Description
This talk describes a book being written as a partial answer to a question posed by Michael Buckland: What might be gained by reinvigorating bibliography? The question was premised on the idea that bibliography has faded into obscurity. The contrarian truth I pursue in the book and this talk is that bibliography could hardly be more integral to our intellectual and creative lives than it is now.A mode of intellectual and cultural accounting, bibliography serves a diversity of foundational roles in the sprawling field we call information science. It only seems to have passed into obscurity because it has become so integral to our work that we do not notice how it supports what we do. I argue this while concomitantly suggesting that there is an urgent need to reinvigorate bibliography as we copy out our many scientific findings and cultural heritages using recently developed systems of reproduction. Like all infrastructures, bibliography as an idea and a constellation of material practices undertaken across the academy and beyond needs maintenance. The need for this maintenance is urgent because we are building new representational structures and systems at such an accelerated pace that we are losing track of our ability to account for what we have built and the things that our systems are producing.
Cats, Carpenters, and Accountants suggests how bibliography contributes to building and accounting for our representational structures and, if reinvigorated, how bibliography can provide a cat-like independence to critically assess not only the performance of our representational systems but also the ideologies built into and reproduced by them.
| Period | Apr 1 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Information Access Seminar |
| Event type | Seminar |
| Organizer | UC Berkeley School of Information |
| Degree of Recognition | Local |