Open Password – Friday, May 7, 2021
#919
Ulla Wimmer – Future of Information Science – Institute for Library and Information Science – Master’s program – BuB – Willi Bredemeier – Password – Frauke Schade – HAW Hamburg – Conference of Information and Library Science courses – Generation gap – Emeritus and other scientists – Gender gap – Curse of interdisciplinarity – sociology of science – theory of science – Bernd Jörs – Winfried Gödert – research fronts – online marketing – user experience – search engines – fake news – smart city and smart country – digitization – research infrastructure – Stefan Hauff-Hartig – Joachim Griesbaum – Dirk Lewandowski – Ulrike Spree – Information Behavior – System Maintenance – Relevance – Quality of Scientific Contributions – Super League – Public Good – Private Ownership – No Grass in the Clouds – Ryan O’Hanlon – Mark Blyth – GQ Magazine – Manchester United – Ever Increasing Revenues – COVID – TV Revenues – Football Fans – JP Morgan – NBA Structure – Andy Markowitz – American Exceptionalism – Immigrants – Inventing American Sports – Baseball – American Football – Karl Polanyi – Bayern Munich – Borussia Dortmund – Social Owners and Titular Owners – Real Madrid – FC Barcelona – Bailout – Roman Abramovich – Ownership Structure – Republican Party –
Research Goes Public – Building Research – IRB – IBA’27 – Productive City – Berlin Information Working Group – Digitization of Large Photo Stocks – Tanja Estler-Ziegler
1.
Cover story: Ulla Wimmer on the “Future of Information Science”
Willi Bredemeier’s comment on it
2.
Outside the box: Failure of the Football Super League – A Rare Triumph of Public Good
Over Private Ownership
3.
Research Goes Public
Digitization of large photo stocks
Ulla Wimmer on
the “Future of Information Science” (1)
Where information science comes from
and how it has changed
– how do we bring this together?
Dr. Ulla Wimmer works at the Institute for Library and Information Science at Berlin’s Humboldt University and coordinates the advanced distance learning master’s program in “Library and Information Science”. In BuB she constructively and critically discussed the reader “Future of Information Science – Does Information Science have a future?” in BuB in a three-page review entitled “A debate that comes to nothing – Information science as a sociological case study of science” (” Basics and Perspectives – Offers in Teaching – On the Frontlines of Information Science”), edited by Willi Bredemeier, Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen, Berlin 2019. We document in excerpts:
“Willi Bredemeier – journalist, doctor of economics and actor in the German information economy since the 1970s – has compiled statements and texts in this anthology that deal with the orientation, problems and methods of information science. The starting point – and therefore probably the reason for the rather alarmist subtitle – was the dissolution of the chairs for information science in Konstanz, Saarbrücken and Düsseldorf after the chair holders retired.
Between 2016 and 2018, these led to a debate about the “future of information science” in Bredemeier’s magazine “Password”…
The authors of the volume mostly work at information and library science institutes at German universities, some in the information industry. The editor was supported by Frauke Schade (HAW Hamburg) and the KIBA (Conference of Information and Library Studies) in the conception of the book (especially chapters 3-7).
Between parts 1 (How the IW should be) and 2 (How it currently works) there are roughly three “gaps” (with exceptions): firstly, a generation gap (unfortunately the list of authors does not contain birth dates that make this easier to understand ). This gap shows that the group (part 1) was socialized primarily in the 1970s and the others later. Secondly, this creates a gap between emeritus scientists and scientists who are still active in science. And thirdly, there is a gender gap: the four (of 33) first authors of the volume all speak in Part 2; There are no women involved in the debate in Part 1.
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The classification of positions and viewpoints is missing.
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It could have been useful and fruitful for the discussion and development of information science to address these three gaps and include them in the discussion. The fact that this did not happen must be described as a wasted opportunity for publication. Because of the chronological and biographical classification of the authors’ points of view (there are also a number of young scientists represented in the volume), the discussion could have gained significantly in plasticity and depth and led to a real debate about the development and perspectives of the discipline.
Instead, chapters 1 and 2 (partly also in 3) ask from a “positionless” position for absolute, generally valid solutions and limits – definitions, “own” methods, unique selling points, boundaries, “research fronts” – of information science or the lack thereof the same in “today’s” information science is complained about. The fact that this is difficult for an interdisciplinary subject is undoubtedly a political-strategic disadvantage that weakens every interdisciplinary discipline – be it science and technology studies, cultural studies or gender studies. In today’s networked research landscape, which is still strongly influenced by discipline-related governance, this “curse of interdisciplinarity” would have to be discussed more structurally and politically than in terms of technical content (i.e. as a failure of “today’s” information science). Perhaps this is one reason why the debate has not been taken up by those active in the discipline.
Not making the specific biographical position of the authors fruitful for the debate is a mistake because it imposes itself in many places, for example in “circulation through search engines”, “information also in digital form” or “information search also through Laymen” – issues that young information scientists no longer discuss because they are self-evident to them. Comparing the two perspectives of “loss” (of a certain historically situated profile) and “diversification” of a disciplinary discipline) could have been a scientific-sociological approach.
Occasionally it becomes apparent in Part 1 that the pointed contributions to an ongoing debate have their gaps outside of their original context: sometimes the texts are missing elements that would form part of a coherent argument, sometimes the mutual references lead to a certain overlap. Nevertheless, they are relevant as documentation of the perspectives of this generation of German information science and the structural problem of closures must ultimately also be reflected on by the scientific community.
However, the two longer contributions by the active professor Bernd Joers leave you perplexed. With their extensive quotations, they read like a long collection of evidence for an increasingly outraged argument, which is itself never made explicit – at least not in this publication.
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Contributions from research
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The authors in Chapters 4 to 6 had the advantage of being able to conceptualize and structure their contributions from the outset – but they sometimes lack the lively gesture of the discussion contributions in Part 1.
The “research fronts” shown in Chapter 6 each contain one to four articles on the topics of online marketing, user experience, search engines, fake news, “smart city and smart country”, digitization and research infrastructure. These texts describe interesting research approaches and projects in current information science. Particularly noteworthy here is Hauff-Hartig’s contribution to “Misinformation, misinformation and disinformation as an information science challenge”. In a number of places, the authors address the questions raised in Part 1 about their “own” questions and methods (Griesbaum, Lewandowski, Spree). In this form they can be seen as a cautious response, without going to the fundamental and strategic level of the contributions in Part 1.
It is obvious that this cross-section of the current research landscape cannot cover all areas and is certainly not a shortcoming of the volume. However, it is noteworthy that the research field of information behavior is missing, with which modern information science has declared the everyday information behavior of actors outside of science and business to be its research object.
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On the reception of the volume
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Reading the volume is profitable and interesting as long as one takes a meta-level and reads it as a case study in the science of knowledge: the reading took place – partly involved, partly distanced – from the position of a university employee who had left library practice late. From Part 1, the author gained a clearer understanding of where information science came from and how much it has changed. The diversification and indeed the specific view of current information science can be derived from part 2. In the end, the question of how the two come together remains the core question of how much profile – and thus differentiation – or how much openness and diversification a subject needs today for its own science-political “system maintenance”.
Ulla Wimmer on
the “Future of Information Science” (2)
Why I felt.
Which topics should be covered? Which argument is better?
By Willi Bredemeier
Basically, I am grateful for Ms. Wimmer’s contribution. This also applies to other reactions to the “future of information science” as well as to further reflections in information science on the state of the discipline, as they have appeared in Open Password and elsewhere (explicitly including the contributions of Bernd Jörs and Winfried Gödert). In contrast to those years when I reviewed the contributions at the ISI conferences in the proceedings for several years and was met with leaden silence, something has started to move.
I was therefore initially tempted to leave Ms. Wimmer’s contribution as it is. I would like to speak out on one point. When putting together the contributions to the reader, I was primarily concerned with the following questions: Which topics should information science address? Which argument is better? How can the quality of information science contributions be improved by, among other things, sharpening the disciplinary profile? These questions cannot be clarified by sorting the authors according to age and professional age, CVs, existing or missing institutional connection or gender and subsequent discussions.
Or to put it another way: the sociology of science does not replace philosophy of science or its disciplinary variants.
Outside the box (46):
Failure of the Football Super League
A Rare Triumph of Public Good
Over Private Ownership
Ryan O’Hanlon interviews Mark Blyth, in: How the Spectacular, Comical Failure of the Super League Explains the World, in: No Grass in the Clouds, April 22nd. Blyth was characterized by GQ magazine as the economist who foresaw Trump and Brexit. The topic is the “Super League”, into which almost all leading European football clubs wanted to unite. After protests from fans and leading politicians, the plan collapsed. From O’Hanlon’s perspective, this was “a rare triumph of public good over private ownership”.
What a wild 72 hours. You think of a Manchester United balance sheet, right? … The only way they can manage to pay off the loans they’ve got, which are seven-percent or higher with all the hedge funds that they borrowed from, is ever increasing revenues. And they’ve done practically everything they can do. And they’ve done practically everything they can do. They’ve done the Chinese licensing deals. They’re doing the tours in the middle of the summer, and the whole lot. …
So you throw COVID into the mix of these highly levered balance sheets, and basically they’re all in deep, deep shit. The only question was: what’s the other source of financing? So you’ve maxed out your TV revenue. Given the rescheduling with COVID, the lack of fans, the fact that people aren’t watching as much – you’re not going to get out of TV anymore, so what do you do? Basically what you do is you generalize Manchester United’s business model for the entire league. And that’s when JP Morgan comes in. And JP Morgan’s going to give them all like 3.5 billion, leveraging its balance sheets, so that they can solve their financial problems. And then they put together an NBA structure, so nobody ever goes bust in terms of relegation. And then you play each other, and it totally makes sense… apart from the fact that football fans are football fans, and not American sports fans. That’s the critical difference.
The US as an exception in sports? There’s a fabulous book by a guy called Andy Markowitz from 2006 (The Book: Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism ). …The biggest sport in the United States once was football. This was in the 19th Centruy. Everyone came over, and the immigrants played. … Then there was this move after the 1880s. And it’s sort of an anti-immigrant wave to make people more American and to break down these ethnic boundaries that were becoming political flashpoints. And one of the ways it was done was by inventing “American” sports. So baseball was the front runner on this, and then it became football – or the American understanding of football. These were all attempts to forge a collective identity.
How about the fans? There are limits to how far you can push this market logic on the social institutions without provoking a reaction. Karl Polanyi, the Hungarian sociologist and historian from the 1940s, wrote that the big fuck-ups of the 19th century and 20th century were attempts to shove markets down people’s throats to the point where they revolted. In a sense, what you’re seeing here is a classic Polanyian reaction. So I think it’s heartening in that it shows there is a limit to how much you can commodify these social goods even if they are nominally private assets.”
Nevertheless, we are all ManU? There’s three models left:
- There’s that business model, which is the Bayern Munich one and the Dortmund one. …Look at how the Germans do this. They invest heavily in talent. They invest heavily in youth, they buy, but they buy judiciously. They don’t pay ludicrous salaries. And the funds own 51 per cent of the companies. It’s a perfect model, right? Because they’ve got cooperative ownership between the people who are the kind of social owners. And then you’ve got the titular owners who do their investment, and there’s a balance of those interests.
- You can have the Manchester United one, where you’re just basically hoping and praying the TV revenue pick back up because you’ve got to pay back all these loans, which is unsustainable.
- And then you’ve got the real Madrid or Barcelona one where basically the Spanish state or Catalonia bails you out because someone is just making more and more ludicrous promises to become the president. And you spend a kajillion dollars on players.
So the Super League will come back? It’s the lack of other options. You’re either praying for an Abramovich and there’s not enough of them around. You’re praying for ever increasing TV revenue, which isn’t going to happen, or you try a stunt like the Super League which we know hasn’t worked. So the online time, the only way you can do this is to downsize, de-lever, and then change the ownership structure. It just makes sense. Now, just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it will happen. I will give you as evidence: the existence of the Republican party. Everything they do is wrong, and they keep doing it. So, you can have bad policies continue, but businesses need a sustainable business model and they just don’t have one
Research Goes Public
Building research in practical exchange
(IRB) After two successful years, “Research goes Public” is entering another round. The event format was created on the initiative of the Fraunhofer Information Center for Space and Construction IRB, in cooperation with the International Building Exhibition 2027 StadtRegion Stuttgart (IBA’27). The aim is to initiate a dialogue between research, practice and the general public. The 2021 kick-off event deals with the topic of “Living in the Productive City” and will take place online on May 19th.
The concept of the productive city has increasingly dominated the discussion in urban development in recent years. Sustainable urban planning has long called for a greater mix of work and living. But there are many obstacles to this vision – such as planning law, monument protection and investor logic. And is the idea of the productive city actually a viable model?
This year, the “Research goes Public” event series focuses on concepts that show new solutions for living in the productive city. The consideration goes beyond the structural and building law aspects and also examines sociological and psychological aspects.
With “Research goes Public – Building Research in Practical Exchange,” a new format was created that is dedicated to the transfer of building research results into practice. Designed and implemented by the Fraunhofer IRB, it brings together stakeholders from building research and construction practice, but also from urban planning and private initiatives in a dialogue-oriented format. The focus is on the question of the barriers to transferring innovations and findings from construction research into practice.
Berlin Information Working Group
Digitization of large photo stocks
from the Holzmann picture archive and Circus Busch in the economic archive
Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues,
we would like to warmly invite you to our online event, which deals with the following topic: Digitization of large photo stocks – Holzmann picture archive and Circus Busch in the economic archive – A lecture by Björn Berghausen, managing director of the Berlin-Brandenburg Economic Archives (BBWA) – https://bb-wa.de/
Original formats, target sizes, digital long-term archiving, online presentation, copyright and usage rights – the keywords that come together in digitization projects are challenges with specific questions and Answer. The Berlin-Brandenburg Economic Archive was faced with a major challenge in view of 350,000 photos from 100 years of the Philipp Holzmann Group’s building history, which were to be digitized in two years and were available in different formats – from silver gelatin photos to medium format negatives. Björn Berghausen’s lecture explains the steps of the project, the collaboration with project partners and approaches to solutions that are currently also being used in the follow-up project – the photo inventory of the Circus Busch Berlin archive. Björn Berghausen has been managing director of the Berlin-Brandenburg Economic Archives since 2011. He previously worked at Schering AG and Volkswagen AG in archives and historical communication and in the “Flick in the 20th Century” project at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.
The lecture will take place on Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom. The event is free. Please register by May 19, 2021 at estler-ziegler@gmx.de . Please do not use the email address listed on our website ( bak@ub.tu-berlin.de ). The TU server is currently not available.
We will send you the access details for the Zoom event by email one day before the event.
We look forward to welcoming you to our event.
Kind regards, Tania Estler-Ziegler (Chairwoman,
Berliner Arbeitskreis Information (BAK), c/o University Library of the TU Berlin, Fasanenstr. 88, 10623 Berlin, http://bak-information.de/
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