May 26, 2014

The Globe and Mail Cites Landmark I School Research Study

From The Globe and Mail

Who reads four million e-mails? The NSA – and professors

By Kevin Kee

History – and the other humanities and social sciences, and the students who attend university to learn them – are all under intense suspicion. Apparently there's a pressing need to decide if we are worthwhile or not.

We know that when governments call for investment in research, they typically mean applied research - the kind that's done in "white-lab-coat" fields like sciences, engineering and medicine.... We hear less about how the changing nature of scholarship is creating a generation of graduates who are more adept than any other at juggling complex texts, information management and knowledge creation.... Digitization has had a huge impact on the demands scholars put on themselves and on each other. These are the same expectations we put on our students.

We used to describe the Web as a library where all the books, journals, and magazines had been pulled off the shelves and thrown on the floor. In 2003, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley [including former School of Information dean Hal Varian and late professor Peter Lyman] estimated that about five exabytes of information had been created the previous year. If we printed five exabytes in traditional book form, those books would fill 37,000 libraries the size of the Library of Congress....

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016