scholarship

in his new book, The Emergence of Genetic Rationality, our guest on wednesday, Philip Thurtle, maps the ways in which genetic information has been organized over the years. he argues that modes of organization and processing of genetic information have shaped how we view ourselves. "In a very real sense, the social need and the technical capacity to articulate a concept of heredity reliant upon heritable traits emerged from the circuits of recordkeeping, clerical divisions of labor, data analysis, new forms of institutional memory, and rationalized communication and transportation practices of the era—what we today might call “information processing.” "

in the youtube video titled, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" Mike Wesch illustrates how we (users of the web) contribute to the organization of information on the web. both authors deal with the organization of information and how this organization shapes our view of reality. philip tells a story about how methods of scientific inquiry have shaped how we think about ourselves. mike tells a story about how users of the internet shape the organization of information about the world.

the blog assignment for tomorrow is to think about the medium each author uses to communicate their research. thurtle uses a print medium (a book) to articulate his ideas and wesch uses video (youtube). thinking in terms of your respective research projects, what are the affordances and limitations of these two modes of communication? who will benefit from the findings of your research and what is an effective way to reach your expected audience?