John Holgate - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by John Holgate
Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 2004
John Holgate, Director of St. George Hospital Library in Sydney, looks back on health librariansh... more John Holgate, Director of St. George Hospital Library in Sydney, looks back on health librarianship in Australia over the past twenty-five years. He surveys innovative changes in technology, cooperative networking, and the contribution made by hospital librarians to these developments. Starting with the Australian Medline Network, he discusses the emergence of union catalogues (HEMLOC), interlibrary loan networks (GRATIS), and specific
Messages and Messengers - Von Boten und Botschaften, 2011
Raphael’s famous painting the School of Athens is given a fresh perspective through the prism of ... more Raphael’s famous painting the School of Athens is given a fresh perspective through the prism of Angeletics and Messaging Theory as developed by Rafael Capurro and the author in our 2011 publication Messages and Messengers (Capurro & Holgate, 2011). In a close analysis of the messaging paradigm employed by the painter in the School and related works a radical new viewpoint of Raphael’s artistic message is presented. The orthodox theological interpretation of The School (notably by Giorgio Vasari (Vasari, 1550), Johann David Passavant (Passavant, 1839) and Eugene Muntz (Muntz, 1888) is questioned in the light of the philosophical framework provided by the exiting and departing messengers—Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus the Atheist. Diagoras himself represents the transforming mission of angelos (messenger) at work in the Renaissance theatre of knowledge and is an avatar for Raphael’s essentially heteronomic philosophy. In conclusion the author draws a parallel between the Platonic Hi...
Messages and Messengers - Von Boten und Botschaften, 2011
![Research paper thumbnail of From classical ontology to who magazine: digital whoness: identity, privacy and freedom in the cyberworld (capurro, r., et al; 2013) [book review]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/88480535/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2013
The 2021 Summit of the International Society for the Study of Information, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2014
Proceedings
This paper explores the relationship between natural language and the phenomenon of information. ... more This paper explores the relationship between natural language and the phenomenon of information. It argues that the Philosophy of Information can provide a bridge between linguistics and information science by offering a deeper understanding of how these two spheres of experience are entangled. Proceeding from the author's 2002 Foundations of Information Science Online Conference paper 'The Phantom of Information' it first asks the question 'How can we best define information'? The author then offers a brief historical perspective on the Philosophy of Language (PL) and the Philosophy of Information (PI) and highlights where the two fields overlap and interact. He indicates how the 'information turn' of the 1990's grew organically out of the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy. The author treats the phenomenon of information as a new language with distinctive features akin to syntax, person, tense, aspect, voice and mood. Specifically he examines Chomsky's concept of recursion and redundancy, Wittgenstein's language as game, Saussure's langue and parole, Benveniste's énonciation, informative illocutionary acts (Austin, Searle), the semantic approaches of Dretske Floridi and Barwise, Grice's implicature and Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker's 'inevitable circle between language and information'. He briefly discusses Terrence Deacon's recent work in biological anthropology on language and information as it relates to his concepts of deixis, reciprocal reference and incompletion. Secondly, the paper indicates how the notion of 'information' is embedded in traditional grammar through adpositions which empower language as a faculty for thought and communication. The Subject/Object template of historical grammar imposed on all natural languages is reviewed from the perspective of pragmatics. The notion of 'information' itself is traced back (by way of Capurro's informatio) to a configuration of ideas and concepts in classical Greek philosophy, specifically those of Epicurus and Chrysippus-the founder of formal grammar. Implications for the history and science of information are discussed. Finally, it proposes future directions for this area of study to explore how our total experience of the sphere of language and that of information are interconnected within a broader framework of mind. A distinction between cognition and connaissance is made. The faculty of human language, once the hallmark of humanism, is now under threat by the omnipresent Datocracy and its champion, Homo Informaticus. The informed and informing citizen, Homo Informationis, as defender of the information commons and infoversity, will need to ally with Herder's Homo Loquens if s/he is to survive. Information philosophers can provide a deeper understanding of these intriguing twin phenomena necessary for our civilization.
Word Ways, 2005
It was a chilly afternoon on December the seventh, 1967, the 26th anni ersary of Pearl Harbour. D... more It was a chilly afternoon on December the seventh, 1967, the 26th anni ersary of Pearl Harbour. Dmitri Borgmann was sitting in the reading room of the ew York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He had come down from Oak Park, Illinois for a few days to do research on synonyms for baldness after noticing that his hairline was receding. For him the NYPL \ as a haven of so litude, an asylum which sheltered him from the madness of the sixtie. He was bro\\ ing through an original 1933 edition of Science and Sanity: An il/troduction to on-Ari totelian Systems and General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski. At page 26 he felt an 0 erpowering urg for some shuteye. Just as his head it the table he was tapped on the shoulder b a petit blond a red miniskirt. ' Mister Borgmann? Mister Dmitri Borgmann?' Dmitri grunted leepily. Was an overzealous librarian, he wondered, or an NYU sophomore wanting him to autograph her of his best-selling Language on Vacation? 'The Secretary General would like to meet with you straight awa. II II' lI""'(1 ill lI ' UII'li II " itll M' word containing n gative lett r Ii. h ul lh It h \ n. th • II, 1\1 1\' \II disastrous. 245 The limo pulled up outside the UN Secretariat building on First Avenue and they took the elevator up to the top floor. While Dmitri was waiting for U Thant in the reception area, Miss Spelling reappeared with a copy of Reader's Digest. 'U will be with you soon. You might like to do the word power test while you ' re waiting, Mister Borgnine. ' 'Borg-mann' he snapped. ' Borgnine is an Oscar-winning Hollywood actor and a well-mixed transposal of RINGBONE. Just call me Dmitri. ' ' Oh, you have the same first name as that famous musician, Dmitri Potemkin. ' Miss Spelling flounced off. Dmitri completed the word power test in a few seconds, then lapsed into one of his typical logo logical daydreams. He was intrigued by the initial U. Was U like M and Q in the James Bond movies a unisyllabic acronym designed to preserve the Secretary General's anonymity for security reasons? Or was U appointed because his given name was the same as the first letter of the UN itself? If that were so, the fOllller Burmese premier, the palindromic U Nu, would have been a more appropriate choice. Then he recalled that U was in fact a Burmese word for 'uncle'. Possibly all family relations in BUIOla were designated by an appropriate initial A for aunt, B for brother, C for cousin, D for daughter and so on. It occurred to him that this might be an ingenious method for mapping all family relationships in English nto a genealogical algebra such as AM for a maternal aunt, 3C2 a third cousin twice removed, S6S7 for the sixth son of a seventh son. This alphabetic schema could also be used for indexing other social groups like the British peerage A for archduke, B for baron, C for count, D for duke and so forth. Korzybski's notion of mapping the individuality of apples into apple I, apple2, etcetera, could also be applied to kinship. He made a mental note of this fascinating idea and resolved to pen an article about it as a contribution to a future issue of his new journal for recreational linguistics called Word Ways. An appellation jerked him out of his reverie. 'Dmitri Alfred Borgmann.' Dmitri turned around, half expecting to see Ralph Edwards from This is Your Life or someone resembling James Mason. Instead, he was confronted by a short bespectacled gentleman in a pinstriped suit. 'My name is U Thant. It's an honour to meet you, sir. Your reputation has preceded you .' Dmitri shook the Secretary General's outstretched hand. Not to do so might be considered non-U. 'How do you do, Mister Thant?' he said, with a reverential bow of the head.
Proceedings
The author examines the notion of informational aesthetics. The origin of aesthetics lies in Epic... more The author examines the notion of informational aesthetics. The origin of aesthetics lies in Epicurus’s notion of aesthesis and the integration of artistic activity within ethics and the ‘good life’—as in the aesthetic theory and practice of the East. The debasement of the word ‘aesthetic’ reflects the increasing alienation of beauty from imagination. The fragmentation of art now packaged as media objects in our digital world is the legacy of this alienation. The author retraces the history of the concept of information aesthetics developed in the 1960s by Birkhoff, Bense and Mole and which sought to marry mathematics, computation and semiotics with artistic activity, based on Birkhoff’s aesthetic measure, and to bridge the gap between science and the humanistic imagination. The failure of the cognitive school is attributed to the limitations of its data-driven view of art itself as an affordance of perception (Arnheim). The roles of algorithmically generated art and of Computationa...
Books by John Holgate
Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A festschrift in Honour of Rafael Capurro Ed. M.Kelly and J.Bielby, 2016
Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 2004
John Holgate, Director of St. George Hospital Library in Sydney, looks back on health librariansh... more John Holgate, Director of St. George Hospital Library in Sydney, looks back on health librarianship in Australia over the past twenty-five years. He surveys innovative changes in technology, cooperative networking, and the contribution made by hospital librarians to these developments. Starting with the Australian Medline Network, he discusses the emergence of union catalogues (HEMLOC), interlibrary loan networks (GRATIS), and specific
Messages and Messengers - Von Boten und Botschaften, 2011
Raphael’s famous painting the School of Athens is given a fresh perspective through the prism of ... more Raphael’s famous painting the School of Athens is given a fresh perspective through the prism of Angeletics and Messaging Theory as developed by Rafael Capurro and the author in our 2011 publication Messages and Messengers (Capurro & Holgate, 2011). In a close analysis of the messaging paradigm employed by the painter in the School and related works a radical new viewpoint of Raphael’s artistic message is presented. The orthodox theological interpretation of The School (notably by Giorgio Vasari (Vasari, 1550), Johann David Passavant (Passavant, 1839) and Eugene Muntz (Muntz, 1888) is questioned in the light of the philosophical framework provided by the exiting and departing messengers—Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus the Atheist. Diagoras himself represents the transforming mission of angelos (messenger) at work in the Renaissance theatre of knowledge and is an avatar for Raphael’s essentially heteronomic philosophy. In conclusion the author draws a parallel between the Platonic Hi...
Messages and Messengers - Von Boten und Botschaften, 2011
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2013
The 2021 Summit of the International Society for the Study of Information, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2014
Proceedings
This paper explores the relationship between natural language and the phenomenon of information. ... more This paper explores the relationship between natural language and the phenomenon of information. It argues that the Philosophy of Information can provide a bridge between linguistics and information science by offering a deeper understanding of how these two spheres of experience are entangled. Proceeding from the author's 2002 Foundations of Information Science Online Conference paper 'The Phantom of Information' it first asks the question 'How can we best define information'? The author then offers a brief historical perspective on the Philosophy of Language (PL) and the Philosophy of Information (PI) and highlights where the two fields overlap and interact. He indicates how the 'information turn' of the 1990's grew organically out of the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy. The author treats the phenomenon of information as a new language with distinctive features akin to syntax, person, tense, aspect, voice and mood. Specifically he examines Chomsky's concept of recursion and redundancy, Wittgenstein's language as game, Saussure's langue and parole, Benveniste's énonciation, informative illocutionary acts (Austin, Searle), the semantic approaches of Dretske Floridi and Barwise, Grice's implicature and Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker's 'inevitable circle between language and information'. He briefly discusses Terrence Deacon's recent work in biological anthropology on language and information as it relates to his concepts of deixis, reciprocal reference and incompletion. Secondly, the paper indicates how the notion of 'information' is embedded in traditional grammar through adpositions which empower language as a faculty for thought and communication. The Subject/Object template of historical grammar imposed on all natural languages is reviewed from the perspective of pragmatics. The notion of 'information' itself is traced back (by way of Capurro's informatio) to a configuration of ideas and concepts in classical Greek philosophy, specifically those of Epicurus and Chrysippus-the founder of formal grammar. Implications for the history and science of information are discussed. Finally, it proposes future directions for this area of study to explore how our total experience of the sphere of language and that of information are interconnected within a broader framework of mind. A distinction between cognition and connaissance is made. The faculty of human language, once the hallmark of humanism, is now under threat by the omnipresent Datocracy and its champion, Homo Informaticus. The informed and informing citizen, Homo Informationis, as defender of the information commons and infoversity, will need to ally with Herder's Homo Loquens if s/he is to survive. Information philosophers can provide a deeper understanding of these intriguing twin phenomena necessary for our civilization.
Word Ways, 2005
It was a chilly afternoon on December the seventh, 1967, the 26th anni ersary of Pearl Harbour. D... more It was a chilly afternoon on December the seventh, 1967, the 26th anni ersary of Pearl Harbour. Dmitri Borgmann was sitting in the reading room of the ew York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He had come down from Oak Park, Illinois for a few days to do research on synonyms for baldness after noticing that his hairline was receding. For him the NYPL \ as a haven of so litude, an asylum which sheltered him from the madness of the sixtie. He was bro\\ ing through an original 1933 edition of Science and Sanity: An il/troduction to on-Ari totelian Systems and General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski. At page 26 he felt an 0 erpowering urg for some shuteye. Just as his head it the table he was tapped on the shoulder b a petit blond a red miniskirt. ' Mister Borgmann? Mister Dmitri Borgmann?' Dmitri grunted leepily. Was an overzealous librarian, he wondered, or an NYU sophomore wanting him to autograph her of his best-selling Language on Vacation? 'The Secretary General would like to meet with you straight awa. II II' lI""'(1 ill lI ' UII'li II " itll M' word containing n gative lett r Ii. h ul lh It h \ n. th • II, 1\1 1\' \II disastrous. 245 The limo pulled up outside the UN Secretariat building on First Avenue and they took the elevator up to the top floor. While Dmitri was waiting for U Thant in the reception area, Miss Spelling reappeared with a copy of Reader's Digest. 'U will be with you soon. You might like to do the word power test while you ' re waiting, Mister Borgnine. ' 'Borg-mann' he snapped. ' Borgnine is an Oscar-winning Hollywood actor and a well-mixed transposal of RINGBONE. Just call me Dmitri. ' ' Oh, you have the same first name as that famous musician, Dmitri Potemkin. ' Miss Spelling flounced off. Dmitri completed the word power test in a few seconds, then lapsed into one of his typical logo logical daydreams. He was intrigued by the initial U. Was U like M and Q in the James Bond movies a unisyllabic acronym designed to preserve the Secretary General's anonymity for security reasons? Or was U appointed because his given name was the same as the first letter of the UN itself? If that were so, the fOllller Burmese premier, the palindromic U Nu, would have been a more appropriate choice. Then he recalled that U was in fact a Burmese word for 'uncle'. Possibly all family relations in BUIOla were designated by an appropriate initial A for aunt, B for brother, C for cousin, D for daughter and so on. It occurred to him that this might be an ingenious method for mapping all family relationships in English nto a genealogical algebra such as AM for a maternal aunt, 3C2 a third cousin twice removed, S6S7 for the sixth son of a seventh son. This alphabetic schema could also be used for indexing other social groups like the British peerage A for archduke, B for baron, C for count, D for duke and so forth. Korzybski's notion of mapping the individuality of apples into apple I, apple2, etcetera, could also be applied to kinship. He made a mental note of this fascinating idea and resolved to pen an article about it as a contribution to a future issue of his new journal for recreational linguistics called Word Ways. An appellation jerked him out of his reverie. 'Dmitri Alfred Borgmann.' Dmitri turned around, half expecting to see Ralph Edwards from This is Your Life or someone resembling James Mason. Instead, he was confronted by a short bespectacled gentleman in a pinstriped suit. 'My name is U Thant. It's an honour to meet you, sir. Your reputation has preceded you .' Dmitri shook the Secretary General's outstretched hand. Not to do so might be considered non-U. 'How do you do, Mister Thant?' he said, with a reverential bow of the head.
Proceedings
The author examines the notion of informational aesthetics. The origin of aesthetics lies in Epic... more The author examines the notion of informational aesthetics. The origin of aesthetics lies in Epicurus’s notion of aesthesis and the integration of artistic activity within ethics and the ‘good life’—as in the aesthetic theory and practice of the East. The debasement of the word ‘aesthetic’ reflects the increasing alienation of beauty from imagination. The fragmentation of art now packaged as media objects in our digital world is the legacy of this alienation. The author retraces the history of the concept of information aesthetics developed in the 1960s by Birkhoff, Bense and Mole and which sought to marry mathematics, computation and semiotics with artistic activity, based on Birkhoff’s aesthetic measure, and to bridge the gap between science and the humanistic imagination. The failure of the cognitive school is attributed to the limitations of its data-driven view of art itself as an affordance of perception (Arnheim). The roles of algorithmically generated art and of Computationa...
Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A festschrift in Honour of Rafael Capurro Ed. M.Kelly and J.Bielby, 2016