Human-created information systems have been around--leaving their traces, changing the way we behave--for eons. The iSchool is the place where a select group of active and engaged minds have the privilege to come together and discuss what it means for humans to interact with these ever-changing information technologies that they have so continuously and actively constructed.
How do the systems that we ourselves create change the way we behave? Conversely, how do the ways we behave inform our construction of the systems? What broader implications does this interaction have for our own humanity? Such are the questions belonging to the iSchool, and they can best be answered by a diverse group of information-focused scholars committed to an open conversation about the similarities and differences in their related research agendas.
The community within an iSchool includes those who focus on the technical creation of contemporary information systems. What do we demand of our infrastructure today? How are we meeting those needs? It also includes those who investigate the ways in which the information is written, organized, encoded and stored by these systems. What effect does the standardization of data values have on our intellectual endeavors? How does what we put in affect what we get out? It also includes those concerned about the security of these systems, the distribution of these systems, the longevity of these systems...all of these topics are closely intertwined, and they can interact with one another, as well as provide new understandings, in an infinite array of possibilities.
The domain circumscribed by the creation of information systems and the ways in which these systems interact with humanity is the domain of the iSchool.
Alison Langmead
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