Epistemology of Information Science
Theory of knowledge and social and historical epistemology. Contemporary issues in knowledge and scientificity. Approaches in the History of Science, Philosophy of Science, Social Studies of Science. The new relations between Science and Technology. Issues specific to Information Science and its socio-epistemological statute. Information Science as a social science. Interdisciplinarity. Current trends and horizons in Information Science.
Generation, Processing, and Transfer of Information through Electronic Medium
Information sources, services, and units in the Internet environment: typologies and standards. Changes in the documentary chain and in the behavior of users facing the new communication and information technologies. Interactivity, interconnectivity, and repositioning of space and time in the context of electronic networks.
Information and Communication Social Networks: analysis, dynamics, and models
Network society and sociology of networks. Network theory applied to social sciences. Social capital. Homophilia, affiliation, centrality, distance, dissemination. Roles and positions. Network effects and information cascade. Power laws. Small world phenomenon. Epidemic model. Social influence. Information networks. Knowledge creation and collaboration networks. Applications in the fields of health, business, science, and culture. Network models and types. The network as a research paradigm. Social network analysis. Data collection, measurement of social networks.
Information and Knowledge in Strategic Management
The use of information as a resource for decision-making in different contexts and activities of social life. Information and knowledge management in different organizational environments. Collective, competitive, and organizational intelligence.
Information and Memory
From a theoretical and epistemological perspective, information study and social memory understood as phenomena constructed historically and socially. Information acting as a transmission code and having as its main basis reading and writing of the world and the word; and memory acting as a socio-cultural support. Both behave according to the fluctuations, transformations, and socio-cultural changes that are constant along mankind’s historical process.
Information and Public Management
Institutional and organizational aspects. Information Environment and Regime: models of managerial, bureaucratic and networked State. Informational governance and electronic government. Actors and policies of information in the Brazilian scenario.
Information in Art and Culture
Cognitive structures, language, and information structures. The informational object in different contexts and media. Information in Art – Theoretical foundations of information in Art, Art History, and Information Science. Different approaches of artistic information in Information Science. Representation in Art. Art objects seen as the artistic and social production of documents/information. The nature of information in Art. Museums, Museology, and Information Science. Informational resources in Art. Image: photographs, videos, films. Media libraries. Information technologies: information networks and systems. Image and sound data banks.
Information Management for Knowledge Production
Information, communication, and knowledge: conceptual issues. Information flow in auditory, textual, and electronic cultures. Information Management: generation, selection, reformatting, storage, and retrieval. Management and distribution of information in electronic communication networks.
Information Management in Organizations
Information as a productive asset and the processes of value aggregation. Information management in the context of technologies, products, and services for organizations. Analysis of studies and research for the integrated planning of information units. Methodologies and studies on the uses and needs of information.
Information, Knowledge, and Society in the Contemporary Thought
Introduction to the main issues, authors, and viewpoints in the contemporary thought focusing on knowledge and information or providing a major contribution to this theme. Organization of the quest for prominent texts/thinkers according to the state of the issues in Information Science.
Interdisciplinary Seminars in Information and Knowledge
This course is organized in the form of a seminar, aiming at familiarizing students with the research themes being developed at the PPGCI, as well as other contemporary themes in Information Science and connected areas.
Knowledge Management
Interactions between knowledge management, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and its contribution to wealth generation and competitive advantages (for companies and regions) in knowledge-intensive innovative enterprises, technology, and communication. Approaches, methodologies, and instruments of knowledge management, technology tools, and organizational strategies. Practices of knowledge management in specific organizational contexts. Entrepreneurial intelligence.
Knowledge Organization Systems
Theoretical and methodological principles for the elaboration of languages of information representation and retrieval. Typologies of systems of knowledge organization and information representation. Performance evaluation of schemes and classification tables, taxonomies, thesauri, controlled vocabularies, ontologies, terminologies, and glossaries according to specific meanings. The modern conception of participation in virtual collaborative communities.
Linguistic Foundations
The great paradigmatic revolutions. Language levels: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicon, and terminology. The structuralist revolution: binarity and alterity. The generative paradigm: the genetic component. From Language I to Language E: correlation, factorization, and text. Orality and writing. Linguistics and its interfaces. The relation of linguistics with other sciences. Science and technological innovation.
Metrics of Information: Theory and Methods
Concepts and their evolution: Bibliometrics, Informetrics, Scientometrics, and Webometrics. The most important laws, their formulations, and formulators. Citation analysis and research front. Applications in science, in technology, in organizations, and in the Internet/Web.
Modeling of Knowledge Organization and Representation
Theoretical and methodological principles for the development of processes and structures of knowledge organization and representation. Theories and models, classical and contemporary, of conceptualization, categorization, and classification. Knowledge organization and representation in disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. The analogy in human thinking, conceptual metaphor, and innovation in science and technology. Semiotics applied to the ontological representation of knowledge. Models and methodologies for the development of ontologies. Acquisition, conceptualization, elaboration, formalization, application, and evaluation of knowledge models, in different fields and sectors.
Organization of Knowledge Domains
Theoretical and methodological foundations of knowledge organization in different contexts of study and application. Organization of knowledge domains and treatment processes, information search and retrieval in traditional and virtual environments. Classification theory. Domains of specialties and domains of interdisciplinarity. The organization of informational resources on the Web.
Producers and Users of Information
Information as a strategic resource in different social contexts: new relevance of an old phenomenon. The socio-cultural and organizational environment of units of information: barriers to communication. Additional informational factors: stocks, functions, products, and services. Studies about users: types of users and characteristics in the search for information. Methodologies for studies on the needs and uses of information. Users as producers of information in contemporary society.
Qualitative Research Methodology in Knowledge Organization
Characteristics of information retrieval systems and their technological, social, and cultural prerequisites. Typology of the areas of knowledge: scientific and technical areas; areas of human sciences, adjacent to humanistic, cultural, and artistic knowledge. Analysis of intellectual and cultural fields. Analysis of social networks in the areas of knowledge. Consequences of ranking and of ‘monopolies’ in knowledge networks. Social identities and cultural and linguistic diversity. Delimitation of regional fields and globalization. Studies on recovering collective memory and local memory. Social constructionism and the new perspectives for the use of participatory, collaborative, or cooperative methods. Qualitative methods and field research techniques in Knowledge Organization.
Scholarly Communication
Production of knowledge as a result of social relations and socialization of information. Theory and practice of communication. The syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approach in information. Form and content of the message and communication channels (informal, semiformal, formal, and electronic). Scientific communication. Printed and electronic scientific journal. Social networks and information networks. Communication cycle in Science, Technology, Industry, Art, and other important fields of social action. S&T indicators. The role of new technologies in information communication.
Semantic Web
Knowledge organization stored in files and web pages. Understanding of human language by machines in information retrieval. Semantic structuring of web data as a facilitator of search strategies. Understanding of informational meanings by computational agents. Development of semantic meaning structures for the understanding of informational content in web pages. Collaborative environment for software agents and information users.
Structure and Flow of Information
Contemporary information activities. (In)tension as the essence of the information and knowledge phenomenon: symbolic structures and inscriptions; storage: memory and forgetfulness. Distribution strategies and the flows of information. Information production: the language of the mind and the language of information representation. Computational processing of the Portuguese language as natural language and its use as a tool for the strategic management of information.
Structure and Flow of Information for the Production and Use of Knowledge
Information as a developmental resource in different contexts and social organizations. The cultural and organizational environment of structures and flows of information and communication. The paradigm of information and communication technologies and the associated cognitive, organizational, and cultural changes. Representation of knowledge aiming at knowledge and information management. Environments and actors of knowledge production and information circulation. Quality and value of information for knowledge use. Structures and processes of organization and knowledge representation in different stages and levels of information flow in networks and organizations.
Theory and History of Information
The origin and the development of information processes and phenomena occur in varying contexts and circumstances and are addressed in different fields of knowledge, such as Theory of Information; Cybernetics and Neocybernetics; Artificial Intelligence; Cognitive Sciences; Linguistic and Cultural Studies, among others. Within this context, epistemological aspects of these approaches and approximations will be emphasized, seeking theoretical formulations that act as interdisciplinary links around the object information.