Lecture slides:
Video podcasts (Tues podcast still under construction):
Week I: Course Introduction

Major Topics:
  • Defining information, metaphors for information processing
  • Life as a biochemical information/messaging system
  • Cosmology and informative objects
  • The ontology of data/information/knowledge/wisdom
  • Do information and knowledge exist "out there", or do humans construct them?
  • The difference between computing and information science
  • Historical precedents for the Information Revolution: from the Print Revolution to the Machine Age
  • Public vs. private information and the making of public and private spaces generally
Assigned Readings (brief this week…):
  • An interview with Stephen Wolfram
  • Amidst all of the silliness of people comparing brains to computers (and vice-versa), here's a nice piece on how the brain is deeply analogue, and what is more, it's very associational.
  • With this year's Wolverine coaching dilemmas, let's try computing football (and this isn't Madden).
  • Also, think of genome decoding as an information project; see Stephen Jay Gould on the Genome (RIP: we'll miss him).
  • To give you a sense of the larger agenda we're addressing here, check out this video called, "Did You Know?"

Recommended Readings:
  • The classic article that ruminates on the question, "what is information" is: Michael K. Buckland, "Information as Thing," Journal of the American Society for Information Science [now abbreviated as JASIST] Vol. XLII, No. 5 (1991), pp. 351-360.
  • We'd assign this directly, but it's long for Week I; it's a look at global seed banks. Think about how these "archives" or "libraries" of genetic code are databases of life—but sadly, they cannot be backed up. Here's a podcast from American Public Media's (APM is an NPR partner) "Splendid Table" show that interviews John Seabrook, the author of the seed bank article.
Other Content: