Week 2 lecture slides and follow-up

The reader of the future, as imagined in a 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics. See blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2012/03/the-ipad-of-1935

Welcome to the course blog for INF 1240! Here I'll post lecture slides (as Prezi file) and supplementary materials to lectures. Most of the Blackboard material is duplicated here, too, and you can find all the group blogs linked in the left-hand column. To starts this blog off, while the angle brackets are still warm from the oven, here is some follow-up information from last week's lecture on "Major Paradigms in Information Research." The Prezi for the lecture itself may be viewed here:





The U.S. patent filed for the 1935 book reader device we discussed can be found here: http://www.google.com/patents/US1977475 . I couldn't help but enjoy Google's OCR misreading in their title metadata: "Means Fob Beading." A tip of the hat to my RA Matthew Wells for finding this.

References for sources I drew upon for the lecture (in addition to the course texts):

Bates, M. (1999). The invisible substrate of information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(12), 1043-50.

Steinmetz, G. (Ed.). (2005). The politics of method in the human sciences: Positivism and its epistemological others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Burke, P. (2000). A social history of knowledge: from Gutenberg to Diderot. Cambridge: Polity. (I was drawing mostly from his section titled "Varieties of Knowledge," pp. 82-90)

Datson, L. & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. (see pp. 238-40 for the story of Charles Bonnett and his month among the aphids)

Windelband, W. (1894/1998). History and natural science. [Reprinted in] Theory & Psychology, 8(1), 5-22. (on the terms nomothetic and idiographic)

I also showed images from these volumes held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library:

Robert Hooke. Micrographia, or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses, with observations and inquiries thereupon. London, 1665. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/3753452]

Charles Darwin. [proof sheets for] The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: J. Murray, 1872. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/1773956]

The Fisher Library is attached to our building through Robarts, and is the best rare book library in Canada (and one of the best in the world). If you are curious about these books, don't hesitate to call them up and go see them at the Fisher -- that's why the library exists. If a small group of students ever wants to go look at them, please speak with me after class and we can figure out a plan.

Happy beading, everyone, and see you in class next week!