The Case against Information and the Body in Library and Information Science

What follows is an editorial that makes a case against the development of an empirical research frontier in library and information science (LIS) devoted to information and the body. My goal is to offer a sober and constructive counterbalance to this Library Trends special issue that is otherwise uncritical of its proposition. In asserting that original research into embodied information may be unproductive for our field, I draw from my personal experience and reflections as well as foundational conceptions of LIS from past and contemporary luminaries. My conclusion reminds all stakeholders in this Library Trends special issue of the many fascinating and urgent research questions that remain unanswered within the conventional boundaries of LIS.¹

In 2003 I was a doctoral student at the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and happily learning information behavior under Marcia Bates. I enrolled in a methodology seminar offered through the Sociology Department entitled Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, and Symbolic Interactionism, taught by the late Melvin Pollner. Our class read a book-length ethnography of one sociologist's experience as the paid caretaker of a teenage girl living with severe mental and motor impairments; the study reported the sexual way the child pressed her body against her older, male assistant during their daily routine and the inexorable sexual response of his body—two haptic forms of embodied information. The aspiring sociologists and anthropologists in the course found these microsocial physical dynamics to be riveting and discussed their meaning for two hours. The next week our enlightened professor assigned an article by Lucy Suchman about the coordinated flow of information via documents in a workplace—a brilliant paper. To my surprise, my classmates were dismissive of Suchman's study. One budding sociologist remarked, "Well, the research design is solid, but it's all about these documents. I mean … who really cares?" This flippant criticism left me speechless, while everyone else in the class laughed in agreement (excepting the magnanimous Dr. Pollner).

To me the anecdote above is loaded with meaning for this special issue. For starters, other social sciences have long histories of studying what we are now in LIS discovering as embodied information. The German sociologist Norbert Elias's (1939) ground-breaking analysis of table manners (including blowing one's nose and spitting) established a research tradition within sociology that is centered on the body. Similarly, anthropology is home to subdisciplines devoted to research into body language and gesture (kinesics), the body in space (proxemics), touch (haptics), the experience of time (chronemics), and the use of vision (oculesics), and it goes without saying that these corporeal phenomena are seen as informative and communicatory. The aforementioned disciplines have well-developed theoretical and methodological tools to describe these bodily functions and to explain them through lenses of history, sociality, and culture. Hence, any LIS scholar interested in information and the body is a latecomer to a mature research domain; has much catching-up to do; and risks reinventing the wheel.

Another notable aspect of the story above is that certain phenomena—namely, the relationship between human beings and recorded knowledge—are deemed not compelling or research-worthy by other social sciences and are eschewed. The precocious protosociologist in my story sounded almost allergic to paper. Indeed, LIS stands as the resident expert and overseer of the universe of recorded knowledge, and there are no significant contenders, a chance blessing that should be leveraged and celebrated by LIS. On the library side, this authority dates to 2000 BC and the clay tablets in the palace at Nineveh. The information science side has roots in the European documentation movement of a century ago. Later luminaries have continued to position LIS as the singular mediator between people and the documentary realm. Jesse Shera proclaimed that the library brought humankind and the graphic record into harmonious relations. Howard White positioned LIS at the intersection of people and literatures. Marcia Bates cast LIS as a metadiscipline charged with the transmission of and access to recorded knowledge. Why turn our attention away from a nexus that is historically and rightly ours...