theorywatch

And, on the topics of negative data and unintended collections, here’s Simson Garfinkel’s “Drives Project,” in which he demonstrates that disposal of data is never quite as easy as one thinks.

Dr. Garfinkel has also just authored a thought-provoking piece in MIT’s Technology Review about Wikipedia’s view of truth (or, as Stephen Colbert famously said, its “truthiness”) as ideally (though not actually) consisting of exemplary references to stable and sourced documentary evidence. Long before Wikipedia existed, however, Patrick Wilson made a similar “indictment” of librarianship in his brilliant book, Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority. (Though librarianship’s “second-hand knowledge” is biased towards prestigious peer-reviewed scholarly articles rather than towards freely accessible online popular ones.)

As we move towards more involvement with primary data, however, as some people have suggested (notably, Andrew Dillon and Glynn Harmon at Austin), are we reaching for First-Hand Knowledge? And what are the implications of that for the profession?

And the consequences of that kind of collection: intended and unintended?

information