Ronald E. Day: Foundational Writings

This book contains two early papers written by Ronald E. Day while he was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, during 1992-1993, which mark the beginnings of his deconstruction of the modern conception of information as the latest form of Western metaphysics. The themes in these two pieces run throughout his later works. The papers demonstrate the intersection of formalist poetics and information science, and the appearance of phenomenology and critical theory in information studies. The problematics that they analyze, that of the temporality of information systems and the phenomenological appearance and constitution as knowledge of natural entities, along with the intersection of politics and information studies, remain relevant today.

Ronald E. Day is Professor of Information and Library Science at University of Indiana Bloomington. His research is in the philosophy, history, politics, and culture of information, documentation, knowledge, and communication in the 20th and into the 21st centuries in the U.S. and Western Europe and in the discipline of Library and Information Science. The approach he takes is that of Critical Information Studies/ Critical Informatics. In this approach I use rhetorical, conceptual, and historical analyses. Along with many articles and book chapters, he has written Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (MIT Press, 2014) and The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). He co-translated into English and co-edited the mid-twentieth century French documentalist Suzanne Briet's book, What is Documentation? With Claire McInerney he co-edited the book Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes.