Subject/Object

I am sure you have all read the mass of news on Amazon’s Kindle. Makes me feel secure that books will be here for a long time.

As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up on the street, left on busses and passed among families at Christmas and amongst book club members. And until these e-books have the same liberalities as hard cover books (unless publishers deliberately kill them, as I can see with textbooks), paper books will be here for a while.

Every see a homeless person with an e-book reader? Yet, I always see them with a paperback. Who can imagine a hippy backpacking across Asia with his or her well worn copy of Siddhartha in their back pocket? Yes, an idealistic idea, but not very possible with the Kindle.

So I direct you all to read dive in to mark’s post “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” with some telling quotes. I’ll include one here:

Act VI: The act of learning If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was. Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Went into the professor’s office today to discuss my research proposal for Research Methods. I am doing really well in the class, and you need an A- to do the thesis option.

I have been considering it–when I came here I had a specific issue that I wanted to look at, but as I have been going through the classes I feel that whatever I was studying at the time caught my interest too strongly. However, as I got to the time to write the paper, it really didn’t motivate me.

In preparation for this research proposal I have been throwing myself in Information Science theory: Information Seeking, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Organization etc etc. Going through volumes and volumes of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

When I started this degree, I had it in my mind to study how Intellectual Property came about, how information was commodified, and how it was sold to the rest of us. Clearly, to me, oral culture is a free culture, where things ripped, mixed and “burned” with every performance (see the wonderful Singer of Tales by Albert Lord.)

Manuscript culture was equally unbashful about its “theft.” I don’t have the quote in front of me, but Seneca encouraged his readers to be like bees: to gather all of the best of from the finest flowers, and mix those words together into a sweet honey so no single source could be discerned from the rest. Students in medieval monasteries would be responsible for copying texts as their magisters read them out in class. To graduate one had to present all the books one had copied.

And we all know where the Internet is going. There is one simple fact on the Internet: to read, view, watch or listen to is to make a copy. That copy is perfect and in exact fidelity to the original. The on the Internet there are no auras.

So, my argument is that, along with all the other goodness that print brought, it also brought along a notion of intellectual “property.” I am not original in this, McLuhan said it long ago. Many of you will have read that my department is making the transition from an Information Science school to a school of Information Studies. And it is clear that this topic I have in mind falls in the realm of the latter.

Yet, being steeped in Information Science theory, I presented a proposal in the best of positivist traditions, studying the independent variable of information behaviors of various scholarly disciplines and its effects on the dependent variable of OA knowledge and uptake.

And I was basically told it was crap. Or that I could do better, judged from the work I had already done in the course. It was suggested that I look at Discourse Analysis and apply some of my humanities background on designing something to research.

Of course I missed the class discussing Discourse Analysis, so it didn’t really occur to me. And I was confused, because I felt that the Social Science methods we were learning in the class were closer to the science then the social–derived from psychology and other such experimental milieus. I am basically interested in media theory and its relation to political economies of information.

So, discourse analysis is a good choice, except I know nothing about it. It is somewhat antithetical to the way things are done in Philosophy–while it may treat the same ideas, the method is not exactly the same. Philosophy is more about logical consistency, discourse analysis more about what is said and what is unsaid in a text, and power structures. So I am teaching myself. I have just over a week to do it.

How does one present a research proposal saying that one is going to study a text? Why do they not just do it? How do I write about ethical considerations. Or validity and reliability? Watching some other master’s theses published on the Internet in LIS, they don’t even tough on these theoretical considerations.

Any help?