theorywatch

Depressing new information-behavior-related research on how facts can backfire. Librarians, take note!

I’ve been silently fuming about the increasing tendency of new books in our field to be so pricey that even I as a faculty member have to think twice about buying them, let alone urging students to buy them (yes, I mean you, Libraries Unlimited, Chandos Publishing, and Scarecrow, with the $45-$75 price tags for all those 300 pages-or-less paperbacks on topics that will date in six months or less!)

So I was totally delighted this month to see Marti Hearst’s brilliant new book from Cambridge University Press, Search User Interfaces, not only published at a very affordable $50 (and available right now at Amazon at an even more affordable $40) for over 400 pages in hardcover, but made available free online.

Thank you, thank you, Professor Hearst! I’m ordering my copy right now!

As George Box noted, “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” Now, this strikes me as very useful.

… according to Don Fallis at Arizona, who takes a very pragmatic (and philosophically-grounded) approach to the epistemology of Wikipedia: he notes that there are several epistemic virtues that haven’t been previously considered in discussions about the “value” of Wikipedia.

This is a NY Times piece on Wikipedia’s proposed “approval system” for monitoring edits.

And here is Faviki, a social tagging application based on using Wikipedia subject terms.

The pragmatic point being, I take it, that the brain (or the World Brain) is always already at work on making the best of what it finds available in its environment.

Well, I personally like the idea of a continuum of reading styles, as touched upon in this essay from Nick Carr in The Atlantic, though it’s clearly not his focus here.

But I think there needs to be some actual research done towards defining the construct of “pancake people” before we take all this too seriously, and it’s likely that such research would include a Google sweep to start the review of the literature, don’t you? (After all, we’re not stupid….)

Very nice conceptual model from Finland, bringing together a number of my own areas of interest, though their focus is different. Have to admire these theorists for attempting to account for both “Goodfellas” and “Gesellschaft” in an integrated model of group information behavior…very innovative!