How Information First Became a Thing: Early Developments in the United States and Soviet Union
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until about 1950 usage of the word “information” was inextricably connected with the act of communication. Yet today we are used to thinking of what Michael Buckland called “information as thing.” The paper explores the process by which information was first conceptualized as a thing, which we argue took place among American computer engineers in the early 1950s. The Soviet Union provides a contrasting case, in which a more active, cybernetic concept of information remained dominant within computing culture.Jusqu’à environ 1950, l’utilisation du mot « information » était intimement liée à l’acte de communication. Par contre, de nos jours, nous sommes habitués de penser à ce que Michael Buckland appelle « l’information comme chose » (information as thing). Cette communication explore le processus par lequel l’information a d’abord été conceptualisée comme chose, ce qui, selon nous, s’est produit chez les ingénieurs informatiques aux États-Unis, au début des années 1950. L’Union soviétique offre un contraste intéressant, où un concept d’information plus actif, cybernétique, est demeuré dominant dans la culture informatique.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".