Interactions - January/February 2010

Overly complicated
or rigid regulations nearly
always stifle innovation
and are, in my view,
best avoided in any field,
regardless of whether
it is well established
or emerging.

faculty would be unlikely to study the question
of how railroads changed the social structure in
our country, or of how automobile emissions are
affecting respiratory health. The former would
be a question for STS; the latter for public health
schools. Similarly, ergonomics is all about the
connection between technology and people, but
we don’t generally study ergonomics in iSchools,
except when the ergonomic questions involve
information technology—and then we call the
subject HCI. Simply put, we are not about the
interactions between people and arbitrary tech-
nology: We focus on technology that mediates
information use.
Perhaps most important, if we shy away from
the central use of the term “information” in carv-
ing out an identity for ourselves, we will fail to
convey the enormous importance and breadth
of what we do. People do understand the signifi-
cance of information in the 21st century. They
understand the challenges and opportunities that
the information revolution has posed. They’ve
used Google and Facebook and Netflix; they’ve
bought things online and worried about whether
they should enter their credit card into a Web
interface; they’ve watched the music industry be
transformed and the newspaper industry collapse;
they’ve read the news story about the risks of
electronic voting; they’ve considered alternative
ways to save and share the data from their last
experiment, or the photos from their last trip. The
examples are endless. Undergraduates get it, our
colleagues in other fields get it, and—let me put
on my dean’s hat—provosts get it. “It,” of course,
is the intellectual richness and the concomitant
importance of this thing we call information, and
we in the iSchools need to be proud about claim-
ing it as the focus of our work.

January + February 2010

interactions

discipline Y, not because the request is inappro-
priate, but simply because we don’t have enough
faculty in the School of Information to participate
in every attractive collaboration opportunity.
Beyond that, the fact that all academic disci-
plines involve information doesn’t mean that all
academic disciplines study information qua infor-
mation. Most engineering disciplines involve mat-
ter, but they don’t study matter qua matter, and
hence engineers don’t view as a land grab the fact
that physicists claim matter as their subject.
Turning to the epistemological claim, that infor-
mation is too abstract to be the subject of a field
of study, I would point out that law schools study
law, business schools study business, schools of
public policy study policy, and so on. Certainly
information is no more abstract than law, busi-
ness, or policy. Even amongst the sciences, it’s
not clear that the objects of study are concrete.
Contrary to what WKK state, many people would
agree with Edsger Dijkstra’s famous statement
that computer science is not the study of comput-
ers; instead, IT is the study of something at least
as abstract as information, to wit, “computation.”
None of these objections would matter if the
proposed WKK definition of the iSchools were
adequate. Alas, I believe that claiming that
iSchools are “the places where people and tech-
nology meet” is too broad, and at the same time,
not bold enough, and thus does not do us justice.
There are lots of technologies with which
people interact, but not all of those interactions
fall within our purview in the iSchools. Many
technologies for transportation exist, but iSchool

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Martha E. Pollack is dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan. An elected fellow as well as the current president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, she is also on the Board of Directors of the Computing

Research Association and the Advisory Committee for NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. Pollack’s research has spanned many areas of artificial intelligence, including the design of assistive technology for people with cognitive impairment, a topic on which she testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Aging.