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Informing science is a transdiscipline that was established to promote the study of informing processes across a diverse set of academic disciplines, including management information systems, education, business, instructional technology, computer science, communications, psychology, philosophy, library science, information science and many others. Its principal unit of analysis is the ''informing system'', a collection of informers, clients and channels that has been designed or has evolved to serve a particular informing need. The organization created to advance the informing science transdiscipline is the (''Informing Science Institute'' ) (ISI), whose founder, Eli Cohen, proposed the need for field in his article "Reconceptualizing Information Systems as a Field of the Transdiscipline Informing Science: From Ugly Duckling to Swan" (Cohen, 1999). The ISI presently host an annual conference ((Informing Science & Information Technology Education (InSITE) )), publishes seven academic journals, and—through its ''Informing Science Press''—has published for dozens of books. Both its journals and books are open access at no cost online, as well as being available for purchase in print form. ==History== Informing science came into being as a transdiscipline around 1998. During that year, two key events occurred. The seminal article that defined the field (Cohen, 1999) was accepted for publication and the field's flagship journal--(''Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline'' )—was launched. The theme of Cohen's (1999) article was relatively simple, and resonated with many in the global academic community. In brief, he argued that many different disciplines are studying the same types of issues: teaching programming, communicating effectively, designing systems to provide information to clients, and so forth, as illustrated in Table 1. This situation was not only inefficient from a research standpoint, but it also tended to promote research silos in which researchers from one discipline were unable to benefit from the research of colleagues in other disciplines. In the long run, he asserted that such a situation would be highly deleterious to our overall understanding of these processes. He expressed particular concern with the situation in his own research discipline, ''management information systems'', which was already becoming fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to practice. What Cohen proposed as an antidote to this situation was the establishment of an interdisciplinary community of researchers described as follows: :The fields that comprise the discipline of Informing Science ''provide'' their ''clientele'' with ''information'' in a ''form'', ''format'' and ''schedule'' that maximizes its effectiveness (Cohen, 1999, p. 215) During its earliest years, the informing science discipline was particularly focused on issues related to management information systems and information/library science—the fields from which many of its researchers originated. Over time, however, instructional technology became an important area of research, leading to the establishment of additional journals in the informing science in the education and instructional technology areas. In recent years, an effort has been made to further broaden the field. In 2009, the collection ''(Foundations of Informing Science )'' (Gill & Cohen, 2009) was published, including both seminal articles from its journals and new contributions. The collection included chapters related to economics, decision theory, political science, education, design, complexity science and mining. Currently, the informing science field is encouraging interest in research that is not necessarily related to technology. In a recent (keynote address ) given at InSITE 2011 by T. Grandon Gill, the editor-in-chief of the journal Informing Science proposed that the field could be described as follows: :''Informing Science'' is the transdisciplinary study of systems that employ information to impact clientele In that same address, a number of areas meriting additional research were proposed. These included: # Greater emphasis on informing systems that evolve, as opposed to those that are created by design # Study of informing through non-symbolic means, such as body language and music, as well as through language and the exchange of coded data # Paying greater attention to the topologies of informing systems as opposed to emphasizing Sender → Receiver communications models whose roots go back to Claude Shannon (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) # Obstacles to informing, such as bias and heuristics, that are particularly challenging when human clients are involved # The relationship of informing systems structure and the complexity of the message being conveyed 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Informing science」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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