Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 10 (1992)

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Item
    Arguing for the Rainforest: High-Tech Topoi and the Value(s) of a Database
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1992) Bailis, Stanley; Gottlieb, Stephen; Klein, Julie Thompson; Fiscella, Joan
    When the World Bank created its Environment Department, no institutional mechanism existed to create, collect, or disseminate environmental information that had accumulated in the Bank. Considering the ethical and political dimensions of environmental information, designers of an environmental database began to conceive it as a source for arguments rather than as a storehouse of data. Conceived in terms of argument, the database was developed in light of rhetorical principles that recognized that "factual" and "objective" knowledge shifts radically in destabilized contexts and is inseparable from values and beliefs.
  • Item
    Creating an Image Bank for Teaching World Religion: Challenging and Reifying Structures of Knowledge
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1992) Bailis, Stanley; Gottlieb, Stephen A.; Klein, Julie Thompson; Fiscella, Joan
    Creating an indexed set of slides for teaching the academic study of religion reveals how existing structures of power/ knowledge shape the frameworks from which new knowledge emerges, and how that knowledge may affect those structures. Although cultural, political and personal history impinge upon every aspect of the project, the data and the challenge of organizing them reveal meaningful world-experiences that lie outside the capacity of our knowledge structures, tending to transform or destabilize them.
  • Item
    Toward a Taxonomy of an Interdisciplinary Area: The Case of Technical Communication
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1992) Bailis, Stanley; Gottlieb, Stephen; Klein, Julie Thompson; Fiscella, Joan
    Although an interdisciplinary program derives strength from its abilily to gain insights from a variety of disciplines, these same multiple disciplines hinder the development of common terminology necessary for advancing research in the field. Technical communication began as a practitioner-dominated field but recently academic programs have started to add the theoretical and research base. As an interdisciplinary field, technical communication benefits from research in art, cognitive psychology, computer science, education, engineering, English, graphics, and rhetoric. Howcver, the lack of a dominant academic discipline has fragmented the development of a coherent discipline; likewise, lack of clear definitions and common terminology hinders the research and theory development of the field. Building a taxonomy for technical communication will help researchers benefit from the multidisciplinary input into the field. The basis for such a taxonomy begins with a Theoretical Model of Technical Communication, then continues with a Framework for a Taxonomy based on the model.
  • Item
    The Materiality of Informatics
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1992) Bailis, Stanley; Gottlieb, Stephen; Klein, Julie Thompson; Fiscella, Joan
  • Item
    How Libraries Cope with Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Women's Studies
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1992) Bailis, Stanley; Gottlieb, Stephen; Klein, Julie Thompson; Fiscella, Joan
  • Item
    The Archival Information System as a Model for Retrieval of Interdisciplinary Materials
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1992) Bailis, Stanley; Gottlieb, Stephen; Klein, Julie Thompson; Fiscella, Joan
  • Item
    Introduction
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1992) Bailis, Stanley; Gottlieb, Stephen A.; Klein, Julie Thompson; Fiscella, Joan B.