Ronald E Day

Chair, Information and Library Science

Professor of Information and Library Science

Education

• Ph.D. at State University of New York - Binghamton, 1990

Biography

I am a professor in the Department of Information and Library Science and the chair of the Department of Information and Library Science.

My 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 that I take 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, I have 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). I co-translated into English and co-edited the mid-twentieth century French documentalist Suzanne Briet's book,What is Documentation? And with Claire McInerney I co-edited the book Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes.

Research Areas

• Information and Library Science
• Data Science
• Social Informatics
• Ethics and Values in Digital Society
• Knowledge Organization, Cultural Informatics, and Natural Informatics
• Theory and history of documentation and library and information science
• Computer Mediated Communication and Social Media
• Critical algorithm theory
• Infrastructure Studies
• Intellectual Freedom and information/data ethics
• Media Studies

Centers

• Comparative Classification Lab
• Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics