LIS 4701 Information Representation

UNIT 1 Review: Representation, March 2, 2004

Reminder: you should be in groups before you come to class on Thursday. Class on Thursday will be in room 006B. This is the only time that being late to class will cost you points – individually, not as a group – because if you are late, it causes your other group members stress.

Major concepts and topics:

• Surrogation
• Aggregation
• Information entities
• Form
• Content
• Intellectual attributes
• Type and value of attributes
• Synchronic and diachronic attributes
• Isomorphic and indexical representation and direct extraction
• Indicative, informative, and critical abstracts
• Exact and ambiguous schemes of information organization
• Hierarchical, hypertext, and relational structures of information organization
• Disinformation design
• 6 functions of information organization

“Other” topics and concepts:

• Mutually-comprehensible representations
• Distillation
• Direct labels, encoding, self-representing scales
• Dequantification
• Information design and its influence on …
• Cholera epidemic
• Space shuttle Challenger
• 9 functions of an index according to British Standard 3700:1988

Readings (you are of course responsible for all of the content of all of the readings that were assigned, not just the points that we went over in class and/or that are on this review page):

• Tufte: Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 6
• Cleveland & Cleveland, The nature and types of abstracts
• Mulvany, Introduction to book indexing
• O’Connor, Considerations of representation
• Rosenfeld & Morville, Organizing information