I’m a faculty member at UC San Diego, at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IRPS). I’ve been there since 1992, with time off for sabbaticals at MIT and elsewhere. A lot of my research is about technological knowledge: what it is, what it does, how to develop it. I spent many years researching process improvement in the semiconductor industry, for example. I coauthored a book on the evolution of firearms manufacturing over 200 years.
My main research at present is how aviation – and by extension all important technologies – shifted from an art to a science over 80 years. Tentative book title is From Daredevils to System Operators.
I have a small research center, the Global Information Industry Center. (At some universities, the number of centers is greater than the number of faculty members!) We are busy quantifying the world’s information.
My official faculty page is http://irps.ucsd.edu/faculty/faculty-directory/roger-e-bohn.htm
My Google Scholar publications list is at http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LfG6NDsAAAAJ
Paul Conway of the University of Michigan suggested I look at your How Much Information report in light of NEDCC’s upcoming conference, “The Tectonics of Digital Curation: A Symposium on the Shifting Preservation and Access Landscape” (http://www.nedcc.org/education/conferences/todc2010/todcdesc.php). Your distinction between data and information is an interesting one. And I was especially intrigued by your valuation of the Gettysburg Address. In the cultural heritage world, we are rethinking what it means to be a curator of analog — and now digital — artifacts. We’ve asked Brewster Kahle (the keynote speaker) to address the implications of overwhelming quantities of data (though in your terms, information) on the curation of cultural heritage moving forward.
The distinction between data and information is more subtle than our report discussed. English has only 3 words (data, information, knowledge) to cover a continuous spectrum of meanings. In the context of our report, we are distinguishing “bytes meaningful to people” by calling it information, while “raw bytes” are data.
There is a lot of interest in the “information overload” issue. The term is about 50 years old!