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Welcome to Ron Day's web site.

I am a professor in the Department of Information and Library Science in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. My research is in the philosophy, history, politics, and culture of information, documentation, knowledge, and communication in the 20th and into the 21st centuries. The approach that I take is that of Critical Information Studies/ Critical Informatics. In this approach I use rhetorical, conceptual, and historical analyses. I am also soon finishiing my six year stint as chair of the Department.

I have written and edited several books:: Documentarity: Evidence, Ontology, and Inscription (MIT, 2019), Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (MIT Press: 2014); The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (Southern Illinois University Press: 2001); co-translator and editor into English of the mid-twentieth century French documentalist Suzanne Briet's book, What is Documentation? (Scarecrow Press, 2006); and co-editor with Claire McInerney of the collection, Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes (Springer, 2007). I have also written numerous articles and book chapters.

The central theme that runs throughout all my works is an analysis of power and information sociocultural-technical technologies. My work has looked at “power” in information systems and their socio-cultural imaginaries in terms of both the generative and restrictive senses of this term in English. The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2001) looked at the problem of power from the aspect of the construction of information as an epistemic trope for factual representation with social, cultural, and political power, from early 20th century European Documentation through mid-century cybernetics and into Information Society/Age rhetoric in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, counterposing such a tradition with critical interventions by Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Central to this examination was understanding the term “information” and its synonyms and offshoots (“documents,” “data,” etc.) as tropes of the new, which tend to erase the historicity of their own construction. Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (2014) examined power in terms of the subject’s construction through documentary technologies, algorithms and social computing, android science, and machine learning. It located “information need” and the information “user” in information seeking and retrieval as functions of technical indexing systems as types of social positioning technologies, translating the construction of subjectivity by means of ideology (Althusser's "interpolation") into the construction of digitallly mediated subjectivity by means of socio-computational interpolation. My most recent book, Documentarity: Evidence, Ontology, and Inscription (2019), looked at power from the viewpoint of poiesis and emergence: how a being becomes both evident and is recognized as evidence, across various ontological-epistemic modalities of inscription: documentary systems, literature, rights theory, and machine learning, following the trajectory from ancient a priori, “top-down” classification to those more recent “bottom-up” techniques of statical inference in machine learning (with the center of the book looking at literature as both realist and relatively non-representational activities). One of the themes of this book was the status of the particular in relation to different modalities of constructing universal types.