How Much Information / Information Growth
Dear members of Air-l: I am trying to find some reliable resources in relation to information growth. I found, for example several blogs or news about large data repositories in the world, but the information seems misleading and the modes of evaluation unclear (eg: http://www.businessintelligencelowdown.com/2007/02/top_10_largest_.html ; http://www.sci-tech-today.com/perl/story/19162.html ) Beyond the well known Lyman and Varian 2003 study ( http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/ ) does anybody knows any other recent extensive study in this area ? Thanks in advance, Jose-Carlos
Dear Jose - Carlos - I don't have a particular cite (sorry) but there is some way to track numbers of referred journals which have gone over two million recently - or so I believe. This might be one way to measure information growth, that won't speak to web expansion but it should speak to information? I am sending a query to our librarians and will reply if i get something useful. Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD thesis, "Locating four pathways to internet scholarship" School of Env. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tues: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/ Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com
Actually I think that you need to specify, what kind of information growth you are interested in. Information as digital data, as www content, amount of literature, mass media or scientific publications? If you are interested in scientific aspect of information, perhaps the following article will be useful for you. It explains the principle at work in ISI Web of Knowledge. There you can find some statistics of journal articles and perhaps it's references may help you somehow. Testa, J., The Thomson Scientific Journal Selection Process [Retreived 1 January 2007] Available at http://scientific.thomson.com/free/essays/selectionofmaterial/journalselecti on Best wishes, Alexander Semenov. P.S. I wonder - when did the notion of "information" separated from notion of "knowledge" in philosophical sense? Isn't it connected with emergence of computers, Internet, etc.? Does anybody have any ideas about it?
On 2/28/07, Semenov Alexander <semenoffalex@googlemail.com> wrote:
P.S. I wonder - when did the notion of "information" separated from notion of "knowledge" in philosophical sense? Isn't it connected with emergence of computers, Internet, etc.? Does anybody have any ideas about it?
A very interesting question. Others on this list probably know a lot more, but I would suggest at least two trajectories: The disembodiment of mental processes after Descartes and the quantification of knowledge in the 19th century. At any rate, when Shannon writes his historical paper on the mathematical theory of information in 1948, the process is complete: Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(July; October), 379-423; 623-656. I would suggest Katherine Hayles as a possible source: Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 0226321460 Best, Charlie Breindahl
participants (4)
-
Charlie Breindahl -
Denise N. Rall -
Jose-Carlos Mariategui -
Semenov Alexander