for Next Time

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Origins Physical Representations

• Very early history of content representation
• Sumerian tokens and envelopes
• Alexandria - pinakes
• Indices

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Origins Mental Representations

• Rhetorical mnemonic theory and practice
  (memoria)
• Memory palaces
• An organization and retrieval technology for
  concepts that combines physical and virtual
  places (loci)
• Examples
• Simonides of Ceos
• Ciceros testes

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Origins Bibliographic Representations

• Biblical indexes and concordances
• Hugo de St. Caro 1247 A.D. 500 monks KWOC
• Book indexes (Nuremburg Chronicle)
• Library catalogs
• Journal indexes
• Information explosion following WWII
• Bush and Memex
• Cranfield studies of indexing languages and
  information retrieval
• Development of bibliographic databases
• Index Medicus production and Medlars searching

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How Much Information Today?

• See report by Hal Varian and Peter Lyman
  http//www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how
  -much-info/
• Total annual information production including
  print, film, magnetic media, etc.
• Upper Bound 2,120,539 Terabytes (1012 bytes)
• Lower Bound 635,480 Terabytes
• I.e., between 1 and 2 Exabytes per year (1018
  bytes)
• How do we organize THIS?

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Lecture Outline

• What Is Information?
• History of Information Search and Organization
• Discussion Questions
• Action Items for Next Time

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Discussion Questions (Borges)

• Yuri Takhteyev on Borges
• How does Borges' view of information compares to
  Shannon's (information as reducing uncertainty)?
• Why does Borges arrange the books randomly? What
  difference would it make in the story? (This
  question is also raised by Dennett in the
  Library of Mendel, so we may want to leave it
  till that discussion)
• What leads the Librarians to postulate the
  existence of the Man of the Book? Does that
  logic make sense?

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Discussion Questions (Borges)

• Yuri Takhteyev on Borges
• What is the significance of the sentence I
  cannot combine some characters - htcmrlchtdj -
  which the divine library has not foreseen and
  which in one of its secret tongues do not contain
  a terrible meaning?
• What is the significance of the Librarian's
  conclusion that the Library is unlimited and
  cyclical?

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Discussion Questions (Dennett)

• Joshua Solomin on Dennett
• It is mentioned that books over 500 pages in
  length can be represented in the Library by
  having them span multiple Library volumes and
  that by doing this, some Library volumes will be
  reused. But Dennett (from Quine) reduces this
  case to the case where the entire Library can be
  represented by a 1 and a 0, simply reused in
  different combinations. I would argue that this
  reductive case is no longer useful, because you
  then have to store the formulae for reproducing
  each book from your 1 and 0, which would be just
  as bad as storing the volumes themselves. So,
  does this strategy of reducing the content of a
  volume and re-using volumes help with the volume
  of information at all? If so, at what point
  between the 500-page volume and the 1-character
  volume will the strategy break down? Or would it
  be argued that it doesn't break down, but rather
  the strategy is still useful when condensed to a
  1 or 0?

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Discussion Questions (Dennett)

• Joshua Solomin on Dennett
• Dennett mentions even finding one readable
  volume in this huge storehouse is unlikely in the
  extreme. If no parse-able information can be
  gleaned from a given volume (or piece of data),
  is it still useful? Can it be said that some
  piece of data is absolutely useless, or is it
  more that we simply haven't yet developed an
  encoding system that corresponds to it (that
  would allow us to decode meaning from it)? Or
  perhaps some third option? What could be a
  possible strategy for declaring some volumes
  useless, in order to reduce the scope of the
  Library to something easier to deal with?

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Discussion Questions (Dennett)

• Joshua Solomin on Dennett
• It is observed that while Borges did not order
  his Library, attempting to do so would have its
  own problems associated with it. Dennett's
  solution is a kind of alphabetizing, organized in
  multiple dimensions. Is there some better way to
  perform this sorting? Assuming that we didn't
  want to have 1,000,000 dimensions to our file
  cabinet (the number of characters per volume),
  could we perform some kind of intelligent
  grouping of volumes? What kind of metadata could
  be developed from this sorted Library to
  facilitate searching -- e.g., a section devoted
  to books about whales, with subsections on books
  involving sea captains as well as books involving
  wooden boys who become human? Would this save us
  anything over Dennett's alphabetizing?

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Discussion Questions (Reddy)

• Katherine Ahern and Brooke Maury on Reddy
• Is there any model of communication other than
  the conduit metaphor and the toolmaker's
  paradigm? Do these two visions leave any aspects
  of communication out?
• If information is not actually stored in the
  'signal', then is the only value in this
  transmitted matter how one interprets it?

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Discussion Questions (Reddy)

• Katherine Ahern and Brooke Maury on Reddy
• What is the value of information (ideas, data,
  facts, etc.) without someone to receive, decode
  and interpret that information?
• Reddy seems to put the responsibility on the user
  or consumer of information in terms of correct
  interpretation. However, are there tools that can
  be 'packaged' with the information, that can
  assist in this unpacking?
• How does one develop a common context from which
  we can establish the rules or semantics of
  information exchange?

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Discussion Questions (Reddy)

• Katherine Ahern and Brooke Maury on Reddy
• Reddy suggests that the increase in signals
  (i.e., libraries, recordings, and mass
  communication) have resulted in less culture,
  because the skill of reconstructing or
  extracting ideas is neglected. What are the
  implications for information organization and
  retrieval? Is it our job to somehow facilitate
  this reconstruction? Does Reddy's analysis even
  allow the possibility of facilitating extraction
  of ideas? If so, how does one encode information
  in such a way as to minimize the confusion and
  lack of clarity around its meaning during
  transmission and upon reception?

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Discussion Questions (Reddy)

• Katherine Ahern and Brooke Maury on Reddy
• Is Reddy's analogy of the evil magician
  representing language appropriate? Are
  subscribers to the conduit metaphor doomed to
  think others hostile or insane? Perhaps the 'evil
  magician' is our own laziness or failure to do
  the work of communication.

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Lecture Outline

• What Is Information?
• History of Information Search and Organization
• Discussion Questions
• Action Items for Next Time

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Homework (!)

• Read Introduction and Chapters 1 2 of George
  Lakoffs Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
• Create your SIMS home page

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Next Time

• Human Categorization

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Sign Up for Office Hours

• Prof. Marc Davis
• Thursdays 200 pm 400 pm
• 314 South Hall