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Hi,
welcome to the home page of Ron Day's web site.
I
am an associate professor at the School
of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.
My research is in the areas of the philosophy, history, and culture of
information, documentation, knowledge, and communication, particularly in the
20th and into the 21st centuries in the U.S. and Western Europe. The approach that I take is that of
“critical information theory” (some use the term “critical
information studies”) or, simply, what could be called, “critical
informatics.” In this approach I
use rhetorical and conceptual analyses in order to explain the social and
cultural production of certain terms, their concepts, and the social and
cultural powers of such in their historical specificity. These terms are, of course,
“information,” “documentation,” “knowledge,”
“communication,” and their cognates.
I wrote The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse,
History, and Power (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001) and I
publish in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology. I co-translated and edited the mid-twentieth century
French documentalist, Suzanne Briet’s
small book, Qu’est-ce que la
documentation? (What is
Documentation?;
Scarecrow Press, 2006). With Claire McInerney I have co-edited a book on rethinking Knowledge
Management, entitled, Rethinking Knowledge Management: From
Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes which will appear from Springer-Verlag in early 2007 (preface).
I also do research on Italian autonomist Marxist movements of the 1960s and
1970s up until today, their use of information and communication
technologies, and the relation of these movements to post-Fordist
and post-structuralist discourses. Last, I have
written on the relation of information and knowledge to poetics and
conceptual and visual art.
I was a school librarian and a community college librarian
for several years. I have taught in
English, Philosophy, Composition, and, of course, Library and Information
Science. Currently, I teach courses in
library reference literature, information in the humanities, and specialized
seminar courses in my research specializations.
At
this web site:
- There
are electronic reprints of published research articles.
- There is the complete translation
of Suzanne Briet’s book, What is
Documentation? , translated by Laurent Martinet and myself, with
Hermina Anghelescu,
and with a biography and bibliography by Michael Buckland, and a preface
and commentary by myself. This
was published in a handsome print edition by Scarecrow Press
(2006). Additional material on Briet can be found on Buckland’s Briet page: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/briet.html
- There is an interview with
me by Ajit Pyati for
the journal Interactions (spring, 2005).
- There are some
additional papers that I gave at conferences,
many of which discuss the relation of art and information.
- There is a PowerPoint
summary of my book, The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse,
History, and Power (http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~roday/explainbook.ppt ). This book investigates the conceptual
and rhetorical underpinnings of three "information ages" in
Europe and the U.S.
through the 20th century in order to understand the relation between
information, rhetoric, politics, and culture during that period and into
our own. The book engages the texts of figures in information science
and social theory such as Paul Otlet, Suzanne Briet, Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Pierre Lévy, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin.
The book's main theme is about how a common conception and rhetoric of
"information" has leveraged modern history, culture, and
society toward being an "information" age, culture, and
society.
- New: Occasional Notes on
issues in information, documentation, communication, and knowledge,
organized by number and topic: #1. “The Work as
(versus) Information”.
- My CV
Thank you for your interest.
Write me, if you
wish: roday@indiana.edu
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