iSchool Capstone

A History of Literary Warrant in Information Science Literature

Project tags:

knowledge organization

Project poster

An understanding of the concepts and problems currently being addressed by information scientists can only be whole if the foundations of these concepts are known. For my Capstone, I am tracing the path of the concept of “literary warrant” in classification of knowledge from its genesis in 1911 to its resurgence in the 1990s and early 2000s as the basis of a method for domain analysis. In my overview of the literature I find that the concept of literary warrant is periodically dropped and then arrived at independent of its originators and past authors, which signifies gaps in the information science literature that will ultimately do harm to its academic progress. In order to advance evenly and sustainably, a discipline must have a tradition of knowing its past, the lack of which information science has suffered from in this particular case study.

Project participants:

Emily Bolton

MLIS